Cutting out everyone but the middleman

Finally, they can make a robo-Rogan that can radicalise young men at a fraction of the cost

BlueSky has already received funding from venture capital, and so will need to find a way to monetise its user base. Once enough people depend on the site for their social connections and friend circles, the promise of decentralisation will be quietly removed, APIs will be restricted (as on Reddit/Xitter), terms of service updated to ban circumvention, and the user-controlled algorithms modified to deliver your eyeballs to the advertisers and your data to data brokers, and before long, it’ll be an Instagram-style slot machine, where you mostly see ads and AI pink-slime, but keep pulling the lever in case there’s another update you care about in there somewhere.

Their US and Australian divisions are solid. The UK one varies, and has some decent people, but also has a persistent infestation of TERF/SWERFs. A few high-profile ones have left after their comments became irreconcilable with the paper’s ostensibly liberal/progressive line, but you still get regular Observer opinion columns about pronoun-mongers sexualising our children or other scare campaigns. There’s a rumour that the editor, Kath Viner, is herself a TERF and personally protecting them, though I haven’t seen any evidence one way or the other.

They could spin up a Mastodon instance, but given how lousy their UK editorial department is with TERFs, it would be justifiably blocked for transphobia.

The village on Lunt near Liverpool considered changing its name to “Launt”, because vandals kept adding a top stroke to the L in signs.

The love song as a genre always felt vaguely religious, like hymns singing the praises of an awesome, terrible god, beseeching them to favour and not smite one, only in this case, the god being romantic love.

Coulsdon is the new Scunthorpe, it seems

Do they want to get France kicked out of NATO?

We’re probably more likely to see Europe paying reparations to Russia to normalise relations and get cheap gas again.

True, though BlueSky is a temporary redoubt at best, though one which, through switching costs, will trap people just as Xitter did. They accepted venture capital funds, and so when the time comes, will have to somehow recoup that from their users. At the moment, they’re in the glue-trap phase, attracting their users with promises to be open and not screw them over (see also: the early days of Facebook). Once enough are there, and have brought their friends and built personally meaningful networks dependent on BlueSky, the trap will close: third-party APIs will be restricted to the point of not providing an escape (as happened with Reddit and Xitter), the user-configurable algorithms will get unremovable additions that gradually increase the amount of ads, influencer content, AI pink-slime and whatever else they want in your feed, and then you’ll lose the ability to see all the content you selected, all the better to keep you refreshing and scrambling for anything you may have missed. And then, since all your friends and the cool people you follow are there, your choices will be to stay and suck it up, or effectively become a hermit.

So, accept cybertrucks in the narrow streets of Italian hill towns, high fructose corn syrup in all food, freedom of hate speech driving vulnerable voices out of your public square, and AR-15s for everyone who wants one, or we throw you to the Orcs?

and apparently Nazis are following suit.

Someone should perhaps spin up a Mastodon/Misskey/something instance named swifties.social and bring them into the fediverse.

He’s technically not wrong.

Singapore, or as William Gibson called it, Disneyland With The Death Penalty.

IIRC, they do forbid third-party clients from their network. You can build it from source, but you won’t be able to connect to production Signal servers.

Third-party clients would not necessarily be a bad thing. Signal has limited resources, and as such has to cut corners. I for one would love a native desktop client that’s not Electron bloatware.

Presumably this will mean a high-performance ARM CPU (comparable to the Apple M series), along with the dynamic recompilation technology Steam have been experimenting with. (It’s unlikely that Intel or AMD will deliver the generational leap they’re talking about.)

yeule is awesome

In a sustainable world, energy can and should be cheaper than raw materials. We are only harvesting a tiny fraction of the solar energy hitting the earth, to say nothing of wind and geothermal power. Rolling out more renewables and energy storage and using some of the surplus power to switch from extracting new resources to recycling our waste would greatly lower our footprint.

I wonder what the proportion of bots to actual gamergate incel chuds who idolise Musk was.