• 10 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle





  • It’s because you can’t “kill” a the AP protocol. XMPP didn’t go away when Messenger and GChat removed support for it, it just went back to how it was before hand, a fraction of tech enthusiasts using it for private communication. It would probably be the same with AP. A separate collection of sites using it to federate information.

    … even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

    Granted this leaves out how Google used it’s influence to control and stagnate the XMPP protocol, but that’s another can of worms.





  • It’s using ActivityPub. It’s interesting because Bluesky (basically, former Twitter) explicitly stated that they didn’t think AP was robust enough and created their own shitty protocol. Facebook might be one of the first traditional SNS platforms to experiment with AP. I would’ve been happier if it were Tumblr, who said they were working on implementing AP last year.

    I wonder how much of the recent Twitter drama has influenced Facebook’s decision to release Threads so soon after its announcement. It’s probably going to be shit quality and just try and monopolize on people leaving Twitter but not wanting to jump to Mastodon.













  • Outside producing one simple WebPack configuration, I haven’t had good experiences using ChatGPT. It often causes me more trouble than it helps. I’ve tried to use it multiple times to write some BASH script, and every time it gives me know that looks nice but is just broken. It’s not syntactically incorrect, it’s more like functionally incorrect.

    For example, it told me that you could pass arrays as function arguments, which you can’t do. Or, it gave me a script that was using variables within a URL string that would be passed into CURL, which won’t work since the URL won’t be encoded properly.

    When I do it, I spend more time trying to fix the code that it gives me. Which, I guess, does have the benefit that it means I got to learn something afterward (both examples above I didn’t know about until ChatGPT gave me the bad code).

    The thing that ensured me that AI won’t take over the programming side of software engineering was when I asked ChatGPT to help me out with some date-time bugs. It just kept making up native JavaScript API functions, couldn’t understand how to parse UTC to figure out a date-time’s timezone, among other issues. The day that AI is able to solve software issues around date-times or currencies is the day that we’ll all be out of a job.

    Edit:
    I guess you could summarize using ChatGPT is like peer-programming with an overly confident CS grad.