This post accompanies my recent video on this topic. Large Language Models (LLMs) - often called "AI" - are incredibly capable at some tasks and rather misapplied for others. One of the things I think they're strongest at is intent analysis and extraction, and this is a place where they can be genuinely useful as an improvent to the human-computer interface (rather than merely being slapped on top…
I've just returned from a fourteen-day trip spent building, running and tearing down EMF , and as I sit on the plane writing this, as well as physical exhaustion, I am experiencing a whole host of emotions - happiness, wonder, determination, and also a strange sense of loss. It is impossible to describe EMF to anyone who has not attended; while initially you might want to compare it to a normal…
I've had many different development platforms over the years - from Notepad++ on library computers in my youth, to Gentoo and then Ubuntu installed on a series of carefully-chosen laptops with working drivers, and then for the last five years or so on Surface devices via the rather wonderful Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Of course, in the WSL era I am still just running Ubuntu, but inside the…
TLDR: I am looking for new developers and maintainers for Takahē who want to help in exchange for my mentorship, or I'll have to sunset the project. I find it important to have hobbies that aren't the same as what I do for work, which is why an increasing number of them don't involve computers at all - I'm very happy building new things on my camper van, making weird geographic art, or hiking…
There are many questionable things about American car culture, but the road trip is not one of them. In a country as large and geographically varied as the USA, road travel is not just a necessity, but it can also be the attraction itself. When I first moved to the USA, I had vague plans of doing some driving around and enjoying the sheer alien-ness of tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, or…
I had taken two months off from developing Takahē in the run up to PyCon US; both due to pressures at work (and then, more recently, half the company being laid off around me), as well as not quite being sure what I wanted to build, exactly. When I started the project, my main goal was to show that multi-domain support for a single ActivityPub server was possible; once I had achieved that…
Today is the 0.7 release of Takahē , and things are really humming along now; this release marks the point where we've built enough moderation and community features to make me happy that I can open up takahe.social to registrations, albeit with a user number cap. We've also launched a Patreon for Takahē , in a quest to make development and operation of Takahē more sustainable - and work towards…
Yesterday I pushed out the 0.5.0 release of Takahē , and while there's plenty left to do, this release is somewhat of a milestone in its own right, as it essentially marks the point where I've implemented enough of ActivityPub to shift focus. With the implementation of image posting in this release, there are now only a few things left at a protocol level that I know I'm missing: Custom emoji…
So, after a few weeks of development, I'm happy enough with the state of Takahē to issue its first official release - which I've chosen to number 0.3.0, because version numbers are made up and I can start where I want. We're only releasing Docker images right now in order to try and keep the support burden down (it removes having to worry about people's OS versions and library environments), so…
Twitter is - was - such a unique place. Somewhere where you can have the President of the United States coexist with teenagers writing fan fiction; where celebrities give personal insights into their lives while government departments post memes about public safety ; the place that gave us @Horse_ebooks and @dril . The "Fediverse", with Mastodon at its helm, is not this. It doesn't seem to want to…