venki

venki

@venki.dev

📍 san francisco 🌐 venki.dev @blogsky.venki.dev: read your rss & substack feeds on bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/venki.dev/lists/3l7jn2dulip24: feed of all blogsky posts https://github.com/venkr/bsky-pds-backup: backup your PDS

136 followers131 following134 posts

unfortunate how dunked-upon this post is, and that Noah & Nate Silver critiquing Bluesky in this manner are reasonably accurate. Bluesky seemed like a really awesome experiment in open social media ecosystems, but ultimately has ended up primarily being a lefty Gab/Truth Social?

i'd really really love to see this for bsky someday the open ecosystem really makes this feel like it'd make more sense

building a small free product that lets you know when ChatGPT scrapes your website to use in a conversation. if you have a website & would want to beta test it, lmk

Surprised that this is getting dunked on, I thought Bluesky leaned further left.

Dean Preston@deanpreston.bsky.social

We are 10 years into the failed YIMBY project, and it’s clear that the for profit real estate industry is not coming to the rescue to deliver housing for the working class. Disaster capitalism won’t deliver the housing we need. Social housing will.

pretty wild we have only half as many cows as 100 years ago because they each produce 6x as much milk!

Saloni@scientificdiscovery.dev

Compared to the 1920s, the average US dairy cow now yields around 6x more milk(!) In a great new article for Works in Progress, @pablohutch.bsky.social explains how big data, artificial insemination, cryopreservation, and more, created the modern dairy cow. worksinprogress.co/issue/how-bi...

Specifically, that there was a belief until the 2010s that tech was bringing liberty & democracy to the world. Now, the all you can say is that it’s bringing growth - which does feel more R-aligned.

I generally wish the guidelines you could be banned for were more minimal. Eg: only for illegal things that you’re legally forced to ban.

alpindale.bsky.social@alpindale.bsky.social

Thank you @bsky.app team for correcting the mistake. Glad to be back!

Enforcement via non-labeler bans/suspensions is pretty rough from a “we’re decentralized” perspective 🤔

venki reposted

I heard people wanted a million Bluesky posts? So I made an open-source script that allows anyone to scrape the Bluesky firehose and collect everything people post. This will be a useful resource to anyone who wants to archive this data or train generative AI. Have fun! github.com/deepfates/bs...

github.comGitHub - deepfates/bsky-scraperContribute to deepfates/bsky-scraper development by creating an account on GitHub.

Feature request: bot/automated account badges like on Twitter I’ve tried to use: a) disclaimers in bio, b) distinctive handles, but my bots are still occasionally mistaken for real people. A self-identified automated account badge would really help!

thinking about tech internships/apprenticeships. - very high value to be hired as a intern/apprentice/junior - meh value to hire an intern/apprentice/junior (because: they're net-negative at the start + fast turnover is the norm) how do you reconcile to preserve this positive externality?

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it seems fun to try to answer the apprenticeship question, which is this: "what sort of software business could hire primarily high-school graduates, teach them more than college does, pay them a (low) salary, and still end up profitable?"

thinking about tech internships/apprenticeships. - very high value to be hired as a intern/apprentice/junior - meh value to hire an intern/apprentice/junior (because: they're net-negative at the start + fast turnover is the norm) how do you reconcile to preserve this positive externality?

one answer is: pick the tails. ie: a company can maybe only get 75th percentile mid-career eng, but 90th percentile interns. this is kinda the norm already, because you then hope to retain the 90th percentile interns as 90th percentile mid-career engineers

another answer is: build companies that are okay with more, less experienced work. for eg, in big tech, imo there's a lot of super interconnected work, and the Mythical Man Month holds, ie: adding more, less-skilled people can actually slow you down. something more consulty can work better?

pretty cool. i do wonder how soon will people figure out monetizing aspects of Bluesky. can you make a (feedgen, labeler, benevolent bot) and monetize it?

Peter W🤓@wang.social

I want to create an incubator that funds atproto/bluesky experimental projects to the tune of $5k-$10k dev grants. I am sorely tempted to call it “Chemtrails”, because it seeds the ATmosphere Hit me with your best ideas!

hmm, MAUs: - bsky: 7.5m (from bskycharts) - mastodon: 800k (from fedidb) - threads: 275m (official source) - twitter: 330m (varies 300m-500m from diff sources?)

i'm surprised that: - threads ~= twitter: really? is that true? maybe diff in DAU? or??? threads also seems to be growing mau. - bsky ~= 1/30 twitter: bigger than i expected (!) - mastodon ~= 1/10 bsky: smaller than i expected, in my head it was bsky-comparable?

low grade bsky anxiety about having 16 accounts on a PDS hosted on Oracle cloud free tier hmm todo: figure out off-platform backups before they axe me

pcp claims that vitamin d is fake and new meta analyses show that: - testing it isn’t worth it unless you have ckd or gastric bypass or such - supplementing it usually doesn’t do much - low vitamin d levels are usually a trailing indicator of chronic disease is this true? @elicit.com

like how the Apple Watch can kinda diagnose you with cardio arrhythmia they should make screen time diagnose you with ADD

using your own abstractions is so cool thanks past venki for grokking the complexities & papering over them so i don't need to hold them in my head rn :)