Just a friendly reminder that climate change was predicted well ahead of time, easily decades ago, with old predictive models turning out to have been decently accurate.

Macs are outrageously priced for the hardware you get.

Yea sure, we all know this. But we’re talking about software here. Not to be too snarky, but the part you actually use. The differences might not be worth it to you, or maybe you need a gaming PC, but for some, it’s just fine.

I guess unless you use a Mac or something I don’t know.

Yea … you can just use a Mac.

I switched … back in 2006 after being fed up with MS BS. Haven’t looked back. Since then I’ve had 2 laptops. That’s it.

The current one is getting old now, sadly, but part of the trick with Apple is timing your purchases for when they kinda nail the product in the particular design cycle. Don’t buy when they do something new for the first time, aim for near the end of a design cycle generally. And don’t get base specs, add RAM and disk space (perhaps through extended 3rd party devices). And their machines can be very useful for quite a while.

Of course there’s Linux, but you’ll know if you’re ready for that.

This development worries me far more than anything I’ve read about LLM advancements in quite some time.

Yea. Nice pickup.

Only thing I’ve seen that works for combatting AI slop take over is the idea that the value of doing some things is the doing itself, not the product. It seems to cut through the consumerism and metric driven capitalism that has gotten us here, while retaining an anti-bullshit-jobs position.

yep! I didn’t pick up on any explicit link … but the coupling AI and recall is not coincidence. It’s serfdom.

Big issue IMO. Never touched it for that reason.

A personal knowledge system has to be designed to last the rest of your life.

I’m scared of cults and not ever being truly enlightened is a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe one day.

Seriously though, in terms of longevity, where I want the dependencies of my system to last for the rest of my life and to be easily installed on as many machines throughout the rest of my life, SQLite (and pure Python for the wrapper, using only the std lib) seem like good bets. Better bets than emacs and org-mode, perhaps not, but certainly without the baggage of being bound to a text editor.

EDIT: just clicked the link, lol.

your own hacked together wrapper around sqlite as a plugin for your text editor of choice

Yea it’s pretty popular and generally I like that, especially compared to the whole discord thing (though real time chat is also a valuable platform).

Ideally, I’m with you and IMO this would be something where the fediverse could shine.

It feels to me like many pieces are already in place for some people to come together and create a fediverse space for filling that SO function. Lemmy, NodeBB and discourse (when they get federation stable, however close/far that is) are all there.

What’s likely needed is for the right pieces and modifications to be put together, the right instance, some basic branding and commitments, donations, sponsorships (and even ads would be appropriate here IMO if done tastefully).

But, in reality the devs on the fediverse are spread pretty thin and many developers generally are in a bit of a squeeze at the moment. Financial support hasn’t reached a healthy equilibrium on the fediverse, culturally and probably quantitatively, in that further growth, creativity and adaptation at any decent rate doesn’t really seem viable.

Back in the heyday of the twitter migration to mastodon or reddit migration to lemmy, there likely would have been some dev ready to go out on a limb and try to scramble something together (however healthy that is). That energy has passed and there doesn’t seem to be a more stable substitute set of incentives for new devs to build new things here (though there are of course devs building on the fediverse, lemmy and newer projects like SL, piefed and bonfire included). Instead it seems like the dev community on the fediverse has settled and they all have their work set.

So the best bet would probably be for some eager volunteers to take the best platform for the job (possibly NodeBB ATM) and put up an instance and see what happens. I think there’s been enough interest, including this post, to make it interesting.

And what’s especially interesting is that the SO archive, AFAICT, is open and available for download, so there’s a real possibility of having a live archive of SO for search coupled with new content, right here on the fediverse.

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

but they kinda brought this on themselves.

Well yea, that’s the point of taking aviation safety seriously. It’s frightening with many points of failure and disaster easily being fatal.

So unless there’s total diligence, the whole industry deserves to feel the heat. If we can’t easily handle corruption in areas of high risk, then we can’t have nice things. It’s pretty simple.

And the industry is affected and should care too. I don’t want to check what model of plane I’m boarding and then be faced with choosing between my ticket price and my life on the balance of probabilities I don’t know anything about. I just won’t fly instead.

Yea. Along with web rings, human-focused search and just harbouring communities better … we gotta start building people-focused online gardens and ditch this capitalistic hustle shit.

I mean there’s something to the idea of a screen-less device that doesn’t distract you all of the time.

But then this has a projector and a camera and flashing lights and is basically an interface to the cloud and AI which has its own engagement dynamics, so the whole “be present” thing is likely silicon valley bullshit, as you say.

The bit I can’t get over is that they’ve clearly got funding, hype and connections but are selling a wrapper around another company’s new/untested/probably-just-shit AI service that only came out relatively recently compared to when humane started. So what’s this company actually about? Channeling Apple hype?

Too fucking good!

Am I bad for wanting this car?

I claim no expertise here … so take this with plenty of salt. I also don’t know how much of this is specific to the protocol itself or is just the way bluesky have decided to build things.

I see two interesting and nice things here:

• Users and their follows or social graph are portable across the protocol
• The architecture (again, not sure how much of this is a protocol thing) has different levels of centrality or decentralisation for different parts of the system. So you don’t have to pick an instance just to create an account but can instead pick moderation policies and feeds when you want to. The issue is that underlying everything is a big giant server that’s collecting data and spitting it all out as a firehose. There’s only one right now (BlueSky’s) but the code is open and they say that others can start one too (however onerous that would be). The upside is that all the things downstream from the giant server can rely on it and instead make apps, feeds, execute moderation etc … which could be a nicer experience for both devs and users.

In the end, my impression of it is that they’re building more of a framework and ecosystem for others to build social media within. ActivityPub by comparison is much more of a playground of ideas and tools that people can make and host whatever they want with it. So more truly decentralised but also, IMO, puts more weight on the developers and the users to make the ecosystem happen and work well. For instance, we could have more portable user accounts on the fediverse, but we don’t (yet), because that’d have to be built and then implemented by all the platforms.

Once I see another Big Giant Central server running in some sort of sustainable or functioning way, then I personally think it’ll have a lot of promise. Before then, however, a number of developers might get interested in developing in that ecosystem because of how it might allow them to make the thing they’re interested in and not worry about other things.

As for how ATProto and ActivityPub can and should relate to each other in the future … they’re the only two decently sized projects really having a good shot at this decentralised thing (though there a few web3.0 things out there AFAIU, eg farcaster) … and I think they’re better off being “friends” rather than “enemies” for that reason.

If my impression of their differences is accurate, they’ll have different strengths going forward. IMO, ActivityPub will be more of smaller community thing. If all of the neuroscientists want to create a network of forums and blogs, that they’re in control of, around the world that all talk to each other but without being connected to all of the other social media, then the fediverse and its platforms will be the ecosystem to use. If neuroscientists want to talk to the rest of the world but still have ownship and control over their data and maybe their platform or feed or moderation, then AT-Proto will be the place to go. Bridges between the two would complement the flexibility here.

Yea I have. It’s more twitter-like in its vibe. But people seem happy there.

I’m not really a twitter person … so it’s not really my jam. But the AT Proto as an idea interests me and I’m interested to see what happens on it. Big question for is still whether a second (or third etc) relay will every be run.

Yep. Key part of the premise. Balmer is consulting in the background and somehow gets part of his personality imprinted on the AI.

Yea, nuclear powered AI with power independent from the grid certainly strikes me as a dystopian AI premise.

Well said.

I’ve said it a number of times else where … but it’s easy to forget that the era of mega corp online platforms was a weird time of rampant extraction and manipulation. We’ve got quite a bit of stuff to unlearn and relearn (like your examples).

And of course now with the big corps turning on us to extract more money and use the data they’ve milked from us build AIs to take our jobs away … we have the final proof of what we should have known the whole time … that social media should have kept its roots in organic human organisation.