What is Hackers' Pub?

In previous years, I published two "fediverse tech roadmap" posts:

- Fediverse tech roadmap 2024
- Fediverse tech roadmap 2025

However, I didn't publish such post this year because not much has happened in 2025. Many problems I talked about require complex solutions, but unfortunately proposed solutions are often very limited or lead to centralization. Or worse, there is no solution but only an imitation of work. I don't want to write about that.

I saw a thread today where ATProto ecosystem was compared to #ActivityPub. Things are happening in the Atmosphere, but not in Fediverse. MAU graphs are flat. What's going on?

There are multiple factors at play, but I think fake activity may be the biggest contributor. Trivial developments presented as breakthroughs. Features that already exist somewhere in Fediverse presented as new inventions. Vaporware. Specs written by people who have no idea how to implement them. Working groups that do nothing but meetings.

Real work is ignored, competent developers see that and quit.

We need to fix this.

For my part, I will continue to document #Fediverse development at @weekinfediverseWeek in Fediverse . But this newsletter doesn't have much impact.

I know this might be a long shot but I'm wondering if anyone knows the best place for custom PCBs?
Specifically I'm looking for a place that is able to manufacture https://github.com/DiscoStarslayer/disco-cart -- a flashcart for a 22 year old obscure game console.
I don't really understand anything about how this works so any recommendations are welcome.

@LilithLilith Wittmann

NGI war und ist im Großen und Ganzen schon sinnvoll angelegtes Geld denke ich. Und da reden wir auch nicht über Milliarden.

Overproduction

#webcomic #krita #miniFantasyTheater

prayer update

"and protect us from the crabby rathbuns"

The Valentines Dance of Celestial Bodies 💞
#valentinesday #dinchenix #pixelart

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Ich bin für Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf als neue Bundespräsidentin.
#Bundespraesidentin

RE: https://tacobelllabs.net/@mosssupply/116093112797414236

my childhood of scrounging parts to cobble together ad-hoc working systems because I had zero hardware budget is, regrettably, coming in handy.

The kind of character portraits that write their own stories.

A motley crew of NPCs you'll run into in 'Beast City', one of the last cities remaining on Earth after WWIII, where 'screamers' descend into the depths of the bio-monster infested BIAS zone to hunt them for credits and score.

One of the earlier sci-fi/cyberpunk dungeon crawlers I've played.

📺: The Screamer, MagicalZoo, 1985 (PC-88/98)

#PC88 #PC98 #scifi #rpg #retrogaming #retrcomputing #pixelart

a few thoughts about clarifying man pages https://jvns.ca/blog/2026/02/18/man-pages/

A new version of clojure-mode is out https://github.com/clojure-emacs/clojure-mode/releases/tag/v5.21.0

It features a few small improvements and a dedicated edn-mode (a lighter version of clojure-mode for better performance in large files)

Enjoy!

#Clojure #Emacs

Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information.

For some reason it hasn’t put out a security advisory - but instead buried it in a service alert which isn’t publicly visible.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-says-bug-causes-copilot-to-summarize-confidential-emails/

RE: https://tacobelllabs.net/@mosssupply/116093112797414236

my childhood of scrounging parts to cobble together ad-hoc working systems because I had zero hardware budget is, regrettably, coming in handy.

Hi, @simplebitsDan Cederholm , just got your email about the new caps. How are things regarding shipping abroad, or from abroad? We, and others, talked about it a while back, but the cap is still almost €50 (ok, fair-ish), and then we add €27 for 7-21 business days (is this still a thing? A month??), or €64 for the privilege of _expedited_ shipment, 6-10 days! I'm not sure if this is a European thing, but we do not consider two weeks "priority" mail.. Anyway, €112 for a cap is completely ridiculous. And I guess that's not changing anytime soon. Thanksss.

"Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes." This study shows that some do - to significant effect. #Technology https://werd.io/the-political-effects-of-xs-feed-algorithm/

Timn O'Reilly

cf. https://chaos.social/@kimcrawley@zeroes.ca/116091407050873777

In previous years, I published two "fediverse tech roadmap" posts:

- Fediverse tech roadmap 2024
- Fediverse tech roadmap 2025

However, I didn't publish such post this year because not much has happened in 2025. Many problems I talked about require complex solutions, but unfortunately proposed solutions are often very limited or lead to centralization. Or worse, there is no solution but only an imitation of work. I don't want to write about that.

I saw a thread today where ATProto ecosystem was compared to #ActivityPub. Things are happening in the Atmosphere, but not in Fediverse. MAU graphs are flat. What's going on?

There are multiple factors at play, but I think fake activity may be the biggest contributor. Trivial developments presented as breakthroughs. Features that already exist somewhere in Fediverse presented as new inventions. Vaporware. Specs written by people who have no idea how to implement them. Working groups that do nothing but meetings.

Real work is ignored, competent developers see that and quit.

We need to fix this.

For my part, I will continue to document #Fediverse development at @weekinfediverseWeek in Fediverse . But this newsletter doesn't have much impact.

"AI는 고용 데이터, 생산성 데이터, 인플레이션 데이터 어디에도 보이지 않는다" "Magnificent Seven을 제외하면 이익률이나 수익 전망에서도 AI 효과의 징후가 없음" 생산성 기준 항후 10년간 +0.5% 정도 news.hada.io/topic?id=26778 *AI가 몇몇 기술 대기업을 제외하면 경제와 기업에 전혀 도움이 되고 있지 않다는 이야기 *AI의 <혁신>이 프로그래머/개발자한테만 가능성을 드러내고 있는 부분이 재미있음. (그나마도 그 결과의 품질에 대해서는 계속 의심 받고 있고.)

수천 명의 CEO들이 AI가 고용이나 생산성에 영향을 ...

RE: https://chaos.social/@andre_meister/116092729450970151

Was soll dieser ganze Altersverifikations-, Klarnamen- und dann auch Beziehungsgraphpflicht-Wahn? Ich bin so müde!

Current - An RSS reader via @boramalper https://lobste.rs/s/m2ouss #design #mobile
https://www.terrygodier.com/current

Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $1B from A16Z, Nvidia to advance its world models

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-18/ai-pioneer-fei-fei-li-s-startup-world-labs-raises-1-billion
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47063451

tropmi eltrut morf :>

#teamtype macht lustige Bugs.

Ich bin für Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf als neue Bundespräsidentin.
#Bundespraesidentin

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Well played.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-13122-6_15

#uno #CardGames #ComputationalComplexity #FunWithAlgorithms #Algorithms #Algorithmics #Games #AI #ComputerScience #ProfessorLife #AcademicChatter #AcademicMastodon

https://digipres.club/@foone/116090775963725728

언제5시됐어

Would you like to be famous?

#poll

Would you like to be famous?

#poll

@hpod16Hannah Grace @EUCommissionEuropean Commission many people use Facebook for the events and groups features, and a great Fediverse alternative is https://mobilizon.org/ @mobilizon . In my community in Cloughjordan Ireland I have got lots of groups into Mobilizon and using it as a community notice board. See http://mobilizon.ie as an example

Google: "AI WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING!”
Me to my phone: “Hey Google, could you start this app?”
Phone: “What the fuck is an app? Need me to generate ideas for cat costumes instead?”

I made a fantasy dataset of AI slop for Eidolon Journal 🐴 https://everydayphotography.org/journal/pet-cake-prank-revenge-train

general reminder prompted by my last (CW’d) post but applicable to everyone:

if you’re not part of a research organization with psychology training, a legal department and an ethics board who needs to approve the plan, you’re not “conducting a social experiment”, you’re conducting harassment

2026 Hackaday Europe Call for Participation: We Want You!

https://hackaday.com/2026/02/18/2026-hackaday-europe-call-for-participation-we-want-you/

Found #nvidia released new Production Branch of their #GPU #drivers 580.126.18.

For #FreeBSD: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/264091/
For Linux: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/264090/

Filed PR for FreeBSD #ports as Bug 293260 and opened corresponding review D55350 for this.
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=293260
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D55350

Reading Release Highlights, it seems to be Linux specific build fix and maybe FreeBSD version is just bumped to keep sync with Linux version.

Institute for Economic Taxation and Policy reports that under Trump's billionaire tax cuts, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, & Tesla collectively paid just 4.9% in federal corporate income tax on $315B in profits. Tesla paid $0.

•That's $51B in tax cuts for just 4 corps from just 1 year

•If they'd paid the original 35% rate their taxes woulda been ~$110B

•Free public college for every American child is ~$75B

45M students get massive debt so 4 billionaire corps get massive tax cuts.

This is America.

shock: people use llm to generate random strings.....
and it fails

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/generating_passwords_with_llms/

Oh no! I've read the https://stevelosh.com/blog/2021/03/small-common-lisp-cli-programs/ and see the new horizons of tinkering

#CommonLisp #lisp

What I listened to today: "HEEL CENA", Westside Gunn

One more from the ringleader of the Buffalo, NY "Griselda" rap clique. The last one I linked was kinda surreal avant-garde but this is good solid hip hop basics. Fantastic flow and vivid production that feels like it's picking up what trip-hop set down. He has raps about how his kids like Minecraft.

Linking the Bandcamp version which has the bowlderized no-blood cover art. Last time Bluesky actually censored the link

https://daupe.bandcamp.com/track/heel-cena

chu……途覚醒からずっとねれないので起きます
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On the fediverse we also see a lot of accusations of Bluesky being owned by Jack Dorsey, and this isn't true. My understanding is that Jay performed an impressive amount of negotiation to allow Bluesky to receive funding independently.

These days Jack Dorsey is instead focusing on Nostr, which I can only describe as "a sequel to Secure Scuttlebutt with extremely bad vibes where bitcoin people talk about bitcoin"

There is also something which Bluesky gets right which the fediverse does not. I mentioned that Bluesky uses decentralization *techniques*, and the most important of those is content-addressing. This allows content to exist even when a server goes down.

This is a great decision and I have advocated that the fediverse do so as well. In fact several years ago I wrote a demo in @spritelyThe Spritely Institute's early days showing off how one could build a content-addressed ActivityPub in a spec-compatible way.

As said, tens of thousands of people are self-hosting *today*. Fediverse software doesn't just scale up, it scales *down*.

GotoSocial is cheap enough on resources where you can run it for family and friends on a raspberry pi or spare laptop you have sitting around.

Now you're hitting the point in this thread where some of you may be thinking "aha! this is where Christine is saying that the fediverse/activitypub are awesome and atproto is terrible!"

you have NO IDEA HOW MUCH I CRITICIZE THE FEDIVERSE ALL THE TIME, I do it all the time, and will later here

The fediverse has a lot of flaws. Oh trust me, we're gonna get to that.

But comparison-wise: what I mean to say is that architectural decisions matter, and scaling up isn't the only thing that's important, *scaling down matters too*.

If you care about decentralization, anyway.

But where was I? Oh yes. We had talked about why PDS'es aren't enough (blog/google analogy), relative costs of hosting things on ATProto vs ActivityPub, etc etc

But we haven't gotten into the really interesting parts which are the structural analysis stuff, so let's move onto that

Now yes, they are using decentralized techniques. Remember when I said content-addressed storage is a good idea and the fediverse should do it too? IT IS! (And as I also said, it's actually fully possible for the fediverse to do, more on that later.)

But the reality is, it's still *centralized*

ATProto is not designed for the Relay and AppViews to only hold part of the network, not *really*, and ActivityPub is. We'll get to this in a moment.

But Bluesky actually has good justification for this! I will defend it insofar as Bluesky was making a serious *design decision*