Brutkey

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

It's so weird that a lot of people think the quality of software is measured in how often it gets updated—it's literally the opposite.

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

We used to be a real country

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

“It’s inevitable” often means “we’re doing this against your will and without requiring consent because we’re in a position of power”

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

Modern programming languages should have logos like this

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

Even if “AI” worked (it doesn’t), there’s many reasons why you shouldn’t use it:

1. It’s destroying Internet sites that you love as you use chat bots instead of actually going to sources of information—this will cause them to be less active and eventually shut down.

2. Pollution and water use from server farms cause immediate harm; often—just like other heavy industry—these are built in underprivileged communities and harming poor people. Without any benefits as the big tech companies get tax breaks and don’t pay for power, while workers aren’t from the community but commute in.

3. The basic underlying models of any LLM rely on stolen data, even when specific extra data is obtained legally. Chatbots can’t learn to speak English just by reading open source code.

4. You’re fueling a speculation bubble that is costing many people their jobs—because the illusion of “efficiency” is kept up by firing people and counting that as profit.

5. Whenever you use the great cheat machine in the cloud you’re robbing yourself from doing real research, writing or coding—literally atrophying your brain and making you stupider.

It’s a grift, through and through.

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

2006: Less is more, don’t repeat yourself
2016: Beautiful code prevents technical debt

2026: trillions of lines of generated spaghetti code that generate other spaghetti code will save us

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

The laptop I bought on eBay that—according to the listing—has no hard disk and a monochrome screen has arrived

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

It's so weird that a lot of people think the quality of software is measured in how often it gets updated—it's literally the opposite.

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

@VojtechHorky@social.coop It's getting better but it's still broken in other ways.

Really the most sensible solution would be intermediary aggregation so especially smaller servers can fetch replies more efficiently.

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

@VojtechHorky@social.coop The real issue is unfortunately the underlying protocol, I'm unsure if this can be overcome without breaking backwards-compatibility.

Perhaps they could add a second, more efficient protocol and slowly migrate to it.

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

You know how to get people to leave platforms run by evil people?

Yes, that's right, by offering better alternatives and being super friendly and welcoming and actively working on recruiting people and evangelizing for the better platforms and most importantly by not being chastizing and gatekeeping misers.

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

And this is working, but it's slow progress.

Mastodon in particular has UX problems that will be very hard to overcome that prevent mass adoption, foremost is that actual conversations (aka replies) are unreliable and slow due to the way posts are distributed. Quote post support was a huge first step to remedy this. I hope we'll see more updates on it.

Bluesky got a big chunk of former Twitter users, especially in some niches like for scientists and activists; they have great performance, reliable threading and replies and really amazing featuers like fully custom feeds—but suffer from intransparent moderation and frankly insufferable leadership (still leagues better than Twitter or Facebook though).

(There's more than these, but these are what I use.)

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

You know how to get people to leave platforms run by evil people?

Yes, that's right, by offering better alternatives and being super friendly and welcoming and actively working on recruiting people and evangelizing for the better platforms and most importantly by not being chastizing and gatekeeping misers.

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

Expert systems are inevitable

Don’t get left behind, Flash is the future

Java Applets will replace all other software

Cryptocurrency will obsolete fiat currency

Better claim your stake in the Metaverse

By 2015, we will all have self-driving cars

Pen computing is going to end keyboards on laptops

You’ll look so stupid if you miss out on NFTs

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

We used to be a real country

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

“It’s inevitable” often means “we’re doing this against your will and without requiring consent because we’re in a position of power”

Being Left Behind Enjoyer
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

We used to be a real country