The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter May 2023
Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again! This issue covers the month of May 2023.
Many thanks to all our readers and all contributors!

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or help these projects! Interested in supporting the Newsletter team? Read more [at the … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de I’ve always liked the sound of crows, and I really really hate the sound of motorized vehicles, so I also find it absurd. I’ve come to think that some people are at some level afraid of nature, and nature sounds remind them of it.

Pinellas County Running: 10.04 miles, 00:10:16 average pace, 01:43:07 duration
goal was 10 miles (furthest since injury) at an easy pace. didn’t pay attention to the watch and felt like i nailed it.
#running

vDSL2 sucks NBN sucks Copper sucks
It is continues to amaze me how NBN continues to operate. With over $50B AUD of taxpayer funds later (See NBN Project costs) folks like me that live in the suburbs continue to have less than ideal quality.

As of this post, I’m sitting on a vDSL2+ connection, with a Fibre to the Node backhaul, delivered by ~450m of Copper cable (last mi … ⌘ Read more

Pink is the new orange with consumers hungry for photo-worthy new citrus varieties
New varieties of citrus like cara cara navels and blood oranges are growing in popularity, but farmers say supermarkets need to stock more to grow demand. ⌘ Read more

I don’t really like the term “gatekeeping”, especially when it’s used to describe the general concept of a barrier to entry. The term “gatekeeping” implies to me a “gatekeeper”–a person A who is trying to control if person B can interact with person C. It implies active discrimination, perhaps even bigotry, when in reality the barrier might be a passive issue such as scarcity or inherent complexity. “Gatekeeping” seems an intentionally- and needlessly-charged term.

I came across the phrase “long fuse, big bang” used to describe large-scale issues with tipping points facing humanity, like climate change, and it feels pretty apt.

I’d like to garbage-collect some symbols in the math I’m currently writing, help

Image

This guy is just such an idiot lol.

• There’s no such mass migration to “the south”. Tons of people are leaving Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and New Mexico for instance. I don’t know enough about the states with net influxes like Texas and Florida but I suspect they have policies that make it attractive for people to move there
  
• Not everybody is able to take account of long-term trends when they make housing decisions. There are financial reasons, family reasons, educational reasons, etc that impact such decisions
  
• But of course, most laughably, cheap energy is fast becoming a thing of the past, and so the problem isn’t “solved” by cheap energy, it’s just kicked down the road. And ffs, cheap energy is literally causing the very heating that he pretends air conditioning will “solve”–like “solving” your drinking problem by staying drunk all the time
  

This oversimplification to drive some kind of political point is so embarrassing coming from someone who pretends to be a university professor. It sounds like a teenage doofus from a 1980s movie talking. He well knows all these things, but he decides to present these views anyway.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I was visiting Germany once, and saw a guy try to load his bicycle onto the bike racks they have on the front of city buses. There were rules about when you could do that, which were posted on the bus stop sign, and I guess the guy thought this was a time when he could do that. But no, the bus driver disagreed. The bus driver got off the bus with a rule book, flipped it open to what I guess were the rules about bikes on the bus, and showed him the rules. The guy pointed at the sign, the bus driver said no and pointed at the book, and they went back and forth for I don’t know how long. It felt a lot like these videos lol

@prologic@twtxt.net doesn’t sound like there has been much planning involved in the “planned power outage” if they can’t tell you when the power will be out 🤦

Funny Programming Pictures Part XXXIII
I feel like mocking CSS and Agile today… ⌘ Read more

Inside GitHub: Working with the LLMs behind GitHub Copilot
Developers behind GitHub Copilot discuss what it was like to work with OpenAI’s large language model and how it informed the development of Copilot as we know it today. ⌘ Read more

People who like this sort of thing will find this to be the sort of thing they like

@shreyan@twtxt.net I agree re: AR. Vircadia is neat. I stumbled on it years ago when I randomly started wondering “wonder what’s going on with Second Life and those VR things” and started googling around.

Unfortunately, like so many metaverse efforts, it’s almost devoid of life. Interesting worlds to explore, cool tools to build your own stuff, but almost no people in it. It feels depressing, like an abandoned shopping mall.

“nubile” should mean cloud-like

My desktop computer developed a really annoying vibration-induced buzzing sound a few months ago after I added some hard drives to it. It was one of these where it’d be more or less quiet, and then all of a sudden a buzzing would start. If you tapped the case, it often made the buzzing stop.

One by one I went through my components, and the day before yesterday I finally identified the guilty party, one particular HDD. Currently I have the case open and a piece of cardboard jammed under the drive in its tray. The computer has not buzzed since I did that, so it looks to me like securing that drive better will finally end this madness-inducing sound.

Wild that it takes so long to track down something like this and figure out what to do about it.

Sam Wight :verified:: “Fucking Christ the @protocol i…” - Urbanists.Social

Incredible critique of the protocol Bluesky is creating. It sounds like s shitshow.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think those headsets were not particularly usable for things like web browsing because the resolution was too low, something like 1080p if I recall correctly. A very small screen at that resolution close to your eye is going to look grainy. You’d need 4k at least, I think, before you could realistically have text and stuff like that be zoomable and readable for low vision people. The hardware isn’t quite there yet, and the headsets that can do that kind of resolution are extremely expensive.

But yeah, even so I can imagine the metaverse wouldn’t be very helpful for low vision people as things stand today, even with higher resolution. I’ve played VR games and that was fine, but I’ve never tried to do work of any kind.

I guess where I’m coming from is that even though I’m low vision, I can work effectively on a modern OS because of the accessibility features. I also do a lot of crap like take pictures of things with my smartphone then zoom into the picture to see detail (like words on street signs) that my eyes can’t see normally. That feels very much like rudimentary augmented reality that an appropriately-designed headset could mostly automate. VR/AR/metaverse isn’t there yet, but it seems at least possible for the hardware and software to develop accessibility features that would make it workable for low vision people.

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @prologic@twtxt.net @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club I love VR too, and I wonder a lot whether it can help people with accessibility challenges, like low vision.

But Meta’s approach from the beginning almost seemed like a joke? My first thought was “are they trolling us?” There’s open source metaverse software like Vircadia that looks better than Meta’s demos (avatars have legs in Vircadia, ffs) and can already do virtual co-working. Vircadia developers hold their meetings within Vircadia, and there are virtual whiteboards and walls where you can run video feeds, calendars and web browsers. What is Meta spending all that money doing, if their visuals look so weak, and their co-working affordances aren’t there?

On top of that, Meta didn’t seem to put any kind of effort into moderating the content. There are already stories of bad things happening in Horizon Worlds, like gangs forming and harassing people off of it. Imagine what that’d look like if 1 billion people were using it the way Meta says they want.

Then, there are plenty of technical challenges left, like people feeling motion sickness or disoriented after using a headset for a long period of time. I haven’t heard announcements from Meta that they’re working on these or have made any advances in these.

All around, it never sounded serious to me, despite how much money Meta seems to be throwing at it. For something with so much promise, and so many obvious challenges to attack first that Meta seems to be ignoring, what are they even doing?

Taxiing
⌘ Read more

Why these grape growers are fermenting their wines to music
In Australia’s largest wine-producing region, wine growers like Andrew Duncan do things differently. But does it produce a better bottle? ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net

Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.

Well, I can’t know what’s in these peoples’ minds and hearts. Personally I think it’s a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.

Let’s say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you’d accomplish is to cement people’s resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don’t like. So you can’t do that.

What do you do instead? The entire field of “rhetoric”, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that’s the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.

That’s how I think of it anyway.

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him “do you support rape” he would not say “no”, he’d go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I’m mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn’t say “no” right away, he’s saying “yes”, except with so many words there’s some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that’s why I give him no slack.

There are people in academia who believe adult men should be able to have sex with children, legally, too. They use the same manner of talking about it that Peterson uses. We need to stop tolerating this, and draw hard red lines. No, that’s bad, no matter how many words you use to say it. No, don’t express doubts about it, because that provides justification and talking points to the people who actually carry out the acts.

Planetary Scientist
⌘ Read more

I am playing some ambient music that begins with a sound that’s a bit like the drone of an airplane engine, and I spent a good minute or two adjusting the volume wondering why the music wasn’t playing because I thought it was a plane🤦‍♂

@prologic@twtxt.net When you unpack what he’s saying in that video (which I’ve watched, and just now re-watched), and strip away all his attempts to wrap this idea in fancy-sound language, he is saying: it would be better if women were viewed as property of men, because then if they were raped, the men who owned them would get mad and do something about it. Because rape would be a property crime then, like trespassing or theft. Left unspoken by him, but very much known to him, is that the man/men who “own” a woman can then have their way with her, just like they can freely walk around their yard or use their own stuff. In his envisioned better world, it’d be impossible for a husband to rape his wife, for instance, because she is his property and he can do almost anything he wants (that’s literally what “property” is in Western countries).

It’s so fucked up it’s hard to put into words how fucked up it is. And this isn’t the only bad idea who bangs on about!

@prologic@twtxt.net It went there because you are supporting bad people who themselves operate at the level of outrage. You cannot have a “debate” about the ideas of someone like Peterson or Shapiro, because those ideas should not be considered debate-worthy. Rape is not OK, period, the end. It is not up for debate or discussion. Yet Peterson acts as if it is. That is abhorrent, and unacceptable in 2023.

@prologic@twtxt.net Because they are rightwing assholes with a huge platform and they are literally HURTING PEOPLE. People get attacked because of things people like Shapiro and Peterson say. This is not just idle chitchat over coffee. They are saying things like it’s OK to rape women (and NO I am not going to dig out the videos where they say that –that’s up to YOU to do, do your own homework before defending these ghouls).

@prologic@twtxt.net

Taking Jordan Peterson asn an example, the only thing he “preaches” (if you want to call it that) is to be honest with yourself and to take responsibility.

This is simply untrue. Read the articles I posted, seriously.

In a tweet in one of the articles I posted, Peterson states there is no white supremacy in Canada. This is blatantly false. It is disinformation. Peterson has made statements that rape is OK (he uses “fancy” language like “women should be naturally converted into mothers” but unpack that a bit–what he means is legalized rape followed by forced conception). He is openly anti-LGBTQ and refuses to use peoples’ preferred pronouns. He seems to believe that women who wear makeup at work are asking to be sexually harassed.

He’s using his platform in academia to pretend that straight, white men are somehow the most aggrieved group in the world and everyone else is just whining and can get fucked. The patron saint of Men’s Rights Activists and incels. I find him odious.

works like magic https://lien.sus.fr/qyEP6

More than meets the pull request: maintainers talk contributions
Creating an open source project can feel a bit like sending out an open invite to a party—will it be a roaring good time, or will you unbegrudginly dine on leftover junk food for the following week after nobody shows? When the first guest arrives, you breathe a sigh of relief. The party’s a success, […] ⌘ Read more

Looks like Google’s using this blog post of mine without my permission. I hate this kind of tech company crap so much.

Image

Do they legitimately believe that end users will encounter videos of gruesome murders, live streams of school shootings, etc etc etc, and be like “oh, tee hee hee, that’s not what I want to see! I’d better block that!” and go about their business as usual?

No, they can’t possibly be that foolish. They are going to be doing some amount of content moderation. Just not of Nazis, fascists, or far right reactionaries. Which to me means they want that content on there.

@prologic@twtxt.net I know very little about it, but speaking secondhand, it looks like there’s a single centralized server now and they’re still building the ability to federate? Like, the current alpha they’re running is not field testing federation, which makes me think that’s not a top priority for them.

There is a “right” way to make something like GitHub CoPilot, but Microsoft did not choose that way. They chose one of the most exploitative options available to them. For that reason, I hope they face significant consequences, though I doubt they will in the current climate. I also hope that CoPilot is shut down, though I’m pretty certain it will not be.

Other than access to the data behind it, Microsoft has nothing special that allows it to create something like CoPilot. The technology behind it has been around for at least a decade. There could be a “public” version of this same tool made by a cooperating group of people volunteering, “leasing”, or selling their source code into it. There could likewise be an ethically-created corporate version. Such a thing would give individual developers or organizations the choice to include their code in the tool, possibly for a fee if that’s something they want or require. The creators of the tool would have to acknowledge that they have suppliers–the people who create the code that makes their tool possible–instead of simply stealing what they need and pretending that’s fine.

This era we’re living through, with large companies stomping over all laws and regulations, blatantly stealing other people’s work for their own profit, cannot come to an end soon enough. It is destroying innovation, and we all suffer for that. Having one nifty tool like CoPilot that gives a bit of convenience is nowhere near worth the tremendous loss that Microsoft’s actions in this instace are creating for everyone.

@thecanine@twtxt.net wow this is horrifying. What happened to Opera? It used to be my favorite browser but now they’re like that one cousin who started getting into drugs, and then got in trouble with the law, and then before you know it they’re scamming old ladies out of their pension money.

The era of ad supported services is coming to an end (and that’s a good thing).
Services like Substack, Locals, and Twitter (seriously) are leading the way. ⌘ Read more

I hope it will work as it seems like a super good idea to integrate it to sus.fr

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net

I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don’t mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I’d really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don’t send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

(1) You go to the store and buy a microwave pizza. You go home, put it in the microwave, heat it up. Maybe it’s not quite the way you like it, so you put some red pepper on it, maybe some oregano.

Are you a pizza chef? No. Do we know what your cooking is like? Also no.

(2) You create a prompt for StableDiffusion to make a picture of an elephant. What pops out isn’t quite to your liking. You adjust the prompt, tweak it a bunch, till the elephant looks pretty cool.

Are you an artist? No. Do we know what your art is like? Also no.

The elephant is “fake art” in a similar sense to how a microwave pizza is “fake pizza”. That’s what I meant by that word. The microwave pizza is a sort of “simulation of pizza”, in this sense. The generated elephant picture is a simulation of art, in a similar sense, though it’s even worse than that and is probably more of a simulacrum of art since you can’t “consume” an AI-generated image the way you “consume” art.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net Who says you need to use anything like that? Where’s the pressure coming from?

an interesting observation in a post twitter reality is how services that are sprouting up to claim some of the refugees are setting themselves up as closed gardens. without the option to federate with other services. like spoutable, counter.social, post, clubhouse and such.

** of array programming, lightsabers and some thoughts on permacomputing **
A bit of this and that, some kind of mishmosh.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been reading a lot about array programming systems like J, K, Q, APL, and BQN. I’ve been intending to add a page to the wiki about them, but havent gotten to that yet. Consider this a little promise that I’ll do that sometime soon. I’m interested in array programming less because I think it’s particularl … ⌘ Read more

Announcing GitHub Actions Deployment Protection Rules, now in public beta
Create and share your own deployment protection rules, or use the rules from our great partners, like Datadog, Honeycomb, New Relic, NodeSource, Sentry, and ServiceNow, to control your deployments with more confidence. And the API is open for the community to build their own rules to make GitHub Enterprise Cloud even better. ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de

twtxt, as I believe it was originally intended, are short little status updates – that’s it.

So, basically a .plan file for finger. But, on the web. like a *web*finger. We have come full circle on this loop!

The world’s fastest train
I like trains, if that should not have been known yet. This year I even have two major vacations (Romania and Scotland) coming up, both by train, even if flying would be possible. But if it can be done by train, then I also prefer the train. ⌘ Read more

I’m not super a fan of using json. I feel we could still use text as the medium. Maybe a modified version to fix any weakness.

What if instead of signing each twt individually we generated a merkle tree using the twt hashes? Then a signature of the root hash. This would ensure the full stream of twts are intact with a minimal overhead. With the added bonus of helping clients identify missing twts when syncing/gossiping.

Have two endpoints. One as the webfinger to link profile details and avatar like you posted. And the signature for the merkleroot twt. And the other a pageable stream of twts. Or individual twts/merkle branch to incrementally access twt feeds.

💭 While some people like to jump between blogging software all the time, or go back to Hugo from a custom one, I don’t really miss Hugo after switching to GoBlog in 2020, but enjoy having my own system quite a bit. Not that Hugo, WordPress, etc. are bad blogging systems, but I really enjoy being able to quickly code a fix without having to research docs, StackOverflow, or the source on GitHub. And when I have an idea for a new feature, it would often not be easy to implement in the existing systems. ⌘ Read more

just loving this little guy: (·,·). it’s like he’s looking through a crack: ‘come on, you’ll understand the function definition’