Put a culture of stopping work at 40 hours. Allow the work to be the work and stop deadlines.
Otherwise, people will take every time savings possible. If I'm using AI for anything, it's because it's important enough to someone else for me to do but not important enough to sacrifice my own time.
I don't think it's about people being scared, at least from what I've seen. It's about people being exhausted.
> Otherwise, people will take every time savings possible
And you're saying they won't if you only cap the maximum amount of time they can work?
> It's about people being exhausted
Work can be difficult and exhausting and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. When I started my job I was tired often because it was hard. I got better at it over time.
I'm really not into any job where my value is strictly tied to the time I put into it. I much prefer a job that some weeks takes me a lot of time and some weeks takes not as much time.
If people are limited in how much time they work, they'll use AI to try to get more work done in that time. You'd have to also limit how much work people are expected to do. Good luck advocating for that change in modern corporations.
It turns out it's very slow to evolve a protocol. How long did it take for IRCv3 to handle channels having persistent history? How about channel takeovers via network splits? We knew these were problems in the 20th century but it took a very long time to fix.
Oh, and the chathistory Extension is still a draft! So is channel-rename! And account-registration?
And why is it still so painful to use Mastodon?
That's but one of many examples. Consider how the consolidation of HTML and HTTP clients was the only way that we ended up with any innovation in those services. People have to keep up with Chrome who just does their own thing.
I want to want a decentralized world governed by protocols, but good software that iterates quickly remains the exception rather than the rule.
All you've said here is that you (and many others) have shown in the past that they've valued convenience and rapid feature development over freedom and stability.
That is good to understand, but when that trade starts causing issues, it is important to remember that there was a trade made.
We aren't as stuck as we think we are, unless we decide not to reevaluate our past choices.
Yes, essentially everyone on the planet was willing to trade some freedom for chats that work on mobile or could send images.
Matrix has shown how incredibly difficult it is to make a modern service in a decentralised way. Requirements like preventing spam become immensely difficult.
Preventing spam may not be possible for much longer without verified IDs considering how advanced ai agents are.
Do any fully trustable ID validation services exist? Ones that verifiably never store your ID but just a validity status for a given ID on a blockchain?
Assuming you want ID verification, why would you need a blockchain? Your identity is deeply linked to who you are and we have identity documents and trusted entities to provide them. These entities can absolutely act as a third-party to verify who you are. This can happen with several different parameters: whether your identity is provided to the site you are using, whether the site your are using is known to your identity provider, whether identities across sites are identical or only linkable by the trusted party. But in all those examples (that are currently implemented by some countries), blockchain is not a requirement.
Assuming you don't want actual ID verification, the choices are even larger but with different trade-offs.
In theory yes, in practice it requires lots of different government services to get on the same page. How do you verify a state ID? Usually the DMV. Have they released an API endpoint for that? Almost certainly no. What if instead you're using a passport? Then the federal government needs to do it. What if your passport is from a country with weak government that doesn't have a lot of capacity?
And of course governments attract hackers because they tend to not be up to date on security best practices.
A single abstraction layer on blockchains allows more developers and security experts to contribute and innovate.
Preventing spam is as easy as gatekeeping. We should be bringing it back. Perhaps there should be multiple layers of social media. There’s deeper and deeper level of authenticity as you go deeper into the network
Phone numbers + phone number country + account age + behavior can be used to build a trust score. It might not be bulletproof but it cuts down spam enough for now.
Imagine a messaging app for example, a 1 month old account with a Nigerian phone number cold DMs an account in Australia. The likelihood of this being spam/abuse is extremely high. Vs a 5 year old account that mostly messages mutual contacts cold DMing an account in their own country.
In many countries, phone numbers are a proxy for ID and are difficult to get without having a local ID. The countries which have not secured their phone number system will be less trusted by spam filters.
Spam is an issue mainly because there are conspicuous meaty targets to be spammed, not in fragmented environments. And a target is meaty for spammers because that target has gathered, more often unnecessary, critical mass (large scale services, broadcast type news /thought leaders/influencers). Else even a small overhead for sending requests will drive away spammer incentive.
E.g. OS exploits were targeted towards Windows, not so much for so many of those Linux distros.
There's also this annoying flash perception that wins. As the big companies abandoned XMPP, less people considered it.
It's pretty good today! Lots of things improved a lot! Some big clean ups!
But think of how much better it would be if people stayed woke, if they didn't just throw up their hands call defeat & say it was never going to work. If there wasn't such a bleak rot in our soul, if we could try to play slightly longer games, I think in the medium & long run it would be much much better for us all.
It feels so easy to spread sedition, to project these fatalisms that only big dumb lumbering central systems win. I'm so tired of this bleakness, this snap to convenience as the only perceived possible win. Let the prophecy self fulfill no more, let us arise from this torpor. A little Ubuntu would be ao good for us all. Ubuntu the old saying (that the distro was inspired by) goes: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together"
Nobody said how hyper the HT in HTML and HTTP had to be, so here we are.
Oh, TLS also. Encrypted connections over HTTP are trivial.
Arguably this has created far more freedom by making encrypted network traffic default and free. Convenience is also freedom when it comes to accessibility.
Short-term yes, long-term it is often the other way around. In many cases, abandoning an open standard for a closed, centralised solution is surrendering to future enshittification for short-lived instant gratification.
Is Mastodon really hard to use for most people? I guess there's some very specific scenarios it may be.
Also the article presents a false dichotomy in my view: protocols need services to be useful to virtually 99.9999% of humans (or at least they do in the architecture we have built since... email?).
Who uses email without relying on servers? Where is your selfhosted email box sitting on if not in a hosting service?
Even IRC relies on servers for people to talk to. I love to experiment with protocols that do not rely on servers - secure scuttlebut? - but even ssb relied on some seed peer that provides a service to initialize the peering
That's why I'm pretty optimistic about the AT protocol: you get the advantages of app-driven innovation (need a new feature? just define a lexicon for it) without requiring data reliant on that feature to live in that application's silo; the records all exist in each users' PDS, under each users' own control, no matter which applications use those records. And of course, if those features prove to be good ideas, other applications can adopt those lexicons and they're immediately interoperable.
Under-appreciated factor: the problem with decentralization is that it pushes work on to the end user, who is least equipped to deal with it. People actively want centralization of things like anti-spam because it lightens the load. The fact that this gets paid for in insidious ways rather than directly paying for a service causes all sorts of weird market distortions.
Note that Discord doesn't replace IRC, it also competes with TeamSpeak; there's a whole voice and video sub-feature to it. Not everybody uses it but the fact that it's available in the same software was advantageous to the original market, gamers.
I can't tell if you are replying to the comment or the post because the topic of TFA is literally comparing protocols and services. Discord and IRC are both mentioned in the post.
Pretty sure they're replying to the post that directly contrasts Discord/Slack and IRC.
TFA mentions both, yes, but as a direct example of service/platform (Discord) vs protocol (IRC, XMPP, etc). The comment asks a question that kinda misses the point of TFA.
Discord could be considered to have "won" in that it's got a lot of (new) users and removes some of the limitations of IRC, but that's _because_ it is a service/platform, and comes with all the trade-offs being discussed in other threads here.
Or one could consider IRC to have "won" because as a protocol it simply can't have some of the restrictions possible with a centralized platform.
It's trade-offs all the way down, but protocols will always have fewer restrictions of the kind currently in the zeitgeist, especially decentralized protocols.
Totally understand, I am all for decentralized world too. In reality tho most ppl just choose whatever works fast and ships fast and more production-ready I guess, no drafts. Would be great if the world sees an opposite example, by far centralised approach just worked better
Not true at all, having seen the other side. In a large enough organization, entire divisions will be cut if a product is missing. Sometimes productive people are on the wrong product that gets slashed to maintenance mode, or they have the wrong manager. Sometimes deep cuts are necessary because the product is failing and a productive person on a growth initiative is cut for subject matter expertise in the core product that will allow maintenance mode to continue. Sometimes tenure is rewarded. Sometimes directors don't see the full story because the managers can't be told of the layoff.
Tenure, in this case, is rewarded by not being laid off - because this person had old knowledge and friends with people who were in power and knew them from earlier in the company.
It absolutely does happen. But I have also seen people rise through the ranks by just being there long enough and being competent. That said, it is not a way to maximize wage growth or general career progress by any stretch.
I'd like you to go look at PRINCE2 and SSADM. Or read the original Royce paper - https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf was written explicitly to term this Antipattern "Waterfall." (Note that Royce marks it as an antipattern.)
We are nearly 70 years into this discussion at this point. I'm sure Grace Hopper and John Mauchly were having discussions about this around UNIVAC programs.
Do you not see the difference between a toy language and a clean room implementation that can compile Linux, QEMU, Postgres, and sqlite? (No, it doesn't have the assembler and linker.)
Or... the places they have deep expertise they have NDA/non-competes to worry about. (At least, outside of California.)
Sure, I could go and create an accounting app - or a clinical trial recruitment app - as a basic clone of what I've already created. And I might even make it better for some niche. But even if I know what that product system needs, I still need to find someone with the relationships to get in the door.
The trick is - you don't need an idea man for a non-technical founder. You really need someone with a rolodex and a problem.
What's happening in practice, though, is a group of people (like Campus Watch) are looking specifically for anyone teaching gender, trans issues, race, and religion, and analyzing the coursework through their ideologies and harassing professors on account of it. And they're going through past years as well as present.
A friend of mine was harassed by these sorts of groups for their teaching. They received death threats, hardcore pornography, and gore in their inbox from these chuds. The trigger was the availability of their course material online.
Cool, if you feel that way then go face them. Don't force professors to stand in the firing line in your stead.
> Not sharing course outlines is not going to help make this problem better.
It would make finding targets more difficult than just doing a ctrl-f, which obviously would make the problem better just by making it harder to find professors to harass.
I see what you are saying, but not publishing the materials is not going to solve the problem. That's because the people who are attacking the professors will just get it by some other means, like having someone attend the class.
Remember, the attackers are not a few oddballs. The are members of a vast MAGA movement that has enough member to elect the present president and that encourages this sort of behavior. And they have tons of money behind them.
> will just get it by some other means, like having someone attend the class.
Not really, they don't have sufficient time budget and a network of agents to do that as comprehensively as with a simple "google search" some bureaucrat/activist can perform in a few minutes
I've heard for years that this sort of cancel culture doesn't exist or isn't a problem, and it's just the consequences of engaging in unpopular speech. Xkcd "showing you the door" and all that.
As a tangent, I'm seeing Lisbon trying to make a lot of buzz, but it seemingly can't crack into the larger ecosystem. What's missing, considering that it should be able to benefit from its EU integration?
There's a lot of problems with bureaucracy there (I've lived in London and Lisbon). It's a great city but the government is insanely inefficient (compared to the UK IME).
Long term visa waits are 2 years+. In a personal example, Portugal was the last country _by far_ in the EU to be able to issue residency cards for UK people after Brexit (despite having a very sizeable british population). This caused a lot of practical problems, as it stuck everyone in a massive limbo - other EU countries wouldn't accept that you were a portugese resident with the piece of paper they gave you. It took intense lobbying by the British embassy and European Commission to get the system in place at all.
In a commercial sense there are other problems. The court system is completely non functional. A simple civil case can take _years_ just to get a hearing. With appeals etc you can easily look at a decade. Again, there's a lot of problems in the UK with courts, but it is on a different scale there. This causes a lot of problems because businesses can get away with various shady stuff knowing it is basically impossible to enforce contractual terms - everything from landlords to b2b has issues.
It's got an enormous amount of promise but until the immigration/court system improves it is very hard to do business there.
The CEO of cloudflare has posted about this kind of stuff on Twitter (Cloudflare is a huge employer there) occassionaly. It's not positive to say the least.
It says that understanding risk (as operationalized by understanding probability) has a larger effect.
But it is also saying that the more external impact someone has, the more they regret saving more -- in the United States but not Singapore.
The study is explicitly saying that internal motivation does not seem to matter. And the article is arguing the reason why.
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