weblog.masukomi.org

Intro Thoughts

I’ve been mostly avoiding GraphQL and watching from the sidelines. I’d been forming an opinion but wanted to actually understand it a bit better before really deciding.

A friend asked what was notable about Pathfinder 2nd Edition in comparison to D&D 5th Edition.

Overview

It’s important for all knowledge workers to have a Personal Knowledge Management System (PKM). That doesn’t mean you need a fancy tool, or a complex process. Sometimes, the “stupid simple” solution is the best one.

To that end, I wanted to talk through my wife’s system. It’s an important example because her choice to specifically not use any of the fancy purpose built tools has resulted in a better solution for her needs.

“Personal Knowledge Management” (PKM) feels like a lot of “bullshit” to many people. In this, I will speak to the idea that PKM isn’t bullshit. It’s just that other people’s ways of managing knowledge, just aren’t designed for your brain. They may sound like bullshit, but if it’s working for it’s creator, it’s totally valid.

Overview

A group calling itself “Mask Group” has purchased three of the largest mastodon instances.

Mastodon users, especially people on those servers, should be very concerned.

Why?

There are some things you need to consider about mastodon to understand why this is very concerning.

1. Large Mastodon instances are expensive to run.
2. Mastodon is not a good platform for large advertisers for a number of reasons.

This means that by buying a large mastodon instance you are signing up for a very large ongoing cost in a system whose current state is adverse to profit generation for the owners. If we assume the purchasers are not complete idiots there are 2 solutions to this problem.

Overview

“Hey!” started as an Interruption Tracker, and now supports Time Tracking too. It has been through 3 iterations: Chicken Scheme, Crystal, and now Raku. This post is a high-level developer’s diary of what I wrote, why I rewrote it, and what I learned along the way.

Quick Summary

I used Midjourney to generate art that I threw on t-shirts, coasters, and almost everything else RedBubble offers. Then I used OpenAI to generate copy for it, and combined that with a handful of custom scripts to generate a product site called Bed Bath & The Beyond.

Musk has given the remaining employees an ultimatum: come back to the office, sign up for 'hardcore' work, or take 3 months severance and get out.

Acknowledging that there are some people who can't really say "no" because of visa issues, or other complicated home situations….

Aside from them, who would say "Yes! Sign me up for 'hardcore' working hours…

Armin Ronacher wrote that Scaling Mastodon is Impossible

I'd like to offer a rebuttal. As someone who's been doing professional web development since 1995, with most of that time being spent in Rails jobs, or doing Rails work on the sidelines, I think i have a pretty good perspective on the situation. For those who don't know, Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails.

Decentralization promotes an utopian view of the world that I belief fails to address actual real problems in practice.