That’s not ignorance, it’s malice. Elon has made it clear that he’d like nothing better than to require everyone to show their official ID for “age verification” purposes before being allowed to use social media. I’m not sure exactly why. Easier to file lawsuits against anyone who uses it to make fun of him, or perhaps it’s just one small step in some kind of grand totalitarian vision of the future. But he can’t hope to get away with imposing it on Twitter unless competitors are required to do the same.

Someone said jokingly that the tiktok algorithm is so good that it can tell when you’re a researcher looking for evidence that tiktok pushes people towards political extremes, and show you exactly what you’re looking for. I thought it was funny, but it also seems like it might be sort of close to what happened here. Normal people would not just passively watch all that shit without reacting in some way.

Disappointingly, Tiktok could not figure out my desires at all when I tried it. I liked one exceptionally good dance video and then it just kept showing me superficially similar dance videos that weren’t so good no matter what I tried to get it to stop.

Apparently I have fewer problems with it than some. It’s snap. Maybe I could come up with some other minor complaints, but nothing big really. It’s mostly just snap. That is what prevents me using or recommending Ubuntu any more.

Yeah China sure is scary. Centralized social media owned by American billionaires on the other hand can totally be trusted never to interfere in elections.

I think realistic graphics in 3D games got to be good enough that further improvement doesn’t really matter any more in 2011 (Skyrim) but I can see an argument for putting it as late as to 2016 (Witcher 3).

Perhaps there will be an infinite number of steps, each of them getting smaller and smaller as the result asymptotically approaches whatever barely-functional sham version of federation is deemed most profitable for Meta Platforms Inc.

Threads uses can now “follow” fediverse accounts but “only if they’ve interacted with a post on Threads” and the posts “wont appear in your feeds.”

Well played, Zuck. Hilarious.

On my system that consistently gets results around 10s and 5s so the difference is sort of interesting. Mine’s a Ryzen 3600, maybe newer CPU features are of substantial benefit to xz.

The .tar.xz format decompresses more than twice as fast as .tar.bz2, allowing you to get up and running in no time

$ time tar xjf firefox-134.0b3.tar.bz2 

real    0m9.045s
user    0m8.839s
sys     0m0.450s

$ time tar xJf firefox-135.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.xz                                                

real    0m4.903s
user    0m4.677s
sys     0m0.510s

Nice! Presumably it’d be twice as fast if disk was infinitely fast or something. Unfortunately by testing this I’ve already used up a hundred times more time than I’ll ever save as a result of it.

The attack we’re warned about: Unstoppable AI-powered distributed adaptive quantum breach tools.

The attack that actually happens: Employees accepting bribes from ransomware gangs.

There are currently zero bluesky servers that aren’t fully dependent on bsky.app.

the vast majority—up to 82%—of the links to false information in the dataset originated from conservative news domains.

I’m not sure what approach would work. As I understand it, it’s designed around the idea that all messages get routed through a monolithic “relay” which needs to see every single event from every user in order for any of them to get routed between the PDS nodes where user data gets stored.

Probably best to just add ActivityPub on top of it, if they really wanted to federate with anyone.

Just a hunch, but I think no decentralised network is going to run ATProto unless someone other than Bluesky forks it and makes the protocol changes that would allow that to be practical. I guess it’s possible, in theory?

It really does depend on how many those “many people” are. Too many to dismiss them as irrelevant, it appears to me.

When I looked at bsky it seemed to be about 60% pointing out stupid shit that Trumpists have recently said and done, and 30% self-congratulatory talk about how popular bluesky is this week.

You may be willing to cede the cartoon frog to the Nazis for their exclusive use, but many people aren’t. If you assume that everyone you see using it is one you’ll be vastly overestimating the number of Nazis in the world.

All the talk about the xz affair seems incongruous with the focus on automated scanners. Correct me if I’m wrong here but I don’t think any of them are going to detect something like that.

the study suggests that individuals who deviate from their party norms are quickly treated as if they are a political enemy.

Is that “party” as in political party? Because I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in Canada it seems like the main polarization is between the Conservatives who have their shiny new Conservative party on one side, versus everybody else who doesn’t really have an official party they identify with all that much on the other side. It’s not yet like the USA with its seemingly-eternal two-party system. I wonder if it looks like that if you view it through Twitter.

And then there’s Lemmy, where you can always count on some helpful stranger who’s completely missed the point chiming in to tell you why you’re wrong.