Here's another article answering this question: https://overreacted.io/open-social/. The one you're commenting on links to it in the first paragraph with "if not, read this!" for that exact reason--I can't explain the motivation and technical details in the same post, or to repeat the same explanation from post to post.
I read this article the other day and I am not sure what the breakthrough is with AT/bsky. It seems like the functionality "This blurs the boundaries between apps. Every open social app can use, remix, link to, and riff on data from every other open social app." is already provided on the web through hyperlinks.
There is seemingly nothing in the AT protocol that prevents sites from defederating and enabling vendor lock-in, just like how every other social media site has switched to requiring you to log in to see links.
There is seemingly nothing usefully decentralized about it. There is some sort of psuedo-distribution where you can host on your own domain. But like email, I imagine these types of users will be effectively blocked due to spam filtering.
It's like P2P if it was invented by people who know nothing about P2P, but just want to create a version of twitter that is immune to the company being bought out by someone they don't like and instituting a different censorship regime.
Yeah except there’s no guarantee of structured data there! With AT, each record is specified using a corresponding lexicon—making for much more straightforward interop.
> There is seemingly nothing in the AT protocol that prevents sites from defederating and enabling vendor lock-in, just like how every other social media site has switched to requiring you to log in to see links.
And that’s fine! Any site can choose to do whatever they please—but the underlying AT records always remain accessible to other consumers (apps, users, …).
> I imagine these types of users will be effectively blocked due to spam filtering.
Blocked by whom? If the relay (which pulls records from your PDS) “blocks” your PDS, you can simply switch to one that doesn’t. The beauty of AT infra is every piece of it can be run separately. That’s “meaningful” decentralization.
>Blocked by whom? If the relay (which pulls records from your PDS) “blocks” your PDS, you can simply switch to one that doesn’t.
Blocked by pretty much everyone, in the case of email. If most people use gmail or hotmail, and these mail providers block mail from new domains regardless of DMARC/DKIM/etc. then you are effectively blocked from sending email to most people. It's inevitable that this happens because there is no sybil resistance built in to the network layer, so providers have to be blocky to prevent spam.
> The beauty of AT infra is every piece of it can be run separately. That’s “meaningful” decentralization.
So kind of like how in the web, every website can be run separately?
You can switch, but everyone else won't coordinate to switch at the same time. So you have been deplatformed. It is the same with the web, where if you get banned from a forum (perhaps one that changes its rules to suit sponsors), you can switch to using a forum that no one uses due to network effects.
>There is seemingly nothing in the AT protocol that prevents sites from defederating and enabling vendor lock-in, just like how every other social media site has switched to requiring you to log in to see links.
Note there is no "federation" in the Mastodon sense; sites don't "talk to" each other. They just all aggregate data from the web. Yes, an app doing that could potentially stop "posting to" and "aggregating from" the web in the future and move the source of truth to a local database. But by doing that, it mostly just loses interoperability--and someone else could start a new app with the already existing data on the network, effectively forking their product with its users/data.
>It's like P2P if it was invented by people who know nothing about P2P
Please don't post snarky dismissals like this on HN. The guidelines ask us to avoid shallow dismissals and snark. Please make an effort to observe them when participating here.
I’ve learned so much, and it took only a few minutes. What a treat.
I had no idea about masking, even though I’ve been doing it for as long as I remember being alive. Aaaah, it’s so draining. When I was younger (in my 20s) I used to think there’d come a time when I’d finally come out of my shell. I’m pushing 40 now, but the shell is only thicker, the cave deeper, the walls taller. Instead of dreaming that one day I’ll be “like everyone else”, I’m contemplating the day I’ll cease to exist. Funny.
Please talk to someone about it. Living with autism doesn't have to be horrible. Even if you can't change everything to fit right now you can always take small steps in the right direction. Eventually those steps add up to a better life.
Alas, American exceptionality as part of its premise precludes any act of learning from anywhere other than itself. Culturally, this is what inbreeding looks like.
I get a good chuckle out of these articles. “Here’s another thing I lack that was supposed to make me live longer!”
Speaking of living longer: I’ve had my fill of fast cars already, but how about an airplane? I watched some guys fly Piper Cubs in Alaska. That looked fun as hell. https://youtu.be/XXuIA_b35fs
Perhaps I’ll buy one of those. They aren’t so expensive.
> Maybe it’s because the delta between say, a 911 and a racecar is smaller than that between a civilian prop plane and a fighter jet?
For me it'd be more because the first three are pastimes, the fourth one is a job.
You don't get to own a fighter jet and fly it around the world doing stunts or taking in sights just because you can; you can't take your friends or loved ones with you either. You are granted the right to fly an expensive piece of government property, whose operating costs can be counted in average taxpayer's annual income tax per hour. You fly where you're told, when you're told, how you're told. The point it gets most exciting, the point where you are granted most authority over your mission, is the point where you're shooting at someone or being shot at.
The movies make it look like all four things you mentioned are fundamentally the same in terms of feelings of freedom. It's not the only case. Adult me got disillusioned about a lot of career paths I dreamed of as a kid :(.
Advice to OP: lay off the Claude Code if your goal is to become an “independent researcher”. Claude doesn’t know what it’s doing, but it’s happy to lead you into a false sense of achievement because it’ll never tell you when you’re wrong, or when it’s wrong.
Bizarre because a quick look at the code and commit log shows it was likely 100% coded by AI, so the author is not trying too hard to hide it, but they also seemed to forget to mention it anywhere in the README or the blog post.
All of the code is imported in 1 commit. The rest of the commits are deleting the specs that I guess were used to generate the code. There’s one commit adding code which explicitly says generated by Claude code. There’s basically no chance the whole codebase is not AI slop.
Github is great at showing your individual ability, on projects that you're working on yourself and/or ones that you want to showcase.
What happens when you have do code features that you won't want to do? No one puts their dogshit, get-it-done-before-the-weekend code on github.
And it's useless for telling me how well you'll do on a team, how you'll interact with other stakeholders, if you're sketchy and will run off with our IP (or just sell creds on the darknet), and if you'll be able to handle high powered office/project politics and their pressures.
Linkedin may not be a perfect (or even good) signal for that, but it's a start. Long work histories but no contacts on Linkedin? Okay, not a dealbreaker, but may be worthy of an explanation.
You're missing out on a lot of opportunities by not giving LI consideration. A lot of good companies use it, GitHub is also important for developers.
However, you can double your income by thinking differently about LI. If that doesn't speak to its value as a network, I might need to reassess what network value means.
My current compensation is more than 4x what it was at my first job out of college 14 years ago. It would have been difficult to pull that off without getting in touch with recruiters at major tech companies on LinkedIn.
I did not have an expert write my profile and in fact I’ve hardly touched it in years.
My most recent job search consisted entirely of friendly intros (most by colleagues at the hiring manager level) at a mix of startups and major tech companies. I have met these people through the normal course of business and life, and never through LinkedIn.
Maybe I'm special, because I've spent my career in tech consulting, so I got to network that way, but this is hardly a unique career path.
I think people that already live in tech hubs or are just in a position to network in person certainly don’t need LinkedIn as much as I did to get introductions to the major tech companies. For me, living in a smaller market and working for a small company it would be very difficult (not impossible) for me to have broken in without a LinkedIn introduction.
My initial salary was pretty low, I started at a small company in a small market not near any tech hubs. But like I said, I think it would have been hard to network my way up without LinkedIn. All of my peers were making about what I was.
Yes but that plus 14 years of experience will add up to at least half if not most, super depends on that starting number. But really a comparison to today's numbers is most telling
1. Never did spend more than a few minutes at a time, but have recruiters reaching out on the regular.
2. This is not a LinkedIn skill. I speak at industry conferences regularly through relationships I've built entirely outside of LinkedIn.
3. Conference speaking does this for me.
4. This isn't even tangentially relayed to LinkedIn.
My first job out of college was from a bunch of cold applications. Since then, I've gotten all my roles by reaching out to people (outside of LinkedIn) to connect, and through my network. The skills you highlight as important are not exclusive to, or necessarily learnable on LinkedIn.
Yes, my point is that LinkedIn is part of an overall strategy.
The best way to use recruiters is to give them a few minutes regardless of the job, they have more, it's their business, and they will start pimping you out. Best job search hack ever!
I'm doing a few extra steps now
1. Tell them the company salaries are far too low, take a sample point back, hopefully a hack that raises everyone's salary
2. Getting intros to companies I want to do business with, not go work for. This has not been fruitful, but it is a recent strategy change
We just got back from watching the launch in person from Cocoa, FL. It seemed as if ten thousand people have come out to watch the rocket climb up. Everyone cheered hard, and spirits were unbelievably high despite traffic and rain.
> fly literally every employee out once a quarter and throw a giant party
Please don't! I love working remotely; but I don't want to travel for work. I don't need a party. I don't need a fancy offsite. I don't want to spend a week with colleagues in some ridiculous tropical destination.
I want to quietly work from home, deliver quality work, get paid for it, and enjoy my life. Being forced to travel is the opposite of enjoying life.
This was my stance before the era of COVID-19... Now, I'm definitely not boarding any kind of airplanes.
It's the parents' job to teach kids how to tell junk food from healthy food; predatory apps from apps which add value; "you're the product" from "you're consuming the product". I do this with my kid, and technology is a boon for her. However, most adults aren't qualified to make the distinction between good and evil, so their kids suffer too.
> It's the parents' job to teach kids how to tell junk food from healthy food
I agree with the sentiment, but an important point is not the forget that behind the curtains there is an army of product managers, AI PhDs and tons of data running a version of Truman Show on each one of us. Usually "you're the product" is blended with "you're consuming the product that adds value". For example, you can search and land to a video to watch something educational, but opaque recommendation algorithms, un-turn-offable autoplays, nagging notifications and whatnot will try to convince you like an optimally-annoying salesman to stay just a little more and pay them in attention and ad revenue, or get you those dopamine hits so that you will want to come back to "just check" the app in a pavlovian fashion.
Whenever you or your kid interact with a screen, you are potentially interacting not only with a machinery with inherent information asymmetry but also one that we train every day exactly how much abuse we are willing to take. For further reading see Tristan Harris and the design ethics questions he brings into light.
Lots of “teaching” is literally excluding from consumption for young kids. Parents know better than their kids, why entrust that kind of advanced decision making within them?
> why entrust that kind of advanced decision making within them?
Because then there's a hope that they'll actually learn the underlying principle and make similar decisions in situations where someone else is not directly in control of their behavior.
There are kids who don't get to eat ice cream before dinner at home because that's the rule, who will happily do so when over at someone else's house without their parents around to enforce that rule. Then there are kids who actually understand why they shouldn't eat ice cream before dinner, who will decline to do so even if they have the opportunity. (That doesn't mean they'll exercise perfect judgment every time, but then, there's also no guarantee they'll follow rules that aren't being enforced.)
It's important to develop the critical thinking skills to filter out "junk food" content.
(To clarify: I'm not talking about children too young to understand the concept, I'm talking about children more than old enough to make such decisions in an informed way. Roughly speaking, think 12, not 3.)
