@80cv…h6w6
Looking at Gas Town (and Beads) from the outside, it looks like a Mad Max cult.
What are polecats, refineries, mayors, beads, convoys doing in an agentic coding
system? If the maintainer is in the loop, and the whole community is in on this
mad ride, then everyone and their dæmons just throw more slop up. As an
external observer the whole project looks like an insane psychosis or a complete
mad art project. Except, it’s real? Or is it not? Apparently a reason for
slowdown in Gas Town is contention on figuring out the version of Beads, which
takes 7 subprocess spawns. Or
using the doctor command times out
completely. Beads keeps
growing and growing in complexity and people who are using it, are realizing
that it’s almost impossible to
uninstall.
Source: lucumr.pocoo.org
And then there are things like Beads and
Gas Town, Steve Yegge’s agentic coding
tools, which are the complete celebration of slop loops. Beads, which is
basically some sort of issue tracker for agents, is 240,000 lines of code that …
manages markdown files in GitHub repositories. And the code quality is abysmal.
Source: lucumr.pocoo.org
hosted PDS
A complaint we often recieved was the need for a Bluesky account to use
Tangled; and besides, we realised that the overlap between Bluesky users
and possible Tangled users only goes so far—we aim to be a generic
code forge after all, AT just happens to be an implementation
detail.
To address this, we spun up the tngl.sh PDS hosted right here in
Finland. The only way to get an account on this PDS is by signing
up. There’s a lot we can do to improve this
experience as a generic PDS host, but we’re still working out details
around that.
Source: blog.tangled.org
Like, what's the point of doing client side routing, when you just recreate the full page reload experience, but slower?
The whole point of doing SPAs was to avoid this. Client side routing should be instant.
This is just one of many performance problems on GitHub. It didn't use to be that way. Trying to go through multiple PRs and
issues is just suffering now. Imagine you have 20 PRs to find out which one introduced a regression, and every click takes more than 5 seconds to show something.
Don't even get me started on the diff view itself - yes, the one that periodically freezes for 2 seconds while browsing through
large PR's
Source: yoyo-code.com
In our work wedemonstrate that training on samples from another generative model can induce a distribution shift, which over timecauses Model Collapse. This in turn causes the model to mis-perceive the underlying learning task. To make sure thatlearning is sustained over a long time period, one needs to make sure that access to the original data source is preservedand that additional data not generated by LLMs remain available over time. The need to distinguish data generatedby LLMs from other data raises questions around the provenance of content that is crawled from the Internet: it isunclear how content generated by LLMs can be tracked at scale
Source: arxiv.org
So throw out all the web standards. Make a browser that just runs WASM
blobs, and gives them a surface to use, sorta like Wayland does. It has
tabs, and a throbber, and urls, but no HTML, no javascript, no CSS.
Just HTTP of WASM blobs.
Source: joeyh.name
So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will
soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is
effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web
standards complexity against any newcomers.
Source: joeyh.name
it’s also possible to force them to happen in some cases by joining a room, making some power actions and then setting your signing key to expire before they happened. some servers will believe the events if they passed the signature check at the time, other servers will drop the events if they learn about the key expiry first, and then chaos ensues
Source: telegra.ph
those signature checks also rely on server signing keys which can be expired and replaced, except the signing key expiry is completely arbitrary so you can simply set an expiry date for your server signing key in the past and watch as new servers are now totally unwilling to authenticate any events from your server, resulting in split-brained rooms. feeding certain key expiry information to certain servers and not others might even make for a novel eclipse attack.
Source: telegra.ph
even room history is a best-effort endeavor. while the room graph itself provides some causal ordering, as some events need to follow other authenticating events, it's exceptionally hard to linearize history if you don’t know the entire history of the room partially. tiebreaks used in the server also include fields like depth and the origin timestamp, which can both be forged. so unsurprisingly, different servers can see messages arriving in a different order to each other. most of the time there is nothing you can do about this.speaking of forging things, it is also somewhat possible to insert messages into history by crafting events in the graph that refer to older ancestor events and, as long as it looks vaguely plausible (like with a sane depth and/or timestamp value), other servers will accept these events without much question and users may not be able to tell the difference if these events eventually get backfilled onto their own server’s copy of the room history.
Source: telegra.ph
as with most places on the internet, spam is inevitable, so another fun way to attack a room is just to join hundreds or thousands of bots to the room, making the room graph very complex and difficult to compute, which in turn means that servers waste lots of cpu time and clients have lots more work to do, especially in encrypted rooms. the only way to discard all of this spam complexity is to recreate the room.
Source: telegra.ph
It’s 2025 and
still nobody’s managed to make a low-trust distributed system
that works well except for Bittorrent, and guess what, Bittorrent works
well mainly because of centralized tracker servers that the clients
trust. Can we agree that these purely-peer-to-peer systems fundamentally
don’t work well at large scale without some amount of authoritative
system helping them along, and stop chasing the dragon of stateless
distribution?
Source: wiki.alopex.li
The biggest issue is that the code generated by AI tools was generally not up to the high standards of these open-source projects. Developers spent substantial amounts of time reviewing the AI’s output, which often led to multiple rounds of prompting the AI, waiting for it to generate code, reviewing the code, discarding it as fatally flawed, and prompting the AI again.
Source: secondthoughts.ai
Instead, relays should differentiate, both in terms of function and membership. In the future (and even now) there will be closed archival relays that scrape the network and provide a backup of user data for a fee; public-read, private-write relays that allow members to participate in an exclusive group with greater reach; private-read, private-write closed community relays; public "town square" relays, paid relays that provide indexes, full-text search, or content recommendations for the wider network (or a relevant subset of it); and relays that provide oracles for data external to nostr.
Don't model things as replaceable events if you can avoid it.
Bluesky is one of the first social media companies that has made algorithmic choice a reality.
Source: bsky.social
The naive economic solution to the problem would be raising ticket prices step by step until it is no longer attractive for scalpers to resell your ticket, because the original price of the ticket is already the maximum that people are willing to pay, creating an economic equilibrium.
Most organizers, including for-profit organizations, do not want to choose this option due to ethical concerns or concerns about community building.
Source: behind.pretix.eu
Events will need to decide whether they want to protect against bots, or preserve high privacy standards. You will not be able to do both.
Source: behind.pretix.eu
we’ll normalize this mediocrity. Cement it in tooling. Turn it into a best practice. We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software.
Source: deplet.ing
The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs. It’s that it will entice people who never wanted the job to begin with. People who don't care for quality. It'll remove the already tiny barrier to entry that at-least required people to try and comprehend control flow. Vampires with SaaS dreams and Web3 in their LinkedIn bio. Empty husks who see the terminal not as a frontier, but as a shovel for digging up VC money. They’ll drool over their GitHub Copilot like it’s the holy spirit of productivity, pumping out React CRUD like it’s oxygen.
Source: deplet.ing
“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement.
Source: www.anildash.com
No consistency, no overarching plan. It’s like I'd asked 10 junior-mid developers to work on this codebase, with no Git access, locking them in a room without seeing what the other 9 were doing.
Source: albertofortin.com
I cannot imagine what coding with Cursor must feel like, for a non coder. Or maybe I can. Walls of code you don’t understand, error after error that you keep pasting into a chat box, which gives you back more code
Source: albertofortin.com
Two service files, in the same directory, with similar names, clearly doing a very similar thing. But the method names are different. The props are not consistent. One is called "WebAPIprovider", the other one "webApi". They represent the same exact parameter. The same method is redeclared multiple times across different files. The same config file is being called in different ways and retrieved with different methods.
Source: albertofortin.com
One morning, I decide to actually inspect closely what’s all this code that Cursor has been writing. It’s not like I was blindly prompting without looking at the end result, but I was optimizing for speed and I hadn’t actually sat down just to review the code. I was just building building building.So I do a “coding review” session. And the horror ensues.
Source: albertofortin.com
although I’ve found it to be quite a capable coder, I still don’t trust it with anything important.
Once or twice, I’ve instructed it to outline a React component, only to rewrite most of it myself.
Source: elijahpotter.dev
I’ve implemented a strict “ask before generating” protocol in my workflow. My personal CLAUDE.md file explicitly instructs Claude to request permission before writing any code. Infuriatingly, Claude Code regularly ignores this
Source: uxdesign.cc
In an effort to impress the user and over-deliver, LLMs end up creating a rat’s nest of ultra-defensive code littered with debugging statements, neurotic comments and barely-useful helper funcitions.
Source: uxdesign.cc
Where an experienced developer might solve a problem with a few elegant lines with a thoughtful functional method, these AI systems often produce verbose, over-engineered solutions that tackle problems incrementally rather than addressing them at their core.
Source: uxdesign.cc
Its “almost there” quality — the feeling we’re just one prompt away from the perfect solution — is what makes it so addicting.
Source: uxdesign.cc
While using AI feels like a superhuman brain augmentation, when I look back on the past couple of years and think about how I explore new thoughts and ideas today, it looks a lot like sedation instead.
Source: dcurt.is
Given the severe flaws of Flakes and the refusal to recognize many or all of them, it is not clear that Nix Flakes will ever be usable. This feature will not be released in a stable state and whatever state it is in is already one of failure. There is no longer a reason for the Nix ecosystem to participate in this charade. Nix Flakes do not solve the problems that many had hoped they would. In fact, they cause many more problems in their implementation. It is time to move on, Flakes have failed.
Source: kilo.bytesize.xyz
Snobol is fascinating. The singular focus on pattern matching
kind of reminds me of Awk. Except Awk doesn’t do nearly as much with patterns,
it devolves into a C-like script to do things with pattern matches. Snobol
uses no such crutches, just pattern matching statements for all logic and
control flow. Its purity is impressive.
Source: ratfactor.com
We now ban every reporter INSTANTLY who submits reports we deem AI slop. A threshold has been reached. We are effectively being DDoSed. If we could, we would charge them for this waste of our time.
We still have not seen a single valid security report done with AI help.
Source: www.linkedin.com
The whole point of making creative work is to share one’s own experience - if there’s no experience to share, why bother?
If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
Source: claytonwramsey.com
Don’t let a computer write for you!
I say this not for reasons of intellectual honesty, or for the spirit of fairness.
I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large language model can transform them into.
Source: claytonwramsey.com
Berry asks how he could write conscientiouslyagainst the rape of nature if in the act of writingon a computer he was implicated in the rape. Ifind it ironic that a writer who sees the under-lying connectedness of things would allow hisdiatribe against computers to be published ina magazine that carries ads for the NationalRural Electric Cooperative Association, Marlboro,Phillips Petroleum, McDonnell Douglas, and yes,even Smith-Corona. If Berry rests comfortably atnight, he must be using sleeping pills.
Source: classes.matthewjbrown.net
Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by thecomputer with a handy alternative: Wife - alow-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile ofhandwritten notes on Wife and you get back afinished manuscript, edited while it was typed.What computer can do that?
Source: classes.matthewjbrown.net
computers areexpected to become as common as TV sets in "thefuture"
Source: classes.matthewjbrown.net
I do not admire the computer manufac-turers a great deal more than I admire the energyindustries. I have seen their advertisements,attempting to seduce struggling or failing farm-ers into the belief that they can solve their prob-lems by buying yet another piece of expensiveequipment.
Source: classes.matthewjbrown.net
A fórmula de sobrevivência do país é a trilogia emprego público, de preferência com aposentadoria acumulada, condomínio fechado e plano de saúde. Esse é o apartheid construído por uma elite analfabeta e totalmente irresponsável que entregou nossa cultura. Nem estou falando da nossa classe média, que tem dinheiro para gastar em boates e shows e sair de lá gargarejando cultura.
Source: brtolentino.wordpress.com
At one point, the AI accidentally removed the abiity to place a
flag on a cell. I asked it to restore that ability, but I didn't
give instructions in as great detail as I did before. It added
transitions to and from the flagged state, but it didn't add the
intermediate flagging and unflagging states as I had explicitly
directed it to before. As a result, flagging ended up being
non-deterministic, with the flag being toggled on and off every 16
ms.
Source: funcall.blogspot.com
This wasn't “vibe coding”. This was plain old coding,
but filtered through an English language parser. It added an
extra level of complexity. Not only did I have to think about what
should be coded, I had to think about how to phrase it such that the
AI would generate what I had in mind and not disturb the other
code.
Whenever I tried to let go and “vibe”, the AI would
generate some unworkable mess. Programming is a craft that requires
training and discipline. No dumb pattern matcher (or sophisticated
one) is going to replace it.
Source: funcall.blogspot.com
The users who are transferring from Fosstodon to another server will lose their posts
Source: fediversereport.com
The third takeaway is that running a fediverse server is challenging, especially over longer periods of time. Both Fosstodon admins have called in quits in response to the most recent drama. Their blog posts explaining their perspectives is that this has been a long time coming, and that the Fosstodon server has been uncompensated work that they do not love doing for years now. Regardless of one’s perspective on how the admins handled the latest situation, it is a further indication that being a fediverse server admin is a challenging job, one that should not be expected that someone can do forever.
Source: fediversereport.com
I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server
Source: idiallo.com
SQL was never intended to be used by computer programs. It was a console language for printing reports. Embedding it into programs was one of the gravest errors of our industry.
Source: x.com
the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything – not with anyhelp from me.
Source: ia801202.us.archive.org
those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a
reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there
and I said so, but was laughed at.
And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find.
Source: www.tbray.org
Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit
about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at
business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these
people are wealthy and litigious.
Source: www.tbray.org