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Cake day: September 22nd, 2024

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  • Meta is developing its own web search engine to make itself more independent of Google and Microsoft’s Bing. The technology will primarily be used to feed the company’s own AI chatbot with up-to-date information.

    More competition against Google is good, but man another AI focused search engine is not what I would be hoping for.



  • Read the article by wired previously and it rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t doubt that there are Nazis using it, but I also don’t doubt that there are Nazis driving ford cars and I know a big chunk of fediverse traffic is Nazis. Outside of the comment from the SimpleX developers there wasn’t any mention of it just being a tool, with plenty of traffic not even going through SimpleX hosted servers. Seems like it was meant to make readers think Nazi when they heard SimpleX. As apposed to reporting on Nazis moving from one tool to a better tool, e.g. Chevys got recalled so many people, some Nazis, bought fords instead.



  • There was already a wave of bots identified iirc. They were identified only because:

    1 the bots had random letters for usernames

    2 the bots did nothing but downvote, instantly downvoting every post by specific people who held specific opinions

    Turned into a flamware, by the time I learned about it I think the mods had deleted a lot of the discussion. But, like the big tech platforms, the plan for bots likely is going to be “oh crap, we have no idea how to solve this issue.” I don’t intend to did the admins, bots are just a pain in the ass to stop.



  • Maybe I should have worded it different. Once in a while places with high population centers have relative power shortages. According to that article the last California controlled blackout due to power shortages was 2022, so it’s not like we’re talking third world regular brownouts or anything.

    I just meant it in the way that the power grid is old and was built during a time when we used less power, and while it generally works it’s already at capacity and increasing capacity would require a lot of investment and cooperation.

    In this particular case, a small grid controlled by one bureaucratic entity, as apposed to many bureaucratic entities across multiple countries, might be more easily modified. But, to my knowledge, none of them could support a sudden increase in power needs as they are currently (see the several big Texas blackouts, or the above article).



  • Mastodon was around for a while, slowly being built up until 2022 when the big twitter surge happened. They had the perfect foundation to make it the next big thing and all they had to do was keep the people who joined, make it slightly easier to join, and develop a few features like quote posts.

    • They banned and defederated everyone who wasn’t in a very narrow sliver of political and technological opinions.

    Mastodon lost it’s momentum, but had a second shot a year or two later. Threads joined the network offering a massive user base that could talk with Mastodon users. Then Bluesky blew up and that was bridged so Mastodon could talk with those people too. Mastodon may not have been the center of things anymore, but it could be fully integrated into the other two.

    • Most servers defederated with threads and bridges.

    There are other things that I’m sure play a roll as well. Luck, discoverability, easiness to join, people getting board, people looking at the next shiny thing, you name it. But it does look to be in many ways self inflicted.


  • No, all three grids US don’t have the power to support most cars becoming electric atm. Heck, on the west coast they occasionally have controlled blackouts because there’s not always enough power as it is. The Texas grid, while having some flaws, would probably be the most agile to be modified on a dime. The US east and west grid need to deal with the US Feds, US States, Canadian Feds, and Canadian provinces and would probably take more time to modernize.

    Edit: Copying my below reply for clearification Maybe I should have worded it different. Once in a while places with high population centers have relative power shortages. According to that article the last California controlled blackout due to power shortages was 2022, so it’s not like we’re talking third world regular brownouts or anything.

    I just meant it in the way that the power grid is old and was built during a time when we used less power, and while it generally works it’s already at capacity and increasing capacity would require a lot of investment and cooperation.

    In this particular case, a small grid controlled by one bureaucratic entity, as apposed to many bureaucratic entities across multiple countries, might be more easily modified. But, to my knowledge, none of them could support a sudden increase in power needs as they are currently (see the several big Texas blackouts, or the above article).



  • You can prevent recall from running and collecting data, you just can’t remove it entirely without breaking some features. I don’t think you can replace the file explorer, it’s your desktop n stuff as well as file exploring, but preventing recall from running might be your best bet. Or, alternatively, if you don’t use the features that you lose in file explorer by removing recall then you might be fine just removing recall and continuing on.







  • Potentially, but in different ways. You could argue that mass defederation and hostility between communities are the beginning of a fediverse specific enshittification process. And instead of running out of money and then swamping platforms with ads, the big servers could run out of money or get a bored admin and instances could dissapear. Constantly dissapearing instances could also be a fediverse specific enshittification process.