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This Overly Long Variable Name Could Have Been a Comment | Jonathan's Blog
  • I try to write comments whenever what the code isn't obvious on its own. A "never write comments" proponent might argue that you should never write code that isn't obvious on its own, but that doesn't always work in practice

    • Sometimes you have to write cryptic code for performance reasons
    • Sometimes you have to deal with unintuitive edge cases
    • Sometimes you have to work around bugs in 3rd party code
    • Sometimes you are dealing with a problem that is inherently complex or unintuitive, no matter how you put it in to code
  • I've started playing The Witcher. No, not the good one.
  • One of my most controversial gaming takes is that I like the first witcher game the most of the trilogy. There is a lot of jank and some cringeworthy parts but overall it feels like a much tighter experience than the later games, notwithstanding some clearly undercooked parts. It takes a lot more cues from older rpgs in how it's structured and I suppose I might just have a weak spot for that.

    To be fair, I've never gotten that far in the third witcher so maybe I'd like more it if I played it enough to properly get in to it. I just got kinda bored after a dozen or so hours which is not a problem I had with the first witcher.

  • Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
  • Yeah I in general think that Graber is very good at giving good answers in interviews!

    Honestly even if bluesky does become enshittyfied, which is a very real possibility, the work they've done on AT proto so far will probably be extremely useful for whoever takes a crack at a more decentralized internet next. There are a lot of clearly smart and passionate people who are given space to research and experiment with different ways of doing things and I think that's both very valuable and interesting

  • Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
  • I agree that the interviewer shouldn't have implied that they are decentralized today! I don't know if bluesky even say that they are decentralized themselves, on their website it says that they're "building an open foundation for the social internet" which is more accurate but maybe they mischaracterize themselves somewhere else.

  • Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
  • So first of, the part of my comment that you quoted doesn't make sense because what I'm saying is that bluesky theoretically allows for decentralized relays but it's impractical in practice. Your analogy doesn't really apply to that.

    I do think that it's misleading to call bluesky decentralized today (at least without any caveats). The goal of the project however is to eventually create a more meaningfully decentralized social network and they have tangible plans for moving in that direction so I think it's unfair to dismiss this aspect of bluesky completely.

  • Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
  • I think that it's fair to want the interviewer to ask more critical questions and in general be more precise with their phrasing but

    repeat that PR talking point

    is a very cynical and uncharitable take on bluesky and decentralization. Cynical takes aren't necessarily wrong but they're not necessarily correct either.

    The AT protocol is by its own account an ongoing project with problems that still need be solved before it is able to provide a social network with all the properties that they're interested in.

    I don't think that it's accurate to say that bluesky is "completely" centralized (it is less centralized than most social media) as much as it's de-facto centralized. One reason for this is that it's prohibitively expensive to self-host relays. This is something that the AT protocol devs have plans for addressing, so it's possible that this de-facto centralization is a temporary stage in the evolution of bluesky and AT proto.

    It is of course possible that they are lying or that they will be unsuccessful despite best intentions but taking for granted that it's just a "PR talking point" is, once again, very cynical in a way that I don't think is completely motivated.

  • Open source project curl is sick of users submitting “AI slop” vulnerabilities
  • What are the odds that you're actually going to get a bounty out of it? Seems unlikely that an AI would hallucinate an actually correct bug.

    Maybe the people doing this are much more optimistic about how useful LLMs are for this than I am but it's possible that there's some more malicious idea behind it.

  • Adopting sudo-rs By Default in Ubuntu 25.10 | and status update on rust coreutils and rust PGP
  • They are open to drop some features apparently, but maybe not "90%"

    The developers are taking a “less is more” approach. This means that some features of the original sudo may not be reimplemented if they serve only niche, or more recently considered “outdated” practices.

  • I have used Windows all my life, and I have some questions.
  • Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

    It depends a lot on the game, but in my experience not always. Running games straight from steam works really well with a small number of exceptions, but a lot of the sometimes weird tools for patching exe:s and so on that some games use can sometimes be a pain to get running. Not necessarily impossible but yeah this is a reason for why I still keep around my windows installation for dual booting.

  • Gen Z's safe space - Sick of Musk and Zuckerberg, Gen Zers are flocking to Tumblr
  • I don't know that it's the "algorithms": a lot of people just use their following feed on twitter and although it changed a while back that was the default feed on bluesky for a long time. I think that there is a fairly large portion of bluesky users who mostly just look at following and still don't really like mastodon.

    Imo, a big reason why bluesky has been a more successful twitter competitor than mastodon is cultural: mastodon has been around for years before musk bought twitter, and a big selling point was that it wasn't like twitter, for example that its "less toxic". A large part of mastodons userbase never liked pre-musk twitter that much and will tell you of for acting like you would there. Bluesky on the other hand has a large portion of users who liked pre-musk twitter and are happy to follow pretty similar social norms as they did in pre-musk twitter.

    This is to some extent reflected in the functions of the different sites as well, for example you can't quote retweet on mastodon which iirc is deliberate because qrt dunking is "toxic". Bluesky has quote retweets (although they allow you to untag yourself from a qrt).

  • Gen Z's safe space - Sick of Musk and Zuckerberg, Gen Zers are flocking to Tumblr
  • Fresh memes!

    My theory is that the primary reason why the fediverse isn't more popular with young people is cultural. For instance, I don't think anyone in generation z would use the term "fresh memes" :)

    But yeah I also think that tumblr has a nostalgia advantage. It represents the internet before it "turned bad", while the fediverse represents a possible future for the internet. Both have different appeals, but I think that nostalgia wins out for a lot of people.

  • Malicious VSCode extensions infect Windows with cryptominers
  • Don't think it has anything to do with electron. VSCode is just the largest editor that people install extensions for, so it's what makes the most sense to write malware for. If vim was more popular, I'm sure there would be more crypto mining extensions for that (I wonder how many there are? Surely more than zero?)

  • Anyone run a matrix server in the cloud? How much does it cost you?

    Toying with the idea of setting this up for myself, maybe a few bridges, maybe a few group chats on matrix itself. What kind of cost should I expect?

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