Ads and monetization have ruined the internet compared to what it was. Early Internet was completely without ads, and things were run by people who were actually interested in the content presented, not in profits.
How early are we talking here? If you mean pre-Web, in the Usenet era it was standard practice to pay a subscription to join a Usenet server. If you mean the early Web, ads were already everywhere by the mid-90s.
Every single time. I know how I’m supposed to read it, I know what it means and where it comes from, but I physically cannot read it any other way.
Worst name ever.
I hosted a meeting with about a dozen attendees recently, and one attendee silently joined with an AI note taking bot and immediately went AFK.
It was in about 5 minutes before we clocked it and then kicked it out. It automatically circulated its notes. Amusingly, 95% of them were “is that a chat bot?” “Steve, are you actually on this meeting?” “I’m going to kick Steve out in a minute if nobody can get him to answer”, etc. But even with that level of asinine, low impact chat, it still managed to garble them to the point of barely legible.
Also: what a dick move.
That’s a really interesting read (and worth much more attention than the pithy one-liners of people who just want to read the title).
On reflection, I think my take away is that Bluesky will always by necessity of its design be hosted and controlled by a single centralised company. But what their architectural model does allow is the possibility of a wholesale migration from one centralised provider to another. That is, it would be possible for a suitably resourced and motivated company to host its own mirror Relay and other components and have essentially a fully functional Bluesky clone. In the event that Bluesky ever “does a Twitter” and go into terminal decline, in theory this might mean that a successor/competitor could emerge and take on the network without loss of existing content.
I’m not sure that’ll ever actually happen, but it’s an interesting thought.
Strangely, I used to work for a bank in their “bereavement services” department; that is, the department that dealt with dead people’s accounts.
If anyone notified us of a death of an account holder, and provided any proof (death certificate, coroner’s report, police letter), the first thing we’d do is freeze the account. All payments out stopped, all cards cancelled, all withdrawals blocked. This was a legal requirement, because once somebody dies their money becomes the legal property of their “estate”, and it’s unlawful for anyone to remove money from the estate without following proper process.
There’s no need to stop each payment individually. In fact, the bank really doesn’t want you logging in to their online bank using the deceased’s credentials and messing around with things for the same reason; unless you’re following proper procedures, it’s not yours to mess with.
Possibly it’s different in different jurisdictions, of course.
Murder rather than suicide, but dead is dead.
For me it’s MATE.
For some reason I’ve never really gotten on with XFCE. Tried it in earnest many years ago, and have dipped into it a few more times over the years, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t gel with me. Always feels like I’m fighting it to get it to do what I want it to do.
MATE has the familiarity and comfort for anyone who spent serious years running GNOME 2. It’s pretty much as lightweight as XFCE these days, but feels more polished and intuitive for it.
Ubuntu MATE is still one of my go-to distros for limited hardware (even though that project specifically seems to have stagnated somewhat in recent years).
It seems insane to me that the US system lets you literally specify the exact judge (that you’ve already bought and paid for) as the only judge that can hear cases against you. And that the system is basically OK with this.
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Bridgy Fed is pretty straightforward. You just follow the account and away you go.
It doesn’t make your bridged posts particularly attractive-looking (essentially you appear as a bot under a subdomain of a server), but it’s searchable and discoverable in the target network.
I’m now mostly using Blue Sky, but I bridge to Mastodon, so all my posts form part of the content that’s available to fediverse users. For little old me that’s not all that important, but if every big organisation or journalist or celeb did that too, that’d do a lot to build vitality into the fediverse network.
BSD is BSD-like
It certainly is that, yes.
All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human.
I’m no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it’s not magic, it’s just technology. You’ll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.
Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There’s no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that’s not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).
This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I’m concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.
BSD is more UNIX than Linux is, to be fair.
In this day and age, if it’s actually important they’ll probably immediately send you a text message/WhatsApp/etc. anyway.
A regular reminder that ChromeOS is Linux. It’s Linux you can buy from a bricks and mortar store, preconfigured for the average low-knowledge user, and with minimal to no maintenance overhead.
We enthusiasts obviously mostly hate it, but we’re not its target audience. Its target audience (non-techies who mostly just like to use their phones) get on great with it.
People need to accept that any Linux distro made for mass market is going to look more or less like ChromeOS. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as traditional distros also continue to exist. But people need to get out of their heads that the “year of Linux on the desktop” looks like Ubuntu or Fedora or Mint. What it looks like is ChromeOS.
Considering the fediverse microblogging scene includes Threads, which claims to have hundreds of millions of active users, I’d say its death is greatly exaggerated.
Yes, I know a lot of Mastodon servers refuse to federate with Threads, and yes I know their active user figures are likely very different from what they claim. But at the end of the day, it’s an ActivityPub microblogging platform with a considerable userbase and a very rich corporate backer.
If something has hundreds of “centralised” platforms owned and run by a diversity of different people and spread all over the world geographically, then that’s “decentralised”.
I can’t really think of another way in which something could be decentralised.
With ActivityPub, there’s nothing stopping you hosting a server literally just for yourself. It wouldn’t get much more decentralised than that.
“Never” is a strong word. API translation is a technical hurdle, but rarely an insurmountable one. If Blue Sky wanted to add an ActivityPub interface to their platform, they probably could.
This issue isn’t technical per se; it’s a matter of priorities. Blue Sky doesn’t want to federate with Mastodon/Threads, because they want users to switch to their platform.
Threads (for better or worse) demonstrates that that’s not a fundamental obstacle for fediverse microblogging.
If someone wanted to launch a Mastodon fork with algorithm-driven content discovery, they could do. Just as with Lemmy/kbin/mbin, the beauty of the fediverse is that different servers can take quite different approaches to use experience design whilst still maintaining compatibility with the rest of the community.
I reckon it’s simpler than that. Zuckerberg has never really invented anything novel; Facebook was a straight clone of a whole bunch of competing social media sites (which just so happened to win the numbers war), and WhatsApp and Instagram were both acquisitions.
I think the Metaverse was Zuckerberg trying to prove to himself and others that he and he personally could come up with the “next big thing”. The fact that he came up with something which absolutely no-one wanted (and most people barely understood) is a testament to why he never came up with anything ground breaking before, too.