What an interesting read! The food analogy instantly made sense to me, I am wondering if other people had the same experience?

What is the point of all this, you may wonder? Well, reading Postman provided a big eureka moment for me - an understanding of why I struggle so much to convince my friends to abandon commercial social media in favor of the Fediverse. Drum roll: the Fediverse may be missing a clear, cohesive narrative.

Technically the Fediverse has everything one would need to enjoy independent social media, away from the surveillance capitalism that powers Big Tech. What has been difficult is finding a story, a simple narrative anyone could follow that would explain WHY the Fediverse is the most empowering, most ethical technological solution out there for social media.

I have come to see the Fediverse as the equivalent of organic, plant based, home-cooked meals and by contrast I see TikTok, Instagram, X, Threads, Snap and other platforms by Big Tech as the equivalent of Big Food – brands like Coca Cola, McDonalds, Nestlé, that promote ultra-processed, highly addictive foods and beverages, contributing to an epidemic of obesity, type 2 diabetes and other diet-related diseases.

The title is pretty self explanatory. Yes, I want to know if it’s AI generated because I don’t trust it.

I agree with the conclusion that it’s important to disclose how the AI was used. AI can be great to reduce the time needed for boilerplate work, so the authors can focus on what’s important like reviewing and verifying the accuracy of the information.

dude was frustrated, he quit and became a farmer

Scientist:

That means: Either the clock works quickly or it works precisely – both are not possible at the same time.

Engineer: Explain that to my manager please!

Also, Engineer: Well, what if we accounted for error rate and fixed precision post-processing?

I kinda agree but you still need money to live and if I was able to work on open source projects while sustaining myself I would choose it anytime.

Interesting concept, it would be nice to provide instructions for instance admins.

Also, I would suggest adding tags, that way instance admins can select specific tags if they want to. It would help create a better local feed for new instances.

To be honest, setting such a goal is scary to me, I have been working on my self-confidence, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it a few years ago. I try to remind myself that I am an autistic with ADHD: if I had food, meds, a bed, a place to study, and the frequent affirmation of a similarly interested peer group I would be happily studying 12 hours a day.

Super Crunchers seems like a good place to start, it’s a book about how quantitiative analysis can be used for social sciences.

It’s astonishing how quickly the golden age of information is turning to the dark age of misinformation.

Most people get over it during uni when everyone is arguing over “X vs Y” language or “vim vs productivity”. At some point you realize how pointless these debates are and continue with your life.

For anyone wanting to publish their code, remember it’s probably better than most OSS code. If you don’t believe that go read a python or js library:

1. python’s celery for example has hard coded timeouts on every control operation
2. react mui has so overcomplicated types that they break webstorm inspections
3. I once found a typing hack on an python library where they reversed a string in order to conditionally import types only when mypy was running in order to avoid cyclic imports.

I still love those libraries, use them at my work and will recommend them to anyone with similar needs as I.

Last but not least, if you aren’t using git something is wrong with you 🤣.

good question, probably the transpiled code does not match the optimized js. Maybe, if they targeted the same js version as js version they are benchmarking, the results would be equivalent?

Also, if they are using a node version with ts support, it will compile the ts before execution which means they are measuring the impact of the compiler, which can be a lot for small snippets.

last week I had misconfigured my auto-format and it was leaving commas and whitespaces. The amount of “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE???” comments I got were of the chart.

There was a linter in place, I literally could not merge unless the issues were fixed, yet people felt compelled to point them out.

reminder that your upvote history is publicly available

I am guessing you didn’t add enough “big corps bad”.

PS big corps bad

A plugin system that allows for custom scoring methods is a good idea, IMO.

This would allow instance admins to install whatever plugins fit their users’ needs. See how many instances are deploying multiple clients like default Lemmy, old Lemmy, alexandrite, and many more.

Arbitrary code execution is not safe, so it would probably require an admin permission to install plugins.

Some ideas for interesting scoring/sorting methods or feed generation in general:

1. personalized AI scoring, most of us agree it’s bad when a big corp controls AI, but maybe it’s better if the user could fine tune it
2. instance/community/other AI scoring, instead of super individualized scoring sometimes you may value the feedback of others including the communities you follow or your instance
3. the explore feed that was recently suggested (or any another mixer), i.e. a mix of home, local and all based on factors the user can configure
4. random
5. Top/Hot/Active/New but only counting interactions from people you “trust” (i.e. you follow the same communities, or have at least X% compatibility) (again big corps bad, self hosting good)

Some of these services are not cheap to host, but the fediverse allows for multiple solutions to coexist. Some servers will charge for premium features, some servers will not provide them, some people will self host over engineered solutions, and big corps will show/sell ads and track user data (never forget big corps bad).

I admire your enthusiasm, so I would like to chime in with my 2 cents. I see a solution to an undefined problem, thus we cannot evaluate if said problem is solved by the solution.

Were I to redesign Lemmy, I would start by defining the requirements of that software. Things to consider here would be:

1. What would be the total number of users?
2. What would be the total number of communities?
3. What would be the total number of instances?
4. What would be the spread of users across instances? Are there categories we can define? (For example, a large instance may have millions of users, but a small instance may have 1-1000)
5. The same about communities.
6. What would be the number of posts, comments, and upvotes/downvotes for each instance or community category?
7. What’s the average size of a post or comment?
8. Probably countless more, but you got to restrict yourself to the ones with the most impact.

Then, I would define operations like:

1. Creating a post, a comment, or upvoting/downvoting
2. Retrieving posts (ordered) for a community.
3. Retrieving comments (ordered) for a post.
4. Retrieving posts (ordered) for a specific feed (subscribed, local, all).
5. Reporting a user.
6. Banning a user.

Then, I would look deep into Lemmy’s architecture in order to understand the complexity of these operations (time, memory, and developer effort). My understanding is that Lemmy is using a database to store all data you subscribe to, including posts, comments, upvotes/downvotes and stats across time. With all the data in a database, most read operations become a SQL query. On the other hand, write operations are relayed using the ActivityPub protocol.

Here I would stop for a bit, and see how I can help Lemmy right now. What’s the most value I can offer with as little effort as possible, i.e. the lowest hanging fruit. For the time being, I believe that would be moderation, basic features are missing, and there are many moderation issues someone could help with ideation, testing or implementation. However, a deep dive in moderation domain logic may not be for everyone, nor does it have to be. There are plenty of performance issues to contribute to.

This experience would give you the context needed to design a better architecture for Lemmy.

Last but not least, I suggest starting small. Distributed systems are complex, even seasoned veterans have difficulty getting their heads around it. For example, counting becomes a problem with large enough data.

well, I mostly create SPAs, with big projects a type system is a necessity…

I am a software engineer, I have literally forked tensorflow and modified the executor, and I have created neural networks for predicting aquaculture KPIs that have been deployed with great success.

I stopped looking for a year, and now I feel AI illiterate. (insert “too afraid to ask” meme)

My experience suggests it’s too early to start teaching people. Let the technology do its loop and settle down.

The wolf, realising the error of his ways, decided to change his diet and become a vegetarian, befriending all the pigs.

Aren’t wolves like unable to process plant based foods? Like, they eat grass in order to vomit or something?

Human babies need a buff, they’re functionally useless for far too long.

Capitalism now wants to extract value from babies??

Now I am kinda wondering if we could somehow fuzz it…