Sorry, I can’t seem to find it, but I can tell you that those filters exist on mastodon. I am using them a lot there.

At the cost of sounding naive and stupid

It may be a naive question, but it’s a very important naive question. Naive doesn’t mean bad.

The answer is that that is not possible, because the compiler is supposed to translate the very specific language of C into mostly very specific machine instructions. The programmers who wrote the code, did so because they usually expect a very specific behavior. So, that would be broken.

But also, the “unsafety” is in the behavior of the system and built into the language and the compiler.

It’s a bit of a flawed comparison, but you can’t build a house on a foundation of wooden poles, because of the advantages that wood offers, and then complain that they are flammable. You can build it in steel, but you have to replace all of the poles. Just the poles on the left side won’t do.

And you can’t automatically detect the unsafe parts and just patch those either. If we could, we could just fix them directly or we could automatically transpile them. Darpa is trying that at the moment.

I think the timing isn’t quite right, because the other social media places aren’t figuratively totally on fire.

There isn’t “the great social media collapse of 20XX” happening, because of some security issue or servers being super expensive or ads being actually 99% of the content. The forces that be are managing things well enough that things aren’t collapsing right now.

There is no single actually big celebrity that has picked a fediverse platform as the place to be, follow and discuss news.

And there is no killer feature that you can only get here.

The bonfire is stacked nicely, but there is no spark. For now. That could change at any moment, but it could also take a while.

I don’t think the timing is quite right.

I don’t really have anything meaningful to contribute to the feeds and most of the discussions are a bit pointless. They’re not really changing anything. So, in part those other platforms are fueled by outrage culture. Which I know is bad, so not having it is good, but then we also don’t have the growth from it.

The technology is there and that should help. Apparently people aren’t going to mass migrate from reddit quite yet, even though the push last year probably helped a lot.

It is a network problem. I think the slow growth will / should happen eventually, because the fediverse is an objectively good place to start a community. It’s just not going to be fast and other platforms adding push factors would help obviously. We’ll see where reddit goes with their paid subs.

I don’t think the low effort posts are a problem, there is hardly motivation to interact with an empty page and there is slightly more if there are “boring topics”. At least it’s a place.

You’re a hero for making this happen in… 24 hours? 48?

The issue won’t go away, we’ll see how well everyone else deals with it, but this is a super strong argument for your system / server.

(Advertise it. Advertise it HARD. “piefed, we have private votes”.)

I would like a (c) where my instances collects all the votes on the post, and then transmits an anonymized aggregate.

No.

https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/programs/applications#requirements

Take a look.

Though, if you have not heard of the program before, you’re probably not involved with a project that qualifies.

A bit, but not really. The key is to understand that it can be applied to very small scale and very simple processes as well. But that it’s still the same concept.

E.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor_(device)

Or not getting enough sleep by noticing you’re tired and changing your daily routine to change it.

People have tried to run economies with it and that… failed. I think it could be interesting to try it again now that we have seriously wide spread internet access and fast, cheap communication. But forcing it on everyone is probably a bad idea and it’s not even necessary. For example, if the data is just easy to access, big companies should do it themselves. That’s their entire purpose. We’re just hindering efforts that way, because the data interfaces are usually not designed to make it this easy. Like, we don’t have a common standard to order material online, or to watch those prices.

So when a fast food chain orders potatoes for their fries and steel mill orders coal and iron, they’re using different systems that have to be maintained.

And the reason I’m writing it here, is that people don’t know about it. Therefore they don’t demand it from their democratic leaders or unions and therefore we don’t have it.

I’m not saying anything new.

It’s the same kind of voting, negotiation, discussion system we already use everyday. Those just look different when they are the same thing. We are 95% there, we’re just missing one or two last steps.

Yeah, except I’m on your side, and that kind of protest is obviously not getting it done.

Because it’s what has been tried for decades and the problem is still there.

Having this problem can also be managed by going through the loop. If you original goal was “calculate stuff to prevent bad things”, and you can’t do it because you’re choosing too much accuracy, you can experiment with the accuracy until you find a good middle ground.

We can use super detailed FEM, CFD what not sophisticated science, but sometimes the stuff from the 1800s is just fine.

We have figured out how to run everything, absolutely everything, in the 1950s.

The original computer “AI” craze was started by “cybernetic systems” and for good reason. You probably only know of the bastardizations of “cyber-” that don’t have anything in common with the original concept.

The original concept goes like this:

1. set a goal
2. perform an action
3. measure how much impact that had, did it get you closer to your goal or not?
4. If you are at your goal, you’re done,
5. otherwise adjust your actions, got to 2. (This is “feedback” and the reason that word is now so common. People at the time knew)

The faster you go through the loop, the faster you will figure out what works.

You can measure anything you want, as vague is you want. Happiness, money, productivity. It’s the way democracy is designed to work, in which case the feedback is vague and the cycle time is measured in years. It runs your thermostats, in your home, big national power grid power plants. It’s how autopilots autopilot.

The idea that “nobody could have predicted…” or “nobody responsible” is a myth. We have the science. We know how it works.

Every failure we still experience is a failure we allow to happen. Because of profit, politics, or whatever.

Didn’t catch something “going on for years”, maybe someone should check more often. “Crazy single individual causing a tragedy”? No, that’s a person at risk, probably with social or mental problems you didn’t take care of before, didn’t flag, and didn’t stop in time.

“Nobody wants to work on our open source project” Really, how is your onboarding? Do people take a look at the docs/culture and run away screaming? Yeah?

The boring part. Making sure that there are holes in the walls for sockets, enough capacity in the cable trays. Planning the routing, but I didn’t have access to algorithm of the software.

Collecting the ever changing inputs from people who want devices with cables in rooms and spaces. :)

I helped design large-ish electrical grids. 30-100k cables

Without the actual calculation bits, unfortunately.

Not very interesting. Bad software. Management didn’t really care about the problem. I was there so the problem was “managed” from their point of view.

So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”

Yes.

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace.

To whom?

If people agree with you, they will move and block and defederate. And if they don’t they don’t.

Sounds like a “you” problem.

Their server, their rules. If they want to run a political censorship social platform, they can and it’s totally ok if they un-invite you.