Yeah, I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same thing. What I’m looking for:

I make a Mastodon account

I make a Bluesky account

I connect them via the bridge

I post on one account, the same content is posted on both accounts

If someone replies to my post on Mastodon (which all Mastodon users can see), I can reply using my Mastodon account

If someone replies to my post on Bluesky (which all Bluesky users can see even if they have not opted into using the bridge), I can reply using my Bluesky account

From what you’re describing, it doesn’t sound like the bridge can facilitate this.

I’ve never been on Twitter/X, Bluesky, or Mastodon. But maybe I’d like to try.

So far I can’t decide because I prefer Activity Pub in principle, but always felt FOMO with Twitter and don’t want the same thing to happen with Bluesky.

I think the best of both worlds would be if I could make an account on both and have one account essentially repost anything from the main account, unless I’m replying to someone specifically where it wouldn’t make sense to reply on both accounts.

Not sure if this bridge is a step in that direction, but it’s far more important to me that everyone can see what I post on both sides than it is that people from both sides can reach me on a singular account. Not sure if others feel the same way.

I’m supportive of your general vibe. But respectfully, being inclusive of your own needs does not require being exclusive of the needs of others. We all share the same world, so maybe we can be understanding of everyone’s desire for comfort without judging them based on how they were born.

Playing devil’s advocate, I completely disagree. If two people are making competing arguments, only the one being needlessly contrarian deserves an upvote. Using Up/Down votes as a means to side with someone is a good way to build a Boeing 747-200 engine.

I was off the app for over a year because of the API change. Decided to make a new account and lurked for a while before there was a comment I really wanted to reply to. I wrote out the perfect reply and my phone locked when I looked away for a few seconds. I unlocked the phone and my comment was gone. I went looking in the help menu to see if there was a place to suggest features like auto-save. Nothing. So, I made a new subreddit for reddit feature suggestions and spent like an hour writing a post explaining my experience. I hit post and the app went back to home. My post was gone.

Since then, I’ve made about a dozen comments in various places. On my old account, I would get dozens or hundreds of upvotes per comment, so it’s surprising that regardless of what I say or where, my new account has only 1 upvote on each comment. Almost like my account isn’t being seen. Is this what we lost the good reddit apps for?

Yeah, it’s specifically the not talking to a kid version that bothers me.

I pick up a subtext of self-importance and I think that’s what I find irksome. A mom is a parent. A momma is a special parent who will do anything for their baby, you’d better watch out. A kid is a child. A kiddo is a specific child who has a close bond with their momma or teacher that you wouldn’t understand. That’s the vibe I get.

Similarly, not a fan of when teachers and parents talk about their “kiddos.”

Feels like they’re needlessly using a more playful childish term to make themselves part of a separate “in group” who “gets it.”

I choose to take your questions as rhetorical, as I think our points do align. I quite agree.

My feelings are mixed. Everything you are saying is true. LLMs, right now at least, are a huge waste of resources. It’s triggering us to move closer to fossil fuels when we should be moving away. Every time I step outside to a nice balmy day, I think, am I going to miss this in a few years’ time? In a few decades, am I going to envy my current self who can do dishes without worrying too much about how much water goes down the drain? Are the generations to come going to look at my occasional can of tuna with contempt and jealousy? Or will they even have the luxury of retrospection?

I understand what we have to lose and how little we are doing about it. But I have also grown up being subjugated inside a capitalist hellscape. And I’ve spent the past few days having ChatGPT help me set up a CI/CD pipeline and start coding some games I’ve wanted to make for years. It’s allowed me to take a few hours of free time and make progress that I expected would have taken a week. It doesn’t have that effect on every task, but when learning new software, it really feels like having someone knowledgeable sitting next to me to answer my questions and point me in the right direction.

GPT 3 was kind of a neat party trick - sounds kind of like a person, but a pretty dumb person. GPT 4 sounded smarter, but still couldn’t code for shit. The o1 model still makes mistakes, but it retains the thread of our conversation weeks after the fact and has put together some code that I would have struggled to do myself. Even if it loses more money than it makes right now, I can see the value in progressing development until we achieve AGI.

People have expressed hopes that AGI will solve a lot of the world’s problems. That it will know just what to do about climate change. That it will crack codes in our DNA and give us endless healthy life. I am doubtful that these dreams will come to fruition. At least not in the way people think. It might have the intelligence to tell us things that we should have already known. Like that we can’t get much better yields in scrubbing carbon from the air than nature itself and we should have reforested far more land than we currently are. And that immortality will take huge amounts of resources and will come at the expense of the health of the masses. More gain for the rich. More suffering for the poor. Business as usual.

But I think there is a window of time where we can be hopeful about what AI has to offer. And we may even be able to leverage it to solve a big piece of the income inequality puzzle.

If we make a social media app that is not designed for profit but instead for the good of the people, there are a lot of problems such an app could solve.

We could design it to seek out real (non-bot) contributors. It will always be an arms race trying to sort real humans from bots but that is no reason to give up. It is a reason to get as far ahead in the race as we possibly can. We should build an app that both recognizes when someone is very likely to be real and when they have also contributed to a cause.

Imagine an application that tracks creative innovation, such as the creation of a funny video or a new meme format. When someone makes an idea and it is popular, the AI model would determine how much of a given experience is improved by their idea and give them profit residuals based on their contribution. And the more ideas that get built on top of the original idea, the more the newer contributors are rewarded for their contributions.

Think about if people could design a farm from the ground up using a socialized app for collaboration. Someone could design a camera system to keep track of livestock wellbeing and to head off diseases. They could make AI-empowered systems to track livestock happiness and find ways of increasing quality of life. And creating more humane automated methods of turning crops and livestock into food ready to transport. Some people would focus on creating ideal distribution methods. Others would create stores or restaurants. Others might work on the people themselves, encouraging them to give new more climate friendly meal options a try. Investors would be paid their dues, but there would be no CEO or board of executives. The means of production would belong to the people.

When people talk about the potential of AI, that’s what I envision. If I can make some passive income with my games and apps, that’s the next project I’ll be diverting my time towards. Because this is a narrow window we have to make this happen. The technology is here, but barriers from climate change and income inequality are only going up. We can lament the fact that AI is currently not profitable and hurting the planet, or we can put more of that energy to use by taking the tools humanity has made and using them to dismantle the systems which made this timeline so intolerable to begin with. The only way to take the current system apart is to make a new one that outcompetes our old ways of life in every measurable way.

Hey, that’s longer than I can run.

No, you’ve misunderstood. She married the Bigfoot and now she’s suing because she was perfectly happy not knowing he was just a bear. They had a destination wedding in London and the divorce lawyer’s bear-wedding annulment fee was 125 pounds.

I’m color blind so I can’t read it, but I can see enough of the big orange dots to connect them together like constellations and fuck you too.

It’s got your number.

Possibly. Is your husband an ass man?

Zero day exploits, to be expected. Obvious simple solution, just upgrade grandma firmware.

For sure, that’s what I meant by membership. There’s just so many different creators I watch, I can’t afford to support them all directly. Maybe I’ll make some playlists to play on the TV with ads while I’m out of the house.

I’ve used an adblocker for ages as well, though I do wish content creators on YouTube could get some passive non-membership revenue from me without me having to disable my adblock and look directly into the Ark of the Covenant. I could get Premium, but at that point, I feel like I’ve negotiated with a terrorist.

Social security number is the public key, now just issue everyone a private key. Boom. Fixed.

Read through the Readme and it’s definitely a good tool to know about. It doesn’t fit the needs of my current problem, but I’m certain I’ll use it in the future for context sensitive searching, since grep/awk/sed/tr have definitely fallen flat for me in the past. I might also be able to study how they utilized tree-sitter CLI when I explore my own implementation.

For my purposes, I want to take a group of similar-yet-different YAML file sets (though file type should be arbitrary), and feed them through a tool that will spit out a YAML template containing everything that is shared between multiple sets.

Then, I want it to create a file for each YAML which defines which parts to pull from the template file and a list of variables to be inserted into holes in the templates. Basically creating a madlib that can recreate any file in the original group given the right list of variables to insert.

For example, if I have a hundred YAML files that are mostly similar but contain different project names, have different server types provisioned, and are pulling different product versions, I would want this script to parse all hundred files and spit out a template that could be used as the basis to build any of the hundred files. The template would be combined with a hundred variable trees that would insert each unique part of each file into the right place.

In effect, I could have a small variables file that gives only the unique portions of the equivalent YAML - in this case, it would contain only the project name, the server type, the product version. Then, these small files could be combined with the universal template to recreate the original hundred YAML files. But unlike using a simple override mechanism, I would be able to change elements of the template YAML including broad structural changes, and after some processing, the change would affect all one hundred output YAMLs.

One could track things like environment variables that are specific to a certain project version and require that whenever a project version has a particular value to insert a particular environment variable into the output YAML. Or a centralized file could be made specifying which product versions correspond to which projects, allowing the engineer to change all product versions for a given set of projects in one go. Or one could create a universal template of IaC code that’s applicable to a broad swath of use cases and quickly build out a full set of YAML manifests and Terraform files using a small file that specifies what components will be needed and where to authenticate to the server.

I’m not aware of any tool that does this, but I think tree-sitter gets me much of the way there. If I can use it to parse any given file into a context aware tree, I would then need to make a script that combines the shared features of many context trees and splits the unique features out into small variable files. Then a script to merge them back together as needed. And something to manage file system structure, such as whether to parse every file individually or to strategically merge some sets so you have one variable file that produces multiple output YAML.

Sorry I’m brainstorming at you, just trying to figure out if the tool I’m envisioning is even feasible. Seems like it is, but I’ll have to figure out how to use tree-sitter CLI before I begin.