gatesvp

gatesvp , 2 hours ago

@pojntfx I kind of see both sides of this.

My engineering friends all immediately recognize the incredible security threat vector this provides. They also know what's available and how to do some of this stuff themselves. Just run n8n with the appropriate plugins. For them this is a bad trade-off.

But if you don't have that background, this whole thing can seem like absolute magic. You finally have this tool that just listens to your instructions and (mostly) does the thing. That's unimaginable power that was previously gate kept by those expensive software engineers. That's incredibly addictive!

I think the end result is going to be somewhere in between. I think the promise of a true personal assistant, of a tool working for you, is so fundamentally important. People will struggle to sort out security issues, but they will want this enough to make it happen. It may not be OpenClaw, but it will be something.

gatesvp , 2 months ago

@pojntfx @atomicpoet

I think we're moving into a larger stable state with respect to how software is planned and built and deployed. I like to think of this relative to how we deploy water resources or electricity. There are different levels of expertise at different levels of the stack.

You don't need to be a plumber to change your shower head or upgrade your sink faucet. But if you're going to move pipes, we want to be certified. And you're going to sign off in a house, we want you to be more certified. A whole building? Even more certified.

Want to design the water system for a whole neighborhood? You will need a professional engineering degree. Water system for a large city? We're going to need multiple engineers with PHDs.

The software world lacks both the certifications and this stratification of responsibilities. We're seeing a lot of people at different strata interacting, even though they lack any overlapping responsibilities. It causes a lot of friction and people talking past each other...

gatesvp , 3 months ago

@Lemmus @futurebird @ngaylinn

GenAi LLMs are great generators of BS text. As noted, they're factually incorrect, requiring a lot of editing (with actual data) to make them correct.

But it's notable that people who use them are pleased with the fact that they don't have to write the BS portions of the text.

Why write BS? Because it's part of the ritual of communication. A cover letter "has to have" this specific structure, it can't just be bullet points that match employer requirements, it must be this awkwardly paragraphed reply that 80% of people won't even read.

This generation of communications is quickly revealing the amount of BS inherent in so much of our comms output. But BS isn't data, it's just glue.

And as we shuffle through this next era of comms, I expect that we're going to have a collective rethink on how we share information. Because GenAI is making it obvious that we're failing here.

gatesvp , 4 months ago

@jonny I'm seeing notes here for the technical challenge of performing a migration of objects between two willing hosts given a user in good standing with sufficient credentials. I think it's great that you have written that down.

But I think the reason we don't have this yet is because that's only 20% of the problem. The other 80% of the challenge is contained in that first sentence of mine.

• How do we signal this intention to migrate to both hosts?
• How do we validate that both hosts are willing?
• How do the hosts validate credentials and good standing of both the migrating user and each other?
• What obligations does each party have to propagate and maintain this effective URL redirect?
• What controls does each party have in order to manage this transition process?
• How do we manage moderation of the incoming content?
• How will this impact current user agreements on most instances?

Any specification here needs to address admins and moderators as key players.

gatesvp , 4 months ago

@jonny

All these questions are addressed in the FEP except moderation

You and I seem to be reading different docs here.

I'm looking at FEP-73cd which looks like the best summary of the various complex cases and it still has several Required use cases that don't have an FEP specification. (table at the bottom)

I'm looking at FEP-1580 and it seems to be operating under the base assumption that "everyone is OK with this". It doesn't use the word "admin" or "administrator" even once. It never addresses "mod" or "moderator" as one of the players in this process.

The words "agreement" or "contract" appear zero times in the specification.

I'm talking with masto devs about what would be good there

That's a reasonable step, but again, I don't think that's the key problem. None of this matters without Masto Admins and Masto Mods also on board.

Every failure case in these specs falls on Admins and Mods to resolve, shouldn't they be first consulted?

gatesvp , 4 months ago

@jonny

This FEP is written to minimize the responsibility of the source instance,

You have this line right there in the spec, and I just don't understand this assumption.

By minimizing the responsibility of the Source instance, you're dumping all of the work on the Target and 3rd Party instances. But they're not the primary actors here.

The key parts of this chain are the Actor and the Source. They trust each other.

• They have an established User Agreement in place
• The Source has an established history of Actor behaviour
• The Actor has a high enough trust in the Source that they have published enough that it justifies migration

When Actor signs up for an account with Target, that new Target User Agreement doesn't assume that Actor is going to bring 200k old posts with them.

If I'm Target, I don't even want this. My default answer here is "no, you cannot do this without talking to me first". We don't have that relationship yet.

This frankly sounds like a giant spam vector.

gatesvp , 4 months ago

@jonny

Inherent in your specification is the assumption that Target's default stance is simply to accept all incoming transfer requests as legitimate.

This is a very Actor-centric view: "It's my content, I can bring it wherever I want, this should be as seamless as possible". But that's an oversimplification of the Publisher (Source) / Actor relationship that's actually in place.

And I don't think that's a fair assumption on behalf of Target. In fact, I don't even think it's a safe assumption for the network as a whole, because it's a giant spam vector. None of this is should be automatic, Target needs an active sign-off on content transfers.

I think this is relevant, because an active sign-off from both Source and Target actually changes parts of these specifications. They don't have to drip transfer, they can coordinate bulk operations, they can negotiate size limits, etc.

gatesvp , 4 months ago

@jonny

The entire move process already requires an active sign-off from the source and target actors,

But I'm not talking about the Source and Target Actors, I'm talking about the Source and Target Administrators. That's a different human.

Again, I just read all of these specs for the first time this morning, it's very possible I missed something here. You seem pretty confident that you have addressed Administrator concerns. And I'm happy to retract all of my comments and provide different and more useful feedback if you can even just clip a portion of the text that I missed with respect to the Administrators and help me get up to speed.

gatesvp , 4 months ago

Look Mike, @FenTiger , I understand your sarcasm here. We are talking about public feedback on a public specification that affects multiple stakeholders.

This back and forth thread is making it clear that at least two of the stakeholders, Admins and Moderators, have not been consulted into this specification. While this doesn't seem like a "mortal offense", it does seem like a pretty significant roadblock.

If Admins don't agree to the spec, they're not going to roll it out on their servers. If they don't want this feature, nothing else matters.

So @jonny , I really appreciate you writing all this down. It is a lot of work and it is very useful for future devs to make something like this happen.

All of my feedback boils down to a simple thing.

Some portion of this spec needs to be drafted and signed by a few Admins from a couple of the larger fediverse instances. If they're not on board, this will never happen. If they are on board, their requirements are going to dictate many aspects of this spec.//

gatesvp , 4 months ago

@molly0xfff I know this is just one article and one example, but this is the energy we need consistently with the administration. Questions, not just reporting.

gatesvp , 4 months ago

@donaldball @patrickleavy @pluralistic

Rather than "maladaptive capitalism", I think solar is a great example of how complex it is to get the right balance between public goods and private markets.

"Imagine if these AI investments had instead been put into solar"... People tried to do this. Power companies could not and still can't build the required infrastructure fast enough. And before we blame that on capitalism, the not-for-profit Canadian Crown corporations that run power in several provinces also haven't been able to do this.

The US Interconnection Queue is twice its installed capacity. Billions of dollars have been put into power plants that are just sitting there waiting for local power companies to connect them. But nobody's going to put another $100 billion into building capacity while you're still waiting for the first hundred billion to come online.

Scratching the surface here, but the lack of solar has little to do with capitalism.

gatesvp , 5 months ago

@lizzard ActuallyAutistic group

So this is tough.

At one level, some people are wired to take all feedback as negative and they need coaching and re-wiring on this front. Couching things in "this not criticism" language can be useful here.

But there's another level here, which are the agreements around shared space and shared things. Where to put things? That's an agreement you both have to make. "The garbages go out the night before" or "we order new dish soap when we open the backup container, not when we finish them".

These are agreements you both have to make. But those are pretty rational and easy to understand.

That shower hose thing?... That very much feels like micro-managing other people's space. It's a shower hose, they mostly hang one way. If simply using the shower is going to damage it in some way, at some point you need to take that off the other person and just fix the shower so it doesn't do that any more.

This is where the autistic experience is different... /1

gatesvp , 5 months ago

@lizzard ActuallyAutistic group

Many autistic people like things "just so".

The keys must be hung in this order, the bathroom supplies must be ordered largest to smallest, the bathroom taps must be left in the center position, the kitchen lights must be kept at 75% except for light number 3 which has to be at full but can only be turned on while I am cooking because otherwise it's too bright in here...

And I get it... I enjoy things "just so".

But this can quickly spiral into 100 micro-rules about the use of every space. Rules that can, at best, be complied with, not necessarily agreed upon.

That can lead to hurt feelings. It can lead to people feeling like they don't even belong in their shared spaces.

At some point I had to move to making the defaults into things I could live with. And I had to negotiate rules for spaces I shared. //

gatesvp , 9 months ago

@ReggieHere @504DR @gerrymcgovern

"No one has the power to change anything".

I think this kind of mischaracterizes what's happening. Changing requires sacrifices that a lot of people in power are unwilling to make.

Ask people if they would spend another 5% on income taxes in order to support a green transportation revolution and they'll yell you off the stage. Tell them you want to tax carbon emissions instead of the 5%... They'll take out billboards demonizing you. They'll start convoys. /1

gatesvp , 9 months ago

@ReggieHere @504DR @gerrymcgovern

Mandate a rule that urban area houses have 10 years to transition from natural gas and boomers will literally picket your house. Not that the grid could support you today anyways.

Underpinning all of this lack of movement is the fact that whenever it comes time to actually pay for the changes we need, people are unwilling to do so.

We have mass complainers, but we don't have people offering up sacrifices in order to effect change. And we need that first. //

gatesvp , 9 months ago

@ReggieHere @504DR @gerrymcgovern

I live in Canada. We rolled out a perfectly sensible carbon emissions tax. It actually forced businesses to pay more taxes at incredibly limited cost to consumers. Heck, green consumers often got a rebate.

We had literal convoys of people in the nation's capital yelling "Axe the tax" and blocking traffic for days.

The party that backed this just got 40%+ of the vote here in last month's election.

That "majority of ordinary people" is incredibly slim.

gatesvp , 9 months ago

@ReggieHere @504DR @gerrymcgovern

There was clearly some form of influence pedaling that helped drive the convoy crowd. But even the current prime minister cut the tax before the election.

Up to the convoy era, I could blame some form of misinformation for bad behavior. But after that, every Canadian News Channel had a clear summary of what the tax actually was and how it worked.

Every Canadian who cared to know how it worked was one search away from learning that truth... /1

gatesvp , 9 months ago

@ReggieHere @504DR @gerrymcgovern

But the truth about the tax wasn't the problem.

The problem is Canada's geographic and demographic distribution. A third of Canadians live outside of metro areas (100k or more people). Those people depend on carbon-based fuel to power their cars, do their jobs and heat their homes.

They don't have public transport options. They can't reliably convert to electric vehicles.

Their livelihood is deeply rooted in burning carbon fuels. ... /2

gatesvp , 9 months ago

@ReggieHere @504DR @gerrymcgovern

And I don't blame them. Modern electric trucks are not really designed to handle 400 km drives in -30° weather while towing cargo. The electrical grid is not always consistent enough to provide heat in the most rural of areas.

So to many people, this consumer carbon tax is effectively tax on their way of life. It doesn't really matter that it's a fair tax. It matters that it forces them to change significant portions of their lives or be punished by taxes../3

gatesvp , 9 months ago

@Uair ActuallyAutistic group @actuallyaudhd

This is why a disproportionate number of ADHD people are in small businesses and entrepreneurship. I have a sibling who has always had two or three jobs. Over the last two decades one of those was always a small business they ran.

I know that "entrepreneur" doesn't sound like "seizure on the highway", but new businesses are always filled with novel chaos management. There is always some crisis and unexpected failure.

gatesvp , 9 months ago

@Uair ActuallyAutistic group @actuallyaudhd

And if you're successful, and the business gets boring, then you just sell it and start a new one. If you have a boring and profitable business, tons of people will take that off your hands.

Then you start something new.

"Serial entrepreneur" is a real thing. They get bored of running a business, so they build a new business.