Macs are outrageously priced for the hardware you get.

Yea sure, we all know this. But we’re talking about software here. Not to be too snarky, but the part you actually use. The differences might not be worth it to you, or maybe you need a gaming PC, but for some, it’s just fine.

I guess unless you use a Mac or something I don’t know.

Yea … you can just use a Mac.

I switched … back in 2006 after being fed up with MS BS. Haven’t looked back. Since then I’ve had 2 laptops. That’s it.

The current one is getting old now, sadly, but part of the trick with Apple is timing your purchases for when they kinda nail the product in the particular design cycle. Don’t buy when they do something new for the first time, aim for near the end of a design cycle generally. And don’t get base specs, add RAM and disk space (perhaps through extended 3rd party devices). And their machines can be very useful for quite a while.

Of course there’s Linux, but you’ll know if you’re ready for that.

This development worries me far more than anything I’ve read about LLM advancements in quite some time.

Yea. Nice pickup.

Only thing I’ve seen that works for combatting AI slop take over is the idea that the value of doing some things is the doing itself, not the product. It seems to cut through the consumerism and metric driven capitalism that has gotten us here, while retaining an anti-bullshit-jobs position.

It’s brilliant IMO (I haven’t seen the latest season but the one before … season 3 did feel like it was losing its way a bit).

The thing with mainstream super hero stuff is that it seems to very much about supporting the status quo without really examining it. Generally, the MCU has been pretty guilty of this AFAICT. It’s also why Winter Soldier is probably the best MCU film IMO … Captain America becomes “the enemy” by standing up for his principles and destroys shield.

The Boys is about examining the status quo and so stands out massively compared to all of the other mainstream superhero stuff.

yep! I didn’t pick up on any explicit link … but the coupling AI and recall is not coincidence. It’s serfdom.

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

Yea. Along with web rings, human-focused search and just harbouring communities better … we gotta start building people-focused online gardens and ditch this capitalistic hustle shit.

Well said.

I’ve said it a number of times else where … but it’s easy to forget that the era of mega corp online platforms was a weird time of rampant extraction and manipulation. We’ve got quite a bit of stuff to unlearn and relearn (like your examples).

And of course now with the big corps turning on us to extract more money and use the data they’ve milked from us build AIs to take our jobs away … we have the final proof of what we should have known the whole time … that social media should have kept its roots in organic human organisation.

Realistically, we’ve seen the dying of the open web.

It may not be dead for good but it’s very diseased.

With LLMs/AIs now polluting all sorts of things with rubbish (the fake bug report for cURL is my “favourite” story so far) that is hard to distinguish from genuine human content …

… I’m now thinking it’s dead. Like, we are going to start thinking about using processes of getting and sharing information that don’t just go over the internet.

Closed online environments with gated membership. In person processes where humanity is physically verified. Live conversation to verify actual human understanding. Static sources of information like books and manuals etc.

Not for everything, obviously. But for some things it seems the open internet may soon have a new cost that undermines its value proposition.

I’m personally not interested anymore in just using the open internet. I’m sniffing for some verification that something is worth reading or interacting with.

Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.

Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.

From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.

When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.

This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.

Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.

And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.

What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.

Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)

Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.

For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.

The cost isn’t the software, it’s the time, energy and risk involved in using it.

The combativeness was deployed to fight off combativeness.

It doesn’t help that Mastodon has very little design considerations for dealing with popular accounts, treating every account as if you’re only following your friends and family. (Emphasis mine)

Came to the same realisation myself. The whole “just friends having lunch together” vibe that mastodon aims for simply breaks down at a certain scale, which means is essentially unsuitable as a Twitter replacement for all that looking for that.

The lack of any feed/notifications management then means that you get subjected to all the annoying randos as though they are your friends or neighbours.

Which, coupled with a culture of purism and gatekeeping and HOA-ing leads to what can be a genuinely toxic culture. Not for everyone all the time but enough of the time for some to have found it awful and left.

But not enough talk about this. It’s designed as a suburban social media where you chat to friends and neighbours. Push it beyond that and you’ll have problems.

Oh man this looks like it has a NSFW and bloody ending.

When I can I try to bring up the idea of “pro bono” developer work with employed developers I know.

Outside of FAANG it garners confused looks because it’s so alien. But the argument never gets any logical pushback because the industry is culturally sick on this issue:

“ Do you use and rely on open source software?

If so some percentage of what your employer gains from that should be provided back, not out of some morality but to keep afloat the open source software ecosystem you and your employer are benefiting from.

What’s more, you and employer will gain more expertise in said software and can even ensure it is more reliable for your purposes.

All employers of developers using open source ought to dedicate a certain number of developer-days per month to open source maintenance and proudly make this number public.

Also, this idea isn’t new, lawyers have been doing this for decades. See this info graphic from a major Australian Law Firm showing off how 1/24th of their work is pro bono.

That’s right, the sharks might be better people for society than your industry is for itself. “

I’m not really on discord (occasionally have gone on there) … but generally the whole fedi, IMO should probably be taking notes from them because they’ve obviously done a few things right which also seem to be exactly the things the fedi definitely doesn’t understand.

On the small subscription fee for the fedi, I think it would work best for specific instances. Here, decentralisation is a strength (again), as the small instance/community approach is well suited as the alternative to the large-with-a-small-subscription model and should provide a diversity of options for different kinds of people.

As for Twitter, right now a bunch of takes are floating around about how dumb the fee is (at least on masto, which has a huge bias against twitter) … while some will definitely leave I do wonder whether it actually makes sense for a lot people. How many principally lurk and would prefer their feed were “better” and are willing to be on a platform that requires the subscription for this? I wouldn’t be surprised if down the line we here takes from people who don’t pay but stay on Twitter because they like the feed better.

Honestly don’t think it’s an insane idea. Not sure how effective $1 would be against bots, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea makes sense: basic and low friction to deter a large amount of spam. Maybe it’s $5 a year or whatever.

Of course there’s an equity issue for those who can’t afford this, especially if it goes mainstream and every online thing requires similar and we get Netflix -> Cable all over again.

But here on the Fedi I can see the idea working if applied to some instances that have set up the governance (eg co-op) and services (committed moderators) for it to make sense.

I think it would be cool if being an admin and moderator could genuinely be a side hustle or more without sucking away at someone’s passion.

Thanks! Seems interesting, especially to see what federation looks like with their more centralised model.

Personally I hope it goes well. 1. Because I think the Fedi could do with competition. 2. The idea of having relatively centralised services complementing the distributed network makes a lot of sense I suspect, with similar realisations percolating around the Fedi over time, and it might be fruitful to see it succeed instead of the usual Fedi snobbiness around not being a “real” federstion.

How would fully portable accounts and communities be implemented do you think? My vague understanding is that users, communities and content lives at a particular URL and can’t simply change its domain.

From what I’ve heard most of the users don’t care about federation but just want an alternative Twitter.

Which makes sense, that’s what they joined after all. “Federation is coming” Is probably destined to be a broken promise for a while unless it goes mainstream and becomes and expectation. For now it’s just hedging bets