Interesting post and corresponding mastodon thread on the non-decentralised-ness of bluesky by cwebber.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

The author is keen about this particular “vision statement”:

Preparing for the organization as a future adversary.

The assumption being, stuff gets enshittified and how might you guard your product against the future stupid and awful whims of management and investors?

Of course, they don’t consider that it cuts both ways, and Jack Dorsey’s personal grumbles about Twitter. The risk from his point of view was the company he founded doing evil unthinkable things like, uh, banning nazis. He’s keen for that sort of thing to never happen again on his platforms.

It’s a long read, but a good one (though not a nice one).

• learn about how all the people who actually make decisions in c++ world are complete assholes!
• liking go (the programming language) correlated with brain damage!
• in c++ world, it is ok to throw an arbitrary number of highly competent non-bros out of the window in order to keep a bro on board, even if said bro drugged and raped a minor!
• the c++ module system is like a gunshot wound to the ass!
• c++ leadership is delusional about memory safety!
• even more assholes!

Someone on mastodon (can’t remember who right now) joked that they were expecting the c++ committee to publicly support trump, in the hopes he would retract the usg memory safety requirements. I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.

The austin allegro was far ahead of its time.

big walmart is watching you.

https://old.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/1gqphel/body_cameras_for_front_end/

is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices

Haha, no. Flat UI was done for reasons of fashion, not efficiency. UI will always expand to consume the available memory and compute, regardless of how boring it looks. Exhibit A: Electron!

He will say what he thinks needs to be said, and the forced-birthers understand this. They haven’t defeated abortion yet and aren’t going to split their efforts, but they will continue to put pressure on ivf in the meantime. Remember, they weren’t always anti-abortion, and didn’t switch to it overnight! Their current position that life begins at conception necessarily conflicts with current ivf practises, and they’ll say they don’t disapprove of ivf in principle, and they might even have a friend who’s getting ivf, but talk is cheap and they’ll absolutely oppose any legislation that tries to guarantee access to it. Which is precisely what is happening.

They can sell out to someone else instead? Amazon seems to want to be an AI company, for example, and their current offering isn’t great even by the relaxed standards of LLMs.

I’ve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images “greebles” after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.

It’s funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now they’re everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.

He professed to have invented the video-sharing technology later made famous by Snapchat and TikTok.

Have a heart… the guy’s side-hustle in fluorocarbon refrigerants got poached, too.

The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that. Most humans, most of the time, are mindless zombies following a script

It’s a funny thing, that there are certain kinds of people who are assured of their own cleverness and so alienated from society that they think that echoing the same dehumanising blurb produced by so many of their forebears is somehow novel or informative, rather than just following a script.

(the irony of responding with an xkcd is not lost on me)

Much like the promptfondlers proudly claiming they are stochastic parrots, flaunting your inability to recognise intelligence in other humans isn’t a great flex.

Not sure where there’s a good summary of the drama, but it started (I think) back in February with some serious concerns about transphobic moderation on tumblr. Openly trans user predstrogen posted

I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere

and he took it a bit too seriously, including banning them for dubious reasons then looking them up on twitter and listing all their old alt account names to their followers, because he’s totally not a transphobic stalker y’all and this is a reasonable thing to do when you’re worth half a billion.

The trackpad and trackpoint of my aging linux laptop stop working if the thing gets its lid shut. The touchscreen continues to work just fine, however. It turns out that while two stupid things can’t make a good thing, they can sometimes cancel each other out.

Guess he’s still pretty shaken by the car-covered-in-hammers incident.

To the surprise of no-one: the robots were just mechanical turks.

https://jalopnik.com/teslas-beer-serving-optimus-robot-was-controlled-by-a-h-1851670923

Ahh, looks like the important stuff was already there. I could have sworn I checked, but apparently not!

Today’s entry in the wordpress saga: seizing plugins from devs. The author of this one appears to be affiliated with wpengine, which possibly signals more events like this in the future.

We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.

A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.

More details here: https://furry.engineer/@cendyne/113296240801713427

And speaking of electronic ass-monitoring, I’m reminded of this gem from 10 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

So little has changed since then!

she’s calling a“baby handler”—picture an exoskeleton crossed with a car seat. It’s a late-night soothing machine that rocks, supplies pre-pumped breast milk, and maybe offers a bidet-like “cleaning and drying situation.”For your children, perhaps, this is their first experience of being close to a machine.

Ah yes, famously the worst part of having children: touching them. Urgh. At least we can be pretty certain that this sort of thing will have no negative psychological impacts on babies and young children, who are famously disinterested in their parents, and neglect isn’t a thing!

Or, once the baby arrives, in nipple stickers that nursing parents could apply to track biofluid exchange. If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.

Do you know what the worst thing about breast feeding is? It is hard to monetise! Women just excrete milk! For free! Anyway, what if we could interpose a disposable data-harvesting device into the process, maybe on a subscription basis?

Reduce your time-to-insight

I do not think that word means what they think it means.

And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?

https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-athlete-intelligence-translates-workout-data-into-simple-and