Where Does Community Live? ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional des...

new from me - Where Does Community Live?

A deep dive into how protocols shape what communities can be build on the open social web

connectedplaces.online/where-does-c...

But it’s the “fear”, correct or not, I’m citing.

Historically, I’d imagine it involved distrust of institutions/Govt’s as well as an instinctual fear of the invisible toxicity of radiation.

I wonder if both of these are translatable to AI.

I keep wondering if nuclear energy is the best/closest analogue as something with obvious pros and cons but which everyone generally noped out of.

I wonder if the history of it bears anything out.

If it was radiation=bad, maybe interesting. If it was the bombs/meltdowns, then you’re prob right.

Made me think of @xkcd.com ’s flying with Python “moment” (but now for AI?): xkcd.com/353/

Especially the “fun again” part, true or not. Also how different many people’s outlook on the tech industry likely was in 2007 (yes, the comic is that old).

One big personal take for me since the “Twitter migration” is that the main missing piece of big social has been “seamless” movement between various levels of private/public in a single/standard interface. Neither fediverse nor atmosphere really target that, and so are both disappointing to me.

Had similar thoughts today looking at things from the outside. My head immediately figured “31 Dec” is still 2025, and that if one person rides one train once, that’d count as ‘open’.

For those paying attention, musk has been a problem or suspect for a while.

I’d heard opinions from people I trusted that he was BS - a decade or more ago.

The lesson, I think, is the power of marketing/branding at large enough scales should be viewed as like weapons of mass destruction.

Honestly haven’t left a film this bitter before.

Timing, pacing, characters, landing moments, coherence etc … all seemed off to me, with a kinda incoherent mishmash of vibes, scenes and events.

I got the distinct sense the director had actors yell a lot because they knew things weren’t landing well on set.

Anyone else feel Mickey 17 was actually embarrassingly bad?

Saw it yesterday, expecting the negative reviews to have missed the point or vibe.

But half way through, for me, it was “objectively” bad.

Like the director already knew while on set that they were in trouble.

I think I say this every year or so but…having been brought up in an apocalyptic doom-prepper destroy-the-evil-globalist-government evangelical movement/cult and then having spent my early adulthood really far from that world, this all feels like the third act of a horror movie.

Three AI-powered steps to faster, smarter peer review Tired of spending countless hours on peer reviews? An AI-assisted workflow could help.

Let's talk about this Nature piece in more detail.

I've rarely read something so anti-scientific anywhere short of the National Review.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025feb.d Welcome to the bi-weekly tech-focused update on everything that is happening on Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere. The theme continues to be: “can ATProto scale down“? Next week will be focused again o...

New: Last Week in the ATmosphere

The ATProto tech news:

- Sync 1.1 is a proposal to make relays cheaper to run
- Multiple PDS browsers now show backlinks, making them a new type of entity in the network
- Bluesky has 2 new vacancies to expand their T&S team

fediversereport.com/last-week-in...

Any other non-USians finding this place basically not worth it since Trump 2.0?

(
I get it, you’re going through stuff, but the “I gotta post about it” energy seems counterproductive, honestly a little sad, not a good use of microblogging, and strangely not informative/interesting from outside
)

There is a type of like pop science journalism geared toward educated liberals (your Kara swishers, your freakonomics, etc) that I think has the potential to rot your brain nearly as much as Joe Rogan type stuff

I keep seeing this. Guys, their literal job is to figure out what to do. They are not helpless even if they are not the majority. I really hope we can stop treating some of the most powerful people in the world as helpless and without sentience.

Sometimes I feel like there are no words that could adequately describe how to grieve for the future. The complex sense of loss, uncertainty, the weight of what seems not just likely but inevitable. Not simply mourning what’s to come, but mourning what’s already slipping away.

If go with With you were here, mainly cuz the long plays there she better on repeat for me.

The long game gets even longer, because before you can even teach people to recognize patterns, you have to convince them that there’s something to recognize at all.

I keep thinking about this post. I'm in this liminal space myself, the last generation with a real memory of an analog world before the internet fully saturated everything. That gives perspective, but it also makes me a witness to a transformation that’s irreversible.

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025feb.b Welcome to this week’s edition of all the news that happens in the wider ATProto ecosystem. This edition is somewhat more technical, next week I’ll focus again on Bluesky and the growing ecosystem of ...

This week's news about ATProto and the ATmosphere:

- @roomy.chat is building a P2P public group chat app on ATProto, now in public alpha
- Microcosm is a new selfhostable API that tracks backlinks for the entire network
- Tracking all lexicons with Lexidex

fediversereport.com/last-week-in...

I’m at the point where we have to stop saying

“Our media must do better” and start talking seriously about why the don’t and how long they haven’t

And the reflection necessary isn’t happening

Screenshot of a twitter post showing that the latest openAI commercial model is better than previous models at doing arithmetic but still cannot reliably produce the correct answer of multiplication problems with values greater than 11 x 11. It's supposed to be impressive I think

you fucked up a perfectly good computer is what you did. look at it. it's got innumeracy

Yea, I’m no staff eng, but the uptick also seemed a bit suspicious to me (quantitatively that is) as I imagine it’d be somewhat more hit and miss than the graph suggests.

Yea, the situation for juniors has been the danger zone from the beginning IMO.

You could tell when everyone zeroed on the “it’s like having a dumb but fast junior always on hand” mental model.

So what are juniors supposed to do then?!

The LLM Curve of Impact on Software Engineers In this article, I share my personal mental model of how LLMs affect software engineers at different levels, and why this leads to both excitement and scepticism.

read serce.me/posts/2025-0... this morning and it mostly tracks with my experience.

Wrote about the different responses to the superbowl and Lamar’s halftime show between fedi and Bluesky, and what that means for people who want to bring the fediverse into the mainstream

I also find it disorientating to see two different but maybe connected py bad versions of a revenge of the nerds.

US’s technocracy, that’s winning and it’s bad, and then the weirdly confused Fedi thing that is not winning, which is also arguably a bad thing.

Like, tech culture is just broken??!

There’s plenty hurtful/ignorant us non-USians could say about seeing the US from afar ATM.

I can’t help but notice how boring all the noise is. All basic/shallow takes like no one can think.

And those with thoughts are defensive about sharing, dodging the shitty engagement.

Like a party gone bad

I actually hate the "lol the giant asteroid will deliver us from this suffering" jokes.

Are there any other people in the progressive movement who think that humans are actually fucking amazing?