jstgord

... cheaper still, Im experimenting with two 3-litre plastic milk containers, filled with water.

[ be sure to a) check for leakages regularly and b) do arm curls well away from electric outlets, just in case ]

Getting up and running on Mastodon went fine for me, I just signed up and tried it, with minimal hassle.

Nova at hachyderm.io seems to be doing a great job managing the tsunami of signups, as people flee Twitter.

I do like the social architecture of communities with their local flavor.

imo, many of our systems are hyper-centralized and thus brittle - I guess Id seen adverts increase in Twitter and was going to move at some point.

I dont want to be on a platform that can be killed due to a single entity [ be it rage-quit, selling out to ad revenue, government overreach, conservative religion etc ] I do worry about youtube and reddit for this reason. These things seem like societal infrastructure which should be at least partly 'owned' by the content creators / consumers.

When I go back to poke around Twitter it just seems like a hot mess.. Im glad I left. I do feel some nostalgia towards it, they built a cool thing.

Twitter is dead .. long live the internet.

Borland manuals were a pure delight..

as was the speed of Turbo Pascal compilation and the elegance of their text mode windowing object system.

I remember scouring all the possible BBS dialup file servers to find a compiler for my first 8086 machine .. I knew there had to be something better than GW Basic .. I could not find a compiler for free, but did happen up on A86 assembler, so got an intro to how the machine really worked.

Was so happy when I could afford Turbo Pascal back in the day. best product ever.

yeah.. sometimes you do need to sit under a tree, or on the beach with a paper notebook and no internet connection.

But I also think we [ the species ] need a way to discuss ideas which cant be turned off at a whim by a single rich or powerful person or organization.

Mastodon may not be that thing [ yet or ever ] .. but there is some hope that it might be that thing for a while.

Au contraire.. I think it has been maturing slowly, quietly..

and now there is enough churn/pain on Twitter to overcome the activation energy hump of moving to a new platform.

We need a social network to share short texts which cannot be easily turned off at the whim of a billionaire [or a government for that matter ] - Mastodon could be that thing, could grow into that thing, so is worth trying.

It also doesnt have to be perfect or complete to succeed - we can fix things and scale as we use it.

Our individual choices are a vote for the future we want - getting there is a noisy stochastic process.

... because I think we need something like Twitter that cant be sold out from underneath the users. Perhaps an idealism that cant be justified.. and yet I think we should at least try things in order to get there.

I sometimes think of a parallel universe in which the internet was controlled fully by Telcos .. we would have had to put in coins every 3 minutes to surf the web. So, I hold out hope for a social network where people can talk relatively freely that isnt killed by spam or individual/corporate/government greed [ for power, eyeballs or money ]

me 3

My gut feel after using M web for a few hours is that its good enough.

I think a lot of our systems are overly centralized.. which makes them vulnerable to the whims of rich individuals or governments.

Now is a great time to make the move, given recent churn on Twitter.

What is the truth of this ?

I would really like to know if my x86 'linux PC', is actually running another 'hypervisor' OS that runs Linux - it seems like a recipe for security vulnerabilities.

If so, there are a lot of Qns :

- what OS, is it up to date ?

- can this OS be communicated with from the network ?

- on which chips does it run ?

- can it be re-flashed / upgraded / replaced ?

- can it interrupt/schedule my normal os ?

- how much CPU/power does it use ?

I would certainly trust an Oxide supplied (Rust) bare metal open-source low-level OS to host linux vms on my dev machine, than say, a totally opaque binary blob that the US government has forbidden xyz company from talking about.. just to speculate wildly.

I also think Oxide has wider market that just the server space - eg. one has to do all sorts of shenanigans to get a core freed up so that you can run timing/latency sensitive apps, without getting interrupted by linux threads doing noisy housekeeping on each core.

.. and why is infra-red more useful ? Can we see through dust or something ?

indeed ..

Top offenders were essentially 2048 pixel wide png photos which should have been 1024 wide jpgs at max - weighing 6MB instead of 250k for a difference the human eye probably cant detect : )

but.. more than that, just an endless stream of js html css inclusions .. I suspect 85% of which is dormant, 20% actually repeated, if I were to guess.

hehe

oh.. I had assumed this referred to the _technical_ dark side ..

Was just toying around with porting a friends very successful shopify store to another platform .. noticed the main home page weighed in at 89MB .. wowza. [ To be fair a lot of that was large pngs which are much smaller as jpg or webp ]

Scrolling thru the endless html/css/js page sources injected plethora of 'liquid' inclusions, I can only describe as otherworldly.