alexch

YES. i’m the OP. The point of the post was to avoid bickering about the technical in-context contradictory ambiguous definitions of “centralized” and “algorithm” and to point to the root issue: concentration vs dilution of *human power*.

How many points of failure are there? Who is in control of them? How many Elons would it take to screw the whole thing up for everybody?

the core fact is that #Bluesky is owned by goblins who are totally (probably) gonna push it down the #enshitification path no matter what its network topology looks like.

(goblin owners including the actual guy who fucked up Twitter and then sold it to the second worst person on the planet)

I wish ATProto was a proper old-school open standard, since there’s a lot of cool ideas in it, and some well-intentioned dedicated hobbyists building a community around it, but it’s still mostly a wishful-thinking stalking-horse for a single company and their greedy #utilitopian owners.

the details of the network topology are important, but ultimately a red herring

what we’re talking about is concentration of control

it’s all about power

who gets to call the shots, for whom, with whose consent, for whose benefit

and power corrupts

don’t trust the scorpion

and there’s a lot of really smart, really well intentioned people working at BlueSky, and on ATProtocol… but as the old saying goes:

*the road to hell is paved with good intentions*

(as i said in a later entry in the thread — which of course nobody bothered to read, since they got stuck playing Dictionary Fallacy with the word “algorithm”, see https://beige.party/@possibledog/113379279962049131 )

maybe the term “centralize” is too physical a metaphor for this abstract debate, since it implies a radial axis, along which the opposite of central is decentral, but that’s not how social networks work: there are always many centers

RubyMine is pretty damn good, especially because you can immediately jump to the source code, even of libraries, and just read the list of available methods. It's amazing to me how completely Dwarf Fortress -- um, I mean vim and tmux -- has conquered the Ruby dev world.

RubyMine FTW. It's amazing to me how completely Dwarf Fortress -- um, I mean vim and tmux -- have conquered the Ruby dev world.

My analysis: layering. YAML doesn't in itself execute untrusted code, but it has a bunch of semi-experimental features most people don't know about or use, and one of those features (deserializing arbitrary classes) has a side effect that sets values on certain other classes -- not written by the people who wrote the YAML parser -- that then, often later on in their lifecycle, execute this untrusted code. I'm not saying this as an excuse -- I have long mistrusted YAML's blasé complexity, not to mention Rails' anarchic pass-HTTP-params-directly-into-the-DB pattern -- but as an explanation of how they missed it.

Also, more than other communities, Ruby has a cultural gap between the people developing the language and core libraries and the people using it to write web apps and frameworks.

Here's two good technical writeups of the exploit as it applies to Rails apps: http://blog.codeclimate.com/blog/2013/01/10/rails-remote-cod... http://ronin-ruby.github.com/blog/2013/01/09/rails-pocs.html

If you’ve ever used the iPad or iPhone, you’ve probably noticed the absence of scrollbars. They don’t exist! Mobile Safari lets you "scroll" the entire page by sliding your finger around, but all other scrollbars are simply discarded. Essentially, we needed to reinvent the native iPad/iPhone scrolling, flicking, and bounceback behavior in JavaScript. Here's how we did it.

Erector is a "builder pattern" view framework, inspired by Why's Markaby. In Erector all views are objects, not template files, which allows the full power of object-oriented programming (inheritance, modular decomposition, encapsulation) in views.