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jstgord's comments

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: A Twitter Off Ramp: A Tutorial for Getting on Mastodon

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.

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

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.

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: Twitter Meltdown, Mastodon, and the End of Social Media (For Me)?

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.

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Has Mastodon blown its big chance?

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.

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: Moving to Mastodon

... 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 ]

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: A Man Behind Mastodon Built It for This Moment

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.

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: I have come to bury the BIOS, not to open it [video]

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.

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: The dark side of Shopify

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

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: The dark side of Shopify

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.

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: Pop culture has become an oligopoly

Your ideas could potentially be encoded in a better ranking/recommender _algorithm_ ..

ie. recommenders using something akin to page-rank could/should inject some random items so as to allow new content to bubble up and good new content to be voted up.

It seems nature does something similar - copying DNA pretty accurately, yet allowing for some mutations to advance things and adapt to a changing environment.

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: Pop culture has become an oligopoly

Could this effect also explain why a lot of seemingly truly original music came out in the 80s .. roughly coincident with a peak in wealth distribution in the middle class ?

My reasoning : a post-war relatively wealthy middle class and free University education meant more time for things like attending political protests, tinkering with emerging electronics/computers, engineering projects and garage bands.

We have wonderful flat screens now, much better comms .. and yet nothing seems fixable, were killing the planet with our carbon emissions and not many people seem concerned, and our best most energetic young minds are slaves to servicing their student debt.

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)

Although mostly horrified / entertained watching a flat-earther documentary a while back with my teenage son .. I was also kind of impressed at one point when the flat earthers did a measurement with a laser over some kilometers to 'prove' the flatness of their landscape.

Needless to say the experimental results differed slightly from their theory. But what struck me is, they were actually doing science .. which is wonderful. I remembered thinking if only our local schools would do a little bit of science, or math for that matter..

jstgord | 3 years ago | on: Elan School

WARN : deeply disturbing and utterly compelling

Im 10 pages in, taking a break because its too heavy ..

Random thoughts come to mind, given recent events, such as how a whole populace can be subjugated by regular abuse and misinformation .. and follow the whims of a despotic cult-leader. [ It strikes me most Russians have no idea whats going on in Ukraine, or are happy to pretend its not really happening. Why do millions have to have their lives uprooted by the decisions of one person ? ]

How many of us have the wherewithal to question the cultural rules we were brought up with, or the persistence to improve or change things, fighting a life-sapping bureaucracy ?

I fortunately live in a liberal democracy with excess food and security, with only first-world problems .. and yet .. it seems 85% of the citizens want action on climate change, while our elected leaders are hell bent on burning as much carbon as possible - so I have to ask, am I even living in a democracy ?

As a software dev, Ive been long thinking that almost all of our systems are far too centralized, and thus too brittle .. banking/currency/payments, social media, communications, food production, energy supply, politics, military, shipping/trade/transport, workplaces, education ..

yes, all of this is off-topic, but there are echoes .. we do have to keep re-remembering the Holocaust, because we are the same humans.

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