Arotrios

I rewatched this recently, and yeah, all the cliches are there (some rather clumsily filmed even by 40s standards) - but fuck me if Bogie still doesn’t blow it out of the water with that performance. I can’t think of a single film noir protagonist that matches what he pulled off in that film. He’s better here than he is in Casablanca by a long shot imho.

Agreed. I’d also like to add that intelligence != wisdom != experience, and you need all three to achieve real understanding.

The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.

I think the Fediverse.observer stats for the 19th are off - it’s showing that drop across all software categories - Mastodon and Kbin show the same dip.

@MargotRobbie I’m getting PTSD from this post, and an urge to say “this”. You’ve officially become my favorite version of Margot Robbie (although Harley Robbie is close on your heels).

Woot Kbin Gang! Holds the best parties by far. You get lemmings and mastodons all rocking out as Reddit burns. This occasionally gets messy (mastodons get pregnant, lemmings get flat), but damn is it fun.

Being able to follow other users makes a huge difference to content discovery - there’s a lot of immediate content you’re missing out on if you’re only on Lemmy, and Mastodon users miss out on most of the long form content and discussions.

Depends on the context, but generally it indicates a lack of critical thinking and a capacity to be easily swayed by sensational claims. Joe Rogan has no legitimacy as a journalist, and a checkered record when it comes to the veracity of what and who he presents on his show, which has shifted significantly rightward over the years, going from pot smoking and ancient aliens to diet supplements and anti-vaccine narratives. Generally, in the US, Joe Rogan fans are predominantly white, male, and right-wing with a libertarian bias.

10k will last you about 3 months comfortably, 6 if you’re single and willing to scrimp or live in your car. That’s your time limit to get a new job.

I had about 3x that saved and took a year off after working a decade at my previous position (I was pretty burnt out and hadn’t been able to take more than a week off since I started). Having that padding gave me the time and peace of mind to look for something I really wanted, and gave me the freedom to turn down offers that would have put me back into the burnout cycle.

I ended up with a full WFH position with a 50% bump in salary. Within a year, I made back what I had spent simply by maintaining my budget from my previous salary.

If I hadn’t had the cushion, it would have been pedal to the metal and accepting the first position offered, and I would have likely hit burnout before a year was out.

The instance owner determines what’s on their “public” tagged activity feeds. If they remove the “public” tag from a post or user account, it’s restricted from non-authenticated requests from outside servers. You’re correct that this shouldn’t grab user IP addresses, but they could if an instance owner is including that information in what they mark as “public” profile feed data. I should reiterate that I know of no instance that does this, but the capability is there in theory (and I do know that certain forum software packages outside the Fediverse collect and publish this level of information, although it’s a dying practice).

I’m not advocating instance owners turn everything private, but it’s clear they’re going to have to examine what they’re providing through their feeds to Threads if they’re serious about their users’ security and privacy. The safest bet is to defederate from Threads until it’s clear what Meta’s intentions are (aside from their rhetoric, which is always deceitful when it comes to user privacy).

As to what Meta will do, they absolutely will scrape that activity data for marketing use, if they aren’t already. It’s what their entire business model on Facebook is built around - targeted ads based on user activity. Anything they say about protecting that data is lip service at best given their past performances and lawsuits. It also very likely that they’ll merge it with their existing data hoards, and do their best to de-anonymize accounts so that they can increase their data accuracy and thus their profit margin.

Looks like there’s a lot of FUD around this, so I decided to jump into the ActivityPub spec and see exactly what they can and can’t get with the spec as is.

First off, they cannot get a users individual IP unless the instance owner publishes it in the profile data as part of a “public” activity stream. I don’t know of any instance that does this currently (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).

It looks like what Meta is looking to do is scrape the information in the “public” tagged activity streams:

In addition to [ActivityStreams] collections and objects, Activities may additionally be addressed to the special “public” collection, with the identifier https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public.

Activities addressed to this special URI shall be accessible to all users, without authentication.

This is similar to what most instances do to show the posts of a user or community - they send a request to get “public” tagged data to publish to their end users. Within this data is all the activity information on that post - who upvoted what and who, and who commented. Again, this is the same way federation works now - your server has an activity stream of all your followed and followers that it can make available to view by tagging their activity as “public”. Many instances have this information tagged as “public” as a default.

Now, this system works fine if you’re dealing with small actors that don’t have nefarious designs on the network, or the resources to dominate it.

When you have a digital behemoth with grand AI designs that’s already embroiled in lawsuits where it was grabbing your medical data and regularly allows law enforcement to stroll through its records, it’s an entirely different situation. Meta has the power and capacity to not only engage in an “embrance, extend, extinguish” campaign against the Fediverse, but also to seriously threaten the privacy and well-being of Fediverse users in a way no single instance owner can.

I think the solution here will be for individual instance owners to harden their security and if not outright de=federate from Threads, ensure that posts are private by default and that their users are made well aware in the TOS that following a Threads user will result in sharing data about their profile that could (and most likely will) be matched back to their Facebook account.

Instances that don’t allow visibility control on posts, like Kbin and Lemmy, should look at adding an option to post only to the local server, or have the capacity to block threads.net outgoing publication based on user profile settings.

Instances that don’t allow follow request filtering probably should look at adding it (Mastodon has it implemented - Kbin and I think Lemmy would need to catch up) - otherwise users could be unaware that they’re sending their data to threads.net when someone from that service follows them.

I think it goes without saying that any data Meta gets will get the AI treatment - both to identify users and to sell your activity to marketers. That activity is the real goldmine for them - that’s a stream of revenue for marketing that rivals what Meta tracks on its own platform.

As such, it may be worthwhile for instance owners to look at removing voting and boosting counts from the “public” activity feed. This would mean more fragmentation for communities whose populations span instances (vote counts would be more off than they are now), but it would prevent bad actors from easily scraping that data for behavioral analysis.

All in all, though, I don’t believe it’s going to be a positive event when Threads does start federating. One of the nice things about the Fediverse is that the learning curve is high enough to keep the idiot count down, and I don’t really see our content or commentary here improving once Meta’s audience enters the space.

This is why when a social media site gets past a certain size, the admin team and the moderation need to be clearly defined, and siloed from each other’s core responsibilities, so the admin team focuses on running the site and the mod team focuses on making it sing.

Looks like the people actually moderating clearly had a handle on the situation. The admin was clearly overworked and didn’t agree with the direction the community was taking, and made a quick decision that was poorly thought out.

The reason admins are admins is because they’re good at running machines. You can turn a machine off if it’s broken, and change how it runs with the flip of a switch.

A community requires a much different approach, and never, no matter how wise the decision, reacts well to being told how to act. It takes a different skill set to properly moderate and run a community than it does to run a server - in fact most admins I know make notoriously bad moderators (myself included, although I’m no longer an admin).

To be honest, the admin here is acting exactly like your stereotypical libertarian tech-bro computer guy who pays lip service to the left while pocketing the more palatable pieces of the philosophy of the right. I’ve worked with a lot of them in tech. LGBTQ+ is hard stretch for these guys in general - they’ll declare gays have rights but won’t march in Pride, use slurs when in like company, and generally see LGBTQ+ as a lifestyle choice and not an inescapable biological state of being.

They don’t understand that it’s not a switch you can flick on and off.

Just glad I’m on the Fediverse where this particular admin’s meltdown doesn’t matter too much, but I have a feeling Squabblr’s fate is going to be the same as Voat (which was cool for about two weeks before the alt-right overran it).

The sun always shines brighter on the day you leave an abusive partner. Welcome to what the internet was like before centralization - a playground of imagination, unfettered thought, and unbridled creativity. Congratulations on becoming part of the renaissance that is the Fediverse and breaking free from the stench of the Spezticle.

Congrats, you get a cookie. Now toddle on kiddo.

To be fair, Aaron wasn’t really heavily involved with Reddit. He was involved with Infogami, which failed and was merged with Reddit. Per this post, he got equity in Reddit as a result, but only worked for a few months on the actual site.

After his death and the media portrayal of him as a martyr for free speech, Reddit started claiming him as “co-founder” much more vocally than they had previously. While technically he had that title, his involvement on Reddit was neither starting the company nor working on it for any extended period of time.

That being said, given what Reddit’s become, wherever his spirit roams now, I’m sure he’s relieved to have his name off the site.

Wow - bit overblown all in all. While it sounds like the quinoa guy is kinda a jerk, I’m not seeing any proof of racism on his part. He just boosted a legitimate news article (the Fediverse servers being seized that popped up yesterday) posted by this Eris character, who had been flagged as a racist troll in the past. This isn’t confirmed or denied in the various posts aside from a profile link on thebadplace.com - which has no information aside from a few racist tags on that profile (can’t tell who the profile is for).

This sounds more like the admins got snippy at each other in off-site discord drama and decided to take their toys and go home. Interesting for the /popcorn, but hey, if mastodon.art doesn’t wanna play with firefish, that’s their decision, regardless of the reasoning, end of story.

Totally - I’ve seen chromebooks that run fine, and it’s good to know that not all school districts are buying garbage machines. I was only speaking to my experience with my son’s, which was a Google branded chromebook - he got it roughly four years ago.

I think the issue was that the ones Google offered at a bulk discount to schools were the low-end models that didn’t have any memory upgrades, and there was a bunch of school-specific bloatware on it that compounded the issue. Multitasking flat out killed them, which made it difficult for my son to do anything with more than one window open. It even had issues with multiple browser tabs. I think he would have done better with a pen and paper and his library card than trying to use that thing for his schoolwork.

These things are such junk - even when new they were so slow and bloated that they couldn’t load my kid’s schoolwork half the time. I had to make sure he had an alternate laptop for use so he wouldn’t fall behind. I felt really bad for the school district, it was clear they were being ripped off, and that most of the machines were going to be in a landfill within 3 years time.

The more dumbed down the advice, the easier it is to encourage your audience to engage. Some of those who agree with them connect, and the sum of your connections on Linked In is absolutely something recruiters look at and weigh when looking at candidates. Keeping it basic and bland ensures the widest audience and potential connection pool with a minimal risk of negative feedback.

Not that I’m justifying stupid content. There’s a reason I don’t spend any more time than I have to on LinkedIn.

Yep - I watched the same thing happen at Digg after they went down the path Reddit is now. Within 3 months of their infamous redesign, it was a ghost town.

Reddit will likely limp on longer, but I think they severely underestimated how badly they’ve harmed their own business.