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Just for context - i have no online presence outside of hackernews. I long for a social sounding board where people can have tech discussions with high availab

Just for context - i have no online presence outside of hackernews. I long for a social sounding board where people can have tech discussions with high availability across borders and with 0 politics Where people don’t promote themselves and do it for the popularity, but for the true essence of discussion

eternityforest 2y ago
I get the impression everyone working on any tech I care about, is not spending time on any board. Most tech discussions seem to be very smart people, exploring elegant ideas I don't have any background in, doing ASM and Forth and compilers and reading Knuth and general hacker type stuff, which is very different from what a lot of working devs talk and think about. Like, it's really cool, but I'm not a mathematician, there's only so much time I want to spend engaging with anything to do with self hosted apps or deep dives on an instruction set. Even in the FOSS scene the interesting stuff seems to be cathedral model. People just do stuff and it suddenly shows up on GitHub with no discussion outside the group prior to that. Tech discussions feel like somewhere of a circle you know what, and it's easy to feel like an outsider if you're not a hacker or mathematician(In the three tribes essay sense).
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  three tribes essay?
  - eternityforest 2y ago
    https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/ https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      Thanks! That {hacker,informatiker,maker} prism explains why LLMs leave me so meh: they're wonderful for makers, may be exploitable by hackers who wish to autogen all the boilerplate around their hand-crafted machine-sympathetic kernels, but huge slushy piles of artisanally-stirred linear algebra are pretty much the opposite of an informatician's quest for elegance.
      - eternityforest 2y ago
        It's probably the biggest influence on my understanding of what computers are to other people. For a maker, LLMs are the biggest thing in coding since type hints getting popular. They completely change how I code now that my typing speed is effectively unlimited and I'm never tempted to choose less best practicesy code to save a half hour of typing. Most of the people I work with are hackers or mathematicians/code philosophers, and it seems like to a lot of them the whole industry is stagnant, they want new ideas, not cleaner repackagings.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  I kinda feel the same. Those guys and gals are too smart for me. Maybe ordinary people should just ignore them and focus on improving themselves instead of chasing the next interesting topic.
big-green-man 2y ago
You're not going to find this in places. Youre going to find it in people. And even then, people promote themselves and politics is inescapable, but you can lower the amount of it you have to tolerate. I go to places that just have people there, not a board where a topic is the goal, but a network where interacting with people is the goal. Mastodon was good but isn't that great anymore because of constant political flame wars. Nostr is cool, a bit heavy on the bitcoin side of things but there's a lot of interesting technical discussion. Just anywhere that there are people, that the network or platform isn't topic specific, and that your experience isn't dominated by an algorithm. That way, you can curate the people you interact with based on your criteria. Personally it's Nostr for me, and I dabble on here because there are always a couple of interesting things to read about. I'm going to reiterate, try nostr out. I have a rule, if I can't read everything all my follows have said in the last 24 hours within 30 minutes I'm following too many people. That way I can keep up, but if I want to dive deeper in conversation I can. Also it keeps a bar of quality for you to curate. I avoid people with tons of follows and followers. A couple hundred follows is about the limit, a thousand followers is also. Those people just can't see everything they follow, they are there for status and their follower count is their golden bull. I avoid anyone that is constantly posting partisan political stuff, even if I agree with them. Every so often, hey what can you expect, people have ideas and express themselves, but people who are constantly Trump this Ukraine that are "problematic" and so I avoid interaction. Memelords... Everyone loves a good meme. Some people live for the memes, and it can be amusing for a while but if your feed/circle is nothing but memes it's just noise and not really engaging at all. Laughter is fun, chucklefucks are annoying after a while. Anyone that it feels to me like they're promoting I avoid. Selfies, shilling their company, drive by PRs to pad their CV for recruiters, web devs. It's great to talk about something youre building, or sharing a photo of a place you went, being proud of what you do, but there's a genuine quality that's hard to articulate that separates people just sharing their lives from self promoters. I stick to those rules and beyond that will engage with anyone. If you stay at it you'll find people to talk to, build a circle to discuss interesting things, even form friendships, though they'll never replace IRL loved ones. Some might even inspire you to build something cool, or you might even inspire them to do the same.

eternityforest 2y ago

I get the impression everyone working on any tech I care about, is not spending time on any board. Most tech discussions seem to be very smart people, exploring elegant ideas I don't have any background in, doing ASM and Forth and compilers and reading Knuth and general hacker type stuff, which is very different from what a lot of working devs talk and think about. Like, it's really cool, but I'm not a mathematician, there's only so much time I want to spend engaging with anything to do with self hosted apps or deep dives on an instruction set. Even in the FOSS scene the interesting stuff seems to be cathedral model. People just do stuff and it suddenly shows up on GitHub with no discussion outside the group prior to that. Tech discussions feel like somewhere of a circle you know what, and it's easy to feel like an outsider if you're not a hacker or mathematician(In the three tribes essay sense).

082349872349872 2y ago
three tribes essay?
- eternityforest 2y ago
  https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/ https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Thanks! That {hacker,informatiker,maker} prism explains why LLMs leave me so meh: they're wonderful for makers, may be exploitable by hackers who wish to autogen all the boilerplate around their hand-crafted machine-sympathetic kernels, but huge slushy piles of artisanally-stirred linear algebra are pretty much the opposite of an informatician's quest for elegance.
    - eternityforest 2y ago
      It's probably the biggest influence on my understanding of what computers are to other people. For a maker, LLMs are the biggest thing in coding since type hints getting popular. They completely change how I code now that my typing speed is effectively unlimited and I'm never tempted to choose less best practicesy code to save a half hour of typing. Most of the people I work with are hackers or mathematicians/code philosophers, and it seems like to a lot of them the whole industry is stagnant, they want new ideas, not cleaner repackagings.
markus_zhang 2y ago
I kinda feel the same. Those guys and gals are too smart for me. Maybe ordinary people should just ignore them and focus on improving themselves instead of chasing the next interesting topic.

big-green-man 2y ago

You're not going to find this in places. Youre going to find it in people. And even then, people promote themselves and politics is inescapable, but you can lower the amount of it you have to tolerate. I go to places that just have people there, not a board where a topic is the goal, but a network where interacting with people is the goal. Mastodon was good but isn't that great anymore because of constant political flame wars. Nostr is cool, a bit heavy on the bitcoin side of things but there's a lot of interesting technical discussion. Just anywhere that there are people, that the network or platform isn't topic specific, and that your experience isn't dominated by an algorithm. That way, you can curate the people you interact with based on your criteria. Personally it's Nostr for me, and I dabble on here because there are always a couple of interesting things to read about. I'm going to reiterate, try nostr out. I have a rule, if I can't read everything all my follows have said in the last 24 hours within 30 minutes I'm following too many people. That way I can keep up, but if I want to dive deeper in conversation I can. Also it keeps a bar of quality for you to curate. I avoid people with tons of follows and followers. A couple hundred follows is about the limit, a thousand followers is also. Those people just can't see everything they follow, they are there for status and their follower count is their golden bull. I avoid anyone that is constantly posting partisan political stuff, even if I agree with them. Every so often, hey what can you expect, people have ideas and express themselves, but people who are constantly Trump this Ukraine that are "problematic" and so I avoid interaction. Memelords... Everyone loves a good meme. Some people live for the memes, and it can be amusing for a while but if your feed/circle is nothing but memes it's just noise and not really engaging at all. Laughter is fun, chucklefucks are annoying after a while. Anyone that it feels to me like they're promoting I avoid. Selfies, shilling their company, drive by PRs to pad their CV for recruiters, web devs. It's great to talk about something youre building, or sharing a photo of a place you went, being proud of what you do, but there's a genuine quality that's hard to articulate that separates people just sharing their lives from self promoters. I stick to those rules and beyond that will engage with anyone. If you stay at it you'll find people to talk to, build a circle to discuss interesting things, even form friendships, though they'll never replace IRL loved ones. Some might even inspire you to build something cool, or you might even inspire them to do the same.