rzazueta's comments

Very cool take.

So, how have you fought off similar oppression in your utopic part of the world, wherever that may be?

Please, enlighten the rest of us.

Naw, decentralized means not having everyone on one platform. ActivityPub-enabled sites (Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc.) can be run by just about anyone, and can serve multiple users.

So, if you have the technical skills and the willingness to host an ActivityPub-enabled instance, you can serve it for others who either don't have the skills or ability to manage it themselves. If you keep it limited just to the folks in your own communities - people you know, friends of friends, etc. - then you limit a lot of the issues that arise from running huge instances - moderation, privacy issues, etc.

We took something natively decentralized - TCP/IP internet - and handed it off to handful of companies to run, thus centralizing it. That was a mistake, especially as they use the power they acquired to push back against folks, for example, trying to build independent community ISPs.

We need to decentralize as much as feasible - it's not all self-hosting, but "just let the money perverts run things" has not worked out so well for us. The solution lay somewhere in the middle, where cooperative groups serve the needs of the communities that matter to them in exchange for fair compensation.

Perhaps not so much "wholesome" - because I can definitely provide a handful of historical and current examples that definitely aren't - but certainly more "community minded".

In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections.

When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while.

I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all.

The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact.

This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome.

I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.

About as effective as robots.txt.

I'm in my fifth decade and I only answer the phone if it's someone I personally recognize - and, even then, I often let it ring out or dismiss it, unless it's my immediate family members.

I'd say I let them go to voicemail, but that doesn't even work anymore. With "ringless voicemail drops" all 20 voicemail slots are filled within two days from the same three robocallers. I've given up staying ahead of it - anyone worth talking to knows one of the other handful of ways to immediately get a hold of me.

This is not a question of "politeness" - it's a matter of enshittification and profit seeking from the same handful of money perverts who own everything, leaving us with the scraps and the pain of dealing with their shortsightedness.

I seem to only use my phone these days for playing the occasional game, doomscrolling, and getting work-related emails when I'm not at my desk.

I question every day whether it's worth keeping. Every day it feels less worth it.

It was recently stated that 40% of owner-occupied homes are mortgage free: (https://www.fastcompany.com/91376388/housing-market-the-real...)

Various stats put the ratio of owner-occupied residences to renter-occupied residences at roughly 70% to 30% (https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/rent-statistics)

Since only 40% of those "owner"-occupied homes have their mortgages paid off, that means the bank owns the other 60%.

Doing the math, this means only about 28% of people actually own the place in which they live. The other 72% is owned by banks, investors, landlords, etc.

That fully 20% of homes in California - intended to be owned by families or individuals as their primary residence - are instead served out as rentals, and this is a low percentage compared to other states, is a massive indicator of the one the key issues facing Americans:

We don't own anything. Not even our own homes. Not even our lives, which we sell to others at a discount as "labor".

When we don't own anything, we have no stability. When we have no stability, we live in a constant state of uncertainty, which is just another word for "fear". Fear makes us act desperately or angrily or selfishly.

And the people who run everything use that fear to manipulate us into agreeing to be exploited by them - to work for them, vote for them, worship with/for/on them, etc.

If you actually want peace and freedom and liberty and all those things Americans claim to care about, we need to start by building stability in our lives.

That starts by taking back ownership of those things that belong to us through our efforts. The mortgage companies provide zero value to homeowners - they simply gate who gets to live in a home vs. who must pay for a rental, which is even more unstable.

Replace hierarchies with cooperatives. Stop using money as the exclusive determining factor of whether someone is housed, fed, clothed, or cared for.

Desperate people make lousy workers - ask any power and money pervert who believes in this system how hard it is to find good indentured servants who will just obey without complaining.

Stable, cared for people make excellent workers - fear may be a motivator, but gratitude is an even greater motivator. When people are stable and able to relax, they are more often willing to contribute toward keeping that stability. You see this when people who have "free" time spend it volunteering for their community.

If that stability comes at the expense of others, however, it's inherently unethical and leads us back exactly to the situation where we are now - where some people gain stability by manipulating others into working for them and stealing from them a significant portion of the value they create.

Have you never been to a Maker Faire?

> Once upon a time, we geeks truly believed that computing and telecommunications would bring us together.

I still believe that. We just lost the plot. We can get it back.

And what, exactly, are we paying congress for? We could save tons just firing the whole lot!

I LOVE My Pebble and even got Rebble working on it not long ago to revive it.

However...

If you want to make it TRULY HACKABLE as you claim, you will not encumber it with cloud dependencies like you did last time. Let ME self host my own Pebble server if I choose. Go ahead and default to your servers and sell services and whatever, but let me host my own and switch the base URL to my own domain, preferably with open source software and simple APIs, without requiring me to go through your servers.

That way, even if this attempt also doesn't pan out, those of us willing to do the work will at least still have the functionality we want. I get the whole VC "lock them into required cloud services for life so we can make endless subscription revenue" model, but it's absolutely corrupt.

And, Eric, I know you know that - you have a hacker's heart. Please listen to it.

Remember: PG&E is a for-profit company. The CPUC consists of folks pretty much entirely in bed with PG&E.

I also love California - it's beautiful here, and the people are generally wonderful. But our state government, despite claiming to be blue, is pretty damned conservative across the board. Corporations first, then - if we still have time - the people.

Currently using SvelteKit for a project, and I dig it. I've used Vue in the past and tried to get on the React train, but both felt a bridge too far from good ol' HTML, JS and CSS. Granted, I'm mostly using the packaging and reactivity in SvelteKit - most of my server side code is written in Node using Express to better separate concerns, with some existing in SvelteKit mainly for BFF purposes.

I feel like if, down the road, I decided to ditch a framework altogether, writing it in Svelte may help seeing as there are very,. very few framework specific elements in it. I may also be deluding myself.

I bought it in the hopes of causing mostly harmless mischief, but its capabilities in that realm are oversold.

That said, I knew very little about UART communication or SPI until I started playing with this and an ESP32 device. I also knew very little about bluetooth, RF, and RFID/NFR type stuff until I started exploring the world with this. It's been a fun journey that's rapidly advanced my understanding of quite a few things.

Others have said its overpriced or that you can build your own or whatever, but it's actually just the right price for a cool little educational tool that also works beyond the educational stage. It may even inspire me to build my own advanced version at some point.

If you're already a hardware hacker or EE, this is probably not much more than a toy for you. If you've always wanted to explore some of these topics but had no idea how to start, the Flipper is a good introduction. I immediately flashed it with custom firmware and it was easier than flashing my BIOS.

The social pressure to "be interesting" is one of the factors that I think leads to a lot of our collective misery. I think the problem is one of scale - if you're not engaging with other people because they don't share your interests, you may be hanging out with the wrong people, but you may not have a choice. You may be required to hang out with them because they are co-workers, neighbors, etc. - members of communities to which you may belong but may not have willingly chosen (i.e. if you're lucky enough to have been able to choose your job and your position and the team you work with, you are in a very fortunate minority).

So much of our self worth is wrapped up in "being important" or "being interesting". We don't ask the question enough, "To whom"? As someone else mentioned here, you should be important to the communities you have explicitly chosen and built - your wife and kids, the friends you choose to keep in your life, etc. If they find you interesting and important, that really ought to be enough for just about all of us. I do feel like an awful lot of this pressure to be interesting stems from people who have not cultivated such communities of choice and are left with a dire need to feel important to anyone who will pay attention to them. It's a sickness that I think a lot of people have been able to muster into the wrong kind of attention building, which makes it seems better than it is (e.g. parasocial relationships through social media, etc.)

All of this is to say: Are you happy? Do the people who matter to you find you interesting and fun to be around? Focus on them and be happy. Our lives are enriched by the people we let into them. So long as everyone in our circles are well fed, well loved, and well rested - ourselves included - we can find peace and happiness. Excitement means different things to different people - you'll never catch me bungee jumping, but I get a rush when a delicious meal I had planned turns out exactly as I intended. Find what excites you, surround yourself with people who love and appreciate you - and whom you love and appreciate in return - and work toward your own sense of happiness without the judgement of the chattering classes.

No - the clapper will kill the power to it, so it won't be able to respond. You need to add a Google Nest device that will respond to your request for claps.

I've been feeling this way for a while. So much human effort spent on producing human suffering and death. No wonder everyone feels like everything is falling apart.

If the org has a software development team, there's really no reason not to roll your own. As stated previously, this is a pretty well solved and well documented problem. A lot of development teams outsource this under the idea that authx is not their core competency, but I'd argue protecting customer data ought to be among every development org's core competency, otherwise they;re asking for trouble.

If you're talking about orgs that don't have a dev team and buy everything off the shelf / through SaaS... well, this is unfortunately part of the risk those orgs run. If you're manufacturing and shipping widgets in boxes, and your box supplier starts using cheaper materials that don't hold up to shipping, the only option is to switch box providers. Same here - if you're org relies on an IAM tool to allow employees to log into SaaS or other hosted software platforms and the IAM leaks data, the only real options are to switch providers or work with the existing provider to fix the damage.

I agree mostly with this observation, but would add to it - people are willing to work when they own their work. There are definitely a lot of jobs and likely entire industries that would disappear tomorrow if we stopped optimizing for money and focused on optimizing for humanity, but a lot of necessary work - farming, construction, distribution of goods, etc. - would still need to happen, and I honestly believe there are a number of folks who would be happy in those jobs if they owned their work.

In a job, you sell a huge chunk of your waking life for a discount to faceless owners and investors who care less about employee and customer happiness than they do about their own bottom lines. In a truly cooperative setting - one where the work and proceeds are as equally shared as possible among all participants - everyone would have greater control over their work and would have full ownership over it. Such companies would necessarily run smaller and leaner with a tighter customer focus, which I think would improve the experience for everyone.

I truly believe switching from corporate hierarchies to radical cooperatives would solve a LOT of societal issues.

"Lobbying and weaponisation of PR" is just artisinal, organic, farm-to-table corruption.

This is a cleaning house / loyalty test: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote...

Reddit mods who do not want to be exploited further are best walking away now and trying to reform - if they decide, this must be exhausting - on the Fediverse.