A number of writers and political commentators considered Berlusconi’s political success a precedent for the 2016 United States presidential election of real estate tycoon Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States,[250][251][252] with most citing Berlusconi’s panned prime ministerial tenure and therefore making the comparison in dismay. Roger Cohen of The New York Times wrote: “Widely ridiculed, endlessly written about, long unscathed by his evident misogyny and diverse legal travails, Berlusconi proved a Teflon politician … Nobody who knows Berlusconi and has watched the rise and rise of Donald Trump can fail to be struck by the parallels.”[253] In The Daily Beast, Barbie Latza Nadeau wrote: “If Americans are wondering just what a Trump presidency would look like, they only need to look at the traumatized remains of Italy after Berlusconi had his way.”[254] During the 2016 United States election, Politico described Berlusconi as the closest parallel to Trump in a historical world leader.[255] In a piece written for Slate and published in April 2017, Lorenzo Newman noted the similarities in the career trajectories between the two.[256]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi#Comparisons_to_other_leaders

It’s what Silvio Berlusconi’s sex parties with underage prostitutes were called.

He was a media billionaire who used his control of the media to get elected prime minister and evade prosecution for various crimes.

Bunga bunga parties seem a more internationally popular Italian political custom.

You never want to know how the sausage is made.

I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.

How would that actually work? Like, you’d have pro-Trump and anti-Trump companies that only employ pro- and anti-Trump employees and only serve pro- and anti-Trump customers? What happens when someone who is basically pro-Trump thinks that ICE goes too far?

To me, this feels like school politics.

OMG! Jaden invited ICE to his birthday party! I’m never talking to him again!

Oh No! ICE nabbed Julio! I’m telling the teacher and they will get suspended!

Probably a good number of these people are actual children. I know there are adults who have broadly similar ideas. For someone living a very sheltered and privileged life, being trolled on the internet is the absolute worst form of aggression they ever experience. Particularly in Europe, activists and politicians talk about “digital violence”, which tells you that they have no sense of proportion.

Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social

The Mastodon devs made a choice in releasing it as open source. They could have decided to pick and chose who is allowed to use it. It was completely foreseeable, that the software would be used for something like Gab or Truth.Social. When they release update, they know that these will also be used by such services.

This is merely a statement of fact, not criticism. They chose not to exercise power or become arbiters of good and evil. That is laudable.

Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don’t ban Nazis.

I get it. You feel that tech companies should deny service to bad people. For example, to a government agency acting on behalf of a president elected by a solid majority of the popular vote.

I agree that the voters got it wrong, but I don’t think that the rich and powerful vetoing voters will lead to good outcomes. Look at medieval Europe. Life got better with democracy, not with a supposedly more just king.

The tech lord most in line with your ideas is Elon Musk, except that he’s kinda nazi. So, on a purely practical note, it doesn’t seem very likely that tech companies being more political would lessen racism.

Do you think it would be better if all the billionaires, who are probably mostly non-nazi, were activist like him?

So, trying to parse what’s going on here.

Bluesky has verified that an account claiming to belong to the US government agency ICE really is controlled by that agency. Somehow that shows that Mastodon is better. Because Trump has his own Mastodon instance and doesn’t need anyone to vouch for his goons?

Looking at the comments, maybe the issue is rather that the Bluesky company provides services to ICE. Tech companies should refuse service. Huh. I guess there is more diversity of opinion on Lemmy than I had thought, regarding the power of tech companies, democracy, and law.

Good pitch. You could also ask people to help out with the more expensive computations. Say, adding alt text.

In the client, you wouldn’t need to be sorting and running extensive calculations on all data. You could, e.g, build the front-page by indexing/scoring posts and comments that have been created since your last visit with a hard cap on some time window (last 48h) or total data points (e.g, keep only the most recent 10k objects in a local hot database, freeze/archive everyhing else.)

Absolutely. There’s a lot you can do. The “For You” Feed on Bluesky is quite instructive. https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky.social/post/3mb2r5qei322a

But when you’re talking about sending a lot more data to clients, you really need to consider what that means for the internet bill of instance owners.

Embrace content sorting and filtering algorithms, but on the client side, with optional control by the user.

You can only filter and sort what was downloaded by the client. So that runs into resource constraints.

Standardize tags on all content. So many of the different ways different platforms classify or organize content can be implemented as tags, which increases interoperability between them.

I’m so with you. https://xkcd.com/927/

Transferable user identity (between instances)

User identity and authentication as separate service from social network instance

That’s more the ATproto/Bluesky vision.

Yeah, one would think so. And those were the hobbyists that Gates was addressing in that open letter.

“They” is the copyright industry. The same people, who are suing AI companies for money, want the Internet Archive gone for more money.

I share the fear that the copyrightists reach a happy compromise with the bigger AI companies and monopolize knowledge. But for now, AI companies are fighting for Fair Use. The Internet Archive is already benefitting from those precedents.

In the US, copyright is limited by Fair Use. It is still IP. Eventually, you’d just be changing how Fair Use works. Not all for the better, I think.

Maybe one could compare it to a right of way over someone’s physical property. The public may use it for a certain purpose, in a limited way, which lowers its value. But what value it has, belongs to the owner.

What kind of person owned a computer as a hobby in 1976?

That’s true in the same way that Trump’s tariffs are paid by other countries. Which is to say: Not at all.

Bill Gates was no billionaire at the time. His background was probably shared by almost all computer hobbyists at the time.

“Property is theft.”

the caveats that commercializing someone else’s work or taking credit for someone else’s work should be illegal.

So, not actually abolishing IP, then.

It’s a bit of a split among libertarians. Some very notable figures like Ayn Rand were strong believers in IP. In fact, Ayn Rand’s dogmas very much align with what is falsely represented as left-wing thought in the context of AI.

It’s really irritating for me how much conservative capitalist ideals are passed off as left-wing. Like, attitudes on corporations channel Adam Smith. I think of myself as pragmatic and find that Smith or even Hayek had some good points (not Rand, though). But it’s absolutely grating how uneducated that all is. Worst of all, it makes me realize that for all the anti-capitalist rhetoric, the favored policies are all about making everything worse.

I really don’t get how opinions on intellectual property and its “theft” turn 180 whenever AI is mentioned.