The Doctor

It’s part of the Fediverse, so if you’re on a Pixelfed instance you can see other servers running Mastodon, et al. Pick an instance that seems like it feels nice to you.

Reading that gave me a fucking headache.

This is the Internet, there’s no shortage of targets.

It says pretty explicitly that it only runs on the user’s machine.

Nuance is deader than Elvis.

Why don’t you ask them? They’re very responsive to their community of users.

I just took a spin through their news blog and changelog and didn’t see anything about it in the latest release, so it’s probably not out yet.

There’s a difference between LLM slop (“write me an article about foo”) and using an LLM for something that’s actually useful (“listen to the audio from this file and transcribe everything that sounds like human speech”).

We already have that. It’s been the state of affairs since 2016.

Politics sucked just as hard when people couldn’t. The only real difference is, now people know that there are folks who ignore them and they hate that.

Why is it that every time somebody stands up to say that information bubbles are bad, it’s usually holding hands with “and I want you to be able to see every single thing I post and you are forbidden to opt out?”

Here’s the thing: We had this before. This is nothing new. This is not a crisis or even worthy of note. This might reflect the cycle repeating again at best, but ultimately it’s a tempest in a teapot.

BBSes were, for the most part, isolated but sometimes federated communities. They had their own moderation policies, their own rules of conduct, and their own local communities. Sometimes, if they were part of a BBS network those communities were in contact with each other. Those BBS networks had their own policies, moderators, and so forth. It was usual for users of a given BBS to also be users of other BBSes; those users fit into the community of each other system pretty normally.

Usenet was distributed across hundreds, if not thousands of servers across the Net; still is, if you read it. Each newsgroup had its own community, rules of conduct, FAQ (usually), and sometimes its own moderation team (the .moderated variants were well known). Rules were enforced, communities were unique to the newsgroup, and norms were followed. Again, it was not unusual for a given user to participate in multiple newsgroups and the communities thereof.

E-mail lists were not that different.

That’s great. But will it actually change anything?

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This has been a common mode of discourse since the 90’s.

Who cares.

Folks that’re going to use Linux already are. Folks that are curious about it are trying it, and occasionally they post asking for help. Everybody else is using what they use and has no interest in changing.

The last time this happened, it took time to get those mines set up and operating. When it slowed down, they mothballed the mines, but they’re still there. It won’t take nearly as long to re-open them.

SCOTUS will decide after they check their bank account balances. But they’ll probably ban it, because China.

That’s how a lot of companies do stuff, though. They see what competitors get away with, figure out how moving the Overton window a little more will benefit them, and if the payoff is more than the risk they do it. That’s how advertising has become so ubiquitous, that’s how selling user data became so common: Wait for someone else to take the heat, make preparations while the controversy is happening, and when it dies down take the next step in that direction.

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Here we go again. Once more, folks don’t fucking listen when they’re warned. And the ones who should have listened just got branched again.

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