R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org

Journalist @adamdavidson on moving to Mastodon: "I think we got lazy as a field and we let Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and, god help us, Elon Musk and their staff decide all these major journalistic questions."
https://themarkup.org/newsletter/hello-world/mastodons-moment

I find it frustrating how user research about how normies prefer algo timelines is floated without acknowledging that it so far has always led to outrage-driven hellholes like Twitter or Facebook.

I don’t want to take it away from anyone just b/c I don’t like it, but if you don’t have a plan for this, I’m ok with the 99% scrolling thru TikTok & arguing with their racist uncles on Facebook about made up news—while this stays a tiny nerd hole.

My adrenal system is tired of outrage baiting.

I've now installed a "RT @" filter so Twitter retweets don't show up in my home feed (shakes fist at clouds)

It's great how well crafted the Mastodon RSS feeds are. Just wrote a blog post about that.

http://scripting.com/2022/11/21.html#a145001

#Tumblr posts that they will be adding #ActivityPub to connect to the #Fediverse ASAP... #Mastodon

I actually have an old B&N Nook e-reader that I was able to get autographed by the inimitable @pluralistic - he wrote on the back of it “if you can’t open it, you don’t own it”

Feeling like there’s a corollary there for the modern day: “if it can be bought and destroyed by a billionaire, you don’t own it”

No billionaire can just “buy Mastodon”. They might buy an instance (I got one you can have for $8!), but the protocol is free forever.

@scottjenson @jeffjarvis You could simply do a very easy logistic regression of your own decision of "favorite" or "bookmark" or "reply" against the vectors of boost and favorite of all your follows to get a statistical prediction of how likely you are to favorite (or reply to, etc.) a post. Let's call that prediction "quality", acknowledging that is a firmly subjective (intersubjective?) kind of quality.

Then need some way to combine that "quality" metric with recency. I'd favor a quality threshold that varies over time to maintain a roughly constant rate of posts selected from the thousands of candidates per day: 5 per day, say, or 50 per day. Maybe only rate a post 48 hours after posting so all the data is in.

The consistent increased risk of diabetes after Covid across all age groups, highest in the first 3 months after infection, from a systematic review of 9 studies, ~40 million people
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-022-02656-y

(Obviously none of what say here will be useful to Mastodon admins fighting fires this week.)

Maybe needing multiple machines with gigabytes of RAM to support only 75,000 users suggests that a more efficient reimplementation of #ActivityPub would be helpful. Maybe not using Ruby and using enough backpressure to handle overload conditions gracefully would help.

I don't know, how effectively can ActivityPub implementations apply backpressure? Does the protocol itself make it difficult? Can failed deliveries get reattempted after a short time if deferred due to overload?

How much total bandwidth are we talking about for this number of users? Back of the envelope? This is super stupid because haven't even read the protocol spec, so please let me know if I'm making totally wrong assumptions here.

First, the inter-server traffic. I'm thinking media attachments aren't included in the activity stream itself, but thumbnails are; those are typically 100K; everything that isn't a media attachment is of insignificant size; users typically subscribe to 100 other users on other instances, who each post 100 posts a day; one post in five has a media attachment; and on average each remote user has two subscribers on your instance, so the 10000 incoming posts a day per user gets reduced to 5000, which is 100 megabytes per user per day. Is that about right?

100 megabytes per day is about 9600 baud, so a gigabit pipe should be adequate for the inter-server communications for around 100k people.

But then you actually have to serve those posts to them, which means at least twice as much bandwidth, and maybe more if they reload the page and you can't force their browser to cache those stinky thumbnails forever.

In terms of messages per second, 5000 incoming posts per user per day is about 6000 posts per second for 100k users. That's about an order of magnitude below what RabbitMQ can do (on one machine!) and two orders of magnitude below ZeroMQ. So the bandwidth thing rather than CPU is really probably the crucial limiting factor (though not, of course, with Ruby).

9/ Anyway, code is increasingly generated in so many ways that we're moving from "writing lines of code is hard" to "the hard problem is determining whether a chunk of code is fit for purpose" (this motivated Joe Politz's dissertation a decade ago!).

10/ The next generation computing problems will not be about writing 80s style 5-line for-loops. It'll be about properties, specification, reasoning, verification, prompt eng, synthesis, etc. How will we get there?

"Vox populi vox Dei" is from a quotation saying the opposite of voice of people is voice of God:

"...riotiousness of the crowd is always very close to madness"

--Alcuin 8th C AD.

https://archive.org/details/littleoxforddict0000unse_b9y8/page/242/mode/1up?q=%22Nec+audiendi+qui+solent+dicere%2C+vox+populi%2C+vox+dei%2C+quum+tumultuositas+vulgi+semper+insaniae+proxima+sit%22

I find this twitter poll interesting: https://twitter.com/danielerasmus/status/1594468482829139968

The thing about Twitter is that it really lacks a lot of the features you'd expect from a true Mastodon replacement.

For example, there's no way to edit your toots (which they, confusingly call "tweets"—let's face it, it's a bit of a silly name that's difficult to take seriously).

"Tweets" can't be covered by a content warning. There's no way to let the poster know you like their tweet without also sharing it, and no bookmark feature.

There's no way to set up your own instance, and you're basically stuck on a single instance of Twitter. That means there's no community moderators you can reach out to to quickly resolve issues. Also, you can't de-federate instances with a lot of problematic content.

It also doesn't Integrate with other fediverse platforms, and I couldn't find the option to turn the ads off.

Really, Twitter has made a good start, but it will need to add a lot of additional features before it gets to the point where it becomes a true Mastodon replacement for most users.

#twitter #mastodon #twittermigration

I really can’t believe how far #3dprinting has come since I started with my first #reprap. I’m printing this #DarkSaber and the QUALITY coming out of a $700 #Prusa is bananas. And the fact that I BUILT IT MYSELF FROM A KIT is mind blowing. And using #OctoPrint by @foosel and OctoEverywhere to monitor remotely? It’s Star Trek levels of awesome. #Irony

Tonight, Artemis Orion will sail past the moon's orbit and then fall back towards the moon, getting as close as 100 km to the lunar surface. At 07:44 ET tomorrow morning, thrusters will be fired to further accelerate Orion and send it towards the DRO insertion point. 4 days later, the DRI burn will insert Orion into DRO proper.

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_artemis_1?rate=0&time=2022-11-21T13:10:00.000+00:00

Go #Artemis #Orion

6/n

Experimenting with 3D modeling using mathematical functions to define a surface using Python in @Blender. A bit different than my usual go-to modeling tool @FreeCAD, but works really great! #3dprinting

@radehi

Touché.

The last thing I learned was TypeScript and the Playwright framework for automation and testing. I learned it because I found it a sound, useful, and innovative new technology.

In the past 27 years, I have seen lots of fancy whiz-bang technologies come and go. At the launch, during the early adoption phase of the technology it seems like, "THIS is IT! The next BIG THING. It's going to be super popular." Then, it runs into problems. and quietly fizzles out.

Use discernment.

Responses to some frequent comments:

* I'm certainly not suggesting that algorithmic feeds should be imposed on everyone! Choice is great. I recognize that many, perhaps most current Mastodon users like chronological feeds.

* "Reverse chronological" is an algorithm, albeit a simple one. It's currently the only option. Chronological feeds are not normatively neutral. There is, unfortunately, no neutral way to design social media. https://mastodon.social/@randomwalker/109308664849924122

@scottjenson @jeffjarvis Also if you're running your own instance you can afford to deploy staggering amounts of CPU power. Like, you could plausibly run GPT-NeoX-20B on your own dual-GPU rig to try to guess which Fediverse posts you'd be most interested in seeing.

The NSA can do this with Twitter, but you're not allowed to.