Daily Journal 📓

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.

The iconic Dallas game developer, rocket engineer, and VR visionary has pivoted to an audacious new challenge: developing artificial general intelligence—a form of AI that goes beyond mimicking human intelligence to understanding things and solving problems. Carmack sees a 60% chance of achieving initial success in AGI by 2030. Here’s how, and why, he’s working independently to make it happen.

Today, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) announced it has joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) as a new member. The DPGA is part of the response to the United Nation’s call to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere.  The announcement was made as part of the opening keynote at the Free and Open Source Developers Meeting (FOSDEM) and celebration of OSI’s 25 year anniversary.

I was curious to get an update about Fastly’s Fast Forward program, which launched in November to support open source internet projects. It turns out, one of the programs Fastly is financially supporting is Mastodon, the open source Twitter alternative.

Despite there being many winners and losers over the course of more than six decades, we can identify a clear pattern that led to the formation of each cohort of technology companies: major technology breakthroughs can act as platforms for new companies and business models.

leaps in software coinciding with leaps in hardware have always led to much bigger markets than an advance in software could create on its own.

As a heuristic, our Platformization Conjecture could be written that the environment for a successful technology startup, over decades, can be simplified as follows:

• Company success is more likely when founded to exploit a new leap of technology.
• Company success is more likely when founded during a period of higher-than-average interest rates.
• Company success is even more likely when companies are founded to exploit a technology innovation that involves both software and hardware during periods of higher-than-average interest rates.

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that platformization transfers attention away from the tool and its uses to a growing space around the tool – from the sword to the blacksmith shop to the surrounding town square, eventually the whole bustling town – torch-wielding mobs and all. ==Tools want to be used; platforms want to be hung out in.==

The Rust community has a popular concept of “fearless X”. Fearless concurrency, fearless refactoring, etc.

Rust GUI should be fearless, for the reasons I’ve described. And fearless GUI is GUI that has other virtues:

An A plus would be implementing Bret Victor’s learnable programming. #Bret Victor

Chaos pilots are people who can creatively lead a project through uncertainty. They have negative capability, but they also have other critical skills, such as the ability to create structure within chaos and take action. Leaders who are chaos pilots are able to drive a team forward on a project even as the environment around them fluctuates.

Contributing to open source, in a long-term, productive way, is hard. It doesn’t happen overnight. It requires learning a lot of general skills and specific quirks about your chosen project. The only way for most people to get there is to have long term relationships with people who can teach them. Those relationships can be started at a sprint or a hackathon, or via a random comment in an issue tracker, but they can’t be nourished there. That’s a much longer process.

The key difference is that it’s made to be compatible with #ActivityPub. So instead of being oppositional to the leading protocol, it’s complementary.

• via Erlend Sogge Heggen in Noosphere Discord

• ((63e09982-0080-45ea-8c84-9c6b28ca3156))

• Nobody really likes C++ or CMake, and there’s no clear path for getting off old toolchains. Every year the pain will get worse.
• C++ is becoming a legacy language and finding contributors in the future will become difficult, while Rust has an active and growing community.
• Rust is what we need to turn on concurrent function execution.
• Being written in Rust will help fish continue to be perceived as modern and relevant.

Your public key is the smell of your breath, since anyone can come up to you and smell it. Now whenever you author an activity, you’ll create a signature, by licking the activity. Only you can create this signature, and other people can verify it’s yours based on the smell of your breath. (This is a very bad analogy, but it makes up for that by being fun!)

They are essentially inheritance diagrams that show what kinds of activities there are, and actors, etc. Posted here in case they are useful for others, too.

Friends, let me put it this way. If you open source your product, you set the value of that product at $0. If you open source your software and collaborate with others who want to better their own lives with it, you can capture value on your product.

https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1618805828580179968

In the responses, Dirk Riehle The Open Source Distributor Business Model

Terence notes that the Open Graph Protocol is… if not dead, abandoned.

Speaking of Twitter, OGP doesn’t have everything Twitter needs, so they manually extended it and added their own proprietary stuff. Who knows exactly why, but one might think the stewards of OGP weren’t exactly on the ball.

On the Google front, they’ve decided to go with their own proprietary “structured data” thing like this:

Copilot is an epistemic agent: it’s not query/response, which is a model which presupposes that I do not change; it scouts ahead and helps me build knowledge. I have a better mental model of my domain, I know more, than I did before I started.

software has gotten harder to build in one very particular and important way: it’s gotten more complex.

I’ve tried to break up the explosion in complexity into the following categories:

• The complexity of rising standards
• The complexity of too many choices
• Complexity and technical decision making in the era of abundance
• The complexity of large teams and aging code bases
• Aspirational complexity

• I believe that we’re having this conversation at this exact moment because we’re at the tail end of a decade of cheap money. The relative ease of raising capital has both contributed to the trends that have brought us to this point of discontent, and allowed us to put off dealing with the challenges it created.

this is why startups are hard. You have to do both: go as fast as you can for as long as you can. Sprint the marathon.

Speed is a competitive advantage in itself. In fact, it’s the only sustainable advantage that startups have. Startups are famously under-resourced compared to big companies; they lack money, brand, people, scale, reach, robustness and pretty much everything else. The one thing that startups can do better than incumbents is move fast.