A broken clock is right twice a day.

No, it’s when you decline to federate content that some users don’t want (and many do).

“and many do”

Yeah, that’s definitely citation needed.

If many people did not want to read other people’s controversial opinions, we wouldn"t be having this whole debate.

It seems like most of the people complaining about this aren't actually on Mastodon.

Well, obviously you’re not going to be on a platform you dislike. I have signed up for Mastodon several times, but always ended up finding the instance dependency off-putting. I wish for a protocol where the instance mostly doesn’t matter and you can trivially switch to a different one, like with e-mail.

Mastodon does not have content promotion. It’s more analogous to the air that transmits your voice than a theater stage.

Nope. Air is static and no one has to pay to keep it there. A mastodon server is private property, and needs maintenance and money to stay on. You cannot force a private entity to host your speech. They always have a choice.

Mastodon is a federated service, like e-mail. Would you use an e-mail server where the admin reads messages delivered to your inbox and deletes the ones they don’t like?

Uh, you mean like a spam filter? I would not use an e-mail service without one.

No. A spam filter still allows you to view the e-mails and reply to them if you want to.

Also, I would certainly not want an e-mail service where the spam filter is based on the admin’s political opinions.

Despite that, Fediverse promoters love to say “It doesn’t matter which instance you join”.

I think it should be ever so slightly more nuanced than that.

It doesn't matter which instance you join if you're just getting started, and don't know enough to make a meaningful decision about which instance to join.

After a week or a month, you might understand how it works a bit better, and also which communities exist, and might have an informed opinion about which community you resonate with.

I am fine with blocking. However, it should be me who decides whose speech I don’t want to see, not someone else.

> How did you verify that?

The compiler works without an internet connection and requires too little resources to be secretly running a local model. (Also, you can’t inspect the source code.)

> You know humans can hallucinate?

We are talking about compilers…

> We agree then that you can verify, test, and trust the deterministic code an LLM produces without ever looking at it.

Unlike a compiler, an LLM does not produce code in a deterministic way, so it’s not guaranteed to do what the input tells it to.

It is for me because the LLM makes my ability to evaluate super, too.

Also, half of the rooms in the house can’t be accessed because they don’t have a door. And when it starts raining, the house collapses.

> I also absolutely LOVE that non-programmers have access to this stuff now too. I am always in favor of tools that democratize abilities.

Programming was already “democratized” in the sense that anyone could learn to program for free, using only open-source software. Making everyone reliant on a few evil megacorporations is the opposite of democratization.

You know what they mean by that term, it's about building things without needing to put in the learning effort. I have bosses building small POCs via vibe coding, something they would not have done via learning to code and typing it manually.

It's the same sort of argument artists use when it comes to AI generated media, there obviously is a qualitative difference in the people now able to generate whatever they want versus needing to draw something by hand, so saying "they could've just learned to draw themselves" is not very convincing. People don't want to do that yet still get an output, and I see nothing wrong with that, and if you do, it's just another sort of gatekeeping, that the "proper" way is to learn it by hand.

Lastly, many, many open weight models exist.

Cars are a great analogy because they made mobility significantly worse for people who can’t afford them or refuse to use them for ethical reasons.

Those people are the exception that proves the rule.

And cars now have become privacy nightmares, which we are now beholden to

I will tell that to the billions of people who are walking and biking around at this very moment. Just give me some time.

I said worse, not impossible. Because of cars, I have to take longer routes and put myself into danger while working.

> Using neovim with plugins feels like using a rolling Linux distro, you never know what breaks next.

You can just… not update them.

Yeah I always see this "issue" with Neovim and its almost entirely user-cultural, installing big blobs of plugins, updating to edge every day and some kind of jones's pressure.

These days you can probably install mini.vim to get basically every paper cut fixed (eg extra "surround objects", aligning text, plugin manager etc), a theme, a few other assortments to taste and park your plugins at known commits or include them in your dotfiles and its ... fine. I haven't updated my plugins in probably 6 months and when I do I update them selectively only if there is actually a reason to do it or the changes are very minor.

They don't have LTS releases, there is always a bug somewhere and the bug fix includes a number of features, if not new dependencies.