# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
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@prologic I have no idea, but I think that's probably closer to the truh. Who the heck has the energy to deconstruct the motives of someone like Trump or Musk who is actively trying to make that difficult? There are more pressing problems in life.
@prologic oops! I broken the yarns!!!
I still don't know the right way to delete a post 😨
@prologic
> Very interesting! I want moooar! 😅 She didn’t really go into any other patterns and plays these assholes use 🤣
Here book *Strongmen* is great. She also has a Substack newsletter. She frequently writes for or appears in interviews for major media, and Googling her name will often turn up a lot of stuff. She's also pretty outspoken on twitter.
@prologic I've found this woman to be really insightful and her explanations are clear: #hv2vsrq
We have to get better and faster at spotting and resisting this pattern if we don't want people like Musk to take over every aspect of our lives.
Trump isn’t a madman. He’s been following the authoritarian playbook since day one: Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and a noted scholar on authoritarian strongmen (she wrote a book about it, too, called *Strongmen*).
Change "Trump" to "Musk" in this story I linked and adjust the details if you'd like to better understand why Musk is doing what he's doing.
Especially if you're approaching this from an engineering mindset: stop. You're not dealing with an engineer or a businessperson who's screwing up, or who's out of his depth, or who's making strange decisions. You are dealing with an authoritarian who's doing *exactly* what authoritarians have always done. Really. Listen to the video. It is about Trump, but you will hear an exact analog of what Musk is doing at Twitter--because these guys are all following the same playbook.
@prologic He's a con artist. You're exhibiting the mistake of thinking of the poll as meaningful on its face, when of course it never was. The question to actually ask is, in what way does it serve his purpose of accumulating power and punishing his enemies to hold a poll like this? Because ultimately *that's* what it was for.
@prologic He's trying to solve the problem that he's a right-wing, authoritarian proto-fascist but Twitter has a bunch of people who aren't that, and who don't worship him.
The chaos is the point--authoritarians from time immemorial purposely, knowingly created bad, impossible rules to confuse and demoralize their enemies.
When dealing with someone like Musk, it's better to think of everything he's done in terms of power and attention. He's not trying to improve twitter or pay twitter's debts or make it profitable the way a reasonable person would. He's trying to exercise power and squash his and his friends' enemies using twitter as a tool. Everything he does makes perfect sense when viewed that way.
@prologic I started to write a snarky twt about Kafka and then deleted it because I didn't want to be too negative 😆
@prologic no offense or anything, but this is for a funded project and I can't go down the route of using software written by my online pals that other people almost surely haven't heard of and I haven't evaluated properly. As far as engineering goes, I'm using this as a standalone service, not a library. I don't write Go and won't in this project; I'd just use nats as messaging middleware. In that respect, it doesn't look overengineered to me--it has almost exactly the features I need.
At least on paper. I haven't tried it out yet.
It's good to know about these other libraries for my personal projects, though!
@movq My worry is that there's a UX design process where somebody has to think "This is a value we will be displaying to a user. Users expect to see x, y, and z when they are shown such a value. Let's make sure our code reflects that correctly." If that's done properly, then "-0" would not be a reasonable output (i.e., it's a bug). But clearly that hasn't been done, so I wonder what else wasn't done.
I'm sure it's fine, but it's hard not to think in debugging terms sometimes.....
Went down a rabbit hole investigating some other things and haven't looked into this yet. I started poking at it last week and so far it looks pretty interesting.
@eaplmx 😆
There's a part of me that wonders what bugs lurk beneath the surface of software that outputs something like "-0". It's *probably* fine, but.........
Weather app says it is -0 °C 🤔
@axodys yeah this is really something to behold
@prologic oh I know and it'd be pretty weird if thousands of people started joining yarn out of the blue
Mastodon has been averaging 3,000-4,000 new users per hour for many hours, I assume because of the journalist bannings and related fallout. Yarn and twt have a long way to go to reach that level of usage!
Reading some research notes I wrote about 10 years ago and feeling like someone else wrote it 👍
@prologic I'm happy to file this as an issue on gitea, but I figured I'd post here in case you have some insights, already know about it, expect it to happen, or what have you.
I had a few people sign up for my pod and then post nothing. Eventually I deleted them using the Poderator Settings -> Manage Users function.
Today, I noticed that they are still listed as follows of my @support feed. If I view the followers of that feed, they're listed there. If I click the link for one of those users, I get a 404, so they're not "there" there. I *do not* see these users following @abucci, just @support and @news
@eaplmx so many mixed feelings! It's exciting, and it's the first year that my baby is walking and talking so he'll be much more into it than he was last year. I also have a lot of work to get done before the year is over 😨
I can't believe Christmas is so soon. 🤯
@prologic I believed they're limited to the US and Canada right now but iirc they intend to eventually expand globally. Definitely to Europe.
@bender I wish I could avoid doing business with Amazon, but they have their fingers in almost everything.
My spam filter flagged a legitimate email from Amazon about "scammers" as spam. Well done, spam filter, well done. Keep doing what you're doing.
My spam filter flagged an email legitimately from Amazon about "scammers" as spam. Well done, spam filter, well done. Keep doing what you're doing. (this is not sarcasm I'm glad that happened haha)
There are lots of quality of life improvements handling phone this way. For instance, I have a phone number I've had for 20-odd years at this point. I receive something like 3-5 unsolicited calls per day and a few unsolicited SMS a week at that number. It must be in every spammer/scammer database on Earth at this point. However, since I've had this number so long and given it to so many people, I want to keep it.
Many XMPP clients give you pretty good control over blocking; you also have the ability, if you want to write some code, to block arbitrary *patterns* of phone numbers. And since it's all handled in one app, you can block calls and SMS/MMS messages from a phone number in one place. All of that has meant an improvement in my life--I can keep this old number, and even though spam gets through sometimes I have a much easier way to deal with it than text clients and dialers on Android give you.
I've been using JMP.chat for awhile now, and I have to say that unless something changes significantly for the worse over there, I may never use anything else for phone service again.
It's basically a bridge between the telephone network and XMPP. When you sign up you choose a phone number (or port in a number you already own), and associate that with an XMPP account. From then on, XMPP messages turn into SMS or MMS (and vice versa), you can call any telephone number with a special JID and likewise receive telephone calls in XMPP clients that support voice chat. On Android, your JMP.chat/XMPP account becomes a calling service, so you can even ditch your cell service entirely and use JMP.chat (meaning you can type a number on the stock dialpad and transparently make phone calls using your JMP account). JMP.chat's perferred client, cheogram, handles the telephone number<->JID conversions for you so you don't have to think about it much. If you have phone contacts, you can call them from cheogram nearly transparently (I find you still have to have a bit of understanding of XMPP so this might not work for your boomer parents).
You can use a self-hosted XMPP server to act as your side of the bridge. JMP.chat handles the telephony side, so you do have to trust them on that one. Cost is $3/month for basic service (I think 150 minutes of talk but unlimited texts).
The net result is that you can do all your telephony in an XMPP client, and it looks almost the same as instant messaging. If you're in a situation where you have access to wifi all the time, you can ditch cell phone service completely (I'm not so lucky, but I did severely downgrade my cell phone service since I don't need it for much more than data anymore). If your XMPP server is configured to do so you can switch between a computer-based XMPP client and a phone client and see all the same messages. You can also make XMPP bots that handle phone calls and SMS/MMS messages if you're so inclined.
@prologic You know they're going to try! It makes perfect sense to that way of thinking.
@prologic I try to keep up on some of the latest BS from Silicon Valley, and there seem to be a fair number of wealthy people (like VCs) who earnestly believe that AI can write code, so they don't need to find and retain software developers like they used to. The mass layoffs currently happening in the tech sector are the first bit of evidence that they're headed this direction. It's not unlikely that in the near term tech jobs won't pay as well, will have worse benefits, and will be more precarious than they currently are (check out https://techwontsave.us/episode/146_tech_billionaires_are_coming_for_workers_w_wendy_liu for instance).
A lot of dumb shit comes out of Silicon Valley, but can you imagine what it'd be like if a barrage of startups with codebases they tried generating with ChatGPT or github copilot started appearing? 😆
@awesome-scala-weekly yeesh, I known it's December but information has been scant in this newsletter for many months now. It's weird to have a scala roundup newsletter with nothing but links to survey results, someone's medium page, and release notes form projects. Nobody's writing anything?
@movq definitely a good point! I didn't set any of this up and I get the impression the people who did were not technically oriented, so the silver lining is that I can help set us up a little better. So that's good lol
Castopod by Ad Aures | Your Free
There's stuff like this popping up for the fediverse/activitypub world that could just as well be created for the indieweb/twtverse (is that a term?). Maybe a route towards getting more adoption is to create a few things like this and show how nicely they can interface with other things like yarn.social.
@movq Right? If they'd said "oh yes, just do x,y,z to your domain" this would have been over long ago.
That said, I do think they could route within-organization emails without requiring DNS entries, since they fully control that infrastructure. They know who the valid users are, they know where we're sending from (since we're all using the gmail webapp), so there's no reason that they couldn't deliver emails directly. My coworker, using the gmail webapp, sends an email to me, who's also using the gmail webapp, we're both within the same organization, and somehow their email goes to my spam folder because our SPF and DKIM records aren't right? That's super weird.
After many many weeks of frustrating back-and-forth with Google tech support that resulted in my giving up on them and using a forum, I finally have a suggestion to fix my email issue: add SPF and DKIM records to our DNS setup. The comment was made by a person who's been answering support questions on this forum for a long time, and they seem to know what they're talking about.
I'm pretty blown away by this. Like yes, it's best practice to add these DNS records for your domain to ensure that your emails are not flagged as spam or rejected and your domain is not blacklisted. But we are using Google to manage our email, and email *within our organization* is being flagged as spam incorrectly by *Google's own spam filter*. Google does not have control over our DNS setup, but they have control over all that other stuff. They pretend to be more or less a turnkey email solution, and yet you need to do some fiddly DNS configuration, something I'd guess most people don't know how to do, to get their email to work reliably *within your own organization*?
That feels bizarre.
for all the things wrong with twitter, I've found it to be a great source of information, and a sort of "source of sources" where you could find people worth paying attention to off twitter.
@prologic yeah, it's tough in the US too. I don't know enough about who owns what to really say what's going on, but my feeling is that most of what is considered "mainstream news" here is little more than propaganda these days. It's getting harder to find diverse sources, and I'm worried that what's happening at twitter will make it even harder (which the pessimist in me thinks was part of the plan all along).
@prologic One reason I keep insisting on this point is that I don't get the impression that the folks opining about echo chambers actually read the research I posted. I'm not disputing that people *try* to create echo chambers, that creating such a thing is valuable to some, nor that they might succeed at times and with some people. All I'm doing is following what the research I've read argues, and has *accumulated evidence for* (importantly), which is:
1. Echo chambers are not widespread. Only a minority of people are affected
2. The phrase "echo chamber" itself is an example *of the very phenomenon you're trying to critique by using that term*. People who want to believe there are echo chambers are stuck reinforcing that term with one another because they are not considering counterfactuals
To quote:
> Using a nationally representative survey of adult internet users in the United Kingdom (N = 2000), we find that those who are interested in politics and those with diverse media diets tend to avoid echo chambers.
2000-ish people is a good sample size. "Diverse media diet" is fairly broad; it mostly means consulting more than one or two sources. The paper defines what they mean by these terms (including echo chamber).
> A deep dive into the academic literature tells us that the “echo chambers” narrative captures, at most, the experience of a minority of the public. Indeed, this claim itself has ironically been amplified and distorted in a kind of echo chamber effect.
That is, "echo chamber" is the result of people in echo chambers about echo chambers! It's maddeningly circular and meta!
The cure to such things is simple: a diverse diet of information. I'm trying to help promote that diverse diet by providing information that contradicts the prevailing "wisdom" about "echo chambers". It's being rejected, or at least not taken seriously enough to read and incorporate. I think that's a fair assessment on my part, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to be frustrated about it.
@logout Ah I see. That sounds pretty interesting, changing the CPU microarchitecture on the fly as better designs are figured out. Thanks for that.
@eaplmx because I said "there is no such thing as an echo chamber", and you responded by posting a cartoon telling me to calm down. Then you asked whether I'd be open to other ideas as if I were being closed minded. Besides the fact that this is exactly how the right-wing/fascist jerks that infest the internet behave, it's dismissive and condescending. It's worth reflecting on that, in my estimation (for everyone).
This fusion energy announcement is pretty amazing. 2 megajoules of energy to ignite, 3 megajoules of energy out. Imagine if that can be scaled and distributed.
@eaplmx Resorting to "tone policing" is one of the only ways you can really "lose" a dispute on the internet 😉
@eaplmx Someone asserts: there is such a thing as "echo chambers". Then it is on them to produce evidence demonstrating that the phenomenon is real. It's not on me to believe it until it's disproved, for the same reason that it's not on me to believe in unicorns until someone's disproved their existence.
So yes, while I'm open to ideas, I'm not open to prejudices that have no evidence behind them just because people like to throw them around in the media or online. It's dangerous to accept prejudices, and in my opinion we should all be very skeptical of any phrase that lumps a whole bunch of people we don't really know into a group and paints them in a negative light. That's a recipe for horror. I think the burden of proof for a concept like "echo chamber" is very high. Any "evidence" I've seen for it doesn't pass muster, and the evidence *against* it, some of which I've shared, is strong. I feel it's safe and pragmatic to reject it.
@prologic here you go: #qryatdq . It's probably exaggerated to call it "pseudoscience", but the conclusion of both the links (the latter of which is a survey of academic literature) is that if there is an echo chamber phenomenon it affects a minority of people and is not a significant mass effect as it's sometimes made out to be.
@prologic No it's true. There's no such thing as "echo chambers" or "filter bubbles". I posted a yarn about what a few weeks ago. It's pseudoscience. People accept it because it fits their intuitions I guess, but it's just not true.
Ask yourself: where did you first hear that phrase? How did it enter your vocabulary? Did you investigate if it made any sense, or did you accept it because it made for a good story at the time?
@prologic I had a disagreement once about whether it was safer to host your own services and data, or use the cloud. The crux of the other person's argument was that the cloud services have professionals who handle data for a living. The crux of my argument was that even if I were significantly less competent, I care deeply about my own privacy, which they don't, and there's only one of me who can fuck up while they might have hundreds of people accessing the machines where my data lives. You can even do some back of the envelope math: if I have a 5% chance of screwing something up each day, and each of them has a 0.1% chance but there are 100 of them, then there is a higher chance one of them will screw something up than I will.
Anyway, it looks like I might have been giving these services more credit than they deserve on the latter point.
@prologic Every once in awhile I peek in there to see if any real mail was flagged incorrectly, and then I scroll through because why not. I'm morbidly curious what the latest scams are, and which of them make it into my spam folder.
@eaplmx Please stop! There is no such thing as an echo chamber. That concept has been debunked. It was always pseudoscience, from the start.
@prologic given how many politicians were jumping into bed with that guy, I hope there's more fallout than just his arrest and prosecution. The corruption goes very deep here in the US. He was bankrolling politicians in both parties, and they were happily taking it and trying to keep the fraudsters in crypto from facing any consequences for literally stealing billions of dollars.
I say "my filters" as if I'm doing something special. I use SpamAssassin on the server side, which I've trained with thousands of emails by now. I use Thunderbird as a client, and I've trained its built-in spam filter pretty well too. I have a couple hand-written ones for special cases.
Big uptick in spam email since Dec 4th for some reason. My filters have caught every single one, which is great. But it went from one or two a day to 10 a day. I've already gotten 6 today and it's not even 10am yet.
Always makes me think some new scam farm went online.
@prologic I'm aghast at just how bad it is. I assume a lot of these big tech sites are a lot less secure than they pretend to be, but my god
@mckinley It's kind of infuriating to me, after all these years of teaching people to not click links in emails, not open up Word documents from people they don't know, etc etc etc, there's always some new automated malware delivery vector that people are trained to use and then have to be trained not to trust
@logout I understand the hobbyist applications. I guess what I found confusing was why a commercial product would be based on an FPCA. ASICs are far better price-to-performancewise than FPGAs, usually. The FP means "field programmable", and that's the big draw of FPGAs, and what you're paying a premium for: you can reprogram the circuitry on the fly if you want. But if the circuitry is meant to be fixed, then you don't need or want to reprogram it. Maybe there's an explanation or I'm just being dense, but I don't get it.
@mckinley the problem isn't QR codes. That's just a data format. You might as well say we need to get rid of bits. The real problem is unexpected, unrestricted code execution. Which has always been the problem.
[Ilana Stern (@Ilana_Stern): "@elonmusk just got booed like I’ve never heard before on stage with @davechapelle and @chrisrock. He couldn’t get a word in, the crowd booed for 10 minutes. Not favored on his home turf. He looked stunned, must not get enough feedback IRL."|nitter](https://nitter.fly.dev/Ilana_Stern/status/1602203082527342592)
Twitter 2.0 is going just great. I imagine something like this actually stings for a narcissist.
I saw a post on Linux Gizmos about an FPGA configuration that acts as a general purpose computer and can run Linux. I have no idea, though, what the heck you'd do with such a thing or why you'd want it?
@marado We're still sending passcodes and 2FA codes through SMS. It's bad.
FTX-hosted NFTs break after website is redirected to a restructuring page
It's kind of unbelievable what a shitshow this all is.
Apparently, people who minted NFTs using FTX now can't see their NFTs because FTX's web sites are fubar. Neither can anyone else. So, they bought what was claimed to be fancy cryptocurrency-based investment computer art, and now they can't even look at their art and the investment is probably worthless. Who's going to buy art they can't see?
@bender With the architecture they have, more servers might make the performance worse. If someone joins your server and has a million followers, then every time they post, the mastodon software generates one sidekiq job on your server for each server among the servers used by that user's million followers. More servers in the mastodon network, more sidekiq jobs on your server each time heavily-followed person posts. Assuming there's a fair amount overhead just in the job creation/completion part of the process, increasing the number of servers increases the fraction of compute time spent on overhead. There's some optimal balance point somewhere between one gigantic server and many many one-person servers. I don't know enough to guess what that is, but given what I do know it sure sounds like the architecture they have has some edge cases where scaling is very bad with respect to number of servers.
@prologic It's nuts! I don't know much about sidekiq but it sounds to me like every single time someone posts, they generate a job per instance just to propagate that post out to others. It's such a heavy-handed way to do message passing, which you can do at a rate of 10k or 100k per second on not great hardware using appropriate middleware (or corresponding libraries).
@ocdtrekkie on second thought, I'm probably misremembering this. I'll have to go dig up the post I'm thinking of. It could be you're right about how it works but there was some other inefficiency in it that gave me pause.
@darch hmm, I think that's a different issue (bit also bad). That one affects the mastodon server, and could also be helped with a more efficient use of resources on an instance. There's (I think) a separate issue with how posts that include web previews are fetched, which affects the remote web server too.
It's possible I'm misremembering.
@ocdtrekkie approximately 8,700 servers up according to https://joinmastodon.org/servers . That many requests should not cause issues on a reasonably configured and provisioned modern web server. It should barely be noticeable on most.
I don't remember the specifics anymore, but it's definitely dumber than you're suggesting. There are many orders of magnitude more requests generated than are necessary, and I'm pretty certain that scales with number of followers, not number of instances.
@ocdtrekkie I read a thread on why this happens on mastodon once but didn't keep a link. I recall thinking "oh my god they don't even do basic caching????" I think it's almost literally the care that when one person with a lot of followers posts a web page with a preview, every single one of those follower's clients will download the preview. Obviously the instance could download it once and cache it, and then send it to every instance user. Then this kind of ddos wouldn't be a problem for now because there aren't very many instances.
@prologic Alright, I just compiled main and am running it! Commit e1d8c3, looks like. What's good?
@prologic I'm thinking I'll have to bend that rule if i want to enjoy all the cool stuff you're adding 🤔
@marado that's a good point. Twitter and Mastodon allow you to mute keywords/keyphrases so that you don't see posts with those words and phrases in your feed. That's an important safety feature yarn should probably adopt at some point (unless it has it already and I missed it!)
I like using the nix package manager in addition to whichever one comes with the system I'm using, because you can use it to craft local environments, development environments, install and experiment with things without screwing up your system, and other good stuff.
But boy does it eat disk space. I just did a hard garbage collection and it zapped almost 70 Gbytes of stuff.
If any of you were thinking of getting me something for Christmas, please consider
@prologic ahh, OK I see thanks. Yes that could help--I could follow "Ars Technica minus Musk" I guess.
@bender ugh I know, that's why I aggressively block, filter, ask politely, etc.
@prologic @mckinley I'm all for playing around, but for what it's worth I've blocked ChatGPT bots and filtered that keyword in other contexts because *so many freakin people* are generating stuff and posting it online that I've grown tired of it. I don't want to see AI-generated text anymore, that ship has sailed.
@prologic could you elaborate on what that would allow?
@prologic Pretty sure I was, and I may have been the one to create it. Anyway, not anymore.
I finally gave up following Ars Technica. For awhile I enjoyed their tech news because they seemed to dig into stories a little more than other outlets.
But lately they've become Musk Technica. They're falling for exactly the same media-hijacking con Donald Trump pulled off with the US political media. I'd scan a list of latest headlines and three or four of them would be about Musk's latest fart. I don't want or need to see that, and I think it's harmful to your sense of well-being. I wrote to them with this concern, and heard nothing whatsoever back, not even a "thank you for your note." So, unsubscribe. Sorry to see another one fall.
Regarding the previous topic of debate being a good way to reach the truth, or a good way to engage with others, please consider that bad actors bait people who hold that view and basically eat their lunch every time:
The Alt-Right Playbook: Control the Conversation
(this whole series looks to be quite good, but I've not watched every video so I can't say.)
Insert quote about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result here.
@prologic maybe he just loves Australian soft rock???
he also likes the Little River Band and the Bee Gees.
@prologic you might be interested to know that my 18 month old is a big fan of an 80s band from your homeland, Air Supply
@eaplmx oh wow, I'd never heard of *that* L*. I suppose such a short name is bound to be reused.
I was thinking about Dana Angluin's algorithm, from 1987. Ancient computer science. The kind that youngsters ought to be taught, but rarely are.*
variant* It's a funny typo because Rivest and Shapire formulate some of their results in Leslie Valiant's PAC framework*
@eaplmx hmm yes I understand what you're saying
@eaplmx Oh no! 🤞 that you don't come down with anything too nasty.
I spent a fair amount of my spare time this week diving into some ancient computer science from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (!!!), specifically Dana Angluin's L* algorithm for learning a finite state machine from an oracle and Rivest & Shapire's followups and extensions. Quite beautiful work in my opinion.
L* is especially simple and elegant imo. Shapire's valiant is more computationally efficient and I think grounded a bit better, but a little harder to understand.
@tkanos You're telling what's known as a just so story. It makes some kind of sense (things happen "just so"), but that does not make it true to reality.
