I live in Louisiana. The police don’t come for a few hours even if you call 911. If someone swats me, it might take 5 days before someone gets around to it. And I have a nice machete so they’ll probably just file it under “suspect had left the scene” and enjoy some overtime pay.

There’s an episode of King of the Hill where everyone finds our Hank has a narrow urethra. And his dad says, “I ain’t got a narrow ureetee. Mine’s so damn wide I could pass the child myself if I had to.”

Or something to that effect.

No one will ever know my Cajun ass ancestors are from France and that I have the gene where you’re urethra is so damn wide, you can pass the child yourself if you had to.

I encourage hostile governments (including my own) to study my DNA. It’ll ruin morale. Balls so big, they have a tenuous atmosphere and a measurable time dilation effect.

Braaaaiiiinnns. And a 16 piece family deal, spicy, with a side of red beans, mashed potatoes, and extra biscuits.

With this kind of speed, we could invent Call of Duty games where the Zombies want slightly more than brains. Generative A.I. uses internet data for training so at first, the zombies will probably request Doja Kat in the racial chat rooms showing feet but human progress marches ever forward. Within a decade, Zombies might just want to get drunk and go to Popeyes.

I’m confused by the map. Why aren’t parts of Colombia and (maybe) Peru ditching the U.S.? I love Cartageña but I don’t expect them to side with us when society collapses.

Also, if we’re fighting, we get Pablo Escobar’s hippos. I don’t know the right balance or if the rift hits Medellin but the hippo gap must be even before we fight.

I’m hoping in 500 years, my DNA sequence is found on a perfectly preserved micro SD card and my clone gets to meet President Camacho and take on Beef Supreme and the Dildozer on Monday Night Rehabilitation.

One good thing about BlueSky’s moderation over Mastodon’s is that it’s (partially) chosen by users. Mastodon/Lemmy instance hosts almost all do an admirable and often thankless job by defederating and booting people but in the end, you’re relying on your instance host and your own one-off blocks.

BlueSky currently does have centralized moderators who kick people off all the time. But if the law changes in any country, BlueSky has the fallback of relying on user-created blocklists and user-created algorithmic feeds. In the U.S., Section 230 is apparently hated by Congress and, while I agree it could be updated and reformed, I’m not confident our corrupt gerontocracy will strike the right balance.

I’d love it if the future of ActivityPub-based platforms uses that approach. Even Instance moderators would probably be thrilled.

Yeah, I have more faith in the Fediverse long term. But we’ve all been through multiple enshittification cycles where everyone abandons a platform and settles on a new one. At least BlueSky is currently open source.

I don’t want to make too much of this but BlueSky is registered as a B-Corps and not a C-corps. For those unfamiliar with US corporate setups, a C-corps is a typical corporation where maximizing shareholder value is the goal. People can disagree on what that means — long term value or short term value, for instance — but ultimately, C-suite executives serve shareholders and only shareholders.

A B-corps (in the U.S.) is a “Public Benefit Corporation” and executives have a duty to serve all stakeholder in the company, from shareholders, to customers, to employees. So, theoretically, BlueSky doesn’t have to be evil.

That being said, it’s not something to rely on. We just saw it with OpenAI, which started as a project at a non-profit and is now a regular ass company that the old non-profit happens to have shares in. A few corporate lawyers can fuck up a good thing very quickly.

I obviously support ActivityPub or I wouldn’t be posting this here but one of the AtProtocol developers bought a Raspberry Pi with 8GB ram and added an NVME drive. He’s trying to prove (or possibly make) this point wrong. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team

So far, it seems like it’s “working” but he’s found some things that are way too slow and needs to be fixed for it to run on a Raspberry Pi. But that gives me some confidence that the developers, at least, aren’t trying to make it so only people with deep pockets can run an instance. (I don’t know what the investors want but the developers aren’t scheming assholes.)

It’s probably going to ultimately be a situation where anyone with a high end PC (by today’s standards) can run their own instance. It’s definitely not an A.I. situation where you have to reopen Three Mile Island and piss away more water than Nestle to self-host.

Even ignoring geopolitics, I don’t think Tencent is going to accept shares in an unprofitable start up in an unproven and possibly permanently unprofitable industry in exchange for one of the most valuable tech properties on Earth.

That’s probably the Occam’s razor explanation. I obviously have no proof for my little pet theory.

I don’t know if this counts as a conspiracy theory but I kind of suspect the story of the Vision Pro was that it was originally a real project focused as much on patents as anything. If they wanted a viable consumer product line, they’d have sold the 1st generation(s) at a loss to help an app ecosystem flourish and compete with other XR products (even if an Apple’s XR headset would still cost $500 more because Apple).

The US military was calling for XR headsets and even evaluated HoloLens. Companies were obviously exploring too. That’s when Vision Pro was under development. Apple isn’t really a military contractor — I’m not sure if they do any — but having patents to license to future XR headsets could potentially be very valuable and subsidize Vision Pro consumer pricing until the component prices fell.

Then, HoloLens shit the bed. It made soldiers nauseous and the military (and companies) pretty much lost interest in XR. The entire HoloLens team got laid off. By then, the Vision Pro was probably in early production but the potential revenue from having the most advanced XR’s patents became essentially nil. So, they just sold them at the actual cost and gave up on the product line.

In that scenario, the Vision Pro lead (and team) delivered exactly what Tim Apple wanted but the revenue potential disappeared. Meanwhile, “A.I. Siri” continued to suck (except the new animation; props to that team). So, the Vision Pro management was rewarded even if the Vision Pro failed in the market.

I don’t really get what selling Chrome and Android would accomplish. I’m all for breaking up tech monopolies but both of those projects are mostly open source that get proprietary Google crap and (for Android, at least, some monopolistic behavior like requiring what’s preinstalled, which is fine to ban).

I don’t work on ad-supported projects so I may be out of my element but it seems like what would actually help end the monopolistic behavior is requiring Google (and Facebook) to spin off their ad network businesses. The monopoly problem isn’t Chromium or AOSP or that Google runs ad-supported search. It’s that if [insert random site] wants ads, they typically use AdSense. If Facebook and Google want to run ad-supported services, fine. But they shouldn’t also also be the middlemen for advertisers who want to run ads on third party sites. That’s a recipe for monopolistic behavior.

In my ideal world, there would be no targeted ads at all and advertisers had to sponsor — and were so partly responsible for — the specific content they want to be associated with. But that probably isn’t going to happen since every politician is an advertiser that wants to launder their sponsorships through a middleman.

Just because he’s a clueless fool with connections who hasn’t invented anything (except maybe a truck where the sides fall off) doesn’t mean he’s not a “technologist.” He’s just as smart as smart as every other “effective altruist” or “networked state” moron.

You may be too young but remember when AOL had a highly paid “Digital Prophet” who was about as close to an actual clown as you could get without floppy clown shoes?

For the record, the network state movement means “seceding from the union.” And it won’t go any better for them than when Seasteading enthusiasts found out pirates exist.

Specialized A.I. (like Alphafold from Deepmind) is amazing. I mostly just think consumer-level generative A.I. that tries to do everything will probably suck for awhile.

Which I guess is basically like human intelligence if that’s how you’re measuring it. I can go to any bar and find someone confidently wrong 60% of the time. And you can win a Nobel Prize and not really know how to invest the award money competently.

I definitely learned that working with a law firm once. I could have set them up something more secure with an open source stack but what they really wanted was a company to blame if things weren’t as secure as I promised.

I imagine that’s why a lot of governments and big companies pick a big corporate vendor when it’d be cheaper and better to hire people. There’s less liability if you can blame a vendor than a specialist in the event something goes haywire.

I’m going to give a sincere answer.

Usually AWS (or Vercel and Mongo Atlas if it’s a Node/MongoDB situation or an early dev situation). I forget all the brand names the other cloud providers use and have to do a search for “EC2 equivalent Azure” or whatever. You can’t be an expert in everything, after all. Plus, Azure has admin pages where I have to use Chromium instead of Firefox and it’s like, “Come on, assholes.” I don’t mind Google Cloud but it’s rarely cheaper and I can’t justify it to someone paying me.

I know Amazon is evil. I cancelled my Washington Post subscription — I lived in DC so I kept it longer than most would — because Jeff Bezos is a fucking menace. But you kind of have to pick one or keep a chart on your desk with all the different brand names and what equals what.

Just use open source. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I’m a full stack developer and I’ve never given Microsoft a dime.

Well, truth be told, my gaming PC came with Windows and I did buy Flight Simulator but I felt dirty after and some of the silly airplane peripherals weren’t working right with Fedora so I kept it dual boot. That was before Steam Deck and Proton, though, so I should probably test it all again.

Desus and Mero interviewing David Lettermn is one of the most perfect interviews ever. https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/video/xnvqVqcIjAlW6JjWbCWqSFiN_BB484EG/

I’m sure it’s on a free service but it’s one of the finest moments in TV history.