Yeah I in general think that Graber is very good at giving good answers in interviews!

Honestly even if bluesky does become enshittyfied, which is a very real possibility, the work they’ve done on AT proto so far will probably be extremely useful for whoever takes a crack at a more decentralized internet next. There are a lot of clearly smart and passionate people who are given space to research and experiment with different ways of doing things and I think that’s both very valuable and interesting

I agree that the interviewer shouldn’t have implied that they are decentralized today! I don’t know if bluesky even say that they are decentralized themselves, on their website it says that they’re “building an open foundation for the social internet” which is more accurate but maybe they mischaracterize themselves somewhere else.

So first of, the part of my comment that you quoted doesn’t make sense because what I’m saying is that bluesky theoretically allows for decentralized relays but it’s impractical in practice. Your analogy doesn’t really apply to that.

I do think that it’s misleading to call bluesky decentralized today (at least without any caveats). The goal of the project however is to eventually create a more meaningfully decentralized social network and they have tangible plans for moving in that direction so I think it’s unfair to dismiss this aspect of bluesky completely.

I think that it’s fair to want the interviewer to ask more critical questions and in general be more precise with their phrasing but

repeat that PR talking point

is a very cynical and uncharitable take on bluesky and decentralization. Cynical takes aren’t necessarily wrong but they’re not necessarily correct either.

The AT protocol is by its own account an ongoing project with problems that still need be solved before it is able to provide a social network with all the properties that they’re interested in.

I don’t think that it’s accurate to say that bluesky is “completely” centralized (it is less centralized than most social media) as much as it’s de-facto centralized. One reason for this is that it’s prohibitively expensive to self-host relays. This is something that the AT protocol devs have plans for addressing, so it’s possible that this de-facto centralization is a temporary stage in the evolution of bluesky and AT proto.

It is of course possible that they are lying or that they will be unsuccessful despite best intentions but taking for granted that it’s just a “PR talking point” is, once again, very cynical in a way that I don’t think is completely motivated.

They are open to drop some features apparently, but maybe not “90%”

The developers are taking a “less is more” approach. This means that some features of the original sudo may not be reimplemented if they serve only niche, or more recently considered “outdated” practices.

tldr is great, sometimes you can’t remember the exact syntax for a certain command and just need a quick reminder as well.

Well it’s not like everyone who uses Chat GPT is going to become delusional but if you start going down the path Chat GPT is going to make it a lot worse

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

It depends a lot on the game, but in my experience not always. Running games straight from steam works really well with a small number of exceptions, but a lot of the sometimes weird tools for patching exe:s and so on that some games use can sometimes be a pain to get running. Not necessarily impossible but yeah this is a reason for why I still keep around my windows installation for dual booting.

I don’t know that it’s the “algorithms”: a lot of people just use their following feed on twitter and although it changed a while back that was the default feed on bluesky for a long time. I think that there is a fairly large portion of bluesky users who mostly just look at following and still don’t really like mastodon.

Imo, a big reason why bluesky has been a more successful twitter competitor than mastodon is cultural: mastodon has been around for years before musk bought twitter, and a big selling point was that it wasn’t like twitter, for example that its “less toxic”. A large part of mastodons userbase never liked pre-musk twitter that much and will tell you of for acting like you would there. Bluesky on the other hand has a large portion of users who liked pre-musk twitter and are happy to follow pretty similar social norms as they did in pre-musk twitter.

This is to some extent reflected in the functions of the different sites as well, for example you can’t quote retweet on mastodon which iirc is deliberate because qrt dunking is “toxic”. Bluesky has quote retweets (although they allow you to untag yourself from a qrt).

Yeah I agree, I think looking towards the future is a better idea in general. I’m on lemmy but not tumblr myself

Fresh memes!

My theory is that the primary reason why the fediverse isn’t more popular with young people is cultural. For instance, I don’t think anyone in generation z would use the term “fresh memes” :)

But yeah I also think that tumblr has a nostalgia advantage. It represents the internet before it “turned bad”, while the fediverse represents a possible future for the internet. Both have different appeals, but I think that nostalgia wins out for a lot of people.

If you want to test windows programs on linux, you’re probably going to want to do that in a virtual machine, or even a spare computer just for testing on windows. Depending on how much you need to use excel, a virtual machine could be a good option for that as well, but if using Microsoft Excel™ is a big part of your job, maybe it makes more sense to just stay on Windows for work at least

“algorithm” just means “set of instructions”, it is a bit unfortunate that it’s become the default term for talking about this kind of thing.

I think that youtube wants to maximize watch time, if you just watch subscriptions you might get “done” at some point but with the home feed you can just keep watching forever

People have scrutinized what chatgpt for example is allowed and not allowed to say by its programmers. I think the difference here is that there is lower hanging fruit to grab because the Chinese state has a different relationship to censorship than a lot of other states.

I also associate Sinophobia with being prejudiced against Chinese people or Chinese culture, however being critical or skeptical of the Chinese state is actually perfectly reasonable. I’m also very critical of the US state and this isn’t because I’m “americaphobic” or some nonsense.

Please explain how this is Sinophobic.

Sure, what I’m saying is that they’re both editors that you need to invest time in. A bit less so with helix since it has better defaults so you don’t need to spend as much time configuring it, but I don’t think that makes a huge difference.

Helix has better defaults for sure and I get why people might prefer it but I have a very hard time imagining it being a better choice than vim in every situation even with a lot more development.

Also, if you work with programming for example your editor is going to be one of your main tools and I think that “reading guides” is an acceptable amount of effort to put in to learning such a tool. Vim has a higher barrier of entry than it needs to (this can to some extent be explained with backwards compatability) but with Helix you still have to put some time in to understanding the editing model anyway.

The biggest thing missing from helix right now imo is plugin support, so a lot of plugins that I really like wouldn’t be available. I use fugitive a lot for working with git for example.

Another one is the quickfix list in combination with ex commands. One thing you can do for example is setup :make to run your compiler and then when you get compilation errors they’ll show up in your quickfix list. You can then use :Cfilter to focus on one type of error and then :cdo to for example do a find and replace on the remaining lines.

In general, if I don’t have an lsp available for whatever reason (I work in cmake a fair amount at my $DAYJOB for example) I would much rather use vim, in particular because of the stuff that you can do with ex commands that I mentioned above (also works great with grep) but also because of the ctags support.

Helix can do a lot of nice things out of the box for a lot of cases of software editing, but it’s not nearly as broad or as customizable of a tool as vim

I don’t really see the point in a “facebook competitior” since the only appeal of facebook is that it’s “normal” and “evryone” is on it, something that just isn’t going to be true for e.g. some fediverse product. Everyone should stop using facebook if possible though, I’m trying to persuade different messenger groupchats that I’m part of to switch to something else left and right personally