Cohost

>The old WebGPU meeting notes have some choice quotes from (IIRC) Unity and Adobe engineers literally begging the committee not to invent a new shader language.

This was an interesting tidbit, so I tried to find the source for it. While I did not find it, I did find the December 2019 minutes[0] which has a related point:

>Apple is not comfortable working under Khronos IP framework, because of dispute between Apple Legal & Khronos which is private. Can’t talk about the substance of this dispute. Can’t make any statement for Apple to agree to Khronos IP framework. So we’re discussing, what if we don’t fork? We can’t say whether we’re (Apple) happy with that.

I found this link via rust hn[1] which I found after reading this blog post:[2]

>Vulkan used a bytecode, called SPIR-V, so you could target it from any shader language you wanted. WebGPU was going to use SPIR-V, but then Apple said no

The lobsters thread also links to a relevant HN post:[3]

>I know, I was there. I also think that objection to SPIR-V wasn't completely unfounded. SPIR-V is a nice binary representation of shaders, but it has problems in the context of WebGPU adoption: It's so low level [...] It has a lot of instructions [...] Friction in the features we need, vs features Khronos needs. [...] there is no single well specified and tested textual shading language. HLSL doesn't have a spec.

The linked blog post from lobsters was also discussed on HN, which you also commented in.[4]

It would be great if…

Unfortunately, most alternatives to Mastodon seem to be either explicitly right-wing (which you may or may not care about) or designed to copy and consume Twitter's business model, and aren't likely to be any better than Twitter in the long run.

Mastodon really is the best alternative at the moment, and it doesn't have to be difficult (although the most difficult option - self hosting your own identity server - is also the most secure.) You can find hosting solutions or even do what I (the laziest person) did and just run multiple accounts through each instance's public website and use browser bookmarks and/or a third party client. Not much more difficult than joining subreddits, but more annoying in that there is no actual shared identity between accounts. Plenty of political activists and media services are already on the platform.

But since you asked, I found some, with what seemed to be the biggest or most recent HN discussiona I could find. Absolutely no guarantees on my part regarding utility, practicality, security or whatever, though.

Nostr protocol: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33323815

Counter Social: https://counter.social/index.html

https://gizmodo.com/jester-hacker-trying-to-fix-social-media-countersocial-1849035091

(^weirdly no HN traction on this one tha I could find)

Cohost:…

The key difference is this:

> [E]very morning, RealPage provides participating Lessors with recommended price levels. Lessors typically must communicate to a RealPage “Pricing Advisor” that they have “accept[ed]” or “confirm[ed] the “approved pricing” within a specified time frame. If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval.

[...]

> But RealPage emphasizes the need for discipline among participating Lessors and urges them that for its coordinated algorithmic pricing to be the most successful in increasing rents, participating Lessors must adopt RealPage’s pricing at least 80% of the time.

This organization was enforcing 'discipline' among the participants to make sure that they didn't undercut each other too often. That's a cartel.

1. https://cohost.org/morayati/post/925436-i-saw-real-page-s-cra

> It would be different if the software made you promise (by contract, for example) to not go below a certain price.

From the reporting of this over the past 2 years, it became very clear they required them to accept the prices.

> Specifically, every morning, RealPage provides participating Lessors with recommended price levels. ... If Lessors wish to diverge from the “approved pricing” they must submit reasoning for doing so and await approval. ... But RealPage emphasizes the need for discipline among participating Lessors and urges them that for its coordinated algorithmic pricing to be the most successful in increasing rents, participating Lessors must adopt RealPage’s pricing at least 80% of the time.

https://cohost.org/morayati/post/925436-i-saw-real-page-s-cra

With the old Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW; a text-based shell for Mac OS of the 80s and 90s) there was similar functionality called Commando for almost every command. The commando information was kept in a 'cmdo' resource. Something similar could be done today with extended attributes, if support wasn't so hit or miss.

Oh, apparently, A/UX had commando as well. If you double-clicked a terminal command from the Finder, it would pop up the commando box to choose your CLI options, then run it in a shell window. Today, running a terminal command from Finder just runs it without any arguments in a shell window.

https://cohost.org/boredzo/post/804893-i-still-want-a-moder

http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html

From a comment on the blog post:

> iirc it's generated from a script in asterisk, with the delay and tone durations set "short" (I think it was the minimum EIA/TIA DTMF mark/space numbers, not sure.)

> My phone system was Google Voice, through an SIP bridge with Obihai (now defunct/discontinued). Asterisk then made the SIP connection and rang my other phones, a Lucent Partner ACS for my landlines, cellphones, ATAs and forwarding numbers, also over SIP.

> Most of the hardware was lost in the housefire last year. This recording was from early-mid 2020 or so.

https://cohost.org/sirocyl/post/2891449-i-broke-ikea#comment-4f432d10-0638-474f-8716-5bb4fa2189ed