Top all-time · #16150
Kye Fox
Personal blog · kyefox.com · on HN as Kyecultureeconomicswriting
Kye Fox's personal blog at kyefox.com covers culture, economics and writing. Since 2019, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 56 times, most often “Nobody cares about decentralization until they do (2024)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Official site of writer and musician Kye Fox.
Most-linked posts?
- Nobody cares about decentralization until they do (2024)2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-10-31
- Learn to Code. Or Don't2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-11-16
What Hacker News says?
I wrote something about the pattern of centralization/decentralization in the context of Patreon: https://kyefox.com/patreons-future-venture-capital-is-bad-an... GitHub is somewhere between 2 and 3 right now.
Comment linking /patreons-future-venture-capital-is-bad-and-destinations-become-dead-ends/
on “GitHub Sponsors”Submitted ActivityPub Could Be the Future as a story · 134 points
HN discussionGetting back into photography: https://www.kyefox.com/photography/ A 70-300 lens is great for keeping a distance.
Comment linking /photography/
on “Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?”Submitted ActivityPub Could Be the Future as a story · 118 points
HN discussionA complementary article I wrote: "Nobody cares about decentralization until they do" https://kyefox.com/nobody-cares-about-decentralization-until...
Comment linking /nobody-cares-about-decentralization-until-they-do/
on “Open Social”Submitted ActivityPub might be a transitional technology as a story · 41 points
HN discussionThis has ActivityPub (AP) support on its roadmap. I wrote a well-received[0] argument that AP could be the future: https://kyefox.com/2020/04/09/activitypub-could-be-the-futur... I softened on it a little over the years since, but I think that was just the dearth of new things coming out that ran on it. Now I'm starting to think that was just a reflection of the fact that the obvious, low-hanging fruit was handled (…
Comment linking /2020/04/09/activitypub-could-be-the-future/
on “Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development”Submitted Nobody cares about decentralization until they do (2024) as a story · 39 points
HN discussionI don't need to know anything about masonry to respect a skilled mason or for it to be mutual. Why would it be any different for a programmer and a leader? I don't know much about programming and avoid it at all costs [0], but all my programmer friends appreciate insights I have when they bounce ideas off me. [0] I've written about this: https://kyefox.com/2022/08/05/learn-to-code-or-dont/
Comment linking /2022/08/05/learn-to-code-or-dont/
on “Mourning Google”Submitted ActivityPub could be the future (2020) as a story · 22 points
HN discussionPatreon is at stage 3: https://www.kyefox.com/2020/04/09/patreons-future/ Everyone but the people at the top are getting tired of all its problems and the uncertainty, but where else do you go? So far, no one has an integrated replacement. You can build a Patreon in pieces connected by APIs, but Patreon is (unfortunately) the only place you can get everything in one place for the price. WordPress is a common alterna…
Comment linking /2020/04/09/patreons-future/
on “Patreon lays off 13% of workforce”Submitted Nobody cares about decentralization until they do as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI had to accept recently that anything trying to emulate Twitter will suffer from the same problems. I wrote about it: https://kyefox.com/2020/09/17/mastodon-shows-its-stripes/ Since then, my favorite instance was killed by a bunch of irony-poisoned instances ganging up on it to convince others it was a toxic hell (projection!) and defederate from it. The instance was basically dead within a week as people migrated…
Comment linking /2020/09/17/mastodon-shows-its-stripes/
on “Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Facebook and Twitter”Submitted I'm Not Switching to Linux as a story · 6 points
HN discussionRecent practical example: I had a lot of trouble picking which photographs out of 20-100 of a subject to use. Enough were sharp, well-composed, and properly exposed to make it near impossible to pick. I've been watching James Popsys' videos[1] lately. He doesn't take the greatest photos in the world from a technical standpoint, but there's a theme that runs through most of his videos and pictures: tell a story. It's…
Comment linking /2020/06/20/eastern-gray-squirrels-at-play/
on “Do the Real Thing”Submitted Patreon's Future: Venture capital is bad, and destinations become dead ends as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIt probably wasn't mine[0], but this is how I tend to put it: >> "The more you can see the inputs and outputs as blobs of "stuff," the better. If LLMs think, it's not in any way we yet understand. They're probability engines that transform data into different data using weighted probabilities." Stuff in, stuff out. [0] https://kyefox.com/ai-assisted-creativity/
Comment linking /ai-assisted-creativity/
on “Making o1, o3, and Sonnet 3.7 hallucinate for everyone”Submitted Headlines Don't Crash Economies as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI had to accept the only way I would blog consistently is with one of the severely feature-limited managed plans from Automattic to keep me from tinkering. 18,000 words later, the system seems to work. https://kyefox.com/
Comment linking /
on “Blogging vs. Blog Setups”Submitted The Case Against Threads as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe distinction blurs with AT protocol. My data lives on Bluesky's PDS for now, but I can log in to that PDS from anything that supports AT. Like leaflet.pub Here's a post on one of my Leaflet publications under my own domain: https://foxes.kyefox.com/3lx46ftzhhc27 This post is stored in Leaflet's own lexicon in its own collection right next to all my Bluesky data. I could move this to a different PDS if I wanted. I…
Comment linking /nobody-cares-about-decentralization-until-they-do/
on “Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar”Submitted This Is Just Like 1984 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSame. I went to three days of a convention in 2016[0]. By the end, the whole thing was so vivid in my mind I could walk around it in my head and remember every little detail. Eight years later, blurs of shapes and colors and sounds are all I have without the photos I took and the words I wrote. Taking notes helps, but a photo captures all those details I don't think to note in the moment. [0] https://kyefox.com/2022…
Comment linking /2022/07/11/my-first-furry-convention/
on “A French village that voted to ban scrolling in public”Submitted Beyond Mastodon and Bluesky: Toward a Protocol-Agnostic Federation as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMy brain just seems to prefer having a tool to reach for with a clear purpose. For me, availability of a thing that does what I want is generally the difference between being able to do it or not. I've tried learning to code on my own, but I always hit a "now what?" situation since the available tools for the things I make are already better than I have any interest in improving on. I'm not a programmer by interest…
Comment linking /2022/08/05/learn-to-code-or-dont/
on “Blender 16yo winner of UK younganimator of the year”Submitted Mastodon Community Stimulus Redistribution as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm of course very skeptical more VC is a good thing and will continue using my profile on Bluesky to grow my newsletter[0] just in case. That said, if anyone can make it work, it's the team there. It's no accident the CEO was able to navigate Bluesky's exit from Twitter. [0] https://kyefox.com/newsletter/
Comment linking /newsletter/
on “Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users”Submitted Cash and Patience as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMIDI 2.0 will likely improve the situation. 4,294,967,296 possible values isn't enough to match a real instrument's range, but it's quite a bit better than 127! Serum has two chaos oscillators that help avoid deterministic-y music. Too many preset designers skip them. Take a look at Sphere from Echo Sound Works. They sampled a bunch of real instruments and used them for wavetables and noises for Serum presets. https…
Comment linking /soundware-explorer-sphere-from-echo-sound-works/
on “Where did the melody go? (2017)”Submitted Outrider alpha: a flexible LLM toolkit in one file as a story · 2 points
HN discussion