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.

1. Jabber was much smaller than the Fediverse when Google launched Talk.

2. Users are more aware of the risk now. “Oh you should go use Google Talk, it’s an open standard” is stupid in retrospect. Likewise, “you should use Threads, it’s an open standard” would be absurd. The value here is “you should use Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever, it’s a good open platform and still lets you interact with Threads users”.

3. It’s important to remember that the most famous example of embrace-extend-extinguish ultimately failed: Microsoft’s tweaks to Java and Javascript are long dead, Microsoft having embraced Google’s javascript interpreter and abandoned Java in favour of their home-grown .NET platform.

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.

It shows that “no rent control” basically means “your landlord can throw you out at any time without notice” by raising rent to a ludicrous amount. It completely undermines all other tenant protections. Even conservatives should be supporting at least modest rent controls to prevent cases like this.

So don’t? You get the new hero like a month or so later then. I haven’t put a dime into ow since I bought it. You don’t need the cosmetics. Let the dumb whales fund the game.

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.

Hah, I (a Sr developer at the time) once built an entire mapping layer in our ETL system to deal with the fact that our product had long and expressive names for every data point but our scientists used statistical tools that had no autocomplete and choked on variable names longer than 32 chars so they named everything in like 8 chars of disemvoweled nonsense.

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

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.”