therealpygon

@therealpygon@kbin.social
therealpygon,

Zoomed out, it just looks like a polygonal boob.

therealpygon,

It’s almost like Reps erode nearly every plan for oversight before it can be passed, every single time, so that their corporate donors get exactly what they want; funding without the “difficulty” of not stealing. Same thing happened with “Obamacare” when they gutted every bit of the cost savings measures that would have limited the rates, negotiated drug prices, etc. Are people really that blind to it?

therealpygon, (edited )

Your wording needs some work there. If you're trying to say that the "pile" would reach 1/4 low earth orbit and cover half the continental US, you're absolutely incorrect. If you are saying it is a "pile of money" that "when laid out as a single layer can cover half of the continental US" or "when made into a single stack would reach 1/4 of the height of LEO", that would be mostly accurate. For perspective, 44 billion would be 44k briefcases, or 440 pallets. That's about 17 semi trailers (single high) or 9 trailers double-stacked. As a "pile" it could easily fit in a single Wal-mart parking lot and wouldn't even be that high. Still a lot of money though.
Edit: Actually, I don't even think the continental US number is accurate. A single bill is 16 in^2. Laid out as a single layer of single $1 bills, that covers ~7e11 in^2 which is about 175 square miles, not even 1/2 of Rhode Island.

therealpygon,

I can't imagine how something like this might exist solely to boost engagement and draw additional user accounts. I'm sure that would be incredibly shocking (or just obvious as hell with user numbers being boosted by numerous bot accounts, as well as increased user time on site). "Reddit migration? What migration? Just look at how many users are coming back."

It's comically tragic how utterly gullible people are in general.

therealpygon,

So you're saying they are going out of their way to commit fraud on a scale that would trigger an SEC investigation of a publicly traded company, rather than you just making up the way something works? You do understand how you can have such placeholders not be included in the number of active users...right?

therealpygon,

No kidding. It's always cute when people who made a webpage one time try to explain (make up) how user accounting must be working in a publicly traded company.

therealpygon,

Gee, who could have thought that allowing html in posts could be bad idea? -Every developer that has ever looked a OWASP.

therealpygon,

Wait... You mean to tell me that you don't drink 100 Diet drinks at a time?

therealpygon,

Care to share? I dislike all the shorts showing up in my subscription feed and home pages. IMO they are a worse version of TikToks. I imagine it would feel similar to going to a movie theater that only plays trailers…forever.

therealpygon,

Woosh.

therealpygon,

Because why would a business buy a computer for $1k that they can write off by depreciating the value of, when they can not own a less useful, less powerful one that only works when there is internet for only $100 per month instead?

therealpygon,

(E: For perspective,) Truth Social was just a mouthy startup for spreading hate, not a nearly trillion dollar company with a lengthy history of anti-competitive activity.

therealpygon,

It will follow the EEE flow along with their normal anti-competition tactics. First, they embrace: their interest in federation is only to give them the access to content that will make their platform not look empty, allowing them to put their coffers to work on drawing the majority share of users. Then they will extend: they will make sure their platform is compatible with ingesting other server content but others will be unable to federate their content (they will become "incompatible" later, due to "features"). Then they will extinguish competition: they'll cut off what little engagement is left with those (inbound only) federated servers because they no longer need them and the majority of the remaining users will move to their platform because that is where the activity is.

Then Kbin/lemmy will be just like all the other random phpbb instances that no one really uses. Being naive won't make things any less likely, yet there will always be gullible people who argue that "of course they will embrace the technology" and that everything else is just non-sense/wouldn't have worked anyway/blah.

It doesn't take long for the largest servers to have operating costs that they will happily allow Meta to burden in exchange for nearly any concession. The main problem is that, while Kbin/Lemmy is federated, it is federated in a manner that still places content in silos and allows single servers to "own" those spaces. It hasn't really fixed the problem yet, it just spreads the problem out over a few more servers. Until spaces are universal (every server owns a slice of that community, spreading out the community instead of just the users), it will remain ripe for EEE.

therealpygon,

Being first to take what is frequently the next logical step shouldn’t be protected from competition for long enough to make the innovation obsolete. 5 years is more than enough time to establish a brand name and recoup any R&D costs. We can raise entirely new people to adulthood in less time than current patent expirations. If it can easily be undercut by a cheaper alternative, then the “innovation” is unlikely to have been that novel or costly. A more complex innovation would be harder to create and productize which should in itself help limit competition. If you aren’t capable of productizing an innovation, you patented it early just to prevent competitors who were already working on the same innovation from being able to recoup their own costs.

People far too often buy into the “R&D is incredibly expensive” narrative that republicans and big pharma like to perpetuate. R&D isn’t generally as expensive as much as if you aren’t first, you automatically lose everything you invested. Beyond that, R&D is frequently done with the assistance public funding, then snatched away by corporations to prevent competition.

If competition is healthy, and is the self-proclaimed hallmark of capitalism, why are corporations so anti-competitive? Competition IS healthy, but it means that wealth is spread across many rather than the few who control patents, and requires continual innovation if you want to maintain your status as #1 rather than just sitting on a large, frequently purchased, patent portfolio.

The current speed of innovation in AI has shown what things could have been like if less time and money was spent trying to stifle innovation in the name of protecting profits by suing over patents. Every patent is just one more ball and chain shackling society to slow progress for profit.

At least, that’s my opinion.

therealpygon,

(e: I would think the answer is) Society. That is how taxes work.

Freight train carrying hot asphalt, molten sulfur plunges into the Yellowstone River as bridge fails (news.yahoo.com)

A bridge that crosses the Yellowstone River in Montana collapsed early Saturday, plunging portions of a freight train carrying hazardous materials into the rushing water below. The train cars were carrying hot asphalt and molten sulfur, Stillwater County Disaster and Emergency Services said. Officials shut down drinking water...

therealpygon,

This sounds both made up but factually accurate.

therealpygon,

Me too. Facebook is the craigslist of Social Networks. Hard to go more than two posts without running into a scam or a business.

therealpygon, (edited )

A luke-warm summary with comical references that only summarizes the first few paragraphs. I hope people don’t only read that summary and think “but that was Google”.

The article is a warning that given a chance, based on the past actions of Microsoft, Google, other corporations and even Meta itself, allowing Meta to participate in any way with ActivityPub will most likely kill ActivityPub. There is no easier way to ensure profits than by killing any hint of competition that might take users away from their services. This is almost always achieved by seemingly “bearing gifts” in the form of users or financial backing. By participating, they will really be trying to prevent users from exploring other options at all. Once they have prevented the majority of users from leaving their platform, and have become “the” largest player in the ActivityPub space, they will have successfully made alternatives irrelevant. They will then kill these connections, excising the competition from participating in the new “ActivityPub”,, forcing projects to be abandoned by the users who want to continue participating where everyone else is. It’s a highly effective strategy that plays off uses FOMO and project enthusiasts aspirations. The fact that people are even considering this might be a good thing is proof that the strategy works, which is why they use it.

therealpygon,

Exactly right. Human greed doesn’t only come from money.

  • “It will be free advertisement and will help the project grow!”
  • “Look how many people are using my server. MY server. I’m popular now!”
  • And the more obvious, “If I make my server big enough, maybe I can cash out by being bought by this big company!”

In the end and from whatever the source, that bus always ends up in the same place once they convince themselves to get on it.

therealpygon,

I'm not sure the distinction would make enough of a difference, and focusing only on XMPP might be doing yourself a disservice. There was nothing social about Office, but the OP points out how the same strategy worked there as well. Users, overall, tend to go where the other users are. Some people left Digg for Reddit because they were unhappy with Digg, but the vast majority simply followed because it was where the users (therefore activity) went. Reddit wasn't even the best of the many options at that time; what was important was the inflow of users. Once that kicks off, others tend to flock like moths to flame.

As you point out, Reddit was not where you interacted socially, yet it became where you congregated because that was where everyone else was and therefore where the easiest access to content and engagement was. If a Meta product becomes the most popular way to consume ActivityPub content, and therefore becomes the primary Source for that content, independent servers will become barren with just a Meta Thanos-snap of disconnecting their API. They only need to implement Meta-only features that ActivityPub can't interact or compete with, and the largest portion of users will be drawn away from public servers to the "better" experience with more direct activity. (And that's without mentioning their ability to craft better messaging, build an easier on-boarding experience, and put their significant coffers to work on marketing.)

Sure, there will still be ActivityPub platforms in the aftermath. Openoffice/Libreoffice still exists, XMPP clients and servers still exist, there are still plenty of forums and even BBS systems. But, there is a reason why none of those things are the overwhelmingly "popular" option, and the strategy they will employ to make sure that happens is the focus of the article, not so much XMPP.

Do You Think There Would Have Been a Large Protest if Steve Huffman Just Said We're Charging to Use the API to Increase Revenue?

I've been a long time Redditor and an Apollo user for about a year. I even paid for it. The main draw for me was the lack of advertising. In the back of my head I kept thinking that it couldn't last. Reddit is losing revenue from the lack of advertising views. It didn't...

therealpygon,

I'm strongly of the opinion that instead of killing Apollo, Selig should featureflag most of the features, scale it back, implement ActivityPub quickly and a guided process to get started. Just killing Apollo gives Spez exactly what he wants, especially with the amount of algorithm rigging they are doing to block ActivityPub/Lemmy/Kbin info from making it into Top and Popular.

therealpygon,

Over the course of days/week(s), you should slowly edit all of your old comments and posts into gibberish, and mark your posts as NSFW. Later, slowly start deleting posts/comments so that you won't be a target of their rollbacks.

therealpygon,

I'd recommend that you make the changes more slowly, changing things to gibberish (random words), rather than using an app to do them all at one time. It is possibly for them to undo your edits and your deletes if you end up on their radar.

therealpygon,

Sadly, it’s probably going to be exactly what happens over time, since that is almost always what regulation does. Some company (Amazon or Meta or Microsoft or Google) will back door legislation via campaign donations to you know who’s, to make sure large regulated companies are the only ones who can run advanced AI models, out of “responsibility” and “safety”. And by seeding all these doom and gloom headlines of a “AI will take over the world” narrative, the public will be just so happy to give up the rights of other people for a thing “they weren’t going to do anyway”, like usual.

therealpygon,

I agree. Many people are fixated on GPT because it is shiny and novel, but it is certainly not the pinnacle of what AI could be, or even close. One day, we will look back on calling GPT an “AI” like we would someone calling the first two tin cans on a string a “phone”. Accurate enough, but certainly a far cry from any modern phone.

AI has the capacity to be the most impactful overall to our daily lives, but like most things, advancement will continue to be limited by hardware.

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