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Cake day: August 26th, 2024

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  • I get the impression, especially these last few months, that Klabnik is undertaking a heavily couched form of political speech. He appears to be deeply uncomfortable with anyone who would question the cloud-based, de facto centralized and commercially enclosed development and usage patterns that have built his career, and that informed ATProto’s heavyweight participation requirements as well as the entire AI-startup market. But rather than opening himself to that broader conversation, he instead attempts to manipulate these discussions by pathologizing individuals with whom he’s having a disagreement, on top of throwing in questionable arguments from authority.

    Consider, for instance, lecturing quips like “Because you don’t always get to pick when you ship” or “They did extensive research on what was out there…” etc. from the lobsters thread. No room to discuss the confused product/protocol approach that Bluesky is taking, or that the “move fast break things” logic that one might apply to a web app does not really fit developing and documenting a broader protocol, if that’s what Bluesky is really trying to create. No room to question that this approach may have harmfully skewed the Bluesky team’s thinking about what they really need. It’s an echo of A16Z’s intentionally braindead “just build things” rhetoric, where the “builders” (formerly “founders”) are above reproach.

    That is an incredibly weaselly way of approaching public dialogue, and has strongly impacted my trust in him for the worse. I think he probably feels a strong need to be perceived as level-headed and civil (“Quiet, Calm, and Sincere” as Something Awful’s community-complains subforum used to be called), as long experience leads a lot of internet denizens to fear discussion forums dying in a flamewar spiral, but uhhh… he’s not meeting that bar.


  • the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979

    No doubt there is very much real discontent in Iran, but as you note, the heavy involvement of Reza Pahlavi made me raise an eyebrow. Loudly currying favor with the current slate of corrupt/abusive/incompetent Anglosphere governments and media does not suggest judgment that would result in a government any more stable or democratic than the existing one.

    And there is, of course, the question of what would become of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially when they saw and assisted in how Iraq played out after de-Ba’athification. The media is still willing to indulge just-so stories about easy imposition of a Western-friendly government, when multiple waves of bloody insurgency have stalled that everywhere it’s been tried. The near-total absence of news from Iraq in the mainstream American media for the last few years fascinates me.




  • One sad thing I’ve noticed due to vibe-coding is the amount of slop packages being spewed out for niche-but-hip languages like Common Lisp and Erlang. The lisp subreddit has a guy pulling up with a bunch of vibe-coded stuff, and somebody on Something Awful turned up with a CLI forums client that forwards through NNTP (???) written in Elixir that everyone thought was kinda neat for a second until they realized it was mostly slop.

    Hard to say it’s making these language ecosystems any more “alive” if it’s all stuff that has to be re-evaluated and probably replaced entirely. And it definitely seems like Yegge isn’t the only one using this stuff to make absolute fever-dream architectural decisions that wouldn’t even be a consideration if they had to write it all themselves.