It’s vice signaling. There’s nothing virtuous about Meta or Zuckerberg. Let’s not forget his first try was a hot or not clone with pictures of women he used without consent.

And that new perm he got definitely isn’t virtuous.

It’s not something where any one person can really host their own instance long term — though people still do (for now). But AtProto is designed so a reasonably-sized company (or maybe a well-funded foundation) can host their own instance and either make a clone or do something novel.

As I understand it, the core difference is just the scale of what you’d have to host. ActivityPub only downloads what users on an instance interact with so you could easily run your own one-person instance on a home computer. A BlueSky instance downloads everything so you’d essentially need the scale of BlueSky (which is already in the terabytes)

The upside to AtProto for users is that your username and content are all portable and you can switch providers (or even use multiple) and not lose anything. ActivityPub’s downside is that it can leave you at the mercy of your admin. Not a big deal on the main instances but there’s been some drama moments where some admin freaked out and those users essentially lost their account.

AtProto/BlueSky was originally envisioned (pre-Musk) as Twitter being semi-decentralized so it’d essentially be the hub of a wider ecosystem. But, obviously, the world’s worst truck designer had other plans.

Hegemony over Europe? That seems laughable when they’re borrowing troops and buying bullets from fucking North Korea. This isn’t the height of the Cold War. Russia’s economy has been hollowed out by decades of kleptocracy and misrule. I’m pretty sure at this point any one of France, Germany, or Britain could win a conventional shooting war with Russia.

No one wins a nuclear war, obviously. Russia can still be a threat. But being a nuisance in the Baltic Sea and screwing with Moldova doesn’t make them look powerful enough to be a hegemon over shit.

I don’t want to rain on everyone’s parade but I think the law bans all apps with over 1 million users that are based in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea (“foreign adversary controlled applications”) where you can make a profile and share content. WeChat would definitely count. So, Red Note is probably/possibly going away soon too. I guess VKontakte is Russian and still in the app stores.

The media is focused on creators and TikTok, obviously. But a WeChat ban would probably suck for people with grandparents in China since that’s the “everything app” there. (I don’t know what China bans but even if there’s other messaging apps allowed in China, teaching your elderly Chinese grandma to use a different app on a ~12h time zone difference is probably not a fun activity.)

I disagree. I used to be a software engineer (and may be again at some point) and the problem with avoiding junior developers is that we need them if we ever want to have any senior developers.

Also, LLMs don’t replace 90% of what a software engineer does. Copilot or whatever is a nice tool that spits out code. It’s not able to architect shit or choose the right tech to use in the first place.

And to be honest, it seems like A.I. progress has hit a bit of a wall and the reality is that it may take decades, trillions of dollars, and maybe even an energy revolution to ever reach its imagined potential. Look at full self-driving cars. The tech seemed like it was 90% there about a decade ago but that last 10% of any big project is the real challenge.

BlueSky’s verification system lets you make your handle any URL you own (via DNS or a meta tag in your HTML). Like the Washington Post’s handle is just @washingtonpost.com

That seems like a pretty trivial thing for any institution to setup even if most users are just going to stick with the default (“whatever dot bsky dot social”), if only because a URL costs a few dollars a year.

Not that I disagree about institutions being on Mastodon. Important government agencies should be basically everywhere. (Like a local weather service that issues critical safety warnings should be on every service possible.)

I haven’t used it in a long time but I think Diaspora is intended as a decentralized FB clone. https://diasporafoundation.org/

I’m not sure if it uses ActivityPub or its own thing. It’s been around for awhile so it may predate ActivityPub.

It might be a little suspicious but even if ByteDance was trying to sell TikTok, there’s a pretty short list of potential buyers that could raise $300bn and wants to buy a social media company.

I’ve been thinking about buying a pellet smoker because my grocery sells the pellets now but I have two smokers and my friend is a big dude — a former offensive lineman — and he loves nothing more than drinking beer and tending to a fire. He loves monitoring the temperature and soaking the wood in water to get it just right. He probably should/could smoke meat for a living and be happy forever.

I like to keep it simple and am into technology so I have wireless thermometers and love my barrel smoker where, once you learn the quirks, it’s basically set it and forget it and get perfect ribs. But I feel like I’d be taking something from a friend if I didn’t also have the 12 hours of beer and monitoring to the temp/fire part. That’s his form of meditation.

Level 1: just doing it on a regular grill like a Weber kettle grill or similar.

Level 2: a pellet or electric smoker where you’re not really in control

Level 3: a small dedicated smoker where you tend the fire

Level 4: A second, complementary dedicated smoker (e.g., if you have a horizontal one for brisket and the like, maybe you buy a vertical one for hanging ribs and doing stuff like that.) It’s a new level because you’re now an obsessive who buys things you don’t strictly need but now it’s your hobby and you can tell the difference.

Level 5: A professional grade, expensive smoker, possibly welded to a trailer for tailgates or family gatherings. Alternatively, building a brick smoker in your backyard or something like that.

Level 5 (special recognition): The guy who made the filing cabinet smoker

Every time I see a climate change sea level rise projection.

Fresh but familiar. Maybe like farm-to-table Soylent Green instead of the packaged Soylent Green.

Any of them getting blue shelled near the finish line would result in at least 5 execution orders. (Biden commuted the sentences of all but 3 federal death row inmates but you know Trump would kill Eric for fun and is indifferent about Tiffany’s life.)

And his idiot failson started beef with Charles Oakley.

I only had 7 kids last year so don’t blame me.

The water level on Ocarina of Time would be fun.

I’m starting to think all these oligarchs aren’t on the up-and-up.

Worth it.

/s in case anyone doesn’t notice. I’ve never been married.

It’s one out of 35. The Space Shuttle disasters killed 14 crew members. Wikipedia says 610 people have reached orbit (or were intended to). Let’s use that as the denominator (so we aren’t counting Jeff Bezos). One in 35 is 2.8%. So, just the shuttle disasters account for 2.2%. Apollo 1’s crew of 3 also died.

But I think they probably just got the 2.8% number from Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents

As of December 2023, a total of 676 people have flown into space and 19 of them have died. This sets the current statistical fatality rate at 2.8 percent.

Typical of Meta to steal an idea from every social network on Earth, including its own, and make it 90% bots. They haven’t had an original idea since pokes.