"Technology was once simply a tool—and a small one at that—used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don’t live in that world anymore. Not only has technology become entangled with the structure of society, but we also can no longer see the world around us without it. The separation is gone, and the control we thought we once had has revealed itself as a mirage. We’re in a transitional period of history right now." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/seeing-like-a-data-structure.html
There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future. It’s a powerful concept that’s been kicking around for a long time, but now it feels closer to reality than ever before. You’ve heard us talk about it a lot on Decoder: the core idea is that no single company — or individual billionaire — can amass too much power and control over our social networks and the conversations that happen on them.
There are quite some reasons that leave me very cautious about Bluesky, one being for sure the fact there's one commercial entity currently backing this service / protocol, especially one that has risen from the same ecosystem that caused a lot of the trouble we do experience with current social media platforms. But, I've then and now been at odds with ActivityPub as a protocol, which gets worse the more I dig into it, and from that perspective, it seems the AT crowd gets a lot of things right, considered a lot of things that don't just seem obvious at least in the 2010s but actually surprising to see them missing from ActivityPub, a spec that has been established at roughly the same time: Full account portability (the idea of comparing personal data, conversations, comments, posts, ... to a github repository which "of course" you want to easily be able to take, backup, move around, ... seems both stunning and painfully trivial), support of custom domains for users (which Tumblr has already been supporting for years now), distributed curation and moderation (because most obviously community structures will be different to server or domain structures and not necessarily live on one instance exclusively) - in a way I really do hope they "show don't tell" by submitting that protocol to some standardization body anytime soon. Maybe this, too, could provide a good option for the "open" fediverse to counter the problems that might arise the very moment platforms like Meta / Threads fully embrace ActivityPub. (I also found it rather interesting to listen to what she had to say about why Meta might be more into ActivityPub than AT - being "server-centric" rather than "user-centric" - but that might just be a loose end of things.)
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Want to become a major player among venture capitalists? A dishwashing job may be a good place to start your journey. VC Wesley Chan worked three jobs in high school, including washing lab beakers, to bring money home to his family. It wasn’t easy, but today Chan is the cofounder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, a two-year-old firm with a $450M VC fund. TechCrunch has more on Chan’s fascinating rise. https://flip.it/vCAf_R #Tech#Technology#VentureCapital#FPV
I ordered these LITERALLY a YEAR AGO to the day, and they JUST ARRIVED!
Apple stalled the Google location tracker network for as long as they could, but now we FINALLY have some competition for AirTags!
I ask this relatively regularly because I want to keep an eye on the landscape.
I'm a software engineer with a PhD in international criminal law. I am on the lookout for (open source?) projects that are useful to human rights researchers/activists/defenders. I am hoping to contribute as a volunteer software engineer.
If you know of a project like this, please get in touch. If you don't, please boost if you'd like!