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danijelb

623 karma · joined August 2, 2013

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danijelb··on ChatGPT Search
In Croatia more than 55% of households have AC installed, and only 10 years ago it was less than 25% of households. It got more popular as our summers are getting increasingly more hot and humid. Average salaries in France are probably double compared to Croatia. It definitely can't be classified as luxury if more than half of the country can afford it, in one of the poorer EU member states. I assume in the next 10 years it's probably gonna be 70+% of all households.

Regarding technical sophistication, AC is more or less using the same technology as a fridge, just scaled and adapted for room cooling instead of food storage.

danijelb··on Wordpress.com Now Supports ActivityPub
It could lead to decentralization of both consuming and publishing. There could be a native timeline UI integrated into iOS/Android. Mobile network operators could host fediverse instances for text/audio/video and bundle them into phone plans which everyone already pays for. The possibilities are endless.

In such scenario search engines would also play a bigger role because if people are hosting videos on 50 different services instead of just Youtube, you need a separate search engine which crawls all instances.

I think the current fediverse servers like Pixelfed and Mastodon are emulating centralized services because we are used to how they function and it would be too confusing. If it catches on, then those services can slowly morph and adopt the benefits of the new paradigm

danijelb··on Wordpress.com Now Supports ActivityPub
If ActivityPub gets really popular, there won't be a single service that's winning. For example, if each Youtube profile is suddenly a fediverse account which you can follow, the owner of that Youtube profile doesn't need a separate Twitter or Wordpress account - simply the act of uploading the video to Youtube will appear in user timelines of twitter, mastodon and all other services. Same would happen with blogs, instagram accounts, etc.

And if we get to such future, it's possible that we won't even need a Mastodon/Twitter account to have a timeline. iOS and Android could build native support for following accounts and displaying timelines in the operating system.

danijelb··on Wordpress.com Now Supports ActivityPub
It's great they are adopting the standard but those aliases are ugly.

Instead of openprotocolfanblog.wordpress.com@openprotocolfanblog.wordpress.com it should be openprotocolfanblog@wordpress.com

danijelb··on Official Mastodon server of the Dutch government
I agree for ads - I don't think it would be acceptable to push ads to other servers. I'm not sure if it's even possible in the standard because they'd have to have some sort of an ad account, but if the user on your instance is not following that account they'd never see the ad.

As for missing out, I guess it's a matter of perspective. I would assume that right now most Mastodon users have at least one more account on a mainstream corporate social media site - Twitter, Instagram, whatever. What they are missing out from Mastodon, they get on other places.

But if we imagine a scenario where ActivityPub becomes mainstream and all providers start supporting it, there are two totally different experiences.

An experience of a person on a server that federates with everyone could mean having just one account and follow everything from one place. For example Twitter would support ActivityPub so you can follow Twitter users without an account there. You could follow a Youtube channel and have it in your feed. The owner of the channel wouldn't need to create a separate account on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, or something - their channel is their followable account on all platforms.

The experience of a person on a small mastodon server that defederates from big corporate servers would be exactly as is today. To follow users of Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Youtube, etc you'd maintain another account. But in the future where ActivityPub is mainstream, that other account is also activitypub-compatible. So, why have two when one is less "powerful" than the other?

Letting the imagination run wild, in such future scenario ActivityPub feeds could be integrated deeply into your iOS/Android phone UI, without needing a separate app. Perhaps also on TV. Most people will want an account that doesn't limit them.

danijelb··on Official Mastodon server of the Dutch government
Resistance from Mastodon enthusiasts doesn't matter. Governments and companies can still decide to run their own ActivityPub infrastructure, running on Mastodon or something else. Threads and other services will federate with them, users will be able to follow accounts from those government and company instances.

Small Mastodon communities can choose to not federate, but they would be missing out on a lot, assuming ActivityPub takes off.

danijelb··on Official Mastodon server of the Dutch government
The government shouldn't provide that service to ordinary citizens, same as they don't provide email hosting on government email servers. I think it helps if you think about Mastodon as email. Government runs their accounts on government server, other users can interact with their content from other servers.

As for people caring about a server for functional programming or some other niche, I believe this is just a temporary state of Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's such an early and experimental technology.

I believe that in the near future there will be multiple large corporate hosted social networks supporting ActivityPub (running on Mastodon or something else, doesn't matter) and then the choice becomes clear for an average user - who do they want handling their data. There could be a Google activitypub service, something from Facebook (they said Threads will support it), different media companies could run their services. Phone networks and ISPs could offer ad-free instances bundled with internet and phone plans. And, of course, there will still be a ton of small niche communities owned by enthusiasts for a variety of topics.

Celebrities and companies will most likely host their own instances, because an account on an official well-known domain acts as verification.

The fediverse itself will be a neutral ground.

danijelb··on The Federated App Problem
Current federation looks like that, a bunch of small independent communities focused on a single topic like tech or photography or whatever, but it doesn't have to be like that. If federation catches on then the most likely the pick will be between 5-10 huge general instances run by corporations.

In such world, Twitter and Facebook could add support for ActivityPub, Google and Microsoft could build their own, different ISPs and media companies could run their instances, and so on. Then the benefit of choice becomes more clear - who do you trust the most to provide you an account. Basically, it would be like the situation with email where most people use a 3-4 biggest services, but the ecosystem is open to new competitors.

The current state of federated social networks is very experimental. If it catches on with big corporations 90% of people will use that, and these small communities can still survive but would be more or less irrelevant.

danijelb··on Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
The web went in the wrong direction when we abandoned the initial concepts of user agents, which was that the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how. That concept, transferred to today's world of apps would simply mean that any client like Apollo is essentially a browser locked on Reddit's website, parsing HTML (which has the role of an API) and rendering the content in a native interface. As long as the user can access the HTML for free, they should be able to use any application (a browser or a special app) and render the content however they wish.

Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly, but with the recent resurgence of server-side rendering we may soon be able to get rendered HTML with one HTTP request. And then the only hurdles will be legal.

danijelb··on The Erasmus Network
Another great success that didn't exist 15 years ago - no more roaming charges
danijelb··on Bicycle
Reminds me of how AI image generators draw stuff slightly wrong
danijelb··on Matt Mullenweg: Tumblr to “add activitypub for interconnect” with Fediverse
Activitypub goes in both directions. For example, people using Mastodon will be able to follow tumblr users, interact with their posts, comment, share it on their profile, all from Mastodon apps. And vice versa. Same applies to all services that fully support activitypub. Another example - right now you can follow a peertube channel on mastodon and see their videos in your timeline as if they are using mastodon, not peertube. If you post a reply on mastodon, it is automatically shown as a comment under the video on peertube.
danijelb··on NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings
Because one of the main issues with negotiation is that people have different idea on what's a good salary depending on their educational and cultural background, the environment they grew up in, etc.

For example a company might be willing to pay up to $175k for a certain dev position. This amount of money seems completely crazy to a developer who comes from a poor family and is the first one to have a skill that can pay so much. It will never occur to them to attempt to negotiate for this amount, because even $90k seems like a great salary compared to what their parents had. $175k would seem unreal, especially in a country where talking about money is taboo.

But if this number can be seen often in ads as an upper range, it becomes normalized in the eyes of everyone who is applying for jobs, no matter their educational and cultural background.

danijelb··on NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings
The interview process will determine if the candidate's skills are suitable for the position and if they are not, they don't get hired. If there is a more suitable position open, the company can offer to hire the candidate for the other position.
danijelb··on NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings
I wasn't an employer but I'm genuinely curious how is it possible that a company doesn't know what they are willing to pay for an employee of specific knowledge? They maybe don't have formal hiring budgets, but they know how much money they have, if some investments are coming, how much they pay other people on average, etc. Also, they obviously know the amount of money they are not willing to go over during the negotiation phase of the interview.

If they are looking for some super specific and rare skill, why not make a separate ad for that rare position? In that case if they are ready to pay 5x the market rate, they can put that in the salary range without influencing ranges of "normal" positions.

danijelb··on NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings
> It is also true that a single job ad might be aiming to employ a number of people at various positions of seniority and experience.

Separate it into multiple job ads, with well defined requirements and salary ranges.

The role of the interview in that case is to simply determine if the candidate fits the desired requirements or not.

If a candidate applies to the position that doesn't fit their skills this will come up during the interview and the recruiter can tell the candidate that they are better suited for another position and inform them that the interview will continue as if they applied for the lower/higher position.

The company obviously knows how much they want to pay a candidate with certain skills and experience. So by making more detailed job descriptions there is no problem with posting salary ranges. Or if for some reason a company really insists on having one job ad for multiple positions of varying experience then they can put a salary range table where they state salary range for each possible position that a candidate might end up in after a successful interview process.

danijelb··on Are we going back to the cable days?
Problems for Netflix started when they started competing against other content providers with their own original content. If they didn't produce their own content and just provided a distribution platform for others I think we would still have everything on Netflix
danijelb··on Ask HN: What is with the new URLs on facebook.com?
I went to Vice's fb page, found the same post that OP linked to and checked the URL. The pfbid part is exactly the same to me. The URL by default has some additional params attached like __cft__ and __tn__, which can be stripped, and those are probably tracking-related. Based on this, I don't think that pfbid is connected to tracking
danijelb··on Top stablecoins shed $7B in May as traders redeem tokens en masse
It's impossible to have a totally different system while the fiat system exists in parallel. Even if people used crypto just for payments and didn't assign a dollar value to it, it would still have a dollar value because if you know that 0.0001 BTC buys 1 kg of something then you can infer the dollar value
danijelb··on Eurovision Song Contest Bingo
They are using CuePilot

https://youtu.be/GTZDn1BwVuQ

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3052371875013875...

danijelb··on Apple, Google and Microsoft Commit to Expanded Support for FIDO Standard
I'm glad to see that the tech industry seems to be re-learning that creating and adopting interoperable standards is a way to go
danijelb··on Ask HN: If you had 24 hours in the year 2050, what questions would you ask?
What language is the most useful/widely spoken globally? What career is most paid? Which stocks or other investments gained most in each decade from 20s to 50s? What is the most useful new scientific discovery? What are the current political/economic blocks? Which things/trends that existed already in 2022 or earlier are still relevant in 2050? Describe the current youth/pop culture. Describe an average day of an average person
danijelb··on Apple Pay surpasses Venmo and PayPal as teens’ favorite payment app
It's not Apple making the experience bad. It's the Americans trying to use a tech from the 90s to text each other. Of course it's not enjoyable - it's SMS. In other parts of the world people install and use modern cross-platform apps to text each other. Yes, Apple made sure to seamlessly transition iPhone to iPhone chats to use modern tech while pretending it's still SMS. But the fact is that the users in USA are intentionally opening an SMS app to text people. Everywhere else, the native Messages app is completely ignored.
danijelb··on Ferrari owner Exor wants to build the Italian Y Combinator
I don't think that the 27+ EU markets are a problem. I'm not even sure if there are 27+ different markets in the EU in the context of startups/tech, because if there were then each country would have their own isolated tech ecosystem which is not the case. Most EU countries are dominated by US tech companies.

If different cultures and languages are not a problem for US startups in spreading to Europe I fail to see why it would be a problem for EU companies

danijelb··on Ask HN: What do you think is all this? (this reality, existence, space-time, us)
If you play the loterry for an infinite amount of time, eventually you're going to guess the winning numbers. I think it's the same thing with us. Our existence is just a product of an infinite lottery on multiple levels. We probably needed an unimaginable amount of planets "brewing" in all corners of the universe for an unimaginable amount of time until a planet succeeded in making and supporting sentient life. But, the environment in which planets can form and be stable is also not given. Maybe it took billions of "generations" of universes until this one appeared. I imagine there is also something more fundamental behind the universe(s), and it probably also had to go through a ton of generations until it generated the concepts of space and time.

To sum up, I think we are nothing more than weird temporarily stable regions dependent upon other temporarily stable regions in the sea of white noise.

danijelb··on DownThemAll (2019)
Thank you so much for the extension. It was a real life saver back then
danijelb··on Facebook Renames to Meta
This is as dumb as it would be to name your internet company Net in the early 90s.

Metaverse is supposed to be a generic term for an interoperable virtual 3D world. And now the term is linked to a specific company. I guess if there will ever be a metaverse, it won't be called that.

danijelb··on Apple's Power Move to Kneecap Facebook Advertising Is Working
I think there's a possibility it would resemble similar industries like mobile services - you would subscribe to a social media service provider of your choice and you'd use their service which is interoperable with other social media service providers. They could sell different monthly plans with some amount of allowed photo/video uploads, messages, etc. To us it might sound strange now, but it would feel entirely normal to people in a world who never experienced free services powered by spying. Not sure if that would be better or worse than what we have now.
danijelb··on How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails
First one that comes to my mind is Decidim (https://github.com/decidim/decidim, https://decidim.org/)
danijelb··on The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
It's popular for some reason even in countries where it doesn't save keystrokes. For example in Croatia we have 5 characters with diacritics (š, đ, č, ć, ž), all of them have dedicated keys on the keyboard and yet many people have a habit of simply not using them.
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