Daily Journal 📓

it seems likely to me that all computer users will soon have ability to 1) develop small software tools from scratch, 2) describe changes they’d like made to existing software they’re already using. what will this mean for software ecosystems?? 2/ https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1637592620888121344

• I think that software built to be user modifiable is going to have the most success with using an LLM to modify it, like #TiddlyWiki
• I’d say #Airtable too… except it’s designed for point and click first.

Report cards are good things and should be designed so nobody can ever coast to good outcomes on them as I did. Good report cards should force you to adapt to a received view of the world that cannot be entirely captured by your nerdy aptitudes, but doesn’t entirely waste nerd energy either.

What if we had social networks that are actually incentivized to help us form complex friendships and groups that work well together over time?

Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!

Students spend hundreds of hours using these tools over the course of their education (and thousands over their career), so it makes sense to make the experience as fluid and frictionless as possible. Mastering these tools not only enables you to spend less time on figuring out how to bend your tools to your will, but it also lets you solve problems that would previously seem impossibly complex.

@[email protected] To me the very first question is the last one: How do we answer questions? At the moment there is no canonical venue. There’s

1. SocialHub.
2. FEPs, which are kind of sort of tied into SocialHub.
3. Public SWICG mailing list, but it isn’t clear that this has “better domain” than, say, SocialHub.
4. The Mastodon project’s github.
5. Various hashtags on here. It isn’t clear if someone wanted to participate where to do so or what would be involved in that.

I’ve been working on a tricky project to move Val.town’s internals to Deno and adding better isolation between execution and the host environment. Luckily, it feels like we’re in the right place at the right time - there are a lot of new V8 Isolate-based JavaScript runtimes coming to the surface, standards emerging for them like WinterCG, and frameworks built for them like Hono and Remix. The last mile - isolation, code bundling, and communication - is still the wild west, and that’s what I’ve been building.

As a developer, ==you can freely build apps on atproto because open protocols are locked-open APIs==. However, if you just want to introduce another way of showing people posts, or moderating content in the network, we are designing interfaces for you to plug in and do exactly that, accessible through our app. ==If you’re building a new social app, you’ll be able to tap into the social graph and interest graph of atproto users the way you are currently able to bootstrap off of a user’s phone contacts.==

The promise of building an audience on apps built on atproto is that long term, it should become a protocol like email that lets you keep direct connections with people regardless of how the services mediating that relationship change.

“The Fediverse” needs to end, and I don’t think anything should replace it. Speak instead about communities, and prioritize the strength of those communities. Speak about the way those communities interact, and don’t; the way they form strands and islands and gulfs. ==I’ve taken to calling this the Social Archipelago.==

A bounty on competence encourages competence.

So we’ll seesaw back from open a bit toward closed again. That is what we know how to do for security. There’s opportunity in making—intermediating, monopolizing—that transition. But the greater bounty lies on understanding the logic of the balance. Not just “how do we make open more secure?”, but “what would a more securable kind of open look like?”

We are not ready for the future of Analytic Engines. I think every organization that has a substantial analysis or writing component to their work will need to figure out how to incorporate these new tools fast, because the competitive advantage gain is potentially enormous. If highly-skilled writers and analysts can save 30-80% of their time by using AI to assist with basic writing and analysis, what does that mean? How do we adopt these technologies into our work and lives? What happens when the web is flooded with convincing but wrong content from these tools? Again, I don’t think anyone has a clear idea. Maybe the productivity gains will be illusory, but, based on my experience and conversations with other users, I don’t think so.

StreetPass is a cool new browser extension that uses Mastodon’s verification system in a clever way.

Mastodon users verify themselves by adding a custom link to their personal site. StreetPass lets you know when you’ve found one of these links, and adds them to your list. As you browse the web, StreetPass will build a list of Mastodon users that belong to the websites you visit.

I spoke with the creater @tvler about the project, 🧵 below.

Visit https://streetpass.social to try it yourself!

My take on that is that ==tech cos and software development are a pop culture that does things because they are fashionable.== SPAs were en vogue, therefore they were the default. There was no malice because tech is driven by fashion, not outcomes or cost – @[email protected]

I’ve written about this pop culture a couple of times:

“Programming is a Pop Culture” baldurbjarnason.com/2022/progr…

“Tech Companies Are Irrational Pop Cultures” softwarecrisis.dev/letters/tec…

The idea that tech is a pop culture comes from Alan Kay :

youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuB… (great talk)

link.springer.com/content/pdf/… (good interview)

Although he is less fond of pop culture in general than I am. – @[email protected]

Alex makes the astonishing assertion that “vanishingly few scaled sites feature long sessions and login-gated content”. The above, as an anecdote to the contrary, is a screenshot of my start screen on my personal laptop in Firefox; it is roughly speaking a list of my most-visited websites. Ignoring Alpaca, an unreleased side project of mine, all but one are SPAs. Taking the requirements of “long sessions, login gated content”, all but one should be single page apps.

Certainly the long tail of websites in the world is probably mostly static, but the big sites — where all the development dollars are spent — are overwhelmingly rich, complex sites. The money is in rich apps, not because the money is being wasted, but because the content and services people pay for are highly personalized and dynamic, where rich apps shine.

The OSS community clinging to the LAMP stack (and then Docker) rather than adopting the 12 Factor Apps pattern and onwards to serverless is only going to become more of a problem. There is no path from LAMP to [conversational programming](Why the fuss about conversational programming?) https://social.coop/@bmann/109845198227859852

The bad news, or at least some of it, is immediately obvious. You probably shouldn’t trust any video or audio recording ever again. There are some good use cases for this as well: realistic AI-run avatars could serve as customer support agents, personal tutors, and more. Hopefully, the positive uses will outweigh the negative, but our world is changing rapidly, and the consequences are likely to be huge.

==Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web.== It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpegretains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry jpeg, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.

The key web 2 concepts were: letting users publish whatever they want (“user generated content” was a buzzword), social graphs, APIs and mashups (what we’d call composabilitytoday), defaulting profiles and photos to public vs private, and tagging over hierarchical navigation, among other things. There were also technical innovations. A seemingly simple but important one was web pages that updated dynamically without reloading the page, what was usually called Ajax and is now just the way people expect web apps to work. There were mobile devices that could access the open web but they were extremely niche (I was an avid Sidekick user). #Web 2.0

Another striking thing about that period was how small and passionate the web 2 community was. I remember in 2004 going to what I think might have been the first New York Tech meetup. The whole group fit in a small room in Meetup’s headquarters. People demoed software they had created and talked late into the evening.

The basis of competition switched from creative idea generation to disciplined execution. You had to decide whether you wanted to be the idealistic band at the indy bar or be pragmatic — potentially making compromises — and play in stadiums.

In retrospect, there was a convergence of three powerful trends: social media (by then that word was replacing web 2), cloud computing (which would enable the apps to scale server side), and the rise of smartphones. Independent product design spaces are multiplicative: even if social, cloud, and mobile each improved linearly, the combination could improve exponentially.

Things that look interesting to smart people usually do so because they are rich with product possibilities. These possibilities eventually become reality. Toys become must-have tools. Weekend hobbies become mainstream activities. Cynics sound smart but optimists build the future.