Jared White

Not downvoting because I appreciate the effort…but ChatGPT is about as opposite from the ethos of open source as you can get imho. 😄

Opt-out is bullshit, it's unethical. Unless people specifically give their consent to their content being used for training data, and are compensated if they wish to be compensated for that privilege, then it's just not morally defensible. Legally defensible? Sure, maybe so. But we don't like to support companies who are merely abiding by the letter of the law, we want them to abide by the spirit of the law and of treating their customers with respect and consideration. This is not that at all. 😕

Ruby, absolutely. Still brings me joy with its expressiveness and flexibility.

Yeah, that's not remote, that's on-call. 😅

I'm squarely in the AT protocol is not the Fediverse camp. Fine if people want to enjoy Bluesky, but the Fediverse is built on top of the W3C protocol ActivityPub. AT is incompatible. Cool that there's a bridge, but a bridge between incompatible protocols will always be a bit of a hack in my book.

I'm a blogger and a web developer, so IMHO:

Blog-style sites have never been as cheap to run as right now. For small-to-midsize sites run mostly as static sites, it might even be close to free.

Virtually all cost is in the human labor, and the challenge of running a sustainable business model like subscriptions off of "words" which I think are valuable but getting audiences to agree is very hard.

But we might be seeing a turnaround here. I'm hopeful!

Some things never change…

I'm totally fine with the SWF engaging with Meta just like they would any other entity building software using ActivityPub.

Funding on the other hand is a different story. It sounds like Meta contributed to an overall fund in order to launch the SWF. OK, I suppose — but if there's specific funding down the road for some specific project or funding in some way which appears to influence decision-making on which projects to work on or how to approach them, that's when I have a huge problem with it.

"physically easy"

Sure, because our necks, backs, and hips are all feeling so great all the time with these long hours at the desk.

"pays well"

Some tech jobs are connected with living in places with high living expenses, not to mention some tech jobs aren't at Big Tech firms so the pay is lower. Struggling with finances doesn't magically disappear because you're good at code.

"people think you're smart"

lolololol said every person ever who isn't white man passing or perhaps presenting as one of the "privileged" minority classes.

Look, do I agree tech jobs on average are appealing compared to many other professions? Sure! But minimizing—verging on gaslighting—the very real harms people may suffer while working in tech is irresponsible. Our industry has a long way to go to provide real equality, equanimity, and stability.

My daughter told me she was getting paper from the other room to draw on, and as she ran off I replied "Sounds ink-credible!"

My hot take is that short-term posture doesn't matter all that much. If you have bad posture but you get up every 20 minutes and stretch/do chores/exercise for 5-10 minutes, you probably erase the original issues.

My one-two punch, if you're looking for advice: make sure you use a chair that makes good posture easy, with your keyboard+mouse & monitor height well separated on your desk (if computing's the main thing you're doing as you work). And then make sure you're getting a lot of activity throughout the day. Spans of 2, 3, 4, etc. hours just sitting at your desk will be really bad for you, no matter how good your posture is.

I guess what I'm saying is if you can either focus a lot on posture or focus a lot on physical activity routines, prioritize the latter. But both are certainly important.

Oh yeah, thanks for bringing that up. And maybe we stay away from WordPress.com now with all the weird AI stuff they've been up to. 🤪

I all for removing barriers to entry in this space, and if you're talking about self-hosting everything and wiring up all sorts of bits and bobs of various services together manually, yeah, it's very technical and daunting. But somebody can get started on Ghost, or WordPress.com, or Buttondown, or ConvertKit or whatever. Lots of ways to write early and often online. Buzzsprout is pretty rad for podcasting as well.

The problem usually boils down to distribution like Nilay said, not hosting. Fediverse seems like a real solution here. Honestly I've never been as successful at both blogging and podcasting as I am right now. This isn't merely a glimpse of some old-school internet nostalgia trip. It's a whole new world out there and it's actually better. 🤩

Squash merge into the main branch. It's the only way to fly. (just my 2c!)

All right, I'll correct you because you're wrong.

What bothers me is an open source tool enhancing a proprietary service which by its very nature breaks open source licensing and in face copyright protections of all sorts across the entire internet.

You seem to be incorrectly stating what is on Wikipedia, which leads:

The fediverse (commonly shortened to fedi)[1][2][3] is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol.

That last bit is absolutely key: a collection of services using a common protocol. Imagine if two different email servers didn't both speak SMTP. Imagine if two different web services didn't both speak HTTP. The Internet as a singular entity is only made possible because of protocol interop between all of its constituent parts.

To say "the fediverse" is comprised of multiple incompatible protocols goes against that grain, and to go back to pre-ActivityPub-as-W3C-specification days as an argument that it's fine to label multiple incompatible protocols as all being components of "the fediverse" is a stretch.

To me, this isn't a let's-agree-to-disagree-issue, honestly. While the term "fediverse" is arguably colloquial and doesn't necessarily imply any specific technical attributes, it ceases to be useful as a term if Fediverse Platform A cannot in any way communicate with Fediverse Platform B because the two platforms happen to be using 100% incompatible protocols. Aside from a third-party bridge, the AT protocol used by Bluesky is 100% incompatible with ActivityPub used by Mastodon, Threads, and others. Therefore, they cannot both be simultaneously services in the fediverse.