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).

My guess is 25% of their developers use AI coding assist. Because as a developer who uses AI almost every day, I can promise you only the most pedestrian code can be written by AI. As autocomplete, it saves me some time typing. But actually writing code from scratch, no way.

Yesterday, I asked it to write some particular code for me to do with multi-threading, and it constantly wrote things wrong, like initializing the access of a database client with the user of a request, which would mean every single user would have the access of the first user, not their own.

I reviewed some code earlier this week that did the same thing with the GlobalExceptionHandler that I suspect was also written by AI. These are sort of insidious in that when you write tests to make sure the code works, the tests will pass just fine.

You have to have a skilled developer to identify those issues because the code looks good, and just about any test an individual developer will throw at it will pass. That bug would have gone to production if I hadn’t caught it. And that’s on top of code that just uses the wrong class or confuses common methods from two completely different classes.

And I couldn’t even get a job at Google when they interviewed me, twice. So you can’t tell me 25% of their code is AI-generated. It’s useful, and a time saver. But it’s not capable of generating reliable code on its own. Certainly not yet, and I believe not ever in this form of AI (maybe AGI if it ever comes about).

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.

My imposter syndrome would never let me do that. I’m not good at this, I’m terrible, it’s just that 98% of the people I’ve worked with have been even worse, and that’s a terrifying realization.

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 think there is specifically a YouTube 3D. Maybe it’s an app. I was pretty unimpressed by most of the VR stuff. Blurry and distorted. Rollercoasters are fun. Nature documentaries would be neat but the quality is so low you can’t really see much detail, just the grand vistas.

I personally find VR porn really meh. I want to like it, but again it’s blurry - especially when they shove genitals in your face and your eyes can’t focus, and you have this really awkward view of someone simulating oral sex that just hurts your eyes, and it’s not even as stimulating as it would be to watch someone else doing it from a reasonable distance. At least for me.

That said, all my shit is a few years old and maybe the resolution and frame rates are better with newer stuff than oculus 2, but I think VR works better with simple shapes than video. Beatsaber is a great experience in VR and there are some similar rail shooters but most everything else has been disappointing.

Minecraft should’ve been fun but it made me sick. Skyrim VR was pretty fun. Especially because you could still mod it, but again the resolution and frame rate are too low for the level of detail in the game.

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.

This sounds like money, except harder. And every time there is a transaction, it takes place on an infrastructure that isn’t free, so there is a necessary cost involved. It seems like this would make it require more effort, have more (breakable) moving parts, and be less efficient than just using money.

The only difference between a vigilante and a murderer is state of mind. Luigi got it right. No dead bystanders. No redeeming qualities of his target, who is probably responsible for a far greater number of deaths. He put work into planning this and it shows, but he got really lucky, too.

If we had a bunch running around, we’d all be less safe. And a hell of a lot of them would probably target villains we don’t all agree deserve it. So I don’t condone it. But in this one case, I think it worked out.

It’s pretty clear that he did the act. However he’s still entitled to the presumption of innocence as a legal fact. The state must win its case. Whether he did it and whether the state can prove he’s guilty are two separate issues. See: OJ Simpson

They do if you want to keep your job as CEO, otherwise they’ll replace you with someone who will chase profits.

I’m so unenamored with unfettered capitalism these days. This shit is unsustainable.