That could be true. People do seem to tend to tolerate slow declines in platform quality surprisingly long before jumping to available alternatives. I think that’s at least in part due to that ‘critical mass’ effect described elsewhere in this conversation that makes people prefer to stay where they believe everyone else is.

If federation does end up being the only solution that pans out, I hope to see additional approaches beyond ActivityPub. As capable as it is, its design seems to confound any implementations of private communications or revocation of access at many levels where it would be very useful and empowering to admins, moderators, and regular users alike.

I would love to see a federation model where each user has an encrypted profile and content in their own archive that they manage and/or have stored somewhere for them, which they can then use to join servers and choose what data from their profile they share with who else on that server, as well as participate in server local and federated public channels, as well as private data exchanges facilitated but not readable by the server or federated network of servers you have a user account signed up.

I’m not sure it could promise revocation for all data on servers of unknown configuration, but could accommodate info that is facilitated by but not readable by any of the participating servers. Posts in public areas would have and require much lower revocation/deletion assurances, but could still have them in a manner at least as robust as ActivityPub.

I’ve been watching the space as time permits and am interested in a lot of the amazing things people make for free for the ‘love of the game’!

I think they are continuously repeating, specifically formulated patterns merely creating the illusion of endlessly increasing stupidity. It the Shepard Tone of political dumbness of action.

I hadn’t thought of that, nor can I imagine many kids shouting “Trump, I choose you!” for any reason.

The distinction between “food” and “drug” is entirely made up, it turns out.

I don’t see much of the former, but the latter seems pretty ubiquitous already: vegans hunting vegetarians for sport, communists splitting socialists into equal chunks among them, clones clawing over one another to be standing more to the west than each other.

“The Left: Where the Perfect is the Arch-nemesis of the Good”

I get the sentiment, but I feel that the majority, if not all of those benefits can be achieved by a floss threaded forum server application and companion client applications. So long as the software’s design objectives includes content ownership and portability, you could bail to another instance with all your stuff and re-share it or not as you see fit.

As much as I understand the goals of federation, it introduces many, many, intractable problems with efficiency, privacy, security, moderation, and ease administration in exchange for openness benefits that can likely or definitely be attained in other ways.

I believe that the idea of federation is not fundamentally bad, per se, but seems to have had a hype wave at a really opportune time, that made it the forerunner among the solutions to lock-in being discussed at the time. Plenty of other solutions seemed just as valid, but they lacked newness and novelty that made them less hyped when Reddit alternatives were being heavily discussed.

One of my favorite tricks that a friend of mine showed me years ago was this:

Put a check box or radio button somewhere on the page that will never end up visible to the end user marked with a label like “check here to verify you’re not a not” or “choose your ethnicity from this list or select prefer not to say”, then reject accounts that ever check those boxes, because a human never would. If you occasionally snare a blind person by mistake,they can email to bypass that with a human admin.

I don’t know if it would trick modern bots, but he said it worked awesome back then.

Fining companies that commit a crime a small portion of the money they gained by committing that crime is not progress, that is the problem here. Meta still made more money, after the fine, than if they had not perpetrated the crime. This is more of the status quo, which is why people are complaining about this the same as they had about the previous million times this same thing happened.

I call BS! I have it on good authority that Bilbo Baggins is at least eleventy-one.

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It seems to me that ICE is operating in a target-rich environment, which makes their choice of targets seem particularly poor for their optics. You’d think they would not want to intentionally nab people that garner public sympathy like this when you’d think they could just as easily find just as many that don’t, but this seems to keep coming up.

It doesn’t seem like a clean path to electoral victories, that’s for sure anyway.

Trident was such a cooler name than WebKit, too. A rare instance of Microsoft giving something a name that was neither confusing nor lame.

I mean, those ActiveX controls were a little… well… Trident was a cool name!

There is never anything fundamentally bad about more choices, but that doesn’t mean that some of the choices are not fundamentally bad.

While that’s true for some of those, you never know when there will be a paradigm shift, and neither do they. Also, off the top of my head, I know that Yahoo! and IBM caused their own undoing through long periods of mismanagement. The world was in their hands and they couldn’t stay out of their own way. Standard Oil was broken up in direct response to the establishment and enforcement of federal anti-monopoly regulation.

So, again, don’t give up hope! If the pendulum does not swing back the other way, it will the defy the sum of all human history. If you think about it, believing otherwise doesn’t even make sense, like believing if I keep throwing a ball on the air, eventually it will stay up there.

I think those are part of the “object lessons” curriculum.

Try not to give up hope! People said similar things about IBM, Yahoo!, AltaVista, AOL, Blockbuster Video, Standard Oil, The Dutch East India Company, and more! All of those are either in the dustbin of history or ghosts of their former selves.

The reckoning will come to these companies that continue to seem successful in spite of providing objectively bad and worsening products; nothing has ever stopped the pendulum from swinging. When you see your chance to help, give it a push.

Unlike Pandora’s box, though, a lot of the dumber applications of this stuff will go back in when the VC money dries up.

When I refer to improvements, I mean fundamental improvements to the underlying technology, which appear to be at a stubborn plateau.

I believe the improvements you’re referring to are better guardrails. They are still improving the interface with regard to context and scope, as those functionalities are separate from the underlying technology, bolted on top of it to keep it on task and more continually aware of and operating within the defined context.

Underneath, though, each new model appears to be a refactoring of the previous one to get different sometimes better results, but the methodology is the same, and its strengths and weaknesses remain largely unchanged.

So, essentially what my objection to this practice is this:

This technology has led to companies leaning harder on their current people to get more done with the same amount of time with AI tools. That doesn’t seem to be successful at any sort of scale so far, but that’s the plan nonetheless. As a result, new talent is coming into the industry at a much slower rate than before–hiring is on hold while everyone waits to see if these tools really can replace bodies in the workforce in a serious way (again, super inconclusive at this point).

So, looking forward even one single generation, we will have dramatically fewer experts in the field than before, because so many fewer people were able to start in that field last generation. Since the need for programmers is greater every year, either these tools will be a wild success and meet all these business demands, or there will be a crisis of demand with no easy ways out.

Since both of the foreseeable outcomes are detrimental to the workers themselves, what and who exactly are we rooting for? I think that most people, given the choice, would choose the existing cycle with a proven track record, rather than gamble on something so uncertain with no clear economic benefit to the workers themselves.

Right, but aren’t the interns in training specifically to get better at that than they are today, and eventually surpass the abilities of the AI?

These LLMs are at best OK at this stuff, and are not improving at any sort of convincing rate. If you don’t train anyone to be better than the LLM, the retirement of your generation will make the whole industry you’re in at best, OK at its job.

This is an appeal to the masses. There is not yet any consensus amongst anyone who has scientifically compiled data that AI use in nearly any application has yielded productivity gains, while ill effects of its use are widely documented with more being discovered often.

I am not saying that there are no productive applications for AI, but I am saying that of the currently millions of attempted applications for it, maybe a couple dozen will prove effective and truly have a positive cost-benefit ratio.

“9 out of 10 doctors recommend Camel cigarettes.”