Part of it is just today’s polarized political climate, especially since the popularity of the Fediverse is partially a backlash to reactionaries taking over Twitter and the corporate enshittification of Facebook and Reddit.

Everything is a war now, and solidarity and boycotts are basically the only weapons that small, independent actors have. So people apply “don’t cross the picket line” thinking to everything, even where it doesn’t make sense.

Want to act properly? Contribute money and labour towards your instances. Help them build better moderation tools so they can handle the flood of crap from Threads, and onboarding tools and better UX so they can steal away the Threads users.

Dumb. Federation is how we escape from every cloud-based service being a dictatorship of the person who owns the platform. That includes federating with privately own orgs to provide them an exit.

By all means make good tools to allow individual users to block Threads (or other private instances ruled by amoral coporations), but doing it at instance level is just dumb.

edit: also, number of instances doesn’t matter. Number of daily active users matters. Most users are on mastodon.social, mastodon.cloud, lemmy.world, hachyderm.io, lemmy.world, etc. And all of those are federating. The only large instance that is not federating with threads is mas.to

There’s a huge discrepency between the scary warnings about Q* calling it the lead-up to artificial superintelligence, and the actual discussion of the capabilities of Q* (it is good-enough at logic to solve some math problems).

My theory: the actual capabilities of Q* are perfectly nice and useful and unfrightening… but somebody pointed out the obvious: Q* can write code.

Either

1. “Q* is gonna take my job!”

2. “As we enhance Q*, it’s going to get better at writing code… and we’ll use Q* to write our AI code. This thing might not be our hypothetical digital God, but it might make it.”

Kill third party everything. No more CDNs, no more tracking pixels, no more cookies, no more content from anything but the domain in the url bar.

JS is the one that’s built into the browser. If JS wasn’t built into the browser, it would go onto the trashbin of bad old languages that only survived because of their platform like VBA and ActionScript and .bat batch scripting. You can’t compare JS to any other language because JS is the one you don’t get a choice on.

The fact that this meme makes sense to anyone demonstrates how dynamic typed programming languages cause brain damage.

Normally I’m all about “yes they should be paid” but in this case it’s particularly ironic - modest ads used to be able to support newspapers. Now they need paywalls.

Title of article: internet is worse

QED.

I don’t think you realize how unwatchably blurry VHS is. I can’t believe we ever watched those things now.

DVD is still a bit of a nuisance because of aspect ratios and they’re a little blurry because SD, but VHS is just garbage.

I dunno, company that sells digital content for young people buys company that sells other digital content for young people. I can see the synergy there. Epic Games Store and Bandcamp aren’t that far apart.

I actually did do operating system development, at least back in school. But comparing Apple to everybody else is insane when Apple controls the full vertical stack of end to end hardware. You may as well compare them to the driver support on Nintendo or Toyota.

And also there’s the problem that the Android OS is based on Linux which handles the “wierd new hardware” problem by recompiling the kernel, which doesn’t work so well with closed-source binary drivers. And that’s before even getting into the ARM architecture.