Bora M. Alper

@boramalper.org

Software Engineer at Stripe.
 Building free software, public services, and digital commons recreationally. 📍 Cork, Ireland 🇮🇪

i want to do a little ✨ ama about atproto ✨ in this thread. no question is too simple if you’ve been curious about atproto but don’t know much (anything?) about it, ask any question and i’ll try to explain it in my own words. (+ would love to hear from friends who aren’t very active on bsky)

Do you understand how serious it is that in Hacker News right now a violent issue against the rsync author is on the home page, full of normies commenting and upvoting it?

I host a podcast where I interview people running organizations like this. It's called Future Mending Radio and I have profiled food and tech coops, pay what you can restaurants, public parks, clothing swaps, and more.

WIRED got a copy of a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that has a curious term for opposition to AI development and data centers: "anti-tech violent extremist activity." Great reporting here on how law enforcement is tracking big tech opponents www.wired.com/story/us-law...

US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows

As Americans stew over the looming risk of job-stealing AI and data centers in their back yards, the feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat, documents obtained by WIRED show.

wired.com

we desperately need a radically pro-technology leftist movement, one that rejects palantir and silicon valley’s vision of “technology” without also becoming radicalized against technology

One of the things I wrote about is that the ATproto architecture requires a "god's-eye view", and that at best, we will probably end up getting a small pantheon of gods. Which is a less participatory form of decentralization. It does seem like where the ATmosphere is going currently.

“Çöküntü devirlerinde iki çeşit insan meydana çıkıyor. Namussuzlarla namuslular... İki tarafta da boğuşma büyük bir şiddetle, açıktan yürüyor. Hele, önce vatandaş, sonra insan olunması gereken dehşetli sıralarda faziletle alçaklığın boğuşması kadar korkunç muharebe yok. […]

🤯 > Always fascinated with traffic light countdown in Amap in China. Turns out it is implemented by crowdsourcing motion data. Had thought they had integration with city govs (which they do but with just a small number of cities). What is Google doing with maps [...]? x.com/RealYuanLiu/...

A screenshot of Amap in China showing traffic light countdowns.

As I said elsewhere I am basically radicalized about this. We fight now for personal computing and personal agency or we lose another decade to closed clouds We push now for an open internet and open models. Nobody is going to hand it to us because they’re nice

2006 internet: RSS feeds, forums, communities of hobby blogs, where people post about interior design, fashion, and music for free 2026 internet: sponsored content, paid partnership, buy my merch, try my supplements, invest in my crypto, click link in bio to unlock the secrets of life for $30

having used claude extensively for the past couple of months, i think there is still a lot of value to understanding your code and steering it intentionally. the amount of incidental complexity claude accumulates otherwise (which mostly results in bugs that it can't ever fix reliably) is staggering.