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>Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.

Creating the network effect was the greatest loss we had in the 21st century. We used to be able to use XMPP to talk to Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and all sorts, and they took it away, just so you'd have to use their shitty little program instead.


We have that today though - it's called Matrix. While other platforms aren't literally built upon it like Hangouts was in the beforetimes, it allows inter-op with more platforms. Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Chat (née Google Hangouts)... and those are just the ones I'm using. The full list includes more [0]

We can disagree about what counts as good enough for the mass market in the modern era, whether normal people will actually use this vs whether normal people used XMPP's interop in 2005, and quibble about feature sets (video calls weren't initially supported in '05, and most bridges don't support them today), but for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be.

Post script: I look forward to hearing about how terrible Matrix was, last time someone tried the (over-crowded) default server 12-18 months ago. The software dev community here will follow up and say that software cannot have gotten better since then, either.

[0] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/


> you can even change which app you want it to be.

From a limited set of options.

My friends are the mass market. You and I are savvy, tech folks and we know what Matrix is. I've got friends who work as car mechanics, secretaries, teachers, etc. They're not dumb, they can spend the time to figure out which app will work best for them on their computers and phones, but they don't particularly want to spend their time fiddling with software on their computer. I love them, and they love me, but do they love me enough to go through this rigamarole just to share Star Trek memes and talk about our days?

For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good. They've put in a lot of polish, and it just works, and it's well supported. Convincing them to move away means that at best, I'm taking on the role of tech support for... potentially dozens of people? Except it won't be that many, because I doubt that many of them will move.

Discord will have to get catastrophically bad before they strongly consider moving off of it, and I would bet you twenty US dollary-doos that the first place we'll move to will be Slack.

Network effects, man.


Sure, but they wouldn't have been the market for XMPP's cross-compatibility before, either. You would have been, and you can have that now - your friends don't have to move to Matrix for you to get one chat app to rule them all. They can stay on Discord, and it doesn't stop you from having inter-op text chat

I agree that it would take something catastrophic for people to move off of the service they currently use. I disagree however on the premise that the move will be from one proprietary service to another. Us tech savvy people can and should self-host the things we believe can be valuable - now or down the line.

I'm not on mastodon but I've perused some threads and if it brings value to people great - the fact that it was there when twitter imploded means some portion of the population actually moved to it and now uses it. It provided some real value to people.


> For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good.

Kind of, but in the past. It isn't good for today's web, otherwise we wouldn't be in this discussion.


Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t realize just how powerful it would be. Same with addictive stuff like engagement maxxing algorithms and infinite scroll.

Now the new challenge is to figure out how to put those dogs down.

This always happens.


The trick is that they delete the actual image of the face, but the embeddings (which can reconstruct the face anyway) are saved permanently onto their servers. You don't own your embeddings, and they never delete them.

Yeah let's trust them this time. Nobody's ever lied about that in the past and there's never been a breach of data that reportedly didn't exist. I'm sure this time it'll work out

Probably just scraped -- you are listed as "Mollerjoi" on https://flashgames.cx/game/supermax and on http://play.ee1234.com/en/all/9a9ead34-cfd7-43a2-b0be-0c2b75... -- interestingly on the "Source" you're not even credited (https://www.y8.com/games/supermax)

This is basically how every custom app works on Mac. You have to go to Settings -> Security & Privacy and click "Allow whosthere"


Would it help to get it on the "official" homebrew, instead of a custom tap/cask? Might try to do an application for that somewhere in the upcoming weeks.


Yoto seems marketed towards older children. I don't think my one year old is able to put the cards in the Yoto by himself, but he can easily stand a figure on top of the TonieBox.


You can do custom MP3s with the "Custom Tonies"


What are some apps that fit this criterion that you use regularly and some that you wish existed. Would you pay for these apps?


I use this golf gps app SimpleGolfGps. Uses the native apple maps gps and allows me to tap around and get yardages. Comparable apps are absolutely bloated in the few hundred mb range sometimes. This one is 527 kb (!!!) and barely sips battery while out on the course. I’d pay a one time fee for it but no subscription.


Isn't this the definition of `discovering`? Did Alexander Fleming not 'discover' penicillin because it was an accident and he treated it seriously?


It's more about how you use them. Asking a general-purpose model like ChatGPT precise k8s questions might prove counterproductive; however feeding the entire k8s documentation into an LLM like Gemini and asking questions that way is invaluable. Not just the documentation, but your entire cluster config. Like you said, "blindly trusting LLMs, you'll find yourself in trouble" this is true, but the same can be said for StackOverflow or any other resource. Sifting through StackOverflow to find the exact answer to your question (and then understanding the answer, and hoping that it pertains to your environment, and version etc) is much less efficient when you can ingest the entire docs, your config, your environment, and your question, and have it spit out exactly what you need in whatever format you need. You can even web search with multiple questions derived automatically from your main question, to gather multiple sources which are aggregated and referenced in the answer so you can easily cross-check for hallucinations. StackOverflow isn't even as easy to fact check as LLMs considering the in-line sources.


Because unsurprisingly the cert expired on the 12th at 10PM. That's how certificates work.


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