Gregory's Server
What's going on over at Bluesky?
Oh they fundraised and got a whole bunch of money from a blockchain investor who has money in basically ever fucked up scam you have heard of.
Great.
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15 posts total
When logging into Wordpress.org (login.wordpress.org) you have to confirm that you are not affiliated with WPEngine. While this looks petty and childish it's another sign the Wordpress is in the hands of people who can't find less destructive ways to handle their fucking midlife crisis.
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 @tante I wonder if they have actually put that in their terms and conditions … and gave sufficient notice of the change to their customers … and refunded the customers who they now do not allow to log in. I suspect this is grounds for at least some people to sue them.
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Balaji Srinivasan is the spearhead of the new fascist movement establishing itself in Silicon Valley. It's easy to dismiss him as a clown given how bad, inconsistent and dumb his ideas are but he's a clown with a lot of followers in tech who listen to his visions of "ethnic cleansing". https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat
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  A few weeks ago I asked around for interest in #luddite events here in Berlin. While everything takes longer than one likes (work and stuff) I did set up a mailing list for announcements/etc. If you want to get an email as soon as things are set up you can add your email address to https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/berlinluddites . I can't fully commit to a date/schedule yet, but I am working on it. Forward the address to whoever you think might be interested. Thanks fellow travelers. Ada Lovelace was cool, sure. But in the year 2024 maybe find a second woman to name your "women in tech" or "diversity in tech" thing after. Otherwise it looks as if you know exactly one woman.
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   @tante Frequently leadership at orgs are composed of people that never really had to get their hands dirty. For 2024 I hope we can talk less about decentralization and more about democratization. Decentralization sounds nice, is sometimes the right approach but is also tech's version of "the market is gonna fix this". Way more interested in finding more robust ways of doing democracy on, with and to the platforms we inhabit.  @tante The big question is what "Democracy" even means in a programmable environment with few paper legacy dependencies.
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@tante As a former techie, I latched onto Firefox fifteen years ago and never looked back. It also says something about Firefox when TOR uses it as the base for its browser.  "Here's an AI to write Alt-Text for your images" is exactly what @danmcquillan argues is the "management of austerity" at the core of current "AI" systems: Marginalized (in this case blind) people get a shitty version of the real thing because we can't be bothered ("can't afford") to give the real thing. Writing alt text is not some annoyance that you should automate half-assedly. Write the fucking description of you post an image. It's just part of what you do when posting a fucking image.
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 @tante I had a Jolla phone and was happy with it aside from the fact that I couldn’t use Signal. If you don’t care about the networks your friends, family, and coworkers use, you can be a purist. I can put a ROM without nasty nasty evil Googles on a phone. What I can’t do is make the damned thing smaller. That’s the thing I will give Fairphone shit about. Phones are too damned big. Make a smaller phone and more people would buy it and use it longer. @tante This is my take too. And it's not like there aren't options for degoogling a Fairphone, I'm planning on installing CalyxOS when I get mine and it's great to have that choice. But it's also great to have the choice to use normal Google Android if that's what people need. It's like being pissed that you can install Microsoft Windows on a Framework laptop, it's just an option you can pick if it works for you.  @tante I wish the Ubuntu project for phones (and other devices) had been successful. Quite apart from the software and apps just having a good enough sustainable (both business and environmentally speaking) hardware platform would be huge win. If you look at what % of all phone users are on the latest flagship ~ $1000 a pop phones I'll bet its < 10%. The rest of us can use something like Fairphone. And if it's a hardware spec then like "the PC" it can be cloned and mass produced. First it was: "Search is bad now, I'll just use Reddit to find answers.". Now Reddit is trying to kill itself while the search engines inject falsehood generators into their pipelines for weird reasons. Finding information is gonna get a lot harder.
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 @tante für unsere (Haupt/Real-) Schüler ist Internet Recherche jetzt over. Sie lesen keine Artikel mehr, sondern kopieren nur das erste Ergebnis ihrer Suchanfrage mit Copy und Paste. Ist auch völlig unmöglich, da etwas einzuordnen, weil ihnen das Vorwissen fehlt. Ich stelle jetzt im Unterricht wieder auf Buchrecherche um oder drucke die relevanten Artikel auf Papier aus. 🤷♀️  @tante worldcat.org and multiple friendships with (borrowing) privileges is the answer. Let’s coin a new term: call it #polylibrarious ?  |
@tante who ?
@tante Honestly, there isn't a social media company that isn't getting looking for funds one way or the other. Let's not forget the whole AI aspect slipping in to many of these social apps as well.
@tante I saw a bluesky dev respond to someone asking about this and they said, basically, "yeah we had some blockchain companies in the last round too, luckily being a public benefit corp will give us protection”
I mean, Public Benefit Corporations *do* generally have some actual enforceable stuff (as opposed to B Corps just being a pinky swear) but that's putting a *lot* of faith in it being enough to hold off the money people.