27
Jan

The Great Decentralization Debate: Bluesky vs. Mastodon

I've been meaning to write a bit about this for a while, but finally getting into Bluesky last week has given me the push I needed to get to it. Back in November, Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the original authors of the ActivityPub protocol behind software like Mastodon, wrote an excellently-researched piece called How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really? A lot of the technical ins-and-outs of the essay go a little over my head, but I think it's a worthwhile read if you, like me, are enough of a nerd to want to understand what's happening technically under the hood of

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4 min read
networks bluesky mastodon infrastructure 100days
26
Jan

DeepSeek-R1 Initial Notes

While I've been traveling, little-known Chinese research lab Deepseek released an open-source model that can compete with the best closed-source products OpenAI and Anthropic have to offer. Everyone appears to be freaking out about it.

The reason for this is its astonishingly low training cost compared to performance (it reportedly cost $5 million dollars to train), the fact that it's open-source, and even if you choose to pay for its API, it's about 90% cheaper than its American competitors. The model is also available to try for free immediately. This is all possible because of how much cheaper the

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5 min read
llms ai deepseek 100days
25
Jan

What Comes After Post-Modernism?

I saw a talk at MAGfest today by Rym Decoster and Emily Compton which attempted to sketch a theory of current post-post-modern cultural output. It's very much a work in progress, but their concept of "metacontextualism" is the idea that after postmodern deconstruction and irony, we are starting to see a trend emerge towards building meaning through choice out of its ashes: being aware of the fractured contexts of a postmodern world, and that there's no single way of knowing or being, but choosing a forking path and going down it. They argue that art is how a society engages

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2 min read
100days Videogames theory
24
Jan

On 100 Days of Making

I am now on day 10 of 100 days of writing, and it occurs to me that I haven't actually explained what this is or why I'm doing it. This is a practice I've done at least once a year since 2022, and has proven itself over and over to be one of the best things I can possibly do for myself, so not writing about it yet seems like a bit of an oversight.

100 Days Of Making is pretty much what it sounds like. You pick a thing (preferably a creative one) and produce a variation on that

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6 min read
100days Writing practice