What is Hackers' Pub?

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This is the thing, right?

When a _person_ does something absolutely inane and I call them on it, they will eventually stop doing the inane thing.

I worked with this guy a while back. He was junior, I was the tech lead on the project. I set the coding standards for it and he didn't like what I picked because it required a lot of work up front. It required docs on public methods, it required fairly high test coverage targets (both branch and instruction), it required following specific naming conventions and programming standards. I often would tell him to make his commits smaller.

No smaller than that.

Smaller still.

You couldn't just turn your brain off.

He fought me every step of the way, but eventually:

He learned and what's more, he began to internalize why I was doing it the way that I did.

Code reviews started flying by. It became _easy_.

AIs, even the really good ones, don't learn from this sort of process. Oh sure they have _memory_, but it is itself unreliable and subject to the same context window restrictions as everything else. They are by their nature ephemeral.

So there's a lot less incentive in me giving it a thorough review.

Unless it is my agent and my project.

Deprecate confusing APIs like “os.path.commonprefix()”. After fixing a vulnerability in #pip, I started digging into the confusing API and found more than I expected.

👉 https://sethmlarson.dev/deprecate-confusing-apis-like-os-path-commonprefix

#python #oss #opensource #security

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sethmlarson/116143641143643176

Seth really did the work here. He even reported an incorrect usage in Whitenoise, which we released the fix for yesterday!

So. Und jetzt hoffen, dass nix genommen wird, weil sonst ist das viel Arbeit im März....
#eh23

Instant LLM Updates with Doc-to-LoRA and Text-to-LoRA https://lobste.rs/s/l2nahy #ai
https://pub.sakana.ai/doc-to-lora/

Když se dívám na "Živé kanály", tak v podstatě už nikdo kromě robotů téměř nic nepublikuje. Na celém mastodonczech odhaduju cca 3 aktivní lidi.

Direct current brain stimulation has been approved by the #FDA to treat #depression at home. Millions of people may now have access to a non-invasive, at-home treatment. https://spectrum.ieee.org/flow-neuroscience-tdcs-depression-fda?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Mastodon-Daily-Pipeline

Why are there usb ports on the microwave?

wrong answers only

Rob Grant, creator of Red Dwarf, has died

Link: https://www.beyondthejoke.co.uk/content/17193/red-dwarf-rob-grant
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184480

When I first started working with #ActivityPub, before #Fedify existed, it felt like writing web apps in Perl and CGI in the late '90s. Interesting, even exciting—but never comfortable. That era where your business logic and your protocol plumbing were just… the same thing:

print "HTTP/1.1 200 OK"
print "Content-Type: text/html"
print
print "Hello, world!"

Decades of web development have given us layers of abstraction we now take for granted. Nobody hand-parses application/x-www-form-urlencoded query strings anymore. Nobody writes their own JSON codec, or manually constructs HTTP request/response messages. These things just aren't your problem when you're building an app.

ActivityPub development still feels like they are your problem. What do you do when the https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#actor property comes in as a string instead of an array? What about when https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#object is an embedded entity rather than a URI? How exactly do you implement HTTP Signatures? And wait—what's Linked Data Signatures, and do you need that too?

The real issue isn't that ActivityPub is complicated per se. It's that you can't get away with understanding it at a high level. You have to know it the way an implementor knows it—every edge case, every inconsistency in how different servers serialize JSON-LD, every signature scheme that exists in the wild. That's a lot to learn before you can even start thinking about your actual app. And when developers understandably cut corners on the protocol to focus on their product, it quietly becomes an interoperability problem for the whole ecosystem.

What I want ActivityPub development to feel like: you spend a day understanding the big picture, and then you just… build your app. That was the goal when I started Fedify, and honestly, we're not fully there yet. But it's where I want to get.

#fedidev #fediverse

なにもできないまま終わりたくない

never have my biases been confirmed so hard

https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/new-poll-democrats-real-problem-isnt

hm

at first i was like "why not use features or platform tags on sub packages?" eg, have `mypkg[nvidia]` refer to `some-nvidia-thing`

but having compilation variant wheels (eg, AVX2 vs AVX-512) makes a lot of sense to me.

And at that point, why not have arbitrary tags

https://feedsin.space/feed/peps/items/5901951

OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

Link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/27/openai-raises-110b-in-one-of-the-largest-private-funding-rounds-in-history/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181211

Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

Link: https://github.com/c3d/db48x/commit/7819972b641ac808d46c54d3f5d1df70d706d286
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181753

Today I was reading @b0rkJulia Evans 's comic about tar: https://wizardzines.com/comics/tar/?utmsource=satcomics

When I learned how to use `tar` on Linux (probably ~20 years ago?) I learned that you don't need to memorize all the compression flags (`-z`, `-j`, `-J`, `-Z`) because tar auto-detects the compression format when extracting/listing.

This is handy because then I only have to learn the flag for my _favorite_ compression format when creating tarballs, and let the auto-detection figure it out for tarballs I receive.

I'm surprised the example in this comic uses the compression format when listing (`-tjvf`). Does that mean there's a version of `tar` in common usage that doesn't support auto-detection? Or is the auto-detection unreliable in some common circumstance? Or some third possibility I haven't thought of?

copying a trend from bsky, bet yall can beat my post there because i get more interactions here

copying a trend from bsky, bet yall can beat my post there because i get more interactions here

RE: https://mastodon.social/@webology/116144224079024413

Talking LLMs now and for a while. Join us via Zoom or send me a DM for an invite.

software gore

@evanEvan Prodromou
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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.

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"

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ThisIsTrue/116143897286092534

[Don’t worry, it’s his sister]

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.

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

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.

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 you may be saying, "Christine, this is really unfair, because you're looking at ActivityPub servers which are only dealing with a small amount of the network, what if it were an ActivityPub mega-node? What are the costs THEN huh?" and "What if we hosted just PART of ATProto?"

What then INDEED

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*

I was part of the 45% of the Washington Post newsroom recently laid off by the economically struggling Jeff Bezos. Over at BlueSky, I posted free no-reg archive links to 15 of my favorite stories from the past four years. Thanks for reading! https://bsky.app/profile/joemenn.bsky.social/post/3mfn7fnnfac27

Actually all these critiques of the fediverse are TRUE, these are known challenges, and actually it's not really so bad, but it could be better, and at any rate, Bluesky made a major decision to simplify a lot for new users, and they have. Things seem to just work for people! Incredible!

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*

Now historically, federation has been achieved on the fediverse via "message passing". Actually, this is to the degree where I just always associated message passing with federation, but really, federation is about the distribution of power, creating an abstract whole in a sea of autonomy.

I'll take one more note about federation which is that often time the message passing mechanism of the fediverse is often called "federation", but theoretically another mechanism could exist, but I'm actually not so sure of that.

There's a reason the actor model and the lambda calculus are undying

ActivityPub, as it turns out, follows the actor model of computation. Okay, many people implementing the fediverse don't know about the actor model aspect of ActivityPub but I am here to tell YOU, dear reader, that it is an important thing, not a detail

"Message passing" is what ActivityPub uses. It's "like email", people say, and that's true.

Actually it's even a lot like physical mail. You write a letter, you say where it should go, it gets delivered to your house.

Message passing. The world runs on it.

I actually think this is improvable but I mostly don't care because this isn't as big a complaint as people tend to think it is on the fediverse, the other concerns like "what instance do I pick" tend to be bigger and "oh no my server went down"

That can be improved, we'll talk about that later

On top of that we can build even more abstractions and the net result is that this is how federation works in pretty much every "federated" system I know.

ActivityPub does some extra work to help you see replies on a thread, think "letters to the editor". This is a bit lossy sometimes though

On that note, again, I am not reading the replies right now because I am (a) afraid to and (b) I'm never gonna finish this and we are a bit over HALFWAY THROUGH the analysis but I have this fear that EVERYONE is mad at me, Bluesky fans, fediverse fans

I am trying to be analytical. I am trying!!!

I said we are about halfway through and criminy we're halfway through the afternoon, I need a break to get some tea

We have a few big topics left:

- Decentralized identity, how does it work (magnets too, yes)
- The Org is a Future Adversary
- Christine critiques the fediverse
- Wrap up

Somebody stop me. #eh23

I have returned, with tea

I am still not reading notifications. Well, I have seen a few fly by on the fediverse which is blipping and blooping nonstop in the Mastodon UI so people are clearly reading it there

Bluesky says "30+". How big is the +?? I will resist temptation to look and assume "31"

Pabu says "Sorry, couch is occupied, find a other spot"

#Cats
#CatsOfMastodon

"Where are we going with this Christine?"

Well you could have just read the blogpost but 3 more sections remain, we are approximately 2/3 there

I know, bear with me, what is left is:

- What should the fediverse do?
- Preparing for the organization as a future adversary
- Conclusions

Alright you've heard enough critiques of Bluesky for a bit and I SAID I was gonna critique the fediverse and I am a WOMAN OF MY WORD

So let's get into it!