Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

@realtegan @jerry Love this story.

Steel City Comic-con hosted William Shatner last year, so no surprise that folks were out in their Star Trek garb. But it's Pittsburgh, so folks were also out in their fursuits.

A group of the two fandoms got together for a photo op in front of the photo-op wall with the Trekkies pulling out their tricorders and getting scans on the furries. Funniest damn thing I saw all day. Wish I'd had the courage to ask if they minded if I snapped a photo too; it was great.

@alan @jerry moar liek furdiverse, amiright? ;)

@jerry "We at the server furhouse.social appreciate your feedback. As a result of your report, we have looked into this person and discovered they were an artist whose Patreon we had not yet subscribed to. We have rectified the error. Please feel free to notify us about other oversights in the future. Sincerely, the admin."

@BlackAzizAnansi I'm sure they're out there, but the nice thing about the Fediverse is if they show up in my field of vision, the block button is my friendly guy-holding-some-bags-standing-in-the-middle-of-the-street who has my back.

Anyone have some good leads on how #docker networking works?

I think I need the ELI-5 hand-puppet version. Trying to wrap my head around whether I need to set different ports for every postgresql container I'm bringing up in a parallel dev / prod deployment on the same machine; I'd expect "they're in separate networks so they should be invisible to each other" but then these containers are also exposing the port in the host's network it seems? Because when I set the `networks` to `- backend` and `ports` to `5432:5432`, I can access that postgresql DB at localhost:5432 from the host environment.

@Pat I don’t have a link to it right now, but someone (maybe Steve Yegge?) once did a blog post about their experience trying to get Google to pick up a new language for a project they were working on.

They had traction until an SVP asked a key question: did the cost estimate factor in maintenance and cross-training in perpetuity for supporting one additional language? Because adding a library or framework incurs a cost on a team using that library or framework, but adding a new language incurs the need for (especially at Google) an entire ecosystem of support—training, documentation, readability and review guidelines, debugging tools, integration libraries for using the language with every core framework Google requires (can the language even talk about protobuffers? Can you even make an RPC in the language? Does the language have a logging framework and how do we tie it to the logging endpoints in the Google fabric), and of course SRE support because every SRE has to be ready, in the limit, to handle every piece of software Google runs.

I was a fly on the wall for how Google picked up Go internally; it was at least a half-decade-long project from public release to “nobody looks at you askance for deciding to base a new service on Go.”

Trying out some experiments.

Successfully got a #RaspberryPi visible on the public Internet for the first time in a long time.

#Cloudflare tunnels don't mess around yo.

“But a DSL would make it easier to represent the problem in…”

My blessed sibling in software… If it’s a personal project, go nuts. If you’re working in a group or for an employer, a DSL replaces one problem (representation complexity) with another problem (work grinds to an absolute halt when the one guy who knew how the DSL works quits and the team has to reverse-engineer the implementation of the DSL to understand what it does in an undocumented corner-case).

Make your decisions accordingly, with an eye towards the engineering part, not the software part.

@jellyosaurus No, but only because I quit Twitter like five years ago when they decided to respond to the US electing a troll President by modifying their TOS to allow some trolls, but only the newsworthy ones.

Mastodon is a welcome addition to my social media habits though. I much prefer the people I’m following here to the detritus I collected on Twitter.

@lauren Question: I'm thinking of setting up my own Mastodon node. What configuration are you running for yours? Did you host in the cloud somewhere or do you have a DNS name tied to an on-prem server?

I've got a home connection via Verizon to the Internet, and I"m weighing my options between paying for cloud service, upgrading to internet service that would give me a static IP, or mounting my instance on a Raspberry Pi at home and using some dyndns or no-ip service to account for the occasional IP address change.

@kickingvegas Thank you! This is extremely helpful.

#emacs

So the only thing that keeps me from using eshell regularly as my shell is that I sometimes hit a CLI tool that wants to use all the TTY features, and that of course gets mangled by eshell.

Has anyone found a good solution for this? I can imagine, hypothetically, detecting one is about to launch one of those CLI tools and launching them in multi-term, but I’m not sure how I’d set that up (in particular, a pattern of running can-eshell | must-tty | can-eshell commands smells like it’d require some weird plumbing).

@msbellows I wish more people had actually read “I, Robot.”

The last story in the book is how the robots are in control. They set the global economy, they move resources, and if someone’s bad at their job, they quietly arrange systems to isolate the damage that person can do (essentially “the net interprets incompetence as damage and routes around it”). And the (human) President of the World gives a pretty good argument that we put them in control because we were never (nor would we ever be) a smart enough species to control our own destiny in an inherently complex and apathetic universe without amplifying ourselves, because at a fundamental level we just aren’t big enough.

It was an interesting take on the topic, but then the conceit of all the short stories in that book is “What if robots but humans don’t, like, fuck it up?”

@Firehawke_R Only if we take the output seriously, and that’s the actual risk.

Ai isn’t a risk to us. People delegating decisionmaking and doing stupid shit because “the algorithm said so” is the risk to us, and we can stop that by just refusing to accept, societally, that “I just did what the computer said to do” absolves responsibility.

AI was partially responsible for the housing collapse. We already know what happens if people give up thinking about hard problems and just trust the machine model.

Reasons I will sail the high seas and warm up a BitTorrent client:

❌ Playing games I don't own
❌ Copies of movies I don't want to pay for
✔️ FoRbIdDeN #BlUeY EpIsOdEs...

@Voline John Hinckley Jr. has entered the thread

@senj

@tvaziri To be fair to your wife, I’ve been using Apple computers since I was five and… I still can’t really use -TAB. It’s a broken model. I never want to switch from application to application; I always want to switch from window to window.

I use four-finger swipe-up swipe-down, which is not as convenient as alt-tab on Windows toggling between windows but is closer than the -TAB shortcut.