I am retaliating by redirecting all links to meta to /dev/null

For one thing the “AppView” as I believe it’s called. When I looked at the whole system a month or two ago the documentation wasn’t great at giving a clear high-level overview and the details are hazy in my memory. It’s at least as hard to figure out as the constellation of protocols used in conjuction with ActivityPub. Among other potential problems the protocol layer that would allow it to be fully decentralized is just missing. If it was there, I think it might look something like ActivityPub added on top of what already exists.

From my browser history here’s one attempt to sum it up: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

I’m sure someone will come up with a link, but if anyone wants a more general solution: https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean

The more I learn about it, the more I start to suspect that even if the bluesky protocol somehow outlives Bluesky Incorporated it will remain a trap created by a billionaire which by design will never fail to be mostly centralised in its operation. Will this new organization see the danger and make their version federate properly? I’ll believe it when I see it.

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Apologies if my initial comment somehow reinforced your misconception that the linked video was all about the difficulty of finding the specs for the file format.

The thing that’s wanted is not one link to the official protocol specification document along with a dozen links to SEO-optimized AI-generated time-wasting nonsense. It’s a large set of links to diverse interesting sources discussing the topic searched for and things adjacent to it. The web was never perfect, but we were much closer to that ideal ten years ago than we are today.

Someone’s complaining about the war and you’ve come along with a pair of earplugs saying wear these, you won’t even hear the bombs.

Coffee and cola are both pretty good. Are you reflexively coming to the defense of generative AI on general principle or did you actually look at those sites, the horribleness of which is exhaustively detailed in the video, and decide that they look as if they could be useful to anyone?

I find it interesting as an experiment to measure how polluted the information environment is with machine-generated shit, not as an exercise in how to navigate around it.

Searching the web for “glb file format” seems a natural thing to do while listening to the first part of this video. On my favourite searx instance I had to scroll past only 7 links to LLM-generated garbage before finding a link to the actual spec. I wonder how Kagi fares in this test.

Perhaps they have made the decision to treat all IP addresses that aren’t officially marked as residential connections in known locations as being in international waters. As the wave of censorship continues, they’ll most likely be required to block VPN users and other “data centre” IPs well before the VPN services themselves are banned.

Interesting to learn that Pornhub now requires “identity verification for uploaders.” That must’ve had the same effect on a lot of non-professional uploaders that the new laws will have on U.S. viewers, making them go elsewhere.

It seems sort of notable that it’s “critics” rather than something like “human rights organizations around the world.”

I spoke against the need for realistic graphics last time the topic came up, and I’ll say a word in favour of it now: It’s pretty awesome having realistic lighting and shadows when you’re admiring the scenery in Skyrim. My 6600 can barely keep up, but the work it’s doing there is fully aesthetically worthwhile. The same can’t be said for every GPU-hungry game that comes out, and it may not have the central importance that it used to, but nice graphics are still nice to have. I say that as someone who appreciates NetHack at least as much as any new AAA game.

My Firefox chrome never looked much like any of those. I remember when the “classic” theme came along in 2011 and everyone praised it for being more compact and efficient, I was already long-accustomed to an even more compact layout that takes up very little vertical space and is still very similar to how I have it set up today.

From a user’s point of view customisation of the UI has gotten slightly more difficult over the years, but it’s still not that much trouble and so far it’s always been worth the effort.

Bluesky as a whole should also join the fediverse.

The fediverse is the one halfway viable alternative to the rotten big platforms that has a chance and I continue to be perplexed that Ed Zitron isn’t on it. We’re building the future of social media over here. Maybe that was you back in 2018, giving up after two days when it turned out you didn’t have an instant audience of millions after two days on mastodon. Maybe the problem didn’t seem so urgent back then. Maybe you got a bad first impression for some other reason. Try again. You make the case for it without being part of it. Join the fediverse, Ed.

I wonder how many of those one in four people are even aware that everything they say gets uploaded to a data centre somewhere. I had a phone with speech recognition as a prominent feature until I wiped it and installed a different OS, and I don’t remember seeing any warning at all about that.

I like the way she’s cheerful and optimistic, and ready to throw fireballs at anything that stands in the way.

I’m not usually going to have a Skyrim follower, but if I’m going to have a Skyrim follower it’s definitely Sa’chil.