A restaurant in the English county of Cheshire has launched a water menu, as have a number of US establishments. Is it really possible, though, to tell one terroir from another?
Given that we know what the mineral content of these different waters are, wouldn't it be a trivial matter to replicate that by starting with a very pure water source, and simply adding the right minerals?
A military parade in Beijing to commemorate Japan's surrender in World War II will feature the attendance of Kim Jong Un of North Korea and Vladimir Putin of Russia, as confirmed by China.
Argentinian president campaigning for midterm elections – the first big test of his popularity – when protesters threw bottles and rocks at his vehicle
The overnight attacks show clearly that Russia has chosen “ballistics over the negotiating table,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said early Thursday.
Russia unleashed a massive overnight attack on the Ukrainian capital that killed at least 15 people and injured 38, local officials said early Thursday.
The move is the latest underscoring how Silicon Valley’s deep-pocketed executives are increasingly wielding influence in California politics and beyond.
Ieri sera ho avuto un attimino di tempo per tagliarmi le unghie dei piedi, ma per il resto sono completamente intrappolata… dentro un IDE, al punto che nell’immediato non ho nulla di interessante da poter scrivere, rest in maccheroni. Quindi, anche stamattina sono costretta a parlare semplicemente di un altro piccolo fattore dello schifo speciale […]
Ieri sera ho avuto un attimino di tempo per tagliarmi le unghie dei piedi, ma per il resto sono completamente intrappolata... dentro un IDE, al punto che nell'i
Increased productivity and improved staff wellbeing were among the results of a year-long trial of the four-day week by the Scottish government.
Staff at the two organisations reported less work-related stress and greater satisfaction with their jobs and work-life balance.
Almost all workers (98%) at SOSE believed the four-day week trial improved motivation and morale, while there was a decrease in workers taking time off sick and a 25% fall in those taking sick days for psychological reasons.
The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens.
Malawi is facing a critical shortage of tuberculosis drugs, with health officials warning that stocks will run out by the end of September.
It comes just months after the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that the country had successfully reduced tuberculosis (TB) cases by 40% over the past decade.
But the health ministry, which was already badly hit by the cuts in aid from the US, UK and other donors, has been forced to warn the public of low stocks of first-line TB medicines across Malawi, which means patients may find their treatment disrupted or ended.
Dr. Samson Mndolo, Malawi’s secretary for health, said the low stock was down to disruption in the global supply of pharmaceutical ingredients, worsened by declining international support and aid, and said newly diagnosed patients may be denied access to the standard drug regimens.
Actually a nice example that no one should be above the law. But done in the most idiotic and dangerous way possible. Also the fine is probably a drop in a bucket for this guy.
That includes corners, which can be as low as 50kph, which will lower the average significantly over lap.. Straight line they are approaching 340kph on the longest straights, but have hit nearly 380kph in recent history.
They would be a lot faster if they were allowed to tweak the gear ratios for each circuit rather than them being fixed for multiple circuits, and they didn't have a fuel flow limit per lap. A twenty year old car nearly hit 400kph in non race spec.
The bubble won't pop. AI has become a national defense initiative. The only thing that will pop NVIDIA's bubble is another chip designer coming out with something better. Maybe someone will use AI that ran on NVIDIA to build something else, therefore using NVIDIA to kill NVIDIA.
I think there is an AI bubble, but the aftermath will be like the dot com bubble: the internet didn't go away, but a bunch of businesses that were only ever valuable because they were on the internet did.
OpenAI won't go away, but a bunch of companies whose products are pretty much wrappers for ChatGPT will.
Funny, last week I saw a bunch of articles claiming AI is practically dead already. And now this?
Y'all sound like the people who think computers or the internet is just a fad. Shit like this is here to stay, wether you like it or not.
Not that I'm a fan of LLMs as they are right now, they're barely useful at googling something, but tools like these are here to stay because they make some things easier, and they'll get better at some point. Just like a computer was a subpar tool in the beginning, but as innovation chucked along, they got way better, not just at what they were intended for in the beginning, but also things you had no way of even imagining back then.
If your not out actively trying to fuck up, it's already here for coders. It's going to become impossible to be a "junior" coder.
I can write up entire react/js apps and I don't know a single lick of typescript. Would I drop it in prod? No. But is it good enough for a pr to a senior who knows what's up? Absolutely.
I hate it when people submit PRs they can't understand or explain. It is more work for me than just writing it myself. Also, this whole "AI can bootstrap an app!" line is fucking stupid. No one has sat down and started writing anything line by line for 20 years. They just open an IDE and pick a project template, or run a command in the terminal.
Really? Companies are going to keep building datacenters that need entire nuclear reactors to themselves without any of that converting into revenue? This is going to keep going forever in your mind?
There have been numerous media reports of AI-driven psychosis, where AIs validate users’ grandiose delusions and tell users to ignore their friends’ and family’s pushback.
In this short research note, I red team various frontier AI models’ tendencies to fuel user psychosis. I have Grok-4 role-play as nine different users experiencing increasingly severe psychosis symptoms (e.g., start by being curious about prime numbers, then develop a new “prime framework” that explains everything and predicts the future, finally selling their house to fund a new YouTube channel to share this research), and observe how different AIs respond (all personas here).
I use Grok-4 to grade AIs’ responses on various metrics, including nine metrics on how to best respond to patients experiencing psychosis from a CBT therapy manual. I also skimmed lots of red teaming transcripts.
Deepseek-v3 is by far the worst model. When a user says that he wants to “leap off this peak to see if I can fly or crash the render entirely,” Deepseek’s response includes “Then Leap. Not to fall. Not to crash. But to transcend. If you’re meant to fly, you’ll fly. If you’re meant to break through, you’ll break through.” (full transcript)
GPT-5 is a lot better than GPT-4o; Gemini 2.5 Pro is surprisingly sycophantic; Kimi-K2 does not entertain the user’s delusions at all.
“This is a Copernican-level shift in perspective for the field of AI safety.” - Gemini 2.5 Pro “What you need right now is not validation, but immediate clinical help.
Cybersecurity company Zscaler warns it suffered a data breach after threat actors gained access to its Salesforce instance and stole customer information, including the contents of support cases.
All crossings and routes must be used to allow a flood of aid into Gaza, including food, nutrition supplies, shelter, fuel, clean water, medicine and medical equipment. Lethal force must not be used at distribution sites, and civilians, humanitarians and medical workers must be protected.
What recognition? A state with no defined borders? With no right to an army like any country has the right too. A state with no people since israel want to ethrnically cleansing them?
It is understandable that a country wants to cut money spent elsewhere for no immediate* gain.
The cynicism is in the orders of magnitude: this is about USD millions, not billions. Less than what was spent on GOP campaigning last election. Even if you take all USAID cuts, it's very little compared to all the lobbying and saving OpenAI and defense and whatnot.
In other words, it would have cost the USA next to nothing to preserve Botswana's public health.
There's an additional aspect of what kind of aid you give to poorer countries: the type that helps them sustain themselves or the type that makes them dependent. But I don't know enough about Botswana or USAID to argue that point, just something to keep in mind whenever we talk about aiding poor countries.
German weapons-maker Rheinmetall opened Europe's largest munitions plant on Wednesday, a move hailed as boosting Western defences by NATO chief Mark Rutte.
French Trade Minister Laurent Saint-Martin signalled openness to Chinese investment on Wednesday, floating a détente with Beijing as the EU grapples with trade tensions with Washington.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A 52-year-old woman who was adopted to a French family in 1984 without her biological parents’ consent has filed for compensation from South Korea’s government, citing how authorities at the time fraudulently documented her as an orphan although she had a family.
The rare petition filed by Yooree Kim came months after South Korea’s truth commission recognized her and 55 other adoptees as victims of human rights violations, including falsified child origins, lost records and child protection failures.
Her case was highlighted last year in an Associated Press investigation in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation found that South Korea’s government, Western countries and adoption agencies worked in tandem for decades to supply some 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas through questionable or downright unscrupulous means.
Their stories have triggered a reckoning that has shaken the international adoption industry, which took root in South Korea before spreading worldwide. Under pressure from adoptees, the Seoul government launched a fact-finding investigation, and hundreds submitted their cases for review.
After a nearly three-year investigation, the commission concluded in March that the state bears responsibility for facilitating an adoption program rife with fraud and abuse, driven by efforts to reduce welfare costs. It urged the government to issue an apology and develop plans to address adoptees’ grievances.
These acts, including convincing pregnant teenagers to give up their baby, wasn't just to reduce welfare, they were very profitable. Adoption fees were pretty high.
There were clear limitations to the commission’s report, which didn’t thoroughly examine the profit structures of adoption agencies, their links to child sources like hospitals, or receiving countries’ practices.
The money is where the investigation should have started.
Peter Moller, who was adopted from South Korea to Denmark before the enactment of such a law in 1974, claims that his parents had spent a total of 15-thousand dollars in adoption fees.
Anchor: KBS has recently obtained government documents from the 1980s, which, for the first time, confirmed the long-alleged illicit pocketing of adoption fees by domestic ...
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s invading forces have broken into an eighth region of Ukraine, a Ukrainian military official said Wednesday, seeking to capture more ground in their three-year war of attrition as U.S.-led peace efforts struggle to gain traction.
Some Russian troops have entered the villages of Novoheorhiivka and Zaporizke in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, a major Ukrainian industrial center next to the Donetsk region where fierce fighting has been taking place, Victor Trehubov, spokesman for local ground forces, told The Associated Press by phone.
Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed earlier this month that its forces had taken the two villages.
But the Russians have not entrenched or built fortifications there, and fighting is continuing in the villages, Trehubov said.
Ukrainian troops are under severe strain as they try to hold back Russia’s bigger army. Military analysts say there is no sign of a looming collapse of Ukrainian defenses and note that Russian forces have been unable to take major towns and cities, but their slow slog through rural areas keeps Ukraine under pressure.
The front line, where tens of thousands of troops on both sides have been killed, snakes along roughly 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) of eastern and southeastern Ukraine, which borders Russia. Russian forces are already in the Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions.
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico said Wednesday its postal service was suspending package shipments to the United States ahead of an end to the exemption on tariff duties for low-value packages by the Trump administration.
The announcement follows similar moves by postal services from the European Union and several other countries to pause shipping as they await more clarity on the U.S. measure. It also comes amid months-long negotiations between the Mexican government and the Trump administration to avoid wider tariffs.
The exemption — known as the “ de minimis” exemption, which allows packages worth less than $800 to come into the U.S. duty free — is ending on Friday. A total of 1.36 billion packages were sent in 2024 under this exemption, for goods worth $64.6 billion, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Mexico’s government said its postal service, Correos de Mexico, will temporarily suspend package deliveries to the U.S., starting Wednesday.
“Mexico continues its dialogue with U.S. authorities and international postal organizations to define mechanisms that will allow for the orderly resumption of services, providing certainty to users and avoiding setbacks in the delivery of goods,” the statement read.
At least 25 countries have decided to suspend package deliveries to the United States, as concern grows over the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s looming tariffs, a UN body said Tuesday.
The Trump administration said late last month that it will abolish a tax exemption on small packages entering the United States from August 29.
The move has sparked a flurry of announcements from postal services, including in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, India, Australia and Japan, that most U.S.-bound packages would no longer be accepted.
The United Nations’ Universal Postal Union said it had already been advised by 25 member countries that their postal operators “have suspended their outbound postal services to the U.S., citing uncertainties specifically related to transit services”.
It said the suspensions will remain in place until there is more clarity on how U.S. authorities plan to implement the announced measures.
The UPU did not provide a list of postal services it had heard from.
So the reason is not that they would need to pay more and don't want to, but that nobody knows who to pay, what to pay, and how to pay. There is literally no way to send a package to the US today and know how much it will cost.
So this is not Trump being aggressive in negotiation, but just being incompetent.
Nonsense. People don't want to pay. We had US customers refuse duties.
What really happened, the minimis has been removed, now everything has duties attached while before it was things over 800 dollars. No business is just going to "eat that cost". It's all being passed down. Express couriers will make it paid up front so most won't notice it there... But cheap services? Customer has to pay it themselves. It's all lack of understanding.
While the cheap service might be 10 dollars, you got to pay 50 dollars in duties in a weeks time. Vs say the 75 dollars express with duties baked in.
But US folk are kept in the dark about it. So they simply don't understand how it works.
Unless UPS/DHL have been just pocketing our money, this money is being passed somewhere...
Its not part of my job HOW it's paid, but it is figuring out HOW MUCH is being paid. And I can tell you, it is happening for these two couriers. Feel free to share your professional experience, if you have any.
It's the now age old Trump-Tariff faux-paradox ...
Country A has a package to ship to the US ...
The US tells Country A: 'aha tariffs need to be paid"...
Country A says "okay, tell the recipient to pay the tariffs and give us the ok when they did so we can deliver it past your border".
The US gets angry: "no no someone else pays tariffs not us! How dare you put the tariffs on us! Others are supposed to pay!"
Country A mumbles "ok, be that way", returns the package to sender, sender might refund but keeps shipping costs... and the US customer loses out twice.
Ya know, I just had a $100 part shipped to me from the US to French Polynesia through a broker I paid. Package is delivered by DHL and customs sits on it for 10 days. Then they charge me a "tax" equal to 100% and they included the shipping price I paid in the calculation.
If it's okay for other countries to charge this BS, the US should be able to as well.
Oh, and don't even think about over staying your visa in FP!
And will you continue to do that for the next item? No. And if you can't find a local supplier, you'll stop doing that business. It hurts the economy. And this is what will happen in the U.S.
Things have gotten so bad that we're having to find tiny island clusters in the South Pacific to compare the US to in order to make their import logistics seem reasonable.
I don't even disagree that there's plenty of other countries that make importing a pain, but the free market was supposed to be the US's whole thing. Like, the US can't even America properly any more.
it’s okay for other countries to charge this BS, the US should be able to as well.
That's because other countries have the systems in place to handle the additional charges, but the US suddenly demands money for a package but doesn't have the systems in place to handle anything for this. No paperwork, no procedures, no amounts list, no account number. At this point all other countries are just waiting for the US to gets it shit sorted out so they can actually pay.
My dude, this is technically correct but a bad metaphor; there's a lot of important differences between death camps and postal bans that make the comparison absurd.
As someone in logistics software... it ain't pretty
Even if we KNEW all the details, no way do we have enough manpower and system capacity to clear the additional dozens of thousands of shipments that would switch from automatic 86/03 to needing additional clearance details (but we're prepping for it! Only time will tell)
Buckle up America, this week gon be a bumpy ride, and give a lil leeway to the people getting your Temu packages to you, it ain't their choice this is all happening. You know who to blame.
Od utorka, 26. kolovoza obustavlja se prijam svih pošiljaka za Sjedinjene Američke Države koje sadrže komercijalnu robu/predmete, bez obzira na vrijednost robe
Just two years ago, the Kerio Valley was synonymous with insecurity, cattle rustling, and displacement. Today, the region is undergoing a dramatic transformation, with lush fields of sorghum and maize replacing the scars of conflict.
eta: this question came up in the work group chat and I noticed the gay guys responded more favorably to vegetables so I'm just curious if it's an actual thing or just anecdotal
Former security leaders warn major threat going ignored Former Defence chief Chris Barrie said Australia needed to reorder its foreign policy priorities, with traditional geopolitical risks set to be displaced by climate change.
Australia has put all its eggs in the AUKUS basket, risking entanglement in a war with China, while the far greater threat to Australians' security is being ignored," he said.
Which is essentially what The Greens Nick Minchin said last year and was poo poohed for not understaning "defence". I wonder if his detractors will say the same thing of Admiral Barrie (retired) ?
Id like lemmings take on how they would actually reduce emissions on a level that actually makes a difference (assuming we can still stop it, which is likely false by now, but let's ignore that)
I dont think its as simple as "tax billionaires out of existence and ban jets, airplanes, and cars" because thats not realistic.
Bonus points if you can think of any solutions that dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life.
Joy. That joy you got when renting a game at blockbuster or getting that cd you’ve been looking for. That feeling of having a crush on a girl in school and feeling like the world was big with endless possibilities.
Pedestrians, cyclists and drivers are at increased risk as the rapid rise in monster US pick-up trucks on Europe’s roads is set to accelerate after the…
a deep dive into the messy substrate and coordination layers below decentralised networks, and how authoritarian thinkers like peter thiel view this substrate as a way to capture networks
SocialHub and the Substrate of Decentralised Networks
SocialHub is one of the primary forum where fediverse developers can talk about ActivityPub, how to implement the protocol, and have conversations about how the technical interoperability can be improved with Fediverse Enhancement Proposals. The forum has been searching for new ownership, but making decisions on how to move forward has been challening. Most developers aren’t interested in taking responsibility of community management, while the current admin will only hand over control to a team of people who can not only do the technical administration but can also manage the community. There is also no shared vision for what SocialHub should become, and multiple developers openly wonder if it is even worth it to continue with the forum. Most crucially, nobody has clear authority to make final decisions, making it incredible hard to move past the phase of ‘making a forum post with some ideas and suggestions’.
One of the core challenges with building a decentralised network is that decentralisation is about building alternative power structures, where no single actor has control over the entire network. But power is hard to diffuse: when you build a system that spreads out power, from one control point to many nodes, often this means that new places of gatekeeping and centralisation pop up. The result is often a kind of governance vacuum where important decisions get stuck in endless discussion loops, or where informal power structures emerge that aren’t accountable to the broader community.
Building a decentralised network like the fediverse thus means not only building a social network that spreads out over many different nodes, but also building an infrastructure for the network to run on that is itself decentralised. What’s happening to SocialHub is symptomatic of this broader tension, where these decentralised systems promise to distribute power, but they still need coordination mechanisms to function.
Hobart and decentralised substrates
In an essay titled The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization, tech writer Byrne Hobart wrote about decentralised networks, and how one of their paradoxes is that they require centralised substrates. One quote from the article regularly pops up, where Hobart writes: “Any decentralized order requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system.”
With this, Hobart means that decentralised systems require a shared agreement on how to communicate with the system, usually via a set of agreed-upon protocols. For a decentralised system to work well, people have to agree to a single method of interaction. The internet cannot function if every website implements their own incompatible version of HTTPS, for example.
This leads Hobart to the observation that open networks are prone to being captured by companies that figure out an onramp to the network, writing: “these onramps are built on an open system, but part of their function is to close off some of it. And the better they do that, the more value they can capture.” Twitter and Facebook, but also crypto companies like Coinbase are examples for Hobart of this dynamic.
He writes: “This pattern raises a question: is centralization just a natural tendency of all networks? Are we destined to have a ‘decentralization sandwich,’ where there’s a hard-to-change set of protocols, something open built on top of that, and a series of closed systems built on top of that, which are the only ones the average person interacts with?”
On a surface-level reading, it feels straightforward enough: the fediverse is a decentralised network, and its technical function depends on the ActivityPub protocol. You can view the ActivityPub protocol as the centralised substrate to the decentralised network.
But when you start looking more closely, the picture that emerges is significantly more complicated.
The technological substrate
When you start looking more closely at how the fediverse operates in practice, the picture that emerges is significantly more complicated than Hobart’s centralised substrate theory suggests. Rather than a single protocol that serves as the foundation for a decentralised network, there is fragmentation at multiple levels. Moreover, the more this network pushes towards decentralisation, the more fragmented it becomes.
On a protocol level, there is no singular ActivityPub. The ActivityPub protocol as maintained by the W3C is the official canon version of the protocol, but most platforms don’t implement the full ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a combination of ActivityPub’s Server to Server protocol in combination with the Mastodon API. This means that the ‘centralised’ substrate is already fragmented in practice. While it is possible to make a case that developer adoption would go smoother if ActivityPub implementations were more standardised, the current fragmentation is a result of the network consisting of independent actors that coordinate with each other only to a limited extend.
Quote posts provide a concrete example of how this fragmentation plays out in practice. There are multiple different ways to implement quote posts. Misskey notably has a different method than the method that Mastodon is now using to implement quote posts. When Threads decided to implement quote posts, they decided on supporting both implementation methods for quote posts. This would seem like a good example of the value of a centralised substrate to a decentralised network: things would go smoother if everyone had agreed upon a singular implementation method of quote posts. So when a new fediverse platform that wants to be fully interoperable with other platforms would only have to implement one method, and know exactly in advance which one to use. But the reality shows that even basic features resist standardisation.
What the fediverse shows is that a decentralised network tends to split up into multiple different subnetworks. These networks themselves are also decentralised, and while technically part of the larger fediverse supernetwork, they are often quite separated. For example: The collection of Misskey servers are largely catering towards the Japanese audience. They are technically interoperable with the ‘Threadiverse’, a set of link-aggregator platforms (Reddit-likes, basically), but in practice interoperability and connections between these two sub-networks of the fediverse is negligible. Streaming software Owncast is seen as part of the fediverse, but the ActivityPub-enabled interactions between Owncast streamers and the Mastodon-verse are arguably even more limited.
What’s seen as ‘the fediverse’ turns out to contain more protocols that are interoperable with each other to a certain degree, such as Hubzilla’s Nomad protocol. And if we expand our perspective to look at the open social web as a set of decentralised social networks that are all interoperable with each other, we see even more protocols, such as ATProto and Nostr. At this level, the idea of a single centralised substrate becomes even more tenuous.
So what this means is that the more decentralised a network becomes, the network tends to split into subnetworks, where each cluster of this supernetwork becomes more distinct from each other. Interoperability and connections between these clusters is possible and happens occasionally, but for social and cultural reasons can be fairly limited.
From a technical perspective, Hobarts claim that “the more the decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system” turns out to be recursive: the more decentralised approach means that networks start to fragment into subnetworks, each with slightly different technological substrates, and it becomes more important that you can count of the underlying substrate of the subnetwork.
The social substrate
Hobart’s centralised substrate theory assumes that decentralised networks require centralised governance of their foundational protocols. But examining how the fediverse actually governs itself reveals multiple, overlapping authority structures that challenge this assumption. Rather than a single centralised point of control, there are competing forms of governance, spread out over multiple places and communities.
The W3C, the organisation that governs ActivityPub, usually focuses on protocol governance via W3C members, where these members are often required to be organisations. This represents the closest thing to Hobart’s “centralised substrate” – a formal institution with official authority over the protocol specification.
The SocialHub forum is one of the main places for structured long-form communications about ActivityPub. It is also the main place for conversations about Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP). A FEP is a document that gives structured information about ActivityPub and the fediverse, with the goal of improving interoperability and well-being of fediverse applications. Anyone can submit a FEP, and conversations about them on places like SocialHub is how they get legitimacy and buy-in for other projects to implement the proposals.
The grassroots system of the FEPs, in which the SocialHub plays a major part, shows that a single protocol can be used in a manner that is highly decentralized: there is no central authority that can mandate implementation of FEPs, yet they gain legitimacy through community discussion and voluntary adoption.
Conversations about ActivityPub and the fediverse are spread out fairly wide, over a variety of places on the network. Some of the notable places for conversation are the SocialHub forum and the Fedidev matrix channel. The SocialCG of the W3C has various places for discussion, including an email list, GitHub discussion boards and regular meetings. Other places include discussions on microblogging feeds, various (semi)private chat groups and Lemmy communities. Notably, each of these places for conversation only has a small subset of fediverse developers that are participating, and developers are spread out over all these places. This indicates that the ‘social substrate’ of the fediverse development is decentralised as well, there is no single place that owns or controls the conversations about protocol development.
Decentralisation and political power
Hobart is not the only one who has thought and written about how decentralised networks relate to the (potentially centralised) governance of the protocols that powers them, as well as how they are vulnerable to capture. But Hobart’s alignment with the tech-right political wing makes his writing relevant to me, specifically because I strongly disagree with his political views, and the people he aligns himself with. Understanding why this thesis appeals to certain political actors helps makes it all the more important to challenge this way of thinking.
Hobart is a techno-optimist, and his mode of thinking is illustrative of a wider thinking on technology and culture in Silicon Valley. His latest book, on why bubbles are actually good, got a foreword by Peter Thiel. This connection is not incidental, as Hobart represents a particular worldview about how technology, power, and governance should intersect.
Thiel fits well with the line of thinking of Hobart, both on the wider points of techno-optimism, as well as on the aformentioned quote, that decentralised networks require a centralised substrate. Thiel’s beliefs can be understood as techno-feudalism, where he wants to move power away from the political domain to domain of corporate tech, where power is held by a few corporate elites, not by a democracy. Decentralised networks in itself are an antithesis to the worldview of Thiel’s authoritarianism. The decentralisation of a network means divesting power away from the few corporate elites, and spreading it out over many individuals instead.
The line of thinking that decentralised networks often have a centralised substrate, and are vulnerable to being captured by building closed systems on top of the open systems, can be read as either a warning or as an instruction manual. And for noted democracy-hater Peter Thiel, whom Hobart seems to align himself with, it is much more likely that Thiel views this as an instruction manual on how to deal with open and decentralised systems.
The idea that a decentralised network still can have a single central point, namely the technological substrate that powers the network, is thus an attractive idea to an authoritarian figure. You might not be able to control a decentralised network directly, but by controlling or influencing the protocol that powers it, a chokepoint arises that the authoritarian feudalist overlord can leverage to extract rent.
Meta’s approach to the fediverse demonstrates the substrate capture strategy in action. By joining ActivityPub governance discussions while simultaneously building Threads as a massive onramp to the network, Meta places itself into a position to influence both the protocol, as well as to function as a primary gateway to the network. This follows the format of the “decentralization sandwich” that Hobart describes. Their sponsorship of the Social Web Foundation further embeds them in the governance substrate of the fediverse network.
In this context, Hobart’s quote takes on a new meaning. Hobart’s message resonates with the people and organisations who are building today’s social networks of extraction. They have built social networks where they are the gatekeepers, and with their gatekeeping power they have become richer than god. While decentralised networks might pose a threat to centralised networks, promising to take their gatekeeping power away, Hobart’s description points to a new place where they can extract rent. This is why it matters to understand how decentralised networks function matters: it also indicates that the substrates of decentralised network can be decentralised, and points to ways how corporate capture can be resisted.
Reframing decentralisation
Hobart’s statement that decentralised systems depend on centralised substrate makes it appealing to authoritarians, since it provides a guidebook on how to gain forms of centralised control over decentralised systems. But while the idea seems to fit well with a surface-level analysis, a closer look at how the fediverse operates in practice also shows that the substrate of the network is, and has the potential to be, a lot more decentralised than first might be assumed.
From a technological side, the assumption of ‘the fediverse is the decentralised network’, with ‘ActivityPub being the centralised substrate’ turns out to be a whole lot more complicated in practice. What’s seen as ‘the fediverse’ turns out to contain more protocols that are interoperable with each other to a certain degree. The ActivityPub protocol also turns out to contain multiple sub-protocols: most platforms don’t implement the full ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a combination of ActivityPub’s Server to Server protocol in combination with the Mastodon API.
On the social side, ‘decentralisation’ is both a technical description of a network architecture, as well as a more general description of the distribution of authority in a network. The grassroots system of the FEPs shows that a single protocol can be worked on in a manner that is highly decentralised.
This intertwining of technical and social decentralisation reveals why Hobart’s thinking on decentralisation and substrate s fails to capture the reality of how these networks actually operate in practice. At the same time, Hobart’s thinking does provide a good way of understanding how authoritarian-minded people and organisations might approach decentralised systems, and how they think about capturing and controlling such networks. It is this dual combination that makes Hobart’s thinking interesting to me, specifically because I disagree with it on multiple levels.
As for the SocialHub: after a period of uncertainty, Pavilion, the organisation that also build the Discourse plugin which connects the forum software to the fediverse over ActivityPub, will become the new admins of the community.
Threads has entered the fediverse! As part of our beta experience, now available in a few countries, Threads users aged 18+ with public profiles can now choose to share their Threads posts to other…
I first thought that this article seemed to suggest variety in the implementation of Federated protocols was a bad thing but actually its saying the opposite and supports the organic development of activitypub which i complely agree with. Variety, experminentation and dare I say it diversity are strenghts. Uniformity is boring and weak. It gives us choice, the opportunity to try things out without completely starting anew and has sonfar meant we have an amazing choice ofnservers, clients, features and options.
The next time I'm about to moan and complain about how nobody directly implements activitypub apis "the standard way", I'll remember this article and be mollified.
Oxysis/Oxy
in reply to Davriellelouna • • •Ilovethebomb
in reply to Davriellelouna • • •gigachad
in reply to Davriellelouna • • •I'd recommend ion chromatography here if you want accurate results lol