blooalien (u/blooalien)

blooalien commented on Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar newpublic.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/benwerd

cramsession · 3 days ago

There has to be a payoff though. BitTorrent is actually pretty hard to get working correctly, track down the torrent files... people do it because it's the only way to get some content and a way to get content you'd otherwise have to pay for. With social media, there's not much reward and most people's friends already post for free on other networks. Not saying it's not worthwhile, but it's hard to extract this lesson from BitTorrent.

blooalien · 3 days ago

Yeah, for sure. Anything trying to be a social network in a properly peer-to-peer fashion would have to be as simple to use (or simpler) than existing social networks, and / or offer some genuinely unique and desirable feature(s) in order to attract any serious critical mass of users.

blooalien commented on Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar newpublic.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/benwerd

bawolff · 3 days ago

Perhaps, but i feel like under this definition, bluesky and friends, dsspite all their talk, really does fit in the centralized camp.

blooalien · 3 days ago

> ... "under this definition, bluesky and friends, dsspite all their talk, really does fit in the centralized camp."

In my mind, I put them somewhere in-between, leaning a tad more toward "centralized" because they still rely on an individual to host the service no matter how "federated" they are. Until they're truly peer-to-peer, there's still that aspect of centralization involved. We need something kinda like BitTorrent but for messaging / social connections.

blooalien commented on Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar newpublic.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/benwerd

bit1993 · 3 days ago

Allot of people have a social media account rather than a website and allot of people use gmail rather than host their own mail. Decentralized means do it yourself, but most people just want something with batteries included that works well and don't really care about centralization.

blooalien · 3 days ago

> "Decentralized means do it yourself" ...

Not necessarily. Just one famous example; BitTorrent is decentralized but for most people it's just "run this app, download files". "Decentralized" just means "doesn't rely on a centralized service to accomplish a goal". As long as the application isn't too complex to install and use, most folks won't care one way or the other whether it's decentralized or not, as long as it accomplishes the goal they're looking to accomplish.

blooalien commented on US halts work on almost finished wind farm because national security npr.org/2025/08/23/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/hvb2

JumpCrisscross · 4 days ago

> Much of that money is money that was granted by Congress already

Not to buy shares.

blooalien · 4 days ago

> "Not to buy shares."

And therein lies the problem. Trump and his cult up and changed the terms of the grant after the grant had already happened.

blooalien commented on Line scan camera image processing for train photography daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/y... · Posted by u/dllu

dllu · 5 days ago

Thanks, I added a section called "Principle of operation" to explain how it works.

blooalien · 5 days ago

Absolutely fascinating stuff! Thank you so much for adding detailed explanations of the math involved and your process. Always wondered how it worked but never bothered to look it up until today. Reading your page pushed it beyond idle curiosity for me. Thanks for that. And thanks also to HN for always surfacing truly interesting reading material on a daily basis!

blooalien commented on Computer fraud laws used to prosecute leaking air crash footage to CNN techdirt.com/2025/08/22/i... · Posted by u/BallsInIt

ceejayoz · 6 days ago

It's still required knowledge.

People have always crammed for the tests, then promptly forgotten it.

blooalien · 5 days ago

> ... "then promptly forgotten it."

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it's mistakes. :shrug:

blooalien commented on Computer fraud laws used to prosecute leaking air crash footage to CNN techdirt.com/2025/08/22/i... · Posted by u/BallsInIt

anonym29 · 6 days ago

Trading one "private sector" state surveillance and narrative control platform for another isn't much of an improvement.

That said, I hate to break it to you, but there is no real question of 'when', or even 'if'. The general public simply does not care, no matter how much abuse they are subjected to by mainstream platform operators.

There will always be a minority who care enough to embrace decentralization, open source, good e2ee, but they are the exception to the vast majority, at least inside the US, who simply do not care enough to change their behavior.

What percentage of Americans do you think would voluntarily, permanently relinquish their own fourth amendment rights for $5000? Scary thought experiment when you recall studies that have found only two thirds of Americans can name all three branches of government, or that fewer than one in four can name any right secured by the first amendment other than freedom of speech.

https://studyfinds.org/constitution-americans-rights/

blooalien · 6 days ago

> ... "only two thirds of Americans can name all three branches of government, or that fewer than one in four can name any right secured by the first amendment other than freedom of speech."

Mere decades ago, not knowing this kinda stuff would get you failed in grade-school Civics class, and again in junior high, and yet again in high-school (at least where I grew up, here in the "Great NorthWest" Rocky Mountains area USA).

Used to be that knowing the basics about how your government worked and what your rights and responsibilities are as a citizen was considered "required knowledge" (right alongside basic history, math, reading, etc) to help prepare you for "life in the real world".

blooalien commented on What is going on right now? catskull.net/what-the-hel... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

slipperydippery · 6 days ago

I'm fairly confident there's going to be no shortage of work for programmers who actually halfway know what they're doing for the remainder of my career (another 20ish years, probably), at least. So that's nice.

Though cleaning up garbage fires isn't exactly fun. Gonna need to raise my rates.

blooalien · 6 days ago

> Though cleaning up garbage fires isn't exactly fun. Gonna need to raise my rates.

This is what I did way back when I was a professional web designer. Cleaning up nasty "tag-soup" DreamWeaver and MS Word websites for folks cost extra compared to my normal rates for just building them a fresh "from-scratch" website.

blooalien commented on What is going on right now? catskull.net/what-the-hel... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

franciscop · 6 days ago

This is probably why I love using Zed for my hobby dev, it doesn't try to be too clever about AI. It's still there and when I do want some AI stuff it can be seamlessly prompted, but for normal day-to-day the AI steps back and I can just code. In contrast, using AI at work with VSCode I feel like the tools get too much in the way, particularly in 2 categories:

- Fragile interaction. There's popups on VSCode everywhere, and they are clickable. Too often I try to hover on a particular place and end up clicking on one of those. The AI autocomplete also feels way too intrusive, press the wrong key combination and BAM I get a huge amount of code I didn't intend to get.

- Train of thought disruption. Since some times the AI long auto-complete is useful (~1/3th of times), I do end up reading it and getting distracted from my original "building up" thinking and now change to "explore thinking", which kind of dismantles the abstraction castle.

I haven't seen either of those issues on Zed. It really brought me back the joy of programming on my free time. I also think both of these issues are about the implementation more than the actual feature.

blooalien · 6 days ago

Yeah, I'ma have to agree with you 100% on Zed. I was previously hardcore into JupyterLab for playing with code, and Kate (KDE default text editor) for writing code until I tried Zed. I love how it's first and foremost an IDE / Editor and all the other features (AI, Jupyter kernels, etc) are just there to enhance it's main purpose when the user wants them, but those features rarely (if ever) seem to "get in the way" of that primary mission of editing code / text. They're just quietly waiting there for when you need them. So far the Zed team has really hit the balance just right.

blooalien commented on What is going on right now? catskull.net/what-the-hel... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

xnorswap · 6 days ago

I won't say too much, but I recently had an experience where it was clear that when talking with a colleague, I was getting back chat GPT output. I felt sick, like this just isn't how it should be. I'd rather have been ignored.

It didn't help that the LLM was confidently incorrect.

The smallest things can throw off an LLM, such as a difference in naming between configuration and implementation.

In the human world, you can with legacy stuff get in a situation where "everyone knows" that the foo setting is actually the setting for Frob, but with an LLM it'll happily try to configure Frob or worse, try to implement Foo from scratch.

I'd always rather deal with bad human code than bad LLM code, because you can get into the mind of the person who wrote the bad human code. You can try to understand their misunderstanding. You can reason their faulty reasoning.

With bad LLM code, you're dealing with a soul-crushing machine that cannot (yet) and will not (yet) learn from its mistakes, because it does not believe it makes mistakes ( no matter how apologetic it gets ).

blooalien · 6 days ago

> ... "because it does not believe it makes mistakes" ...

Because it doesn't actually believe anything at all, because these things don't think or feel or know anything. They just string together statistically likely language tokens one after another with a bit of random "magic" thrown in the mix to simulate "creativity".