Gordon Brander @gordon@mastodon.social
Everything around me was someone's life work.
Joined Nov 2016
Gordon Brander
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@gordon There exists a HTML to markdown converter: https://github.com/domchristie/to-markdown
Were you looking for something like this?
I would like a tool that converts web pages to markdown. I am going to build it.
Gordon Brander
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Gordon Brander
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results of asking my divination students to write a javascript/p5js function that generates random numbers (without using built-ins like random() or Math.random()) https://mastodon.social/media/mUrd6N7KOY-MNyGIkJ8 top one is Math.random() for reference. (a few students cheated and used the noise() function in p5js :smirk:)
Gordon Brander
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I like how when I click a link in Mastodon it opens immediately instead of taking me on a world tour of 5 different redirect servers on 3 different continents
WELCOME TO THE WORLD BABY #001. YOU HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED:
1x SOYLENT SUBSCRIPTION
1x LOT SUBSCRIPTION https://www.lot2046.com/
REPORT BACK IN 18 YEARS. EOM.
Gordon Brander
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I've written 'toot', a very simple command-line utility to allow Mastodon posts to be sent from the command-line: https://www.npmjs.com/package/toot
Gordon Brander
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i made a tiny thing for curling the API: https://github.com/decklin/tusk
the cli ux is very preliminary, suggestions welcome
#botally ppl may be interested? all my twitter bots use basically this level of wrapping, not a high-level-language lib.
(inspired by @tinysubversions' web page tool... thanks!)
We've got a second shot at making Twitter a shared piece of social infrastructure... An API for news and bots and emergency response systems and messaging and anything else we might dream up.
Alex Payne, (engineer who helped scale Twitter), way back in 2010: "Decentralization isn’t just a better architecture, it’s an architecture that resists censorship and the corrupting influences of capital and marketing.
"At the very least, decentralization would make tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as email. Now that would be a triumph of humanity."
Gordon Brander
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For kicks I booted an instance of mastodon for running bots. It's at https://botsin.space/
I made a bot too. I wanted to make something that broke past Twitter's character limit, so I made a bot version of Strachey's LOVELETTERS https://botsin.space/@loveletter
Gordon Brander
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@gordon nice! might also check out botsin.space, looks like there are a couple bots there
Registered http://generative.design. Tempted to stand up a Mastodon instance just for art bots / generative bots. WDYT? #botally
Gordon Brander
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Gordon Brander
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@Gargron Just to get my head around this federated stuff. Could an instance be started around a common hobby, country, interest, company etc? And can you choose to leave it open to read so users are findable and you can remote follow them? Or are they private by default?
Encouraging distinct neighborhoods could also help overcome network effect. If you can spin up a neighborhood for your group/subculture/friends, you bring the network with you.
@bcrypt brought, like, the whole infosec world with her to Mastodon yesterday.
Support moderated signups: e.g. "this neighborhood is for my university/team/company".
Ways to provoke distinct Mastodon neighborhoods: allow easy customization of app colors, signup page. Repaint the walls = the home is yours.
Distinct Mastodon Neighborhoods also encourage federation.
E.g. "this is the neighborhood where we talk about art. This is the neighborhood where we talk about infosec."
Everything around me was someone's life work.
Joined Nov 2016
Server run by the main developers of the project 
It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!