You’re not wrong, and an open option might be an improvement over the current situation. On the other hand, it might encourage broader use of remote attestation.

I’m mostly disappointed that there’s no meaningful organized opposition. When Microsoft first proposed adding remote attestation to Windows, the New York Times called it out as oppressive. Now it seems like only hardcore open source nerds care, and I think the tech community should be doing better.

I don’t like it. Remote attestation is a violation of the user’s right to control over their own devices. We should be pushing to eliminate it, not expand its use.

I had an inverse experience after an adult beverage or two and talking to someone about a third party’s script they found unsatisfactory. It went about like this:

Zak: filename.py sucks

Claude: What’s wrong with it? Bugs? Code quality? Features?

Zak: yes

Claude rewrote it, claiming it had “multiple issues”. It found and corrected a major bug, added error handling, and improved command line argument handling.

A senior engineer obviously needs (and knows how to handle) considerably more access to their workstation and company IT infrastructure than the average employee. On the other hand, I’ve occasionally read complaints from IT security types about engineers being way too eager to install sketchy stuff.

There’s some truth to those complaints. I might need to try out several libraries and tools to see what works best for a certain use case. Is that new one with 15 stars on Github actually safe? Are all of its dependencies? How many developers perform a task like that in a sandbox? How many of those perform a thorough audit before taking it out of the sandbox?

Why?

It makes sense to try to give users an idea of how robust a project is, but the exact details of the tools involved in its creation rarely add much to that. It gets a little weird with LLMs because they allow someone with no programming skill to create software that appears to work, which ought to be disclosed; “I don’t know what I’m doing and I asked a robot to make this” does indicate unreliable code. A skilled developer having an LLM fill in some extra test cases, on the other hand can only make the project more robust.

Well-behaved server software honors delete requests, but there are a bunch of ways for that to fail without anyone doing anything malicious:

• If your instance shuts down, there is no way for you to generate delete requests
• If a server admin has to restore a backup from before your request, the deleted data will be restored
• Immature or experimental software may not work as designed; Lemmy itself has a version number starting with 0
• Archiving services may keep snapshots of pages from fediverse servers; here’s your user page on lemmy.world on archive.org
• Fediverse servers often make content available by RSS, and RSS clients may store that content; there’s no way for them to receive a signal that it should be deleted

And then there’s malicious activity. It wouldn’t be hard to run a server that speaks ActivityPub, subscribes to a bunch of stuff, pretends to honor delete requests, and actually keeps everything.

Deletion will always be unreliable on the fediverse as long as it runs on technology that looks anything like current implementations.

What do you think of Discovery Klingons? It seems like they came and went with little explanation, while the early TOS human-looking Klingons did get an explanation in canon eventually.

Thanks for doing this here instead of corporate social media.

Wafrn might be worth a look. I’ve been meaning to try it myself.

Mastodon’s character limit is pretty easy to change when self-hosting, but it has other limitations like a lack of even basic formatting and images inline in posts. I think that’s true of several of the others as well.

I have a .com for like $19.99 but pay to have my info redacted from whois stuff, an email address, all cones to like $42.99

Porkbun charges $11.08 for a .com with whois privacy. $30/year for email hosting might be worth it if you’re getting very good service, but I think you’re overpaying.

$11.08 for a .com. Source: just renewed.

In most languages, I would agree with that. In Lisp, I think I might not. If Common Lisp didn’t come with CLOS, you could implement it as a library, and that is not true of the object systems of the vast majority of languages.

You don’t even need to define a class to define methods. I’m sure that’s surprising to people coming from today’s popular language, but the original comment was about syntax.

Whether Lisp syntax is ugly is a matter of taste, but it’s objectively not unreadable.

I imagine the tricky part for someone unfamiliar with Lisp would be that there’s no syntactic clue that a particular thing is a macro or special form that’s going to treat its arguments differently from a function call. Someone who knows Scheme may have never seen anything like CLOS, but would see from context that defmethod must not be a function.

Entirely readable to someone who knows Common Lisp, and unreadable to someone who doesn’t know any kind of Lisp. Mostly readable to someone who knows Emacs Lisp, Clojure, or Scheme.

Being able to correctly guess what the syntax does without knowing the language is a function of similarity to familiar languages more often than it is a characteristic of the syntax itself.

It doesn’t look like the major instances forbid posting in Portugese, and it’s ActivityPub+AtProto, so people can follow you from Mastodon and BlueSky. It doesn’t really matter if your audience is local.

You might consider Wafrn, which is a federated system like Lemmy. There are four instances listed there as open to new accounts right now.

You can even post to Lemmy with it, and people will be able to follow you with Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, etc… and optionally, Bluesky.

Reddit has that, and the ability to follow a user and get notifications when they post. I’m not sure it’s widely used there, but I think it would be a decent feature to add to Lemmy.

Lemmy doesn’t have a concept of a post that isn’t attached to a community. It’s probably possible to post to Lemmy from Wafrn by tagging a community as it is with Mastodon.

You can follow Wafrn users from Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma, etc…

Early Reddit didn’t have those either, so I suppose it’s a proto-Reddit-like. Nookie does look better.