Translation:

For when you have to move fast

The Böcker Agilo transports your up to 400 kg heavy treasures at 42 m/min - whisper quiet thanks to a 230 V electric motor.

It’s also funny how Lemmy is buying up this narrative.

The entire US economy is currently being propped up by growth in the AI/tech sector.

What’s happening is that Dementia Don is curb-stomping the US economy. AI investments, mainly in data centers, are the only thing that still seems promising. When you are on a trek and someone leads you through Death Valley, while pouring out all the water, you shouldn’t blame the last horse that still keeps going.

Putting the blame in the right place would certainly help, with a view toward the mid-terms.

Financially: Diversify. Make sure that you are not completely dependent on what happens in the US. But mind that Europe comes with its own imponderable risks (ie Putin). Same with China. Maybe some old leader dies and the new crew runs everything into the ground; they go to war with Taiwan, that sort of thing.

I agree with everything. The thing is, I’ve been thinking about the psychology behind this lately.

When Fedi-Fans complain about Bluesky, it is usually based on the misunderstanding that it also is instance based. It really doesn’t seem to occur to many that things might be done differently. But I think it may go a little deeper.

A common complaint is that it’s too expensive to run a full relay. People want to self-host it all. They want to feel that they are in control and don’t need anyone. It’s not particularly rational but people do lots of silly things chasing that feeling. The rational start would be to move somewhere remote and grow your own food. Instead, people buy a pick-up truck or degoogle their phone.

That architecture also appeals to a more tribal mindset. An instance is “our” place. We just pull up the drawbridge when bad people come and we are safe here in “our” castle.

I think to some people that is more appealing than the more open design of atproto.

On Bluesky, there is all this waffle about some people trying to get someone banned. They might find such tribal architecture more appealing.

I’d argue that the modular design is a more radical approach to decentralization.

Yes, but only if you can do without instances. Instances seem to be important to many in the Fediverse.

I realize my title has little to do with the post

I was going to say. Red dwarf is the name of a ship and Constellation is a class of ship. In any case, you can’t have a proper ship without a bridge.

Yes, but that doesn’t seem sufficient for some. Conservatives certainly would like to remove trans people from the public completely. Aside: It’s foolish for trans people to copy these tactics, assuming this comes organically from the trans community. These people are certainly acting like the heels in some right-wing propaganda play.

Bluesky offers several ways in which users can remove unwanted content from their experience. Easiest is for users to block Singal; banning him from their personal part of the network. Blocklists can be shared easily. Users can also spin up their own moderation service.

I probably shouldn’t go into the details of what Bluesky can do on a technical level. Incidentally, that blog post contains errors.

In short: On a technical level, the Bluesky company can greatly reduce the visibility of someone. But they would likely run into legal problems if they used that on Singal. The EU regulates what can be done quite strictly. Maybe they could benefit from some industry friendly “loopholes”. I’d have to look that up.

That needs a longer explanation.

An instance does not interact with all other instances. It only syncs with other instances when users follow someone there, join a community, …

But that’s also a problem. It means you can’t search the entire Fediverse from a particular instance and find new and interesting discussions and people. There is no discovery feed. For that, you need something like Bluesky’s relay. That relay actually does keep up with what everyone is posting and archives it.

But that’s one aspect of Bluesky that draws a lot of criticism by Fedi people. A full relay is expensive to run and not something anyone can self-host. Pruned down versions are doable, though. If everyone actually did run their own relay, then one would get you the combinatorial problem.

In practice, large instances are the Fediverse solution to the discovery problem. You can see what the many users on that instance post. Also, the many users subscribe to many things and so a large instance will cache much content from elsewhere. That architecture encourages centralization.

There’s other difficult issues. So you have a little server that serves your content to a few followers. Some celebrity with millions of followers would have to rent an entire server rack. But what if little old you interacts with a celeb and now all their followers try to fetch your content from your little server? Common problem. You just need caching. EG the celebrity rack also serves your content to their followers and takes the load off your server. But now whoever is doing the caching can also filter replies. There’s no simply solution there.

Yes. On Bluesky, they could be individually muted or blocked. You can make and share blocklists, make your own custom feeds that exclude such posters, or even create your own moderation service that removes (or blurs, …) posts for your subscribers. Obviously, that is not satisfactory for some people.

Yes. It’s only a problem if you expect or want the Fediverse to be the future of social media, which it isn’t.

This does raise a question relevant to the Fediverse. Some Bluesky users are lobbying to have Jesse Singal banned, whoever that is. Of course, a hallmark of a decentralized network is that there is no central authority that could actually do that. Implicitly, this demand is a rejection of the very concept of decentralization.

Once people find out what decentralization means, are they even willing to tolerate it?

Ethical meaning : “private”, "anonymous, “not training with your data”, “no censured”, “open source”…

Yes. You have to be careful with the meaning of “ethical”. Most often, people write about “ethical AI” to demand money for copyright owners.

Case in point: Some people say that AI is only open source if the training data can also be shared freely. That means the training data has to be public domain or that permission by the copyright owner was obtained. If that’s what you mean by “open source”, then your options are extremely limited. EG some offerings from AllenAI.

Uncensored is also tricky. Many say that ethical AI does not output bad content. Of course, what bad content is depends very much on who you ask. The EU or China have strict legal requirements but not the same, of course. In any case, when you train an AI, you steer it to generate a certain kind of output. Respectable businesses don’t want NSFW stuff. Some horny individuals out there want exactly that. So it depends on what you want.

Check out the SillyTavernAI subreddit (and also LocalLlama). There you find people who value private, uncensored LLMs, though not necessarily copyright. It’s also where the above-mentioned horny individuals hang out for related reasons.

Duckduckgo offers free, anonymous access to major Chatbots. Maybe worth checking out.

Bad rant. Wrong on technical aspects and self-contradictory. Anyway, off-topic here.

Only if the medication doesn’t work. The evidence is that placebos don’t work. Mostly, the placebo effect is a statistical illusion.

It is plausible that the body will expend more energy to combat a disease if you are (sub-)consciously convinced that you are cared for and don’t need to stress. Stress hormones down-regulate the immune response. Cortisol, used for treatment of autoimmune disorders like asthma and allergies, is a stress hormone.

But a sham treatment could also have the opposite effect. If your subconscious understands that as a signal that you must get back into action, you may end up releasing stress hormones. These psychological effects are just too idiosyncratic and fickle to be used reliably.

Stuff like broken bones or cancer doesn’t respond to psychology at all. The body is already doing all it can.

ETA: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7156905/

It’s more like colds are incredibly good at responding to the human body. Following the evolution of corona was quite amazing, no?

Many things are fundamentally feasible. I see 2 things you argue for.

One is changing the caching strategy. I don’t think that’s wise in terms of load sharing, but certainly feasible on a small scale. In certain circumstances, it may be preferred.

The other thing is using older protocols and standards. The practical reason to do this would be to use existing tooling, libraries, code. I’m not seeing such opportunities. I’m not that familiar with these, but it seems like they would have to be extended anyway. So I don’t really see the point.

At a minimum this is adding the number of instances that federate a given content streams to the multiple of storage needed to host the content, even if that storage is ephemeral. Not so big a problem at 100,000 users, but at 100,000,000 users this is a lot of storage cost we are talking about. Unless somehow the user/client doesnt cache the content they pull from an instance locally on their device when they view it?

Worry more about the bandwidth. Your instance would have to serve your content to all these 100M users. The way it is, much of the load goes to the instance where a user is registered. That means that an instance can control hosting costs by closing registrations.

My point was this isn’t an issue when all content is self-hosted, because the author as the host can edit, delete, or migrate all they want and maintain full direct control over the source of that content the client interacts with whenever a pull request comes in. Yes the user Caches the content when they read it, but there is no intermediary copy.

There’s the fundamental problem. What you think of as “your” data, other people think of as “their” data. That can’t be resolved. What’s worse is that controlling “your” data requires controlling other people’s computers and devices, as with DRM.

War. War never changes.

Depends on the jurisdiction. This is a conflict between freedom of speech and the reputation of the brand (which has financial value). Countries with a more recent monarchical past tend to value reputation over free speech, eg Japan but also Europe. The US has been a republic for a quarter millennium. Since MS is a US company, I think they wouldn’t even pursue this in the first place.

Generally, service providers are exempt for liability for such things if they follow certain rules of conduct. EG the US DMCA says that you are not liable for copyright infringement, if you comply with takedown notices. I’m not sure how that works for trademarks in the US.

Generally, though, you should expect to be held responsible for any infringing content on your service, once you learn/are notified about it. You will be treated as if you had created the content yourself. That means that you will have to make the argument in court that the use of the trademark was legal. And if you lose, you will pay the damages.

Questions?

You have full control over a server on which you chose to run certain Software. But you feel you don’t have to comply with takedown requests because that’s just how the software works? That may work on indulgent parents but not in court. If you’re too technically inept to know how to comply, then you’re just not complying. End of story.