Fly NY to FL. This is not far off.

It’s more like “I don’t have any money for you. What? This? Oh, this hoard technically belongs to the dragon that I have subjugated and keep in my dungeon. He lends me coin as I need it, and I will pay him back when I’m dead”

This series of articles and replies has really made me think about the structure of the Fediverse (as a casual user, though in the software biz), and for that I am very thankful. It makes me think, though, that just as open source developers got around the “free as in speech vs. free as in beer” issue by using the word libre, if the Fediverse needs another term – or even just call it “capital-F federation” – to distinguish the kind of first-class federation that Christine and ActivityPub represent vs. the definition that ATProto has suggested (and even vs what lots of regular software/service companies mean when they describe a system of microservices as federated).

Algorithm is just a fancy word for rules to sort by. “New” is an algorithm that says “sort by the timestamp of the submissions”. That one is pretty innocuous, I think. Likewise “Active” which just says “sort by the last time someone commented” (or whatever). “Hot” and “Scaled”, though, involve business logic – rules that don’t have one technically correct solution, but involve decisions and preferences made by people to accomplish a certain aim. Again in Lemmy’s case I don’t think either the “Hot” or “Scaled” algorithms should be too controversial – and if they are, you can review the source code, make comments or a PR for changes, or stand up your own Lemmy instance that does it the way you want to. For walled-garden SM sites like TikTok, Facebook and Twitter/X, though, we don’t know what the logic behind the algorithm says. We can speculate that it’s optimized to keep people using the service for longer, or encouraging them to come back more frequently, but for all intents and purposes those algorithms are black boxes and we have to assume that they’re working only for the benefits of the companies, and not the users.

ActivityPub is not a great fit for realtime chat. As others have noted, the Matrix and XMPP protocols are federated and designed for exactly this use case.

Algorithms can be useful - and at a certain scale they’re necessary. Just look at Lemmy - even as small as it is there’s already some utility in algorithms like “Active”, “Hot” and “Scaled”, and as the number of communities and instances grows they’ll be even more useful. The trouble starts when there are perverse incentives to drive users toward one type of content or another, which I think is one of the fediverse’s key strengths.

Wow, I think this is the first ever Baudrillard meme I’ve seen. Truly we’ve entered the age of simulacra.

Drat, a missed opportunity!

Protip: Adding “: a study” to virtually any title instantly makes it sound more informed and scientific.

Check out Mullvad Browser, which is based on FF. It has always showed up as giving a non-unique fingerprint for me on the EFF site.

Ah, me and my wife.

Proton therapy is pricey and often requires multiple treatments (at a hospital with a proton gun), and the article makes it sound like the steam delivers heat in a beneficial way, tho as you note they don’t directly compare to any kind of laser therapy.

In case anyone is thinking about some ancient aliens BS, this is about the natural accumulation of metals important to a green energy transition due to plate tectonics:

The study identifies the margins of ancient continental cores as promising locations for these metal deposits and explains the geological mechanisms behind their formation.

Nearly 97% of US teenagers have at least one electronic item in their bedroom [1] and 60% of time after school is spent on some form of screen media activity [2].

Jesus.

Oxfam’s research shows that the richest 1% —comprising 77 million individuals, including billionaires, millionaires, and those earning over $140,000 per year in PPP terms— were responsible for 15.9% of global CO2 emissions in 2019. The bottom 50% (3.9 billion people with an average annual income of $2,000 in PPP terms) accounted for 7.7%

Billionaires and the other 0.01% (not 1%) account for a ludicrously outsized amount of Carbon spend. However the Oxfam research really calls out how outsized even a much Carbon even a much more modest American lifestyle is. $140k/year is a lot even in the US, but still well within what many would call “normal”, especially in pricier areas. We spend a lot of time attacking billionaires for their lifestyles (and don’t get me wrong – fuck them all), but the problem is a lot larger than that.

They can be had on eBay for around $500, though there are some cheaper ones if anyone would like to cannibalize one to make a Johnny Mnemonic-style cyberdeck.

I was in Vegas a few years ago, jogging the strip early in the morning before another day of tech conference hell. At one of the intersections a scrawny dude in unkempt clothes sat on the ground giggling and holding a sign that said “why lie? I wanna get high” (he clearly was). There was more money in his bucket than any of the other panhandlers I saw.

Wow, that’s a great sandwich and a great photo. Well done!

I don’t know if it’s actually true, but at one point Elon mentioned they were specifically training Grok to be anti-woke, so presumably that means their training corpus has some… weird… stuff in it that’s more heavily weighted than it ought to be. In short, it’s not unlikely that Elon and Grok “think” alike.

Even modest hardware can run a decent LLM. Maybe someone will open source a project to let people make their own avatars explicitly to poison the social media sites.