Tell me about your Boring Technology that gets the job done and gets out of your user's way.

Tell me how you made your app or service easy to use and hard to misuse.

Tell me how you're encoding an understanding of the importance of consent into your architecture.

Tell me how you're treating your employees better than your competitors are treating theirs.

Believe it or not, there is still plenty of interesting and exciting work to talk about that doesn't involve LLMs.

Cryptographers contributing to the IETF is working to standardize FROST, a two-round threshold signature algorithm based on Schnorr proofs, which is backwards compatible with Ed25519.

This means it will soon be possible to generate Ed25519 signatures from, for example, 4-of-7 shares held by independent parties. And the verifier doesn't need to do anything different; it's just an Ed25519 signature to them.

That's cool as fuck.

There's little-to-no hype about it.

actually, what *are* threshold signatures useful for

independent codesigning?

i wish this turned into a "cool tech things that happened recently" thread so here goes my contribution

the new Sony A9 camera revision that came out last year has a global shutter CMOS sensor
which means the sensor takes the whole picture at once, and not line-by-line, so there's no more rolling shutter effect,

i've never seen that problem in my photos but it's particularly useful for video and probably low light photography and i hope more cameras will receive this

Behold, our website!!

Complete with RSS feed, not a single tracking or 3rd party or whatever cookie, all content written as Markdown and can be cloned from a git repo, minimal (and optional!) Javascript (basically just HTMX), no user-side logging (only anonymised server side analytics) and we're planning to add internal tag and fulltext searches, as well as WebMentions for likes and comments

https://nightlife.lucidragons.de

root

The softest spot to find dragons on

^Dergennest

i don't work in tech and agree

so tiring

the techbros are so out of touch

@ret I had a similar technical fight over and almost-identical use case eight years ago and it was *grueling*.

I'm always really impressed to hear stories like this where the better architecture actually wins. Good on you!

(Also I briefly had a 'does this person with for my former employer?' moment because it sounds so familiar)

tbf there’s plenty of existential dread and rage-bait to be had via ActivityPub, and to what end? (If I can’t look at advertisements, what’s all this been about?)

I suspect some refugees haven’t shaken off the tendencies from the places they migrated from.

big tech is eating itself, its desperately trying to find the next big thing, as it's been a while since they did anything new that people actually like.

And about the layoffs: Doing layoffs while running a profit should be illegal.

agreed on literally every point in this thread

wish there were obvious, attainable avenues for real change, but there is at least solidarity in the meanwhile

this all has to burn itself out eventually, i hope

and the things they're actually useful for aren't interesting to shareholders or news. Utilizing a much more advanced form of predictive text to improve voice transcription for accessibility reasons, whether for really accurate live captions (like streams) or for someone who's unable to type easily or accurately due to an impairment is awesome, but it's boring to billionaires because it helps people and not business execs. Nah, they gotta talk about how it'll "change the world" and use nebulous bullshit words.

It's garbage in and garbage out instead

The topics which particularly excite me:

1) CRDTs: Peer-to-peer collaborative editing has made huge strides in just the past decade!

2) DGGS: There's a lot of good work designing alternate trivially-processed spatial datamodels, which is hindered by people thinking lat/long are "real world".

I wonder who else can name tech which isn't getting the hype it deserves?

I work in fusion and green tech, which shouldn't be doing anything LLM related... But now we get news of how we need more power to run all of the LLMs. So I'm getting tired of people now describing my work as existing solely to feed LLMs.

I know some people in other science fields that might do some ML work for small models (places where it is appropriate to use) that also run into LLM and gen AI BS getting pulled into their fields news one way or another.

I'm reminded of the time I had to quit a job because the (US) company got bought out. The new company was a multinational tech conglomerate based out of Canada.

This (again, multinational) company implemented a policy of minimum 3 days in office/week.

My nearest office was almost two hours away, one-way.

The kicker? The team I _actually_ worked with was based in California. I'm in Wisconsin. The local satellite office had nothing to do with what my team worked on.

Make it make sense.

There must be a skull-like rock formation to use as a landmark somewhere on the path

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@monkeyspawdom Aaaaaaaa you're absolutely making my day. I need feedback so badly. The commissioner loved it but that was all the feedback I got. xD

I love that part too!!

aaahh this story was so sweet!!! 😭🥺

"Cuddling with someone you love is just more comfy!" (- Javin) - *picks up my stuffie from across the bed, and hugs it while mewling softly…*