Bluesky is “fine” if what you want is Twitter without [as much] fascism. It’s a better user experience than Mastodon. The average user doesn’t care about federation and all the rough edges where you have to understand technical details in order to understand what’s going on is frustrating for them.

I hope Mastodon learns some lessons from Bluesky (curated follow/block lists, and curated feed algorithms) but I still hope federation is the future. Bluesky will eventually enshittify because it has financial backers who want a return and could give a fuck about uses or ethics. But for the time being it’s a good platform, and perhaps more importantly the best shot at breaking Twitter, and I will strategically support it while it remains a good alternative.

Rednote I have no idea about. Not happy about Chinese propaganda and censorship, but not any happier about right-wing American propaganda and censorship, so fuck it. I haven’t made an account yet but I might at some point. TikTok was by far the best algorithm at delivering what I want to see in the moment, and as I only spent a handful of minutes a day on TikTok on average, that’s really valuable.

Insta is useless as you seem to have to curate your feed to only be a single thing. Plus, fuck Meta in the ear. So if Rednote gets the content creators and the algorithm, I’ll probably check it out eventually.

That’s what I mean. Their own native search that only searches Reddit. I’m not saying it would be great, just better than Google for many uses cases.

This isn’t me talking up Reddit—I haven’t been back in over a year. This is me trashing Google.

I could see the EU backing down a few years ago, but these days they have watered down any actual advantage in search by filling their results with ads and low quality content. Not that I use Reddit any more, but a good Reddit search engine would probably be better for a lot of use cases.

The question in my mind is: is refusal an automatic rejection? I guess if I was casually looking for a job, I’d say ‘no’, but if I was out of work and desperate, I’d say yes (and did, when I was out of work for 5 months last year).

That’s an old article if they were looking at integrating “popular platforms such as Google+.”

All the parts of my job that make me want to shoot myself? Pass. Fortunately I have no such fear of AI.

At the end of the day users have to police their instances by leaving if the policies are too draconian for them. Casual users on a big enough instance might not care too much at first, but I think there would be a slow but ever-increasing migration off-instance.

It really depends on how many users disagree with the policy. My last instance defederated Threads and I didn’t agree but didn’t care enough to leave. It was database issues that lingered for months that made me leave and I don’t know my current server’s policy on Threads.

I could use one of those…

Kinda shows there is a limit to how far you can get simply ingesting all text that exists. At some point, someone is going to need to curate perhaps billions of documents, which just based on volume will necessarily be done by people unqualified to really do so. And even if it were possible for a small group of people to curate such a data set, it would become an enormously political position to be in.

I appreciate it.

Well the resistive heater isn’t enough for her here lol. But she’s a perpetually cold person.

It’s all well and good that heating efficiency means more range, but it has to also actually put out more heat to appease her. I could deal without the extra heat and rely more on the heated seats and wheel and maybe a 65 degree cabin, but she won’t. That’s why I was saying it’s two issues.

I know the resistive heater in my Volt can’t compare to the heat put out by the ICE. Often in the winter we’ll have to run the ICE to keep the cabin warm enough. It does have heated seats and wheel, but my wife is the type to set the heat to max until it gets too hot rather than just picking a temp and hitting auto to let the car manage it.

If the heat pump can put out more heat for less energy, that would be a boon. That might be the second biggest issue (next to range) that has my wife vetoing an all-electric car. She gets the next vehicle, but I want the one after that to be a full EV.

Problem is it wasn’t illegal. So the law is no use here. So exposing the activities they are engaged in right in public is no use. It’s like whistleblowing on Trump colliding with Russia. He did it right in front of everybody and got away with it.

Also, ultimately profits don’t have to always increase. In fact, it’s an impossibility over the long term without diversifying, and even then growth will slow. There’s not a damn thing wrong with a business that consistently, reliably turns 1B into 1.1B (or whatever).

killing a CEO is very likely to result in either imprisonment and/or death and unlikely to directly cause change. It’ll spark some discussion on the news, but is that really worth throwing your life away?

Maybe? I mean a life lived in misery isn’t worth much. At the end of the day, only he can answer whether it was worth the cost, but the rest of us have the opportunity to build on the message he sent. Will we capitalize (lol) on that opportunity? Probably not, but Mangione was undoubtedly a spark. Eventually a spark will catch, but of course it’s never certain who will get burned.

Every revolution begins by breaking the rules to bring someone untouchable under the status quo to justice. There is a very real threat of copycat vigilantes or worse that public sentiment will somehow lead to actual change. Power seized by the proletariat is always a threat to those with power.

At the end of the day, I think the problem is that so many people don’t identify Thompson as a killer. I think if more people saw Thompson as a killer, sympathy would be less controversial.

I don’t condone vigilante murder, but this is a case where I think the calculus that Mangione did to conclude the benefits of his action outweigh the consequences was probably correct and that there wasn’t a more reasonable way to address his grievance. And if you do something wrong and it turns out for the best, you still did something wrong, so get outta here ya little rascal and don’t let me catch you again.

Insofar as the agents described in the article, I’m not sure where the overlap with Lemmy is.