Contemporary liberals: "Those evil Libertarian Capitalists of Silicon Valley...." Contemporary libertarians: "There's absolutely nothing wrong with modern social media companies, and people need to just shut up and take the data centers." 🙄

I wonder if, something like this but it's (a) upfront that it's just scraping Instagram, and (b) the point is that it can't be stopped and you're making money from it. Let's just go full pirate, what's the point of a decentralized censorship-resistant protocol if nobody's trying to actively censor it? I envision a massive bot operation, "InstaMirror" or "InstaLeak" or something, like XCancel... Just spitting out Instagram npubs onto Nostr. All labeled so it can be easily muted as desired by users. Zaps are active, and go to the pseudonymous operator. The point is, "this is the money you could make by switching to Nostr," and there's a mechanism for the Instagram creator to take over their own Npub should they desire. View quoted note →

Starting to get my hopes up about *Lanterns*, I'm liking what I'm seeing in the first 2 episodes... Space/CGI stuff is used sparingly, but it looks good when it shows up.

I'm pretty good at showing up right after the "cool kids" have left, but before the crowds have shown up.

Sometimes I'm amazed by how much FOSS has developed over the past decade or so (c.f. desktop Linux), and other times I'm amazed by how many stuff is still nigh-unusable crap... Take Open Street Maps, which *has* to get better if people are going to leave the GooglePlex InfoContainment Dome... I type in "mexican restaurant" into the search bar and it literally finds places called "Mexican restaurant". No category or semantic searching at all. Like, WTF.

I love all the development around #amethyst, but one long-running issue that still bugs the heck out of me is the persistent "media player" card that shows up in Android, and just stays there forever... Even if I literally just scrolled past the media preview for some video or other. This gets served up to basically everything that uses the Android media player, SmartWatches, car audio, etc, even when I'm currently listening to a podcast or music being served by another app.

Reading this inside look at Cursor, the classic "walk around in socks" Tech startup where ideas come first and implementation comes second... I can't help but wonder why we still haven't seen anything like this for science.

Colossus

Inside Cursor

Sixty days with the AI coding decacorn

One of the biggest pain points with leaving the Googleplex Info-containment Dome is real-time traffic maps. *Nothing* in FOSS world seems to have real-time traffic.🫤

What does the rise and fall of Hawk Tuah Girl say about the difference between American (internet) culture in 2024 vs 2026?

GM, on the Nostr highlighters -- @Boris by @Gigi and Stash by @laoc42 are still roughly on par for me in terms of usability... Still looking for a good desktop solution that can handle (a) highlighting text from arbitrary websites, and also preferably (b) act something like an RSS reader. I guess Boris can import OPML on mobile, but not desktop?

Traditionally, and as is reflected in salary hierarchies, "product testing" is far lower on the totem pole than "development" in Silicon Valley. I think the AI age starts to level that, if not even inverting the value completely. When anyone can develop an app, especially in the mobile context, the bottleneck isn't the development itself but an *actual* human being with *actual* thumbs using it on an *actual* smartphone out in the real world. No LLM will be able to test that. So the bottleneck specifically is having real people test it in real environments *and* report back useful feedback to the human/AI developer centaur. That's a role that I feel I've played in Nostr... Some developers welcome it, some don't, but for every 1 of me who's providing actual feedback, there are 10 users who download your thing, hit the same friction point I did, and give up.