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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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  • I don’t think that there is an obligation with that kind of standard, no.

    Banking and security, accessibility yes.

    Specific choice of “user side software”, probably not. And it’s somewhat unlikely to happen too, because if you think about apps on phones, if suddenly a completely new phone OS were to show up and had 30% market share, it wouldn’t make sense to have a law that would legally require them to offer an app on that platform

    And Chrome isn’t “officially bad” in a legal sense.

    The internet standards themselves are a bit… imprecise too. Implementing them in browser is ultimately up to the companies, there is no legal body requiring a browser to have or not have features. They just usually sort of do the same things because going different paths would be stupid. Mostly. Sometimes they totally do that, though, e.g. calendars and contact info have a standard, but all implementations are a mess and transfer is a pain.


  • When things collide, they transfer their movement energy. If things collide like this >- They will continue in roughly the same direction. If they collide like this -> <- their movement will cancel out and they will fall into the sun.

    Satistically, at the “beginning of time”, in a random sphere around the sun, things will not be completely the same. So everything will either collide and fall. Or it will collide and continue in roughly the same direction. What we have now are the leftovers that were moving in roughly the same direction and colliding so little that they didn’t fall into the sun because of that.

    The same is true for the “disk”: If you start with a roughly evenly distributed sphere of gases or something, there is a middle somewhere where there is a little bit more mass than anywhere else. That’s where things will go.



  • At the cost of sounding naive and stupid

    It may be a naive question, but it’s a very important naive question. Naive doesn’t mean bad.

    The answer is that that is not possible, because the compiler is supposed to translate the very specific language of C into mostly very specific machine instructions. The programmers who wrote the code, did so because they usually expect a very specific behavior. So, that would be broken.

    But also, the “unsafety” is in the behavior of the system and built into the language and the compiler.

    It’s a bit of a flawed comparison, but you can’t build a house on a foundation of wooden poles, because of the advantages that wood offers, and then complain that they are flammable. You can build it in steel, but you have to replace all of the poles. Just the poles on the left side won’t do.

    And you can’t automatically detect the unsafe parts and just patch those either. If we could, we could just fix them directly or we could automatically transpile them. Darpa is trying that at the moment.


  • I think the timing isn’t quite right, because the other social media places aren’t figuratively totally on fire.

    There isn’t “the great social media collapse of 20XX” happening, because of some security issue or servers being super expensive or ads being actually 99% of the content. The forces that be are managing things well enough that things aren’t collapsing right now.

    There is no single actually big celebrity that has picked a fediverse platform as the place to be, follow and discuss news.

    And there is no killer feature that you can only get here.

    The bonfire is stacked nicely, but there is no spark. For now. That could change at any moment, but it could also take a while.


  • I don’t think the timing is quite right.

    I don’t really have anything meaningful to contribute to the feeds and most of the discussions are a bit pointless. They’re not really changing anything. So, in part those other platforms are fueled by outrage culture. Which I know is bad, so not having it is good, but then we also don’t have the growth from it.

    The technology is there and that should help. Apparently people aren’t going to mass migrate from reddit quite yet, even though the push last year probably helped a lot.

    It is a network problem. I think the slow growth will / should happen eventually, because the fediverse is an objectively good place to start a community. It’s just not going to be fast and other platforms adding push factors would help obviously. We’ll see where reddit goes with their paid subs.

    I don’t think the low effort posts are a problem, there is hardly motivation to interact with an empty page and there is slightly more if there are “boring topics”. At least it’s a place.





  • How is it vague?

    It’s vague in all the legal ways:

    • First of all which kinds of games it applies to. It obviously can’t work for games that have a technical server requirement, … world of warcraft, but actually EVE online. The guys who run that game, get experimental hardware that’s usually military only (or at least they did in the past). The server is not something, you could run even if you wanted to. Drawing the legal boundary between what “could be” single player offline (e.g. the crew, far cry, hitman), wasn’t done.

    • It’s not clear how it should apply to in terms of company scale. The new messenger legislation that was passed, made space for the EU parliament / system to declare and name, individually, who counts as a company that is is big enough, so that they have to open their messenger system to others for interoperability. It’s not clear if the law has to apply to everyone, and every game, or just e.g. companies above 20 million revenue or something.

    • It’s not clear what happens if a company goes bankrupt, and the system isn’t immediately ready to keep working.

    And a few more.

    That being said, I think Thor’s stance on this is silly. All of that is part of the discussion that is now starting. He could raise good points and get them included, but I guess that’s not happening.






  • A bit, but not really. The key is to understand that it can be applied to very small scale and very simple processes as well. But that it’s still the same concept.

    E.g.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_(device)

    Or not getting enough sleep by noticing you’re tired and changing your daily routine to change it.

    People have tried to run economies with it and that… failed. I think it could be interesting to try it again now that we have seriously wide spread internet access and fast, cheap communication. But forcing it on everyone is probably a bad idea and it’s not even necessary. For example, if the data is just easy to access, big companies should do it themselves. That’s their entire purpose. We’re just hindering efforts that way, because the data interfaces are usually not designed to make it this easy. Like, we don’t have a common standard to order material online, or to watch those prices.

    So when a fast food chain orders potatoes for their fries and steel mill orders coal and iron, they’re using different systems that have to be maintained.


    And the reason I’m writing it here, is that people don’t know about it. Therefore they don’t demand it from their democratic leaders or unions and therefore we don’t have it.

    I’m not saying anything new.

    It’s the same kind of voting, negotiation, discussion system we already use everyday. Those just look different when they are the same thing. We are 95% there, we’re just missing one or two last steps.




  • We have figured out how to run everything, absolutely everything, in the 1950s.

    The original computer “AI” craze was started by “cybernetic systems” and for good reason. You probably only know of the bastardizations of “cyber-” that don’t have anything in common with the original concept.

    The original concept goes like this:

    1. set a goal
    2. perform an action
    3. measure how much impact that had, did it get you closer to your goal or not?
    4. If you are at your goal, you’re done,
    5. otherwise adjust your actions, got to 2. (This is “feedback” and the reason that word is now so common. People at the time knew)

    The faster you go through the loop, the faster you will figure out what works.

    You can measure anything you want, as vague is you want. Happiness, money, productivity. It’s the way democracy is designed to work, in which case the feedback is vague and the cycle time is measured in years. It runs your thermostats, in your home, big national power grid power plants. It’s how autopilots autopilot.

    The idea that “nobody could have predicted…” or “nobody responsible” is a myth. We have the science. We know how it works.

    Every failure we still experience is a failure we allow to happen. Because of profit, politics, or whatever.

    Didn’t catch something “going on for years”, maybe someone should check more often. “Crazy single individual causing a tragedy”? No, that’s a person at risk, probably with social or mental problems you didn’t take care of before, didn’t flag, and didn’t stop in time.

    “Nobody wants to work on our open source project” Really, how is your onboarding? Do people take a look at the docs/culture and run away screaming? Yeah?