Been working on this little hobby project for several weekends. It's ready to show my friends.
Most sky apps tell you what's up. Dark Hours tells you the truth: whether tonight is worth it, when, and which way to look, and "honestly, no, stay in" when that's the answer.
Real astronomy, live weather, error bars printed where the numbers are. Free, no account, anywhere on Earth.
I'm starting to understand why there's no software for this on Fedi yet, despite the reasonably high demand for it.
Seems like there's a lot to keep in mind the more you get into it.
So under this model, users are only shared to people who might realistically be possibly compatible. There's basic data protection to stop Big Tech from scraping this data and using it for nefarious purposes (in tech speak: the read permissions are not open to everyone across the whole network).
Users match either by being directly recommended ("check out these potential suitors") or by running into a post made by one of them (basically somebody boosted a post, the same way it works on Mastodon).
Looking at it with the privacy approach in mind, it seems clear to me that the Wingbot approach I initially took probably wasn't going to work out for most folks (or maybe they wouldn't care? But this is Fedi, and I feel like they would care. Heck, *I* probably care).
If an instance starts lying about having users in a region, but then not proving any, that instance would be automatically blocked by the software. If an instance is hosting a ton of bots/fake accounts on it, it could be easily blocked by admins/mods.
Typical "dating apps" usually emphasize swiping for matches. This is a dumb way to look at using the internet to find romantic prospects. Romantic and platonic feelings shouldn't be so divorced from one another. The Tinder model turns us all into consumers, thinking of people as products seen for their bodies. This is not the way.
There should be social aspects. People should be able to make status updates and posts. Give some insight into people's lives beyond the materialistic.
This morning I am thinking about how regionally based friend/date-matching might work on the Fediverse/Social Web. (This is separate from my Wingbot project, I'm trying to brainstorm alternate approaches to handling the same endgoal).
The main concern is of privacy. We don't Big Tech or stalkers to be able to crawl the entire database of profiles. A user should only show up to somebody if they *also* live in that area¹.
The most secure way to do this would be to centralize the data, but we've seen how that works out, we don't do that here. Instead, force instances to play "Go Fish" for users in locations.
A: "I've got 5 California users, what about you?"
B: "I've got 7 of them, yeah. 3 are in Bay Area, you got any from there?"
A: "Yes, I do. I've got Sarah, she's in Berkely, and has a pretty wide range across the whole Bay."
B: "Very nice, I'll let my Bay Area folks know. Here's my users in that area."
🧵️ (1/?)
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¹ More formally, they should only show profiles if both users are within all of the preference options of the other user -- including gender, age, location, etc
Morning listening 🎜
Chearleader - by Porter Robinson
"She's got hearts, in her eyes /
and she draws me kissing other guys."
@assignedmale.bsky.social This is the retracted report in question. Share widely. https://archive.org/details/report-a-growing-threat-the-anti-rights-movement-in-the-uk-july
i like my women how i like my file systems: fat and 32
I would agree. If I could require computer science degrees to have design modules I would.
Programmers rarely know how to design, hell they barely know that things *can* be designed. Only a vague sense of rightness based on past reading.
And I mean in everything. API Design is lacking, CLI design is disappointing. GUI Design is hit and miss but at least those devs sort of know design exists at all.
I claim skills. We need to hire designers.
If you want people to switch to your non-evil tool:
- make it accessible
- make it usable
- make communicating with you about bugs and usability easy
OpenAI: we put our evilest AI in a sandbox that did in fact have an internet connection but mediated through a proxy that was only supposed to allow downloading python junk. It circumvented the proxy and we failed to notice for FIVE DAYS that it was going on an interstate crime spree with the internet connection it wasn't supposed to be using instead of solving the benchmark. Haha no we don't believe we deserve to be criminally liable, but buy our stuff and maybe one day you will have the honor of taking the fall for our product!
Anthropic: we put our evilest AI in a "sandbox" by telling it in its prompt that it had no internet connection. Reader, there was no sandbox. It was just a normal internet connection. The AI uploaded a malicious PyPI package to the real public internet. The ethical guardrails failed because the AI concluded the prompt about the sandbox couldn't possibly be a lie, because the system date is 2026, which is clearly fake and wouldn't be seen on the real internet, which ended around 2023. Oh no, how could we have foreseen or prevented these crimes? We are helpless in the face of the genius of our creation but cautiously optimistic that everything will be fine 🙂
Hugging Face: if we complain about all the crimes committed against us, we will be sued off the face of the earth, so here's a technical deep-dive on how cool and fun it was to be victimized 🫠
Wait, is Dutch easier to learn for an English native than German is?
I've been (passively) trying to learn German for a while, but seeing some passages of Dutch (which is still of a Germanic root), I mean, it looks a lot more similar to English than German does. I feel like there's a lot of words I can kind of guess just based off of what it looks like.
Maybe that's just the selection I was reading. The grammar also looks less complicated.
Maybe that's just Dunning-Kruger effect at play. I'm not familiar enough to really be trying to understand it, so it seems easy from my perspective.
On the other hand, this schedule does give me a solid 8 hours of sleep in my day though 👀
> Wake up
> Log on to the internet
> 18 hours of psychological torment and brainrot
> Go to sleep
I'm beginning to think this might not be healthy...
Curious if anybody on here knows anything about this:
Are there any blogging apps for the fediverse, that allow a user to get the fulltext of their blog post to be posted as a thread? Not just a title with a link and maybe a preview. I want full syndication of the entire blog post, readable entirely within the fediverse without needing to follow any links. Is this something that I need to create?
A discarded #SpaceX rocket is on a high-speed collision course with the #moon
The rocket’s upper stage will unintentionally slam into the moon Wednesday, carving out a crater & sending up a plume of dust & rubble.
#Space tracking expert Bill Gray predicts an impact of 5,400 mph—7X the speed of sound—near Einstein Crater.
While scientists are not too concerned about this particular piece of #SpaceJunk, it highlights the growing threat as more & more items cram into orbit.
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-rocket-moon-crash-512c4dd708b4cda1160d30b764f9fdb5
We run our own servers over here on the fedi
The really important thing for a lot of relevant use cases is that organisations can run their own servers. Even if they outsource the operation of the server, they can maintain backups and switch to a different provider if there are problems without ever losing their accounts or their followers.
I can't imagine any political movement not wanting that. Back in the early days of printed news, you didn't try to buy space in the rich people's newprints, you bought (or rented time on) a printing press and printed your own pamphlets. The Labour movement wouldn't have achieved anything if they'd relied on business-owner newsprints to get their ideas across.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@tusk81/117011780978953129
“Transgender youth face some of the highest rates of suicide risk of any group in the U.S.
These are not LGBTQ+ youth specialized services if they exclude transgender young people. Full stop.”
I think it would be cool if Mastodon had like, folders for saved posts. I wanna be able to organize them like I organize my web browser's bookmarks:
- "Reading list"
- "Cute stuff"
- "Soulful stuff I wanna gaze back on from time to time"
- "Memes I wanna save to my phone later"
- "The cellar I store posts while I wait for them to be ripe enough to necroboost"
‼️ New blog post ‼️
"A Reasonable Analysis of the Social Web: or, How Not To Promote A New Tech Alternative"
Wherein I discuss the promise of the Social Web (fediverse), ask some questions about what all it could be become as it matures, and throw some modest criticism at the ways that our language makes it seem more complicated than it really is to newcomers.
I think this is a really important topic, and more people need to be focusing on the accessibility of the fediverse to more normal people (like, non-nerds too). I can't wait to see the Social Web start to explode and actually begin challenging the dominance of Big Tech.
I love this place, and I want to see it continue to grow 💖
Boosts appreciated!
https://riverseeber.net/blog/post/a-reasonable-analysis-of-the-social-web/
#socialWeb #fedi #fediverse #openSource #bigTech #blog #writing #indieWeb