• 8 Posts
  • 159 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I thought those were for only when shit is seriously wrong and execution can’t continue in the current state.

    That’s how it starts. Nice and simple. Everyone understands.

    Until

    some resource was in a bad state

    and you decide you want to recover from that situation, but you don’t want to refactor all your code.

    Suddenly, catching exceptions and rerunning seems like a good idea. With that normalized, you wonder what else you can recover from.

    Then you head down the rabbit hole of recovering from different things at different times with different types of exception.

    Then it turns into confusing flow control.

    The whole Result<ReturnValue,Error> thing from Rust is a nice alternative.


  • Decentralised social media platforms are increasingly being recognised as viable alternatives to their centralised counterparts. Among these, Mastodon stands out as a popular alternative, offering a citizen-powered option distinct from larger and centralised platforms like Twitter/X. However, the future path of Mastodon remains uncertain, particularly in terms of its challenges and the long-term viability of a more citizen-powered internet. In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities, to understand their motivations and lived experiences of running decentralised social media. Our research indicates that while decentralised social media offers significant potential in supporting the safety, identity and privacy needs of marginalised and stigmatised communities, they also face considerable challenges in content moderation, community building and governance.







  • Wait til we discover the launchpads in the geologic record.

    I have it on good authority that the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, they predicted the Chicxulub collision and escaped the Earth on arks. Of course they realized that their warm blooded servitor species would survive the impact and evolve sentience much like their own (they created our genomes, so it was easy to predict), so they hid the launchpads until we would be ready to see them.

    The arks landed on Planet 9 (the big one, not the lil one), since it was less likely to be hit by similar events. They hollowed it out, helping to create Pluto and Ceres, and have been living in there ever since.

    Discovering the launchpads will show them that we’ve achieved sufficient technological prowess for them to reveal themselves to us. I can’t wait!










  • There’s also the stuff that “you get to know before it becomes news”, which also won’t be on Mastodon because it lacks the “gossipers” and the mass of users that is needed for having people “everywhere”

    It’s not the gossipers, it’s a trending view. Mastodon doesn’t tell users about active conversations as they happen. That makes it really hard to get breaking news, because you need to be following someone who is posting about it AND you need to recognize that it’s breaking news.

    Maybe that has improved in the year or two since I used Mastodon.




  • we’ve been seeing these “twitter’s in biiiiiiiiig trouble now!!” headlines for how many years now?

    this time it’s for realsies.

    yet people refuse to just delete it

    Many journalists want to feel connected, and since many politicians have a presence on Twitter, they feel like they can’t. That means Twitter gets referenced way more than necessary in news stories, which feeds its popularity.