Recent Comments

Fancy meeting you here :)

I think you're right. These 'social networking' sites are just hangouts like any other, subject to fads and people outgrowing 'em. The Hotwheels and Beanie Babies of the internet. Before Facebook and Twitter it was MySpace and before that AOL and Prodigy, and before that it was BBSs, and before that it was snailmail clubs and round-robins. No doubt cavemen had their own hangouts, equally ephemeral.

Which radio stations? I *like* industrial sequenced synth shit. :D

Thanks for releasing your code (I am curious as to why you picked GPL3). I read the install/config instructions and sounds like anyone could get it working, starting from basic knowledge. Contrast to slashcode which works fine for the user, but (per the Chronicled Adventures of Soylent) setup is definitely not for the faint of heart.

The one feature I wish for right now on Pipedot is a daily mailer, or weekly if there aren't enough stories to warrant daily. Cuz otherwise I forget Pipedot exists. :( Usually I only remember to come here when someone mentions/sigs it on SN!

I just discovered the email doohickey, that's a nice feature ... gave it a try, but so far it doesn't appear to be working. "Sent" mail vanished into the aether, and what I tried to send myself here produced this bounce:

SMTP error from remote server after RCPT command:
host mail.zenbi.net[69.164.201.49]:
550 5.1.1 [reziac@pipedot.org]: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table

Dunno if that's useful but thought I'd report it.

Just for the record, I've had a paid Slashdot sub since... 2001, I think (maybe before) and it amounts to $5 every 3 years or so.

It's the ultimate 8-bit machine: 7 MHz (*1) Z80-compatible CPU, 512K main RAM, 128K video RAM, FM synthesis (OPLL), MIDI, adjustable speed autofire on space bar. Full specs here .

(*1) The original Z80 took 4 ticks for even the most basic instructions, more unless paired with fast RAM. The R800 in the turbo R can do them in 1 tick. So it's a lot faster than what the clock speed would suggest. For an 8-bit machine, that is.

While I still have it wired up, I must admit that I only really start it when doing research for the openMSX emulator. If I want to play old games, I do it in the emulator: it is just more convenient with save states, reverse, cheats etc.

We still have a fully-functional Commodore 64, along with the color monitor, disk drive, joysticks, several game disks and cartridges ... Most of sits in storage, though, with only the Commodore 64 sitting out, proudly, with our collection of obsolete technology (Lazer Tag, Coleco Electronic Quarterback, Microvision Game System, Arcade Defender, etc.).

Platforms? To network over the Internet with people? That's about ALL there is!

What isn't surprising is that these things are dying, it's that they ever got so damn popular to begin with. Facebook offers nothing that hasn't been around in free and open forms for years without locking you into a single company's walled garden. A list of features and corresponding preexisting services:

Messaging ->E-mail
Newsfeed/Wall ->Blog
Photos ->Webserver/FTP/various server applications for gallery generation
Groups ->Web fora, usenet...
Chat ->IRC, XMPP, and other often more closed forms.
Event Planning ->shared calendars (though I'll admit, Facebook did at least implement this in a more easily accessible way than most, at least when they first rolled it out).

Most of what Facebook has to offer is a UI slapped over a bunch of preexisting utilities, and the cost is that they get all of your data, and that as long as you're relying on their services you can't simultaneously easily network with people who aren't without using redundant services to talk to people on different platforms. Well, for one, some people (and I've no delusions that it's "most") are just simply getting fed up with their data being slurped up and used to sell ads to target at them, or worse, funneled to law enforcement/employers. For another, the simple fact that there are people you may want to network with that aren't on Facebook means you'll need to engage in some of these alternatives for the various services Facebook offers. THAT seems to be a big weak point for these closed private platforms, because it's what trains people who either never learned to use the alternatives before getting on Facebook, or who forgot about them in the frenzy to jump on the next big thing. When you realize you can have everything Facebook offers without giving anything up for it at all, and often getting what amounts to more freedom to craft your own UI to streamline it all if you choose to, it kind of makes you wonder why you would do otherwise.

For the matter of G+ specifically, I think it mostly just has a lot more competition in the form of Facebook than Facebook had in the form of Myspace, and that G+ doesn't really offer enough that significantly distinguishes it. Myspace, if we can all remember back, was an absolute mess of a site, and half the time when you came upon a person's profile, music would immediately start playing, there'd be flash elements strewn about, and often broken scripting due largely to just how much Myspace allowed users to customize their profiles. And beyond even the user-created mess, the site itself just never had a very friendly UI, and the privacy settings were all but not there at all. Facebook's arrival to your average Myspace user of the day was like the coming of the Messiah with how many fixes it made and features it brought, even if it was just yet another corporate walled garden. And also, if we can remember back to 2004, when Facebook hit the scene, it had no ads, it was only for college students, and only people at your school could see your profile at all unless you specifically messaged with them (or at least exchanged pokes). They gradually added the more and more insidious aspects of the site, and relied on the growing ubiquity of the site to keep people from bucking them off, and for the most part, it's been a winning strategy, though it almost certainly is unsustainable in the long run. Google+ has none of this to offer, and unlike the other alternatives for talking to people not on your social network of choice (email, irc, xmpp, etc), it's only useful for networking with people on Google+, meaning that you'll end up having your Facebook to network with most people, your G+ to network with people who somehow thing Google is great but Facebook is the devil, and STILL having to maintain an email account at the very least for those that don't use social networking. That's a lot of timeshare to expect from the average user, and it's just not going to happen. Google+ will continue to be used by nobody but Ingress players until they shutter it, and expecting otherwise by this point would be silly.

Tracking cookies are SO SO SO the least of the issues facing the plurality of home Windows PCs.

I would have been much more impressed if they took ClamAV and made it at least as good as the garbage from Symantec and McAfee. Right now it's still actually worse (particularly on Windows).

I haven't read the articles (of course) but so far this sounds like PR more than an actual valuable piece of software (because it's only going to be used by people who already know how to use Adblock, flush cookies, and maybe even subscribe to an additional block list in Adblock).

This is why every device I own has its own gmail and g+ account. Way I figure it is that if I am forced to have a google account just for the ability to download an apk from google then it does not need to be linked to my ages old gmail. I hope they like meeting my phone, tablet, media box...

The requirement for a g+ account to vote in google play has killed the rating system. Looks like they now cull negative comments so people post 5 ratings dripping with sarcasm. See Samsung Push. A system broken and twisted.

You'd like TrackMeNot .

It's crazy - like, "let's create an app that helps people get raped and killed."

Anything that enables face-to-face social interaction could be described as "help[ing] people get raped and killed." It's kind of silly to see that as the most important thing about the app.

The new generation doesn't care about real names. Hear about that new app - currently the hottest craze on earth - where you get to a new city on some business trip and it helps link you up with people of the age and profile you choose? It's crazy - like, "let's create an app that helps people get raped and killed." The new generation doesn't care. They will when the shit hits the fan.

It looks written from scratch. There don't seem to be any crappy old boondoggles cluttering it up and useless "feature" slowing it down.

Yet again, many thanks Bryan!

awesome indeed! I hope we can get rid of the horrible slashcode over at Soylent now :P

I too find myself less and less on Soylent. The *no javascript* at all cost just sucks and makes everything very annoying. The color scheme makes my eyes bleed and the 10 mod points for a couple of hours you'll get maybe every two weeks is just ridiculous.

Just thinking out loud here, brainstorming, really:

Paid subscribers get to see more than the first 20 comments? I'm not sure IMAP email (I've already got one) is a huge benefit. Or like the Android app model: paid subscribers see no ad banners. Not sure if it would everywhere, but at b3ta.com paid members get a little icon next to their names, which becomes a bit of a status symbol over time. I think they also offer different icons per year, so if you wanted the polar bear you had to be a member in '06 or something like that. Or the icon reflects number of years as a paid member? Maybe the email notification of responses to your post is a paid feature or something? By the way, $12/yr is a decent price point.

Wordpress , Drupal , MediaWiki , Joomla , PhpBB , MODX , and PHP-Nuke all chose vanilla GPL. MyBB is LGPL.

Hi Bryan, great job!

I see that you have chosen the GPLv3. I very much suggest to switch to AGPLv3, as this specifically protects code contributions for web apps.

Added anonymous viewing of bugs.

Zomg, was this a bug in the bug tracker? Maybe I need another bug tracker to track bugs in the first bug tracker. I guess the GitHub page has an "issue" section too. Soylent is simply using the GitHub version.

Hi Bryan,

Do you have a long-term goal in mind for this project? Are we a test bed for the source code you are developing? Are you going to reach a "stable" code at some point and focus more on stories and promoting the site? Either way, great job so far.

Not just the privacy aspects, but when everywhere is begging for likes so they can spam you on social networks, the appeal dies. I think there is a market for a social network that doesn't allow businesses to participate.

Captcha added to the submit page.

Likely an optional subscription (around a dollar per month or so.)

As a reward, subscribers would get certain "heavy" features activated like an IMAP email account and extra storage for the blog.

Captcha added to submit page. Damn spammers.

Democracy tends to work only when a solid baseline has been established. I wouldn't expect a bunch of settlers to a new continent to function entirely by democracy, at least not very well. There's also the matter that a lot of this baseline stuff is, in the end, not important for the majority of users, and that their input is not needed.

Why are people not contributing to the vote on soylent? It's pointlessly difficult, for one, but I also think it's just because people don't care about the name. It works and they remember it, what's the problem? It was chosen early on by a benevolent dictator and people accepted it. Why change it? It's not like many of us would know something about marketing anyway.

Apparently, someone had a patch over there to get collapsible comments before the whole ownership saga. Where are they now? There's no way in hell they'll accept pipecode within the next millenium.

It looks as though someone has submitted a bug report on this. For future reference, bugs can be submitted here (login required).

You have touched on two of my pet peeves as well: (1) when the messenger is more important than the message, and (2) when arrogance breeds the offering of opinions without appropriate pause for reflection. However, these seem so eminently human traits, they seem hard to criticize in an absolute sense. My latest approach to these things is just to ignore the bias implicit in listening to others based on perceived eminence and concentrate on their content or message. I suppose in the present context that means trying to say something sensible about the future of artificial intelligence or our fear of losing control over the AI we create... mmm...

I guess I would say we need to consider what purposes intelligences, whether natural or artifical, serve because -- presumably -- intelligence will evolve to support these purposes. And, there isn't enough conversation in society at all levels about the reasons for our moral (or purposeful) choices. Thus, I suppose I could be almost as afraid of the very rich and powerful making decisions which adversely affect my personhood as I am of any future artifical intelligence. Maybe this could change if we could demonstrate how choices for shared good outperform choices for personal good? Maybe an AI superior to our own natural intelligence could help us discover this?

Hopefully, someone with access to the site source will perform a mass deletion of those already submitted, as removing them individually is beginning to give me an rsi. Also, my latte is getting cold.

Oh, you're probably right--I make pronouncements about all kinds of things all the time, and if I had the kind of platform Hawking does I'm sure my dumber statements would be blown up to cringe-inducing proportions. OTOH, a lot of people will give such statements by Hawking, or any eminent scientist, far more credit than they deserve, and that's a problem. And it does seem that physicists are particularly prone to this kind of thing, although scientists in other fields certainly aren't immune.

I'm sure it's just the inevitable saturation and loss of novelty, but I'd also like to think that a big part of it is that Facebook and Google+ both demand real user names, and people have slowly realized that they don't quite LIKE doing all their private communication in public, under their own name.

It's really distressing just how LITTLE complaining one sees about the "real name" policies, which strip the Internet of many of its key values, including "talking with strangers".

Ditto. I really hate the way Soylent looks at the moment, with such bad screen density and utility that it takes way too long to read any discussion. (And the brown doesn't help either.)

Hey did Bryan write pipecode completely from scratch? That seems extreme, but it works very well.

Thank you!

Bottom of the page, "Bugs", right next to FAQ and the RSS feed. But you have to sign up (again, separate systems) to the bug tracker to submit or even view the bugs...

for my edification, how do you submit a bug report here?

I've heard this meme a lot and, for better or worse, I've often liked it. There is something refreshing about viewing the genius in our society as normal in other respects.

On the other hand, it takes amazing skill, luck, or fortune to become someone whose voice has a platform in society, its hard to judge someone for using the platform once they've reached this status. I figure we are all pretty opinionated about lots of topics in our own circles of influence?

Yes, I just submitted a bug report about that. The stories submission is totally unprotected so auto-posting anything will work. He should at least enable the (nicely clever) captcha system already working on the "sign up" page.

Then again, I think one of the reason's why I like Slashdot, Pipedot, etc. is to talk with interesting strangers over the internet.

My personal discomfort with social networking stems from the fact that there appears to be a great agenda to monetize my participation and, as part of that, to link my participation to all sorts of other things thus making me look over my shoulder about how comments in one setting might be used against me in another. I think there is a great market for the exchange of ideas on the internet whether through community forums or online courses or whatever, but I would like the mandate and reach of such community's to remain narrow.

I went to check out the stories in the pipe and came across a long list of gibberish stories with apparent links to items like "viagra pills" and whatnot?

Thanks for sharing your hard work Bryan. Does pipedot have a strategy for paying for hosting pipedot.org when it gets more popular?

Awesome Job Bryan. It's always great when people give back to the community.

Not likely, although frankly Pipedot code + Soylent numbers/community would be a win/win. The more I look at that old Slash code, the more my nostalgia for it fades and the more I'm annoyed by its antiquated interface.

But I doubt you'll convince them to change much of anything. Look how hard it has been to even discuss/vote on a name change? They seem to be burdened by, rather than benefiting from, the community spirit that drives the site - Democratic processes are fun but sometimes a benevolent dictator gets things done faster. Ever see that t-shirt of a pyramid, with the slogan 'slavery gets shit done'? That's a bit extreme - I'm not defending slavery - but it's easy to see kumbaya democracy undermining the ability of a community to be effective.

Who's to say? I concur that G+ isn't all that it was cracked up to be, and some of their decisions - like making any potential Youtube commenter a G+ member and then lauding the 'huge growth in users' - have been circumspect. As the Forbes article points out, the G+ thing was run by an ex-Microsofter who probably came pre-installed with that kind of crappy business tactic in his genetic code.

That said, all the pissing on current platforms might just reflect falling page-views in major media and the need to post/publish inflammatory articles that drive page views.

Anyway, given there doesn't seem to be - in my opinion - any alternative platforms out there, I don't see anyplace for people to 'go to.' Unless we've just grown tired of talking with strangers over the Internet. Not impossible.

i wonder if we can convince the powers that be over @ soylent to have a look at the possibility of maybe using pipecode... they might even be able to use apache2 :-P

can it be given a "parent" link, and the option to see its whole subtree?

Ya, I've been meaning to add that.

That Forbes article flows like honey compared to BBC News online article. By policy, every single sentence is a separate paragraph. This shows a disgusting disregard for all the principles of good writing that I was taught back when the UK had an education system that actually taught you something, and shows either the same disregard for the readers or is simply patronising to them.

Anyway, back on topic, I think a lot of it is simply fashion. Is there any reason to think that facebook or twitter will follow a different-shaped popularity curve from myspace's from last decade? I can't pretend to be an expert in any of the individual social media platforms, as I've never been a member of any of them, never seeing them as just stupid flashes in the pan pandering to people who weren't using the internet back in the 1980, and the web in the early 90s, say, and who want strokes from as many different directions as possible. And like other fashions, when you see your kid brother wearing the same types of clothes as you, and listening to the same music, you cringe and find anything exclusive and new to differentiate yourself from the likes of him. So your next hang-out was a pub, rather than the multi-story carpark. The bottom line is that both actually smell of piss, but you're briefly happy while you're there with like-minded individuals. Of course, as seen in platforms closer to home, it's just as easy to get fed up of the platform by it changing under your feet. I stopped listening to some metal radio stations when all they played was industrial sequenced synth shit^W^W^Wmetal. There's little reason to think that the users have any more loyalty to the platforms than the platforms have respect for the users. So in some ways, it's a non-story, as it's so predictable.

(Bryan: feature request - when looking at an prior post linked to from the mail messages, can it be given a "parent" link, and the option to see its whole subtree?)

(And fuck beta!)

Was I about to post a comment here?

There might be some good information buried in that Forbes article, but reading it is like trying to read someone Tweeting a novel.

Isn't there a Somebody-or-other's Law that says that all eminent physicists will eventually embarrass themselves and everyone else by making silly pronouncements about things wildly outside their area of expertise? Sadly, Hawking seems to have reached that point in his career.

In addition to the above those involved seem fixated on viewing their work as hyper-deterministic "machines" instead of beings .

Yes, since any advanced AI must be a self-learning system, only a limited control can be had over its evolution.

We can't.

It's that simple and it ought to be obvious: by definition we are unable to predict the result of any general intelligence that is significantly improved over our own. It's not as we're any particularly good at predicting ourselves either or far "simpler" things like Langton's Ant but we're extremely good at pretending we can "predict" outcomes after we've done the same thing over and over again (which of course has nothing at all to do with any real prediction).

99.999999% of humanity has no clue as to the severe limits of determinism in complex uninhibited systems i.e. the real world. Maybe at most a few will cry out "but science!" without realizing that most hard science as it applies outside of laboratory environments is based on generalized empiricism rather than an imagined (because no such thing exists) form of hypothetical deterministic super-accounting.

Anyway back to the "we can't" answer: it is not an "acceptable" answer, in particular it is completely unacceptable to anyone with an interest in hard AI be it academic, financial, megalomanic, tangential, or anything else. Thus denial.

As for "weak AI" the same might apply but because (as with humans) any upsets would rely on unintended emergent properties and/or chaotic or orderly confluences it becomes a far harder argument that easily obfuscates and occults; and this makes it superb for derailing any and all discussions about hard AI so that one can even easily pretend one isn't in denial!

In addition to the above those involved seem fixated on viewing their work as hyper-deterministic "machines" instead of beings . To me that sounds like an incredibly efficient one-step recipe for disaster (both for humans and the AI).

I've been offered one but have instead decided to have it donated to an orphanage. Poor orphan kids with crappy bandwidth and not enough flash storage. It's a pity, really.

Hey, Dice/Slashdot never offered me anything except a kick in the head and a steadily declining interface. Actually, they didn't even offer - load the page and their craptastic GUI just boots you in the face.

I am suffering something similar - it's a zen state of mind you need, and you can still get it, but it's getting harder. I'm a writer, not a programmer, and the challenge is the same. Tough to get into the zone with so many gadgets, widgets, and things on my desktop flashing for my attention. I do my best writing with the Internet connection turned off, and my best thinking when I'm walking the dogs. Studies show you're sharpest at this kind of stuff early in the day; if you're programming late at night it gets much harder, fast. Try getting up before dawn, drinking a cup of coffee, and setting down to your programming with a rested mind and the network connection turned off. It's a formula that's worked wonders for me.