China develops AI robot capable of human farming tasks
China develops AI robot capable of human farming tasks
China develops AI robot capable of human farming tasks-english.news.cn
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North Korea's Kim Jong Un to watch Beijing military parade alongside Putin and Xi Jinping
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is heading to Beijing by train on Tuesday to attend a military parade with his Chinese and Russian counterparts, North Korea’s state media reported. The event could demonstrate their potential three-way unity against the United States.Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin are among the 26 world leaders who’ll join Chinese President Xi Jinping to watch Wednesday’s massive military parade in Beijing that commemorates the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and China’s fight against Japan’s wartime aggressions.
While the event would mark Kim’s first attendance of a major multilateral event during his 14-year rule, it would also be the first time for Kim, Xi and Putin, all key challengers of the U.S., to gather at the same venue. None of the leaders have confirmed a private trilateral meeting.
https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-kim-china-xi-putin-parade-9b47625f8f6c1e0c0391de9fae848e11
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Indonesia protests: president scraps lawmakers’ perks in bid to calm tensions
Indonesia protests: president scraps lawmakers’ perks in bid to calm tensions
Police set up checkpoints across Jakarta on Monday after deadly protests that have forced Prabowo Subianto to remove perks include a housing allowance worth 10 times the minimum wageRebecca Ratcliffe (The Guardian)
Boxer Imane Khelif appeals to Court of Arbitration over World Boxing’s genetic sex test decision
Imane Khelif appeals to Cas over World Boxing’s genetic sex test decision
Imane Khelif has appealed to the court of arbitration for sport over World Boxing’s policy for competitors to take a preliminary genetic sex testGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
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Inane Khelif is an example of transphobic hysteria getting out of hand. This poor woman is being demonized and accused of "being a man" because these fuckers don't think she's pretty or feminine enough. There's a misogyny angle too.
Women with a certain jaw shape, small breasts, muscular physique, tone of voice, etc. will be deliberately misgendered even if they have lived as cisgender their whole lives.
But in many ways, its nothing new. Girls who are tomboys or have short hair or wear loose jeans and hoodies have always been slandered for not being "girly" enough. It's just that trans is the current weapon of choice for conservatives looking to bully people.
This isn’t an example of transphobia getting out of hand. This is what it is. Just an excuse to bully people.
It's gatekeeping femininity. Think — when was the last time a TERF got upset about a cis woman being harassed or beaten-up for using a women's restroom but appearing too butch? Why aren't they upset when trans men (that they think are confused women) get beaten up for using the women's restroom?
The cruelty is the point.
Because people are way, way worse at spotting trans people than they think they are. And they’re really bad at statistics.
Cis women are literally half the population, so even if you assume 95% of cis women look so feminine that nobody could mistake them for male, that still means you’re roughly 10x more likely to run into a ‘masculine looking’ cis woman than a trans woman period, regardless of how masculine or feminine she looks to anyone.
Intersex is pretty common. She might know that she falls into that category and doesn’t want to provoke a debate which may go against her.
Buuut we should probably have that debate. The sooner a major athletic org has to admit that a strict gender binary is untenable, the sooner we can bulldoze that talking point from transphobes’ scripts.
Xi Jinping criticises ‘bullying behaviour’ and Putin blames west for Ukraine war at Shanghai summit
Xi Jinping criticises ‘bullying behaviour’ and Putin blames west for Ukraine war at Shanghai summit
China’s leader urges attendees to oppose ‘cold war mentality’ while Russian president claims Ukraine war was ‘provoked by the west’Helen Davidson (The Guardian)
Putin: "Look what you made me do."
As textbook "psychopathic abuser speech" as it gets.
Who the hell is cancer boy?
I guess it is just a joke, but that nickname is fcking disgusting
China to show off military might in parade attended by anti-west leaders
China to show off military might in parade attended by anti-west leaders
Leaders of Russia, Iran and North Korea will be at event marking 80 years since defeat of Japan in second world warAmy Hawkins (The Guardian)
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Most of Canada’s counter-tariffs on the U.S. have now ended
Most of Canada’s counter-tariffs on the U.S. have now ended
Last month, Prime Minister Carney said many of Canada’s tariffs on the U.S., on goods that comply with the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade agreement, will come down starting Sept. 1.Uday Rana (Global News)
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What shit reporting. What is the aggregate value of current American tarrifs on Canadian goods and services and what is the aggregate value of Canadian countertarrifs on American goods and services?
Journalism is dying and Global is anything but "news". They literally just quote what people say, without research or context or logic. Lazy bullshit.
I setup a Mastodon relay - anyone want to help me test?
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/35533581
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/35533537
I setup a Mastodon relay - anyone want to help me test by adding it to their instance? Would help me know if the "Recent jobs" stat is working (I think it requires 2 instances at minimum to show jobs) and if adding to instances (outside of my own) is working properly and how traffic looks.
I setup a Mastodon relay - anyone want to help me test?
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/35533537I setup a Mastodon relay - anyone want to help me test by adding it to their instance? Would help me know if the "Recent jobs" stat is working (I think it requires 2 instances at minimum to show jobs) and if adding to instances (outside of my own) is working properly and how traffic looks.
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Oh, is it this time of the year again? Ok, here we go:
All forms of reparation were settled with the cession of the territories east of the Oder. If Poland wants to open this can of worms again, so be it. Königsberg by Christmas?
Maduro says 8 US ships 'with 1,200 missiles' targeting Venezuela
Maduro says 8 US ships with 1,200 missiles targeting Venezuela
The United States, which accuses Maduro of leading a drug cartel, has announced a deployment of warships to the southern Caribbean in an anti-drug trafficking operation.Le Monde with AFP (Le Monde)
'well I voted for Trump because I just don't want there to be any violence'
- dipshit traitors that don't understand how fascism works.
We have an unfortunately long and sordid history of fucking with central and South America with effective impunity. Looks like we’re ramping up for some more.
sigh what a time to be alive 😐
The thing is if the US just left maduro alone his regime probably would've collapsed by now. Every time anything bad happens there he can blame it on the CIA and US plots and half the time he's right so people still believe him.
If we got rid of the sanctions then the people couldn't blame anyone else but maduro for the shit economy and they maybe would oust him. But America just can't stand an independent left wing country "in there backyard"
The reason why Maduro is in power is the US. Plain and simple.
Hadn't the US propped puppet right wing governments in Venezuela, there wouldn't have been a need for a Chavez mesias.
The US doesn't care about drugs. They care about Venezuelan oil and continue tal hegemony. That's it.
So, it's not only Trump. It's every single government before him.
French streamer insists he didn't kill co-host during live broadcast
French streamer insists he didn't kill co-host during live broadcast
Safine Hamadi denied mistreating Raphaël Graven, who died during a 12-day streaming marathon, calling the stunts consensual and scripted. Prosecutors and the French government are now investigating the Kick platform for negligence.Le Monde with AFP (Le Monde)
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How viewers paid more than £31,000 to see 'trash streamer' being abused during ten-days of torture before he died live on camera
Raphael Graven, better known online as Jean Pormanove, was a prominent figure in France 's streaming world with over a million followers across social media.Sabrina Penty (Daily Mail)
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Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world's leading experts say
Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world's leading experts say
The world's leading association of genocide scholars cited several actions by Israel, including attacks on the healthcare sector and the killing of children.Emir Nader (BBC News)
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I genuinely believe that the vast, vast majority of people on this planet who are aware of the situation in Gaza can see that it's a genocide and that Israel is criminal.
I don't have anything to base it on, but I just have a feeling that we've reached a turning point in how Israel is perceived globally. I don't know what that will mean in the future, but I think it'll mean something big.
A) yes the view is changing
B) it's not going to be big because it's a small conflict in a tiny country.
Could you elaborate what this is supposed to mean?
They are not going to be wiped off the map soon and neither are they going to reform their country and have peace for everyone.
Main thing about the conflict is how stuck it is.
I think my point stands.
Israel has clearly lost most of the Democratic voter base. They're losing conservatives too, but it's really hard to overstate the importance of losing Democratic support. American Jews are increasingly unwilling to support the Zionist project, and Israel has always depended greatly on international support for everything from financial assistance to providing the actual Jewish bodies who are needed to actually move into settlements and birth more Israeli Jews.
We're not far from a day when Israel loses access to their US weapons and tech infrastructure. But their economy was never designed to work without American Jews visiting and moving to Israel.
Personally, I'd like to see the international community force the adoption of a democratic one state solution. And I think that's no less far-fetched than something like a return to the previous status quo.
I really don't think the next Democratic president will be a Zionist.
It's like abortion and guns. There used to be pro-gun Democrats and anti abortion Democrats, but culture changed and those are no longer positions you can hold off you want to get elected to any position.
In 2028, defending Palestinian genocide is going to be as electorally viable as saying abortions should be "safe, legal, and rare".
the west is still not willing to sanctions isrsel itself cuba style.
Pretty much this. Same for Russia.
I think the current government can be gotten rid of and a new government may handle things differently. That's about as good as it will get.
Trump and whoever comes after him when he croaks will still support Israel.
Well, duh!
"If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize." - Kevin Alfred Strom
Funny how with any other country the west has a hair trigger with calling out genocide, but Israel gets a free pass somehow.
Come on, that's not a good look is it.
Sorry did not know that was a supremacist. I just remembered that quote from somewhere. Regardless of the source, it rings true. Be it Israel, trump, religion, etc.
Just looked up the Wikipedia article. That guy was seriously fucked up.
My bad.
I mean if it's any consolation, America under the leadership of Trump or Vance isn't going to do jack shit to help Palestine or anyone else. They're literally fucking over their own people and telling them that empathy is a sickness.
Rest assured if any country is going to be leading the charge it won't be America. The entire country is on the verge of complete collapse. I would actually be more surprised if it doesn't happen at this point. It's pretty much inevitable. That's not hyperbole, collapse of the U.S. and democracy and division into smaller city state monarchies is literally the goal of this administration. If that happens, North Korea levels of isolationist policy is the only possible outcome.
Fuck another country.
We need to rebuild the UN from scratch, start over. This time, no veto rights for anyone. This time, give the fucker teeth. Give it the atrong Army it needs. If some dictator, be it a Korean one, a Chinese one, a European one, a Russia one, or an American one, decides to behave like an asshole we can send the actual world police on their asses, and this time it will be a police that is guided by ALL of humanity, not just a rich few assholes that can buy a politician to veto anything useful the UN could decide.
Also, why aren't any Arab countries doing something to end this instead of staying on the sidelines?
I get where you're coming from, but slow your roll on "It's time to forget what happened in 1940-45".
Understanding history is a vital part of not repeating mistakes.
Perhaps I was too poetic: that was my point.
You can't point to the IDF and say, 'Hey! Look! See how they're doing the same shit Nazis did??' if people aren't well informed about all the shit that Nazis did.
Jesus fucking christ, do you really need to have what he meant spelled out to you in fucking crayon???
He means lets stop allowing them to hide behind 6 million dead people to deflect, or worse, justify, what they are doing today.
Yes, I understand that. Which is why it would be a mistake to forget it.
It's not coincidental that the Holocaust is our most useful case study in understanding and explaining Israel's crimes against Palestinians. If you want to oppose genocide, it is a mistake to try to do so by "forgetting" about a genocide.
Remembering previous genocides is an important part of preventing/halting genocides.
Also, why aren’t any Arab countries doing something to end this instead of staying on the sidelines?
Because the last time they did, most of the Sinai peninsula ended up under Israeli control.
why aren’t any Arab countries doing something to end this instead of staying on the sidelines?
CIA's hard work.
Everybody says that Israel is committing genocide. Even some Republicans are boasting about it, even the Israeli government is boasting about it without using the word specifically.
At this point you'd be hard pressed to find anyone that would deny it's a genocide, except for using the word
Days since Israel committed genocide: 0
This is a live ticker. Come back daily for updates!
Because everything that is the state and institutions is a-ok in the minds of liberals and neoliberals.
Also if this shit does blow over and the media says 'actually there was an unacceptable genocide going on long before this!' The people who tacticly supported it and were always talking about civility snd debate will claim that they were always vehemently against it...
Meanwhile they will claim that activists who were always against it to have been stupid idiots who just wanted an excuse to break things and not go to work like adults and they were actually for the genocide! Thus their arrests and criminal charges will stay and they will continue to have their credibility attacked.
Flotilla leaves Barcelona in biggest attempt yet to break Israeli blockade of Gaza - National | Globalnews.ca
Flotilla leaves Barcelona in biggest attempt yet to break Israeli blockade of Gaza
A flotilla with aid and activists left Barcelona for Gaza to break Israel’s blockade, as famine worsens and over 63,000 have died in nearly 2 years.globalnewsdigital (Global News)
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DAT-protocol
I stumbled onto this interesting protocol. Already has a browser using it called the beaker browser
Basically a decentralized protocol for data with Git-like features built-in. I wonder if any of you have stumbled onto this. Any thoughts ?
dat-ecosystem - explore p2p projects
dat-ecosystem is a post-web p2p community of projects - Most projects are self funded. Some of the projects contribute maintainance and development to core pieces of the Dat ecosystem while others create high level applications built on top of p2p pr…dat-ecosystem.org
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What is it?
From one of the projects
Agregore, a browser for the distributed web, facilitates peer-to-peer data sharing without central servers, supporting protocols like BitTorrent and IPFS for direct loading and sharing of content.
So instead of putting stuff (like my webpage) on a server, I share it P2P? But then my computer has to run 24/7 which basically makes it a server, right?
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Teatro del silenzio 2024: who wants to live forever
Anche noi vogliamo dare il nostro contributo per UnoRadio – la musica condivisa nei social network decentralizzati italiani.
Forse per il pubblico mainstream non sarà la migliore interpretazione di questo brano ma, per quella che è la nostra storia personale, qui c’è dentro anche un po’ di noi.
Who Wants to live forever di Bocelli e Brian May
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Ukraine suspects Russia of assassinating former parliamentary speaker
KYIV, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Ukrainian officials said on Monday they suspected Russia of involvement in the murder of former parliamentary speaker Andriy Parubiy after a suspect was detained.
National police head Ivan Vyhivskyi said the gunman had disguised himself as a courier and fired eight times in Saturday's attack in the western city of Lviv.
"He spent a long time preparing, watching, planning and finally pulling the trigger ... There is Russian involvement," he said on Facebook, without providing evidence.
Russia, which has been at war with Ukraine since early 2022, has not commented, and there has been no claim of responsibility for the killing of 54-year-old Parubiy, a leading figure in protests that helped to oust a pro-Russian president in 2014.
Vadym Onyshchenko, regional chief of the SBU intelligence service, said the murder looked like a contract killing.
"We have information indicating the possible involvement of the Russian Federation's security services in organising the murder," he said in a statement published by the SBU.
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Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s top scholars on the crime say
Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s top scholars on the crime say
International Association of Genocide Scholars resolution backed by 86% of members who votedLorenzo Tondo (The Guardian)
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As someone who lives near a major international border, I also run into this problem, but I'm also fucking confused why this is even a problem. The phone has a fucking GPS built in. It knows exactly where it is at all times. There is no excuse for this except greedy providers and cowardly regulators.
If I am standing on my country's soil, using an unmodified cellphone, within a reasonable margin of error, I should pay my country's local rates. Full stop. That should be a legal obligation. If telecom providers want to bake that into their roaming agreements with international and specialty providers like that, so they must accept my calls and bill me accordingly, fine. If they want to make the phone refuse to connect to the roaming tower at all and force it to connect to a lower strength local tower, also fine. If because of technical reasons or interference they really cannot do that so that it would just lose service altogether, maybe a popup saying that my national connection has been lost and asking if I want to start roaming, rather than a text saying "Heads up! You're roaming suddenly and we can charge you whatever we want now!"
It's not that fucking hard. Make. It. Make. Sense.
EU chief von der Leyen's plane hit by suspected Russian GPS jamming
EU chief von der Leyen's plane hit by suspected Russian GPS interference
The European Commission said the plane's navigation was disrupted in Bulgaria on Sunday.Maia Davies & Will Vernon (BBC News)
More than 800 killed after strong quake hits Afghanistan
More than 800 killed after strong earthquake hits Afghanistan
There are fears the death toll will rise significantly as the area is remote and mountainous, making rescue operations difficult.Yama Bariz (BBC News)
[Video clip] Tech CEOs at the White House - One-upping each other in Ass-kissing
barf
Source: chaos.social/@D_70WN/115156775…
D_70WN 🌈 🏳️⚧️ (@D_70WN@chaos.social)
Attached: 1 video Spätestens jetzt sollte dem dümmsten klar sein, wenn die ganzen #gafam #techbros u.a. diesem Typen (Psycho) huldigen und fein weiter unsere Daten Missbrauchen.chaos.social
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YSK: Before she was the CEO of BlueSky Jay Graeber worked in cryptocurrency
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Grab…
In 2015, Graber began working as a software engineer for SkuChain in Mountain View, California. She then worked in a factory in Moses Lake, Washington, where she soldered bitcoin mining equipment. In 2016, she began working as a junior developer for the Zcash cryptocurrency.
So lately I have been trying to figure out why people are calling BlueSky decentralized and I noticed that fun fact. It made me realize how cryptocurrencies are something else that was often technically "decentralized" but in reality controlled by a single person or group.
In case it's also not known, Jack Dorsey who helped found BlueSky is a big cryptocurrency booster.
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Because however one feels about blockchain tech and its future, past companies within the crypto industry are notorious for selling the moon, being shady, and cashing out early. 'ZCash' appears to be a good example, particularly because a small group exerts such a high level of control over it.
And if the parallel holds, and at least some of that applies Jay Gaeber's own personal experience and expectations of what a company's trajectory should look like, it doesn't bode well for Bluesky.
Because the claims of people involved with cryptocurrency are historically very untrustworthy, that's why.
The thing that got me interested is that BlueSky says it's "decentralized" but the more I look into it, it's only "decentralized" using a very narrow, highly technical definition of the term "decentralized".
Cryptocurrency is the same. People with a financial stake in cryptocurrency often say it is "decentralized" but it's only true if you accept their extremely narrow definitions of what that word means.
I keep seeing people ask why people call Bluesky decentralised. I never see people call Bluesky decentralised.
(Okay, "never" isn't quite correct, I've seen the term used in relation to Bluesky maybe a handful of times but you make it sound like that's their main selling point)
I never see people call Bluesky decentralised.
I find that surprising, because BlueSky uses that term: bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2…
Jay Graeber herself .
Here is the Verge calling it decentralized: theverge.com/23686778/bluesky-…
Here is NYT calling it decentralized: nytimes.com/2024/11/22/technol…
Here is CNN calling decentralized: cnn.com/2023/04/28/tech/bluesk…
Bluesky’s CEO wants to build a Musk-proof, decentralized version of Twitter
Originally funded by Twitter, the decentralized social media service Bluesky is opening up to more users. CEO Jay Graber says Elon Musk banning links to Twitter competitors is “exactly why what we’re building is important.”Alex Heath (The Verge)
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Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users - Bluesky
Bluesky now exceeds 13 million users, the AT Protocol developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped highly requested features like direct messages and video.Bluesky
For me the mistrust on bluesky started when it was so easily adopted as "twitter" alternative, mastodon being just there struggling for that.
In order to achieve that a lot of money and influence have been moved around. People didn't organically moved, they were influenced to move there. I don't trust that.
Gunboats follow sanctions in US strategy on Venezuela
The US naval buildup off Venezuela's coast is not about drug interdiction, but imperial pressure. Caracas's response, grounded in asymmetric defense and bolstered by key Eurasian alliances, has transformed a lopsided showdown into a contest of global powers.The US has entered a new phase in its long war on Venezuela. Having exhausted economic and diplomatic tools, it has now turned to the military lever, dispatching warships to the Caribbean in a naked display of force.
This escalation caps years of imperial targeting of the Bolivarian government in Caracas – beginning with sweeping sanctions under former US President Barack Obama, tightened to unprecedented levels under President Donald Trump, and sustained through bipartisan consensus.
Officially, Washington frames this as part of a broad “counter narcotics” campaign targeting so-called terrorist organizations. But that story collapses under scrutiny. What the US really seeks is regime change and regional control, thinly veiled behind drug war rhetoric.
Gunboats follow sanctions in US strategy on Venezuela
The US naval buildup off Venezuela's coast is not about drug interdiction, but imperial pressure. Caracas's response, grounded in asymmetric defense and bolstered by key Eurasian alliances, has transformed a lopsided showdown into a contest of global…thecradle.co
How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse.
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/45188740
arewedecentralizedyet.online/
Are We Decentralized Yet?
A site with statistics regarding the decentralization status of various web servicesarewedecentralizedyet.online
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GitHub - bluesky-social/pds: Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) container image, compose file, and documentation
Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) container image, compose file, and documentation - bluesky-social/pdsGitHub
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Yes. The relevant metric:
99.55% of posts are on a single instance. That is not "federated" in any meaningful sense.
Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS means running your own Personal Data Server that is capable of federating with the wider Bluesky social network.
GitHub - bluesky-social/pds: Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) container image, compose file, and documentation
Bluesky PDS (Personal Data Server) container image, compose file, and documentation - bluesky-social/pdsGitHub
PDSes only store user data. These are full instances that can be used to browse the network. The idea is to make your account really yours. Bluesky is hosting most of them. But there are some people who do it on their own.
But bluesky controls much more important components in the network, namely the Relay and AppView.
If Bluesky decides to cut off your PDS you are pretty much alone.
Bluesky is pretty much a centralized platform like Twittler.
Bluesky's Moderation Architecture
Moderation is a crucial aspect of any social network. However, traditional moderation systems often lack transparency and user control, leaving communities vulnerable to sudden policy changes and potential mismanagement.docs.bsky.app
Zeppelin.social is 3rd party appview and you can host your own
whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2…
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month
Add using DID:Web and you're now fully self hosted
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O.whtwnd.com
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So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
Bluesky is the newest iteration of privately owned and controlled social media
Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.
Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don't get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.
The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though...
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I'm with you. To my knowledge all my irl woke friends ride only mainstream social media.
I had a local anarchist reach out to me on my ancient FB Messenger of all things.
I get that it's not the most important part if you're doing prefiguration, but as far as I can tell most people just want to be where most people are, even if it is supporting actually vile corporations.
Unfortunately not understanding or being sufficiently motivated by the threat of corporate social media is still prevalent among a good amount of lefties I know, but I find even when they are uninterested in leaving corporate social media they can at least understand the logic behind it in a way a lot of techy type people start to just get combatitive when you try to explain.
Most often when I have a conversation about this with someone who is very technically well versed with computers and the types of systems that are relevant to federated social media their response is to answer every one of my broader ethical questions by changing the topic to a conversation about technical details and they either utterly miss the point or outright refuse to have a discussion about it because they think I am being too cynical.
Ultimately these people only have one real argument which is to just repeat the mantra "stop being so negative, lets just wait and see before we jump to conclusions" endlessly about the same cycle of bullshit repeating over and over again.
this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details
Not weird at all; this was the case with cryptocurrency too. Otherwise qualified and intelligent people would invest in centralized scam coins because they had no understanding of economics, just tech.
It's sad but cool that it works the same way with social capital.
Intelligence and expertise is worth pursuing for the benefit that comes from learning for the sake of learning, but it is true that there is a danger to knowing more and more about a very narrow subject in that it becomes more and more seductive to believe that the thing you are an expert in is a key to understanding everything else and that this gives you a righteous vantage to look down upon the genius of others and judge from afar.
Some of the smartest people there has ever been or likely will ever be throughout history have time and time again completely undermined their potential by falling prey to this delusional drug of a belief.
So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
They call it marketing, I call it propaganda.
"It's the same picture."
Always has been. The only difference is what they're selling.
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Because, despite being wildly impractical, it’s technically built on tech that COULD be decentralized.
Yes exactly, it reminds me of the logic of cryptocurrency boosters. I just found out that the bluesky CEO (not to mention jack dorsey) are both crypto advocates so it makes a lot more sense now.
YSK: Before she was the CEO of BlueSky Jay Graeber worked in cryptocurrency
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Grab…In 2015, Graber began working as a software engineer for SkuChain in Mountain View, California. She then worked in a factory in Moses Lake, Washington, where she soldered bitcoin mining equipment. In 2016, she began working as a junior developer for the Zcash cryptocurrency.
So lately I have been trying to figure out why people are calling BlueSky decentralized and I noticed that fun fact. It made me realize how cryptocurrencies are something else that was often technically "decentralized" but in reality controlled by a single person or group.In case it's also not known, Jack Dorsey who helped found BlueSky is a big cryptocurrency booster.
whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2…
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O.whtwnd.com
It's not:
In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage. That is a nearly 5x increase in just four months, and my guess is that by next month, we'll see that doubled to at least ten terabytes due to the massive switchover to Bluesky which has happened post-election. As Bluesky grows in popularity, so does the rate of growth of the expected resources to host a meaningfully participating node.
whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2…
Check atproto.africa, app.wafrn.net, zeppelin.social and altq.net
A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
This is an update to a Summer 2024 blog post. At the time, atproto relays required a cache of the full network on local disk to validate data structures. With the Sync v1.1 updates, relays don't need all that disk I/O.whtwnd.com
So why does everyone keep referring to Bluesky as decentralized or even comparable to the fediverse
Parrot the marketing hyperbole.
The enshitification continies.
Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it's usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.
They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it's just a buzzword, I believe.
This site currently measures the concentration of user data for active users: in the Fediverse, this data is on servers (also known as instances); in the Atmosphere, it is on the PDSes that host users' data repos. All PDSes run by the company Bluesky Social PBC are aggregated in this dataset, since they are under the control of a single entity. Similarly, mastodon.social and mastodon.online are combined as they are run by the same company.
Fediverse Observer checks all sites in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home from a map or list or automatically.
Lemmy Sites Status. Find a Lemmy server to sign up for, find one close to you!lemmy.fediverse.observer
If your idea of a federated Twitter is a bunch of mini-Twitters that sometimes exchange indirect replies or something, then the Fediverse fulfills that purpose completely. Mission accomplished, we can all go home now.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time, even the thing Mastodon merged half a year ago that supposedly fetches all replies if you remember to navigate to the topmost post, and wait up to 15 minutes for your view of the thread to coalesce, falls short.
And this is why hosting Mastodon is cheap, it fundamentally cannot provide the functionality BlueSky offers. Of course, you might think that such functionality is not desirable anyway, and that's entirely fair. But if you're looking for the immediacy that centralized Twitter gave users, I don't see a way for Fedi to ever provide that, whereas there is a path to BlueSky decentralization. It's a fact that your UX is diminished if all of your followers and followeds are not on the same instance.
But in the end, I think there is space for both.
If your idea is that the replies to every post look the same to any user, anywhere, at any time
This is only true of Bluesky because everyone is using Bluesky's infrastructure at the moment. If Bluesky ever deindexes someone and they start posting to an alternative relay, you suddenly don't have a guarantee of a full view of a post's replies.
Content addressing means you can make your instance pull from both their relay and the bluesky relay and trivially merge threads and views without consistency issues, so that's solvable.
The bigger issue is all those other regular users who doesn't, and still get confused (unless they manage to pick a client app that does it for them)
I mean, this would become less trivial the more replays go into use, where to get a full view you'd have to pull from all the relays that exist.
ActivityPub's solution to this is just IMO better, the original post has a replies collection attached to it that acts as the authority the replies the post has. This also allows creators to eject replies from the collection. There are issues with the way fedi software currently handles fetching from these reply collections, but the missing replies thing is very solvable in ActivityPub.
Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user's post goes viral.
And as for moderation bluesky also carries information with the top post from the post author and allows hiding replies too, etc. This gets enforced on the appview side, so the posting user's PDS is unscathed if it goes viral.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
Realistically, the relay network will likely end up voluntarily adopting a tree topology - hobbyist communities would run small relays bundling all activity from members' PDS servers, then a larger relay in front gathers everything from a ton of smaller relays and makes it available to appviews
Doing it this way is why small instances gets hammered when a user’s post goes viral.
Setting up caching in the reverse proxy layer would alleviate this a lot of this. Like, GoToSocial only recommends to set up caching for the key and webfinger endpoints, where having it set up to cache posts and profiles for like 60 seconds (or however long the Cache-Control header says, Mastodon defaults to 180s) would alleviate the strain on the server so much.
There are other thing you can do, like this post explains some other things for Misskey, but the defaults should be sensible so you don't have to be a sysadmin expert to host an instance and they're currently not. I host 2 Lemmy instances (ukfli.uk and sappho.social) from a £5/month VPS and they're able to handle bursts of hundreds of requests without issue.
Bluesky is built to assume a handful of big relay (remember that a relay can merge in contents of another) and a bunch of appview and a ton of PDS servers, feed generators, moderation labelers, etc.
People are already building small, non-archival relays so this assumption seems mute. It's also important to remember that relays are an optimisation, not a core part of the protocol.
How to optimize your fediverse instance
A compilation of tips to optimize fediverse instances. Notably their reverse proxies, configuration, and load balancing.Latte macchiato (Latte's Blog)
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But....I came here just for the gloating fediverse content.
What else could there be?
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second, even on this account my last post was 1 month ago.
I mean I agree... it's kind of the constant crux isn't it?
The IT nerds pick a protocol that's uncontrolled, you need to select options and servers, because... well obviously that's kind of the definition of uncontrolled.
Some big name with big VC backing makes a big platform, makes it simple as possible, no choices, no control but good defaults. Average joes all flock there, build huge communities, users happy. Obviously the bulk of the creative types, celebrities etc... that most people care about flock there.
Big corp or VCs start demanding more monetization, or political censorship, or whatever kind of enshittification they inevitably always will. Users complain, but it all continues to amplify... open communities announce "hey we've got our alternative here", they say "thanks but nah that's too complicated, and you don't have the users that I want to see anyway". People complain more... and either adapt and accept the enshitification as normal... or maybe another big VC backed individual or other corp opens an alternative and pulls off the impossible critical mass goal, and process repeats.
I don't really know the solution, just know the pattern. Bluesky is IMO the new twitter... fundimentally I don't see it as super different than the old twitter. Only way I really see everything working is if say... a corporate backed giant actually played nicely and allowed interoperability with a federated protocol that's actually... well hostable.
It's basically like exactly what happens out in the real world... walmart comes offers better convenience and lower prices than local competitors... local economy adapts to walmart, individual stores shut down... half of owners, etc... forced to working for walmart for garbage pay.
I think the difference is that while other services boom and bust, the fediverse keeps growing slowly because it is decentralized, and can't be enshittified in the same way.
It is not as easy or attractive as Bluesky right now, but it keeps growing slowly and getting more kinds of people.
Maybe it won't be the network of choice for journalists, metal celebrities, etc, like twitter and bluesky, but it already is making its way as something more like old school tumblr -- some people like it, some don't.
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It's doable on Mastodon but significantly more complicated.
You need crawlers to index posts across the Fediverse (and avoid getting them blocked), personalized recommendation models per user, and you need pre-emptive caching on the user's instance for anything recommended (ideally the crawler would make a cache on behalf of each of the opted-in users' instances, but without content addressing this is a security risk). You also need to poll for edits / deletions.
On Mastodon, your instance doesn't receive posts until somebody on your instance interacts with the account posting it (following the poster, browsing directly to the post, etc).
Feeds with recommendations requires fetching stuff in advance to not be slow and janky. Basically the feed service would need a bot account on your instance and retrieving all popular posts, given the current architecture. Having thousands of these bots across every instance do this would cause a significant performance hit on smaller Mastodon instances when one of their users posts something popular. So you need something different, like a server plugin where the bot fetches the content once and tells all participating Mastodon servers about their cached copy, so they don't all have to hit the hosting instance. But that's a security risk with the Mastodon design.
They're implementing E2E encrypted social stuff. Voting privacy and encryption is linked.
Especially when you have users across multiple servers and both want voting privacy AND being able to deal with vote manipulation. You need stuff like pseudonymous commitments per account attested to by the hosting instance, etc. The only thing that's simpler but still private is having instances just digitally sign a total vote tally, which also means you can't detect vote manipulation on other servers at all.
But accounts are already pseudonymous?
Here's where I am at:
I can check if my votes are federated correctly by checking if any of my votes are suppressed or votes in my name are made up. If my instance sends a different random token with each vote, I can still do that, as long as I know which tokens are assigned to my votes.
But vote tallies can also be manipulated by making up new votes through fake/bot accounts. If a vote can be connected to posts, this can be checked to some degree. Say, if an instance has a lot of voters that never post, that indicates a problem.
I don't see how the second thing with E2EE.
The very very short TLDR is that anonymization is very hard, but there's auditable cryptographic voting schemes which preserves anonymity by using anonymous cryptographic commitments and one of a bunch of different techniques to count encrypted votes (homomorphic encryption, threshold encryption, etc).
You could set it up so you know which server each set of votes comes from but not which users on the server. You could also make it prove each vote comes from one real account and that no account voted twice. You could even make use of commitments plus ZKP to prove banned accounts can't vote!
It sounds complicated because it is complicated. And somewhat inefficient. But it's possible. And it would be fully encrypted and anonymous voting.
You could also make it prove each vote comes from one real account and that no account voted twice.
How would it prove that the account is real? I suspect that the meaning of "real account" is not the opposite of bot or sockpuppet.
I assume it proves that there is a public key associated with each vote.
It doesn't sound like cryptography is able to add anything worthwhile. You have to trust the instance to police itself. Self-hosted instances still don't vote anonymously.
A group of users has to cooperate to hide their votes from others and each other. Only the tally is known, but you have to trust the group. On the Fediverse, such a group will be the users of an instance. The more users the instance has, the more anonymous the individual becomes.
You have to trust the instance admins to weed out bots and sock puppets, which is extra hard when they don't see the votes either. Presumably, compensating by collecting and keeping other data, such as IPs, for longer is undesirable. You have to believe that admins, volunteers all, are willing to do the extra work and that they don't actually favor manipulation for ideological reasons.
The only way to uncover untrustworthy instances is to look at aggregated data. I guess you'd have to get/scrape data for some community and then analyze by instance if the number of posters is out of whack with the number of voters. I wonder if anyone's ever done such a thing. It's certainly more challenging than looking at oddities among voters who brigade some topic.
Admins of large instances could get away with having many sock voters among the real users, if they wanted to manipulate discussions for, say, ideological reasons.
It is my understanding Bluesky outright is not decentralized. It may have an API that allows satellite instances but if the main official instance goes down the platform dies.
Mastodon, Lemmy and their siblings are decentralized in that no one instance is sacred. If sh.ijust.works were to go offline right now, the rest of Lemmy would keep right on trucking. Hell, all of "Lemmy" could die and Mastodon and Peertube et al would keep right on trucking.
ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀
It's a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.
otoh, atproto's PLC DID method is also not really decentralized... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).
Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization | bryan newbold (🚴Vancouver Island 🇨🇦)
This is a reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber's thoughtful (and widely read) "How decentralized is Bluesky really?" blog post. I am so happy and grateful that Christine took the time to write up her thoughts and put them out in public.whtwnd.com
... but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.
In the blog post you linked, neither the author or myself came to your conclusion:
However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.
The blog post also says this:
There is one other thing which Bluesky gets right, and which the present-day fediverse does not. This is that Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down. In this way (well, also allegedly with identity, but I will critique that part because it has several problems), Bluesky achieves its "credible exit" (Bluesky's own term, by the way) in that the main node or individual hosts could go down, posts can continue to be referenced. This is possible to also do on the fediverse, but is not done presently; today, a fediverse user has to worry a lot about a node going down. indeed I intentionally fought for and left open the possibility within ActivityPub of adding content-addressed posts, and several years ago I wrote a demo of how to combine content addressing with ActivityPub. But nonetheless, even though such a thing is spec-compatible with ActivityPub, content-addressing is not done today on ActivityPub, and is done on Bluesky.
My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more "decentralized architecturally" I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.
Okay yes this makes sense. Although, honestly i think I'd prefer the AP method of doing it because BlueSky sends ALL content to all nodes, so it's MUCH less cost effective to join with a private server.
I run my own lemmy instance, so i know the data volume since 2023 has been probably like a terabyte or so. But, with BlueSky I'd have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes (a guess based almost entirely on nothing).
So it really boils down to yes I agree that AP has problems with data accessibility, but I'd prefer that over unnecessary data redundancy
with BlueSky I’d have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes
I think this is a common misconception based on some critics' incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) "A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month" for some numbers.
If I understand correctly, to run a "full nework relay" does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren't interested in for any long period of time.
Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people's relays.
Disclaimer: I'm not an atproto expert, and I haven't set any of this up myself.
You can design an appview that crawls PDSes directly, no relay needed.
AppViewLite does that
portable identity
So like when bluesky starts having to pay back their investors I can portable my identity to.... one of the other equally populated blueskies out there?
Blacksky
Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.Blacksky Community
There are already "other Blueskies" out there, and you can already port your identity to them.
However, most users haven't, and most users are not motivated to do so. Thus, OP created a website.
We're counting hypotheticals as real now? I suppose your not-hypothetical girlfriend goes to another school too, right? Just not motivated to visit?
As you're no doubt aware, the reason 99.9% of bluesky users are on a single server is obviously not because "nobody is motivated" to create other servers.
I'm just going to respond to what you said before you edited your comment to be a reaction gif.
Since (as of November of last year) a majority of Bluesky's user base is non-technical, they have don't have the knowledge or motivation to switch to another PDS. If 30 million users joined mastodon.social, the fediverse would also be centralized.
The only way for Bluesky to be decentralized by the metrics you use is for them to force users onto other PDSes.
For those who enjoy in-depth write-ups, Christine Webber has looked at how decentralized BlueSky is really, before: social.coop/@cwebber/113527462…
How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really? dustycloud.org/blog/how-decent…A technical deep-dive, since people have been asking me for my thoughts. I'll expand a bit on some of the key points here in a thread. 🧵
Exactly.
Communities are not higher quality with a million people. Small communities where you can know who the other posters are are a much better experience.
There can be disagreement about anything.
I’m just not wasting my time trying to have a conversation with x_h1tt1er42069_x. I can find him at anytime on Reddit if I have a problem that only he has a Solution.
Having such a person in this community wouldn’t be an enjoyable experience.
Because they've been told it's federated and don't understand that it really isn't. My bluesky profile reads "Created a profile until you all figure out Bluesky is another Twitter."
All I use it for is to read post from people not on mastodon and to reshare my bridged posts from mastodon.
Most likely because they care less about the idea of federated platforms and more about "not Reddit" and "not Twitter." I'm one of those users personally (not that I don't care about the idea, it's good to have a return of what is effectively 3rd places of the internet). Most of them, like me, probably came here during the Reddit migration and moved to BlueSky when that took off in popularity.
If I didn't dislike the Twitter format as much, I'd probably spend more time on BlueSky than forgetting about it until one of these threads appears, and I'd probably be on Tumblr still if I didn't only use social media from my phone and Tumblr didn't have such a horrible app.
People are going to go where the people are, for better or worse, until something pisses them off enough to go somewhere else. I originally created a Twitter account to follow a bunch of artists I followed who left Tumblr during the porn ban. I didn't care for the platform (I hate the tweet format) but that was where all the artists went so I followed. Similarly, when the 3rd party api fiasco hit Reddit, I left and immediately went looking for where the people from the subs I read by "newest posts first" went - except the communities fractured and disappeared. It was the possibility of them reforming here that made me go through a GitHub to figure out how to make an account (spoiler: they never really did reform). I had no idea what a federated platform was supposed to be or do.
The fact that Lemmy is so niche is its biggest advantage and its biggest curse. You either love how small it is, like Reddit back in the day, or you suffer the lack of population for the things that you're into, and the very nature of the federated platform makes it that much harder to centralize enough people in one niche to form a community (there we go again - centralization). Lemmy is the Wild West frontier town to the big social media giants' company towns.
Oh yeah sure. I'm here after all, jumped ship from Reddit a year or so ago and I actually prefer Lemmy.
I jumped ship from twitter to mastodon around the same time. And while I like the idea of mastodon and I like the interface, fact is that Reddit / lemmy is a different sort of usage from twitter / bluesky / mastodon. Twitter I mostly used to keep up with my favourite content creators, and occasionally shout at clouds. Those content creators just aren't on mastodon, they've mostly moved to bluesky. Those are the users that are the foundation of a platform like that. So yeah, I use lemmy and bluesky now.
TBH I'm not sure mastodon could scale up big anyway - it would be a nightmare trying to regulate bad content and comply with local laws etc.
How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon?
The usual way, whatever that is. What would Mastodon do about it? How do you manipulate Bluesky?
BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.
It's the number in OP, so I ran with that. The fediverse number apparently excludes Gab and Truth Social. Makes sense, since those aren't federated with the rest, but that also shows an issue.
How do you manipulate Bluesky?
The same way you manipulate Twitter, by tweaking the algorithm.
Capitalists love interoperability when they can use it to disrupt other capitalists. When they get in a dominant position they hate it.
It's basic enshittification theory.
Arizona’s Heat Is So Extreme Even Rattlesnakes and Cacti Are Struggling | You have to wonder, if these creatures built to survive this can no longer survive, what’s going to happen to us?
Arizona’s Heat Is So Extreme Even Rattlesnakes and Cacti Are Struggling
Two Arizona rattlesnakes died while underground, cooked to death in their burrows. These are creatures evolutionarily suited to survive.Luis Prada (VICE)
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We're all perfectly "evolutionarily suited to survive", just not to the environment we're making.
We'll adapt, or we'll die, just like everything else.
Sucks, but that's our fate, now. We should not have done this thing.
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Humans are kind of a notoriously migratory species.
Time to see to what extent that instinct still exists.
Old cyberpunk saying:
"The future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed."
Sure, in the long run, we are all dead.
In the medium term, there are better and worse spots to try and call home, should one want to elongate one's lifespan.
Increase the resolution of your projection render, and you can see more details.
Oh right of course, the economy being globalized also means everyone everywhere has the same standard of living, perfectly equally distributing resources despite massive local and regional differences in geography, culture, populatiion density, thank god communism has been achieved.
Also, of course, climate change will just have precisely the same climatic effects over all of these highly varied areas.
And finally, it certainly will not be the case that industrialized and militarized technologically advanced societies will displace and dispose of any indigenous populations on now relatively fertile land, nor will poor subsistence farmers who already live on extremely thin margins be obliterated by the slightest breach of those margins... or just physically displaced by rising sea levels or floods or fires literally permanently destroying the land they work.
No, there are just no historical precedents for anything like that, no.
... You can't possibly be serious, can you?
We will all die. Well, except for the billionaires in their nuclear powered bunkers.
If only scientists had been shouting about it since the 70's. Oh. Wait a minute.
Honestly, we kinda deserve it at this point.
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It goes further back than the 70s.
Climate change was even mentioned in a mainstream movie in 1958. Specifically, “Indiscreet,” a charming romantic comedy starring two of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the time, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.
In this innocuous scene, the two lead characters (Philip and Anna) have recently met and are out on their first date. To break the tense, awkward silence during a painfully long elevator ride, Anna attempts to make casual small talk with Philip.
————
INT. ELEVATOR:
ANNA:
It’s unusual for the weather to be so muggy this time of year.
PHILIP:
Yes, I read an article the other day that claimed the world’s weather was changing.
ANNA:
Really? That’s interesting.
PHILIP:
Yes, isn’t it?
————
Yes, Philip, it IS interesting. And you should’ve shared that article with Anna’s brother-in-law, the diplomat! Then we might not all BE in this situation…Philip!
😡
News Coverage of Coal's Link to Global Warming, in 1912
A 61-word article in two obscure New Zealand newspapers nailed the connection between coal burning and global warming .Dot Earth Blog
The first mentions of climate change are well over 100 years old.
It’s like Y2K; the first person to realize that it was going to be a problem did so in the 1950s, and it hit mainstream again in the 70s. But we didn’t throw billions at the problem until the mid 90s…
Except this time there is likely no amount of money that can keep the climate train from hitting the wall. But we might be able to slow the train down a little.
"It’s so hot that even the famous cacti of the Sonoran Desert, such as the saguaro cactus —the Trident-like one you’ve seen in countless cartoons and cowboy movies —are struggling in the heat. They photosynthesize at night, when it gets a little cooler. But climate changeHas extended the times in which it is hot as hell not only further into the calendar year but further into the night. The saguaro cactus is struggling to photosynthesize when it’s still over 100 degrees, even after the sun has set."
Cacti, and plants in general, do not and cannot photosynthesize to any appreciable degree at night. Even the brightest, fullest moon and clearest sky full of stars is not enough light for this process to be effective/efficient. They do their carbon capture / gas exchange primarily at night, but that's a separate process and is not the same thing as photosynthesis.
But also, this whole section is just poorly formatted, unedited, incorrect, and badly written. Like even the tone seems to change in these "2" paragraphs. Why even include this in the article? It really undermines the rest of the content, in my opinion.
"This city (Phoenix, AZ) should not exist.It is a monument to man's arrogance."
Peggy Hill.
I was debating whether I should correct you that it was, in fact, Bobby who said this - or whether that would be pointless and rude.
While debating, I looked it up so I could source my potential claim and it turns out . I apologize for doubting you!
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
I... guess I appreciate that you bothered to look into it and just freely admitted what you were going to say was wrong?
Lol, but no really, that kind of intellectual honesty, as well as restraint in general, are rare and commendable.
But uh, no need to apologize for an unrealized thought crime lol.
Honestly, I think it's good policy to announce when one is convinced that one's beliefs are wrong. Whether doing so preemptively is universally a good idea is debatable, but I thought it might be helpful for some who thought as I did and maybe it would even garner a laugh from you. Not that I know you in any particular manner.
All that cheerfulness and attempt at morality aside, it can be hard to take the same stance once one has defended one's position, so maybe this is good practice for when I've actually stated my beliefs and need to swallow my pride.
Hope you're having a great weekend!
Likewise, in all respects and regards!
Hope your weekend goes well too.
The world objectively would be a better place if more people spent more time second guessing themselves and their preconcieved knowledge sets and beliefs, in a way that at least resembled critical thinking.
Or, in less words... intellectual humility, as opposed to incurious and stubborn overconfidence.
Only if you join me in it and also let me give you a heartfelt compliment.
Oh right, we would have to make sure that room has AC, if its in Phoenix.
That person has not yet allowed it, but I'm interested in what heartfelt compliment you have to offer them.
I know less about them than I do you (I've seen a few of your other posts on lemmy) so I'm genuinely curious. Complimenting strangers is a big part of my life and I'd like to learn from you.
Hah, I mean, I don't know them at all lol, my approach would just be to have a bit of chat about how their life has been going recently, and I'd bet I could find some admirable trait or accomplishment.
Or maybe they just dress particularly well, maybe they have a pleasant voice... possibilities are endless, so long as you keep and open mind and more or less just politely say what you really feel.
... Its funny, I am quite a cynic at a broad societal level, but actually person to person? Still tend toward naive optimist.
[PDF] Two authors file a proposed class action lawsuit against Apple, alleging Apple knowingly used a dataset of pirated books to train its AI models
::: spoiler Comments
- Hacker News;
- Reddit.
:::
- Apple Intelligence is a set of generative AI programs and technologies designed and
maintained by Apple.- Apple—one of the world’s most valuable companies—has invested substantial capital and engineering resources into Apple Intelligence. It regards Apple Intelligence as a breakthrough
innovation that will make its users’ experiences “profoundly different” across various product applications. Through Apple Intelligence, Apple hopes to add trillions to its market capitalization in coming years.- But Apple is building part of this new enterprise using Books3, a dataset of pirated
copyrighted books that includes the published works of Plaintiffs and the Class. Apple used Books3 to train its OpenELM language models. Apple also likely trained its Foundation Language Models using this same pirated dataset.- Apple is building another part of its Apple Intelligence empire by using Applebot, a software program that copies mass quantities of webpages (also known as “scraping”). Apple scraped data with Applebot for nearly nine years before disclosing that it intended to train its AI systems on this scraped data. Scrapers like Applebot can also reach “shadow libraries” that host millions of other
unlicensed copyrighted books, including, on information and belief, Plaintiffs’ and Class Members’ copyrighted works.- The Foundation Language Models within Apple Intelligence depend on the contents of their training datasets. The Foundation Language Models operate by copying and later simulating
creative expression found in copyrighted works. For this reason, the inclusion of expressive high-quality
material—especially copyrighted material—in Apple’s AI training datasets is deliberate and
commercially significant. For instance, to access even more copyrighted material to develop its valuable
generative AI products, Apple entered into a multimillion-dollar licensing agreement with Shutterstock.
But not with Plaintiffs or the Class.- Plaintiffs and the Class are authors who have registered copyrights for their published works. They did not consent to the use of their works in any Apple Intelligence model, including the
Foundation Intelligence Models and OpenELM language models.- The licensing market for AI training data is burgeoning. Nevertheless, Apple did not compensate creators for use of their copyrighted works and concealed the sources of their training datasets to evade legal scrutiny. On information and belief, Apple continues to retain a private AI training-data library including thousands of pirated books to train its future models, without seeking Plaintiffs’ or Class Members’ consent or providing them compensation.
- In sum, Apple has copied the copyrighted works of Plaintiffs and the Class to train AI
models whose outputs compete with and dilute the market for those very works—works without which Apple Intelligence would have far less commercial value. This conduct has deprived Plaintiffs and the Class of control over their work, undermined the economic value of their labor, and positioned Apple to achieve massive commercial success through unlawful means.
Guyana says its solders were shot at while transporting ballots to polling stations near Venezuelan border
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/35522130
archve.org snapshot of guyanachronicle.com articleEarlier this year US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “It would be a very bad day for the Venezuelan regime if they were to attack Guyana or attack ExxonMobil”.
Guyana says its solders were shot at while transporting ballots to polling stations near Venezuelan border
archve.org snapshot of guyanachronicle.com articleEarlier this year US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “It would be a very bad day for the Venezuelan regime if they were to attack Guyana or attack ExxonMobil”.
Joint Services patrol attacked while transporting staff, election materials near Guyana-Venezuela border -
A JOINT Services came under attack while transporting Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) officials and election materials near the Guyana-Venezuela border onStaff Reporter
India's International Booker winner at the centre of a political row
Banu Mushtaq: Why is India's International Booker Prize winner at the centre of a political row?
Banu Mushtaq has become the subject of a controversy after she was invited to inaugurate a prominent festival in Karnataka.Cherylann Mollan (BBC News)
This is in my home state. The festival in question is Dasara and the inauguration is to offer first prayers to the deity and the procession of the idol on an elephant. This is a proper Hindu festival and procession.
The issue here is not only that she is a Muslim, but she is staunchly against idol worship and has given many statements regarding the same. How can she inaugurate the procession and offer first prayers when she is opposed to it?
The political issue is that the openly Hindu hating party that is in power in the state (Indian National Congress) wants to do many such controversial things to degrade Hindus while chanting "secularism" and appeasing Muslims.
Now Live: Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputer, JUPITER, Accelerates Climate Research, Neuroscience, Quantum Simulation
Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputer, JUPITER, Now Live | NVIDIA Blog
At JUPITER’s inauguration ceremony in Jülich, attended by Germany Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and NVIDIA unveiled ways the supercomputer is already spurring innovation across the world.Chris Porter (NVIDIA Blog)
Technology Channel reshared this.
Chinese cluster now world's top innovation hotspot: UN
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/47662510
Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou has overtaken Tokyo-Yokohama to become the world's top cluster for innovation, the United Nations said Monday.
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originalucifer e NoneOfUrBusiness like this.
Is this Lemmy thread full of bots/ Fake comments?
I am asking for 2 main reasons.
- I can't even think of any way that a recent thread can get this giant amount of comments.
- I have a concern here about how Lemmy can fight bot accounts. Is there is any plan or way for that or is Lemmy defenseless against bots?
More importantly, is Lemmy. World admins/mods investigating or are aware of this?
Revealed: Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war
Remember when they claimed that they killed 9000 hamas militant in 3 months?cbc.ca/news/world/israel-war-g…
Revealed: Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war
Figures from classified IDF database listed 8,900 named fighters as dead or probably dead in May, as overall death toll reached 53,000Emma Graham-Harrison (The Guardian)
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Maeve e giantpaper like this.
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Azathoth likes this.
Sorting globally by comments in my main page(I block suspicious instances) brings the following post as the second most comments post, this year:
So, to put it simply.
Either the post I am suspicious of is highly lucky in comments or that the post comments is full of bots.
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Druid_Moo likes this.
I don't think it's strange that a post like the one in your OP would be top (in terms of comments) for the year, with or without deleted comments.
Doesn't unreasonable.
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Druid_Moo likes this.
When I click that link, and go there in a browser without logging in, I only see 70ish comments listed. But I also see a lot of removed comments as I scroll down, mostly from a single user. My uneducated guess is that there was already some chicanery in the thread, which the Mods have dealt with, and you are seeing the result of that.
As far as what can be done about it, there really is little to be done, as log as Lemmy remains open (and federated). Posts and comments hop around from one instance to the other, and while some instances can take a hard line against bots some other instance can be more permissive then it becomes a game of whack-a-mole. Active, open moderation is the best cure, but takes effort.
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Azathoth likes this.
I see as showing 13,627. So probably script/s.
Which also explains my being banned from an instance after sleepily uninstalling my particular browser which stores passwords, rather than merely rm'ing from the home screen. I couldn't find my key at reinstallation, so had to rereg for some instances, then a few days later found it and was able to recover passwords. I can easily see why the admin of that instance assumed
Private instance, also clearly lying about forgetting password.
It happens. But I'm not bothering with re-regging.
@FuckingHellGenocida@lemmy.cafe has a ton of deleted comments, then this comment replies to one of them. in which
@GenocideCuntFuckoff@lemmings.world replies over 2000 times.
You also have this comment asking about bots. To which JordanLund replies it is a single person running scripts. His reply garners nearly 1300 replies from @ZioDumbokrat69@lemmings.world
Between those two sets of replies, that is 3,310 of the comments. This is not counting the top level comment spam.
There are only a handful of comments remaining in the thread. Less than 20 legitimate comments.
Its all from one spammer who threadiverse folks regularly talk about needing to manage spam from (if I'm not mistaken about who it is. They change usernames all the time and I don't keep up with their accounts cause I'm not an admin)
The mods appear to have dealt with the issue appropriately. For me it only shows 77 comments as the "count", but there are like a bajillion deleted comments by the same guy
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Druid_Moo likes this.
Sorry, I know getting lots of the same response can be a bit much
Hope you have a lovely day 😀
I'm not sure about that, but follow the link below if you're interested in buying crypto or need ED medication.
link
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Fitik likes this.
god that's toxic. is lemmings.world a common instance to see that kind of unhinged shit from? I'm considering blocking the instance to prevent ever interacting with one of that guy's alts
edit: apparently it's a known problem. but yeah it's only a matter of time before somebody like that starts hedging their bets and trying other places
Asda trials 'transforming' new AI technology on UK supermarket shelves
Asda trials new AI technology on UK supermarket shelves
Asda is currently trialling new 'transforming' AI-powered cameras on some UK supermarket shelves to help monitor stockMolly Court (Lancashire Telegraph)
A proposal to help the Lemmy devs
I've heard about the Lemmy devs struggling financially to be able to support Lemmy in the past. A lot of users say they'd support the devs if they shut down lemmy.ml, but it can be hard to quantify the value of such statements.
Thus, a proposal: Some trusted team of admins from another instance, say .world or blahaj.zone for example, should set up an account for people who want to support Lemmy but not lemmy.ml to donate into. This account would immediately donate all the money sent to it, if and when lemmy.ml is shut down. The Lemmy devs could think of it as an emergency fund for a rainy day, and if the financial situation ever gets desperate enough for them, they could shut down lemmy.ml and draw on this fund.
A side effect of the fund's existence may be that people, now given the choice to support Lemmy without supporting lemmy.ml, stop donating to the devs directly and just put their money in the no-ml fund instead. if that happened, the devs would have no choice but to shut down .ml, but hey, that's the free gift economy for you.
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Auster likes this.
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hankskyjames777 e Pamasich like this.
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hankskyjames777 likes this.
Hell no, why would anyone sane give money to tankie scum like the Lemmy devs?
You are better off donating to World or the Piefed developers.
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hankskyjames777 likes this.
I think it's kinda a dick move to hold a fund ransom until something is fulfilled, politician does this and it's already bad enough. What if the fund being held by said account being misused? What if lemmy dev insist that they will not back down? Would the fund be held until it does, which will likely take forever?
If i want to donate and 100% make sure some of the fund actually reach my goal, i would've just donate to them. If i don't agree with their political view point i will just don't donate, or donate to piefed which equally need the fund to progress. Having someone else holding the fund for me is very icky, financial-wise.
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Communick: social media and messaging hosting that respects you and your privacy
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Basic Glitch
in reply to Basic Glitch • • •mrfriki
in reply to Basic Glitch • • •Basic Glitch
in reply to mrfriki • • •They already told him he couldn't sit with them bc he was wearing sweatpants on a Monday.
Actual footage of Putin breaking the news and breaking Trump's heart 💔