maegul (he/they)

A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

  • 35 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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  • Yea this vibes.

    For me, it felt like coding was a more attractive term for people who weren’t “proper” computer science and “engineering” types who weren’t confident that they knew what “program” meant or even “algorithm”, as they were working things as they went.

    I’d guess that as computing involved more and more people with this non-standard background, coding became preferred. I certainly encountered people uncomfortable with my casual use of “algorithm” because it triggered their imposter syndrome, and my pointing out that they write algorithms with the code the write all the time certainly didn’t help.


  • Yea, I figured, and it’s a predictable trend. Just hadn’t noticed it had already become a toxic social media phenomenon.

    Relatedly, one of my anti-arguments is that we’re basically failed the rise of social media tech and so should hold off until we work out how to do tech better at a socia level. Seeing this intersection here just emphasises my feeling.

    Also thanks for the reply!














  • It’s an old conversation and it’s not you.

    I don’t have links to anything on hand, but you’re not the first and won’t be the last to wonder about this and (maybe) start criticising it.

    I also can’t give you the technical details (I’ve even forgotten a lot since I last cared about this), but basically, IIRC, it’s as you intuit … The platforms can be in the fediverse and still do kinda their own thing such that platform interop is not well guaranteed, arguably at all.

    In the end, I convinced my self it’s a core problem of federated social media and failing at it was a huge missed opportunity to have an awesome feature that the commercial platforms lacked. “Federation happened in the client” was my way of trying to capture this perspective.

    BlueSky probably doesn’t do any better but they architecture and protocol might point in the right direction.






  • Not to claim equivalence or anything, but smartphone and the internet (ironic saying so here I know).

    I’m a xennial … old enough to remember living without all this and the middle time where computers were either games or just useful tools.

    For me, and I’m pretty sure many others, I’m pretty convinced it’s better that way.

    I’d really like to get away from these things, at least just to relearn older habits.