VeeSilverball

Arch is always “latest and greatest” for every package, including the kernel. It lets you tinker, and it’s always up to date. However, a rolling release introduces more ways to break your system - things start conflicting under the hood in ways that you weren’t aware of, configurations that worked don’t any longer, etc.

This is in contrast to everything built on Debian, which Mint is one example of - Mint adds a bunch of conveniences on top, but the underlying “how it all fits together” is still Debian. What Debian does is to set a target for stable releases and ship a complete set of known-stable packages. This makes it great for set and forget uses, servers that you want to just work and such. And it was very important back in the 90’s when it was hard to get Internet connectivity. But it also means that it stays behind the curve with application software releases, by periods of months to a year+. And the original workaround to that is “just add this other package repository” which, like Arch, can eventually break your system by accident.

But neither disadvantage is as much of a problem now as it used to be. More of the software is relatively stable, and the stuff you need to have the absolute latest for, you can often find as a flatpak, snap, or appimage - formats that are more self-contained and don’t rely on the dependencies that you have installed, just “download and run.”

Most popular distros now are Arch or Debian flavored - same system, different veneer. Debian itself has become a better option for desktop in recent years just because of improvements to the installer.

I’ve been using Solus 4.4 lately, which has its own rolling-release package system. Less software, but the experience is tightly designed for desktop, and doesn’t push me to open terminals to do things like the more classical Unix designs that guide Arch and Debian. The problem both of those face as desktops is that they assume up-front that you may only have a terminal, so the “correct way” of doing everything tends to start and end with the terminal, and the desktop is kind of glued on and works for some things but not others.

Not dead, just sleeping. It’s a tougher, higher interest-rate market which cuts out a lot of the gambling behavior. I remain invested but my principle has shifted away from the financial and trad-economic terms to this:

Blockchains are valuable where they secure valuable information. Therefore, if a blockchain adds more valuable information, it becomes more valuable.

And that’s it. You don’t have to introduce markets and trading to make the point, but it positions those elements in a supporting role, and gets at one of the most pressing issues of today: where should our sources of truth online start? Blockchains can’t solve the problems of false sensation, reasoning or belief, but they fill in certain technical gaps where we currently rely on handing over custody to someone’s database and hoping nothing happens or they’re too big to fail. It’s just a matter of aligning the applications towards the role of public good, and the air is clear for that right now.

I think it’s reasonable for some instances, where there’s good alignment. There was a thread I replied in a few days back around how/if TTRPG creators(who are mostly small enthusiasts themselves) could advertise in related magazines, and legitimizing that business wouldn’t really pose a conflict for the hobby - that’s how it was built in the first place! It’s just a matter of finding a place for it and defining the technical solutions.

As a general “let in all the advertisers and promise riches for someone” measure, it does cause known problems. There is some freedom to figure out what works in a specific case here, it’s not defined top-down since it isn’t centralized.

Drawing gets a lot easier if you approach it as a muscle-memory skill like calisthenics or juggling - if you can write letters neatly, you can also learn to draw shapes you’ve practiced. The early exercises in books like Keys to Drawing (Dodson) or The Natural Way to Draw (Nicolaides) introduce ways to practice those skills, and then the rest is “find subjects you want to draw”, which can be as simple as watching a video, pausing it, and quickly using that for the exercise. Do that for a few minutes a day for a few weeks and drawing skills will magically emerge.

There are tons of “how to draw tutorials” that don’t explain any of this, speak about it conceptually, and tell you to go draw a thousand cubes, which will make you better at drawing…cubes. (There is some point to that kind of technical skill, but it’s not the thing to invest in if you just want to use images to tell a story)

Kbin is kinda a lot tbh, it’s got a bit of a space shuttle control panel thing where the different sections of the ui are modal and you have to remember to configure each one so that you can see e.g. “newest microblogs posted by subscribers to mechanicalpencils”. I figured it out after a few hours of stumbling around seeing content and not being sure how I got there.

With respect to how it works in the microblogging corner of Fedi, the tendency is to be actively collaborative, and aggregate some moderation resources, sometimes through backchannels, other times through a tag like #FediBlock - all of which have political implications that have been years-long meta discussions. The emphasis, at least among instances that want to moderate heavily, is on allowing users to feel undisturbed in their own space and not be challenged on literally everything they say, but to still expand that space where it makes sense.

I’m not sure the exact same dynamic will take place over here. The existence of many distinct spaces on the same instance mitigates a major initial problem Mastodon faced in its early waves: when you literally put everyone leaving Twitter on the same public timeline, old grudges spark up and they start campaigns to harass each other off the platform. That’s how it came to pass that Mastodon ended up with a ton of user privacy features, and over years, instances warring over ideology and trying to colonize each other, which of course ends in mutual blocking.

In our case I think there’s a good chance for small aggregator instances that just “do one thing well” to thrive and see a lot of external traffic, while not having to moderate their entire comments section, since you can opt to not federate that - not your site, not your concern.

It will never show an consistent number. The way Activitypub operates is “you see what you’re subscribed to”, and that occurs in a technical/political sense of “these instances have agreed to federate”, and in many cases they don’t federate everything that happens. So if someone on instance A upvotes something posted on instance B, but instance C is not subscribed to instance A, A and B will see the upvote, C won’t.

You don’t have to give up on your clout-chasing dreams, but the numbers won’t tell the whole story.

I’ve had some thoughts on, essentially, doing more of what historically worked; a mix of “archival quality materials” and “incentives for enthusiasts”. If we only focus on accumulating data like IA does, it is valuable, but we soak up a lot of spam in the process, and that creates some overwhelming costs.

The materials aspect generally means pushing for lower fidelity, uncomplicated formats, but this runs up against what I call the “terrarium problem”: to preserve a precious rare flower exactly as is, you can’t just take a picture, you have to package up the entire jungle. Like, we have emulators for old computing platforms, and they work, but someone has to maintain them, and if you wanted to write something new for those platforms, you are most likely dealing with a “rest of the software ecosystem” that is decades out of date. So I believe there’s an element to that of encoding valuable information in such a way that it can be meaningful without requiring the jungle - e.g. viewing text outside of its original presentation. That tracks with humanity’s oldest stories and how they contain some facts that survived generations of retellings.

The incentives part is tricky. I am crypto and NFT adjacent, and use this identity to participate in that unabashedly. But my view on what it’s good for has shifted from the market framing towards examination of historical art markets, curation and communal memory. Having a story be retold is our primary way of preserving it - and putting information on-chain(like, actually on-chain. The state of the art in this can secure a few megabytes) creates a long-term incentive for the chain to “retell its stories” as a way of justifying its valuation. It’s the same reason as why museums are more than “boring old stuff”.

When you go to a museum you’re experiencing a combination of incentives: the circumstances that built the collection, the business behind exhibiting it to the public, and the careers of the staff and curators. A blockchain’s data is a huge collection - essentially a museum in the making, with the market element as a social construct that incentivizes preservation. So I believe archival is a thing blockchains could be very good at, given the right framing. If you like something and want it to stay around, that’s a medium that will be happy to take payment to do so.

Ask anyone of the popular reputation of philosophers and it’s basically the same as programmers. Socrates would definitely piss a few people off in code review meetings. Programming as a pursuit is very prone to sophistry because it’s unclear even how to start defining the problem space, and there are always categories of problem where, when encountered, everyone either solves it with the exact same falsehood, or uses the one dependency that actually solves the problem. And then in the end, the software ends up not being used, so the wrong problem was solved.