(There is a clear parallel to the Luddites here, who were skilled technicians and clothmakers who weren’t worried about technology surpassing them, but the way factory owners used it to make cheaper, lower-quality goods that drove down prices.)

I think we need to start putting this on billboards.

main article link broken I think

It takes emotional labor to separate people from the situations/context you interact with them in. Part of work culture should be making sure that people aren’t too stressed and tired to do this labor by unrealistic work demands and inhumane treatment.

From what I understand about nursing, at least in my country, this is systematically an issue of pushing people too hard so I would say give yourself slack for not being perfectly aloof.

Lol I love how people assume they won’t load the AI up with even more ads than the traditional search results.

Greta Thunberg is a certified badass, if I ever come in to possession of a large bulldozer I am going to name it after her in honor of the fact she gives zero fucks about obstacles in her way trying to hold a better future back, she plows the bullshit out of the way and keeps going.

Thank you for that wonderful image!

Stephen Miller is a nazi, he doesn’t give a shit about health except as a narrative device to create permission for more authoritarian violence.

I mean, you can do something illegal and still be a hero.

This man’s name is Brad Smith, he is directly complicit in profiting off of the Genocide Of Palestinians.

Brad Smith is a mass murderer but more pathetic than the typical one because he just wants to profit off the genocide without having to witness the actual violence of it firsthand.

I propose a toast to Brad Smith living a long and painful end of life with a debilitating disease that destroys his quality of life or some other form of small justice befalling him!

I raise my glass

During a press conference on Wednesday, Smith said Microsoft has launched a formal investigation into Israel’s reported use of Azure. “We are committed to ensuring that our human rights principles and our contractual terms of service are upheld in the Middle East,” he said.

BULLSHIT

If we continue to let men like this rule society with no meaningful consequences for them we will be utterly subsumed into violence, it is only a matter of time.

Congrats on switching!

It was actually the rise of spotify and enclosure of the music listening commons that killed my desire to record and produce music.

AI feels like the boring next step from the Spotify CEO saying musicians shouldn’t expect to be able to make a living making and recording music. It is all part of the same movement to train people to see creativity done by humans as inherently valueless and amateur so that profitable simulcrums of human creativity can take center stage that parasitically feed on unpaid artistic human labor. I don’t hate music streaming services, I hate the axiomatic assumption in my society that progress can only ever be a process of increasing austerity for artists in order to fund increasing profit for the ownership class that steals the labor of artists.

Art is a product of a corporation in the context of a market to be evaluated by how well it attracts attention, entirely human made art is just a silly thing you occasionally do on the side as a gesture to someone you know like a handwritten note that is novel and fun precisely because it is a vanishingly rare thing. This is the suffocating environment being forced on human artists.

What about all those love letters your mom wrote me on facebook?

edit no you are right this is worse

Did they actually stop? Yeah it seems like the UK is further along the process of disengaging but our connections to the genocide of palestinians run so deep it is hard to fathom the US government listening to its people and stopping arming Israel.

And yet somehow bombs seem to grow on trees in the US and UK for dropping on innocent children by the IDF in Gaza.

This ad was a waste of the energy it took to print.

Bluesky theoretically has the capacity to be decentralized. I am sure people will show up in this comment thread and provide a whole lot of technical specifications about mostly proof of concept features that demonstrate that Bluesky is in some sense technically decentralized. Maybe not anymore? That seems a bit less common these days it seems.

To all of those responses theoretical or prophesized lol I ask in turn -why then has the CEO of Bluesky not ruled out serving ads to users as a way of monetizing the currently unprofitable nascient social network?

This isn’t a conversation about details no matter how much people will try to steer it there with an air of expert authority. This is a conversation about values and how we embue them in the structures of our communities.

Bluesky is a for-profit business with investors who will seek a return on their investment. Until proven otherwise we must assume they will monetize similarly to the way every other social media company has so far. The words that people who work for Bluesky are less important than this basic economic reality.

If you listen to any of this long rant, please ask yourself this question. Why are massive social media companies, with so much cash on hand they might as well be small countries, only putting serious effort into creating decentralized social media technology and building out the infrastructure NOW after the path forward was already blazed? Where were they when the fediverse was still just mostly a cute idea without practical infrastructure built out and standards agreed to?

When talking about whether a specific corporate social media platform is decentralized or not you cannot ignore this context, these foundations had already been laid and fairly well built up by a small rag tag team of developers working almost entirely as volunteers funded on a yearly budget so small it wouldn’t cover a single dinner check for the executives of Meta.

An aside… also consider the implications of the massive amount of computation that the architecture of Bluesky is set up to require for moderation of channels with the claims they are making about needing channels to processed by servers to be fed back to nodes in turn. Consider the difference in power/leverage between small nodes and massive communities in a situation where moderation is done by humans doing moderation (with automated screening tools to help maybe, but ultimately human) vs when moderation is done by applying a prohibitively expensive amount of computing power to the raw firehose of conversation. The difference is who gets to moderate public spaces and who doesn’t.

Come join the community I made recently specifically for battlefield like games made by indie developers such as the superb ww2 battlefield-like Easy Red 2 !

!indiefields@sopuli.xyz

Fuck EA

Reddit is a for profit website owned by rightwing idiots pretending to be a community space rather than a volunteer effort to help rich reddit chuds train their AI crap… so the problem isn’t inherently about the popularity here.

Regardless though, I want more people here based on the principle that when good things happen to me it is better if they happen to others and I should endeavor to destroy any barrier to seeing a fluid relationship between my wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around me.

Bluesky is a for profit venture with a marketing budget it uses to sell the idea the platform is decentralized.

Bluesky is not decentralized and there is no realistic business plan proposed for how to lucratively monetize a truly decentralized network. Bluesky MUST turn a profit, this isn’t an inconvenient detail, it is a crisis the company is on the clock to solve like any heavily speculative venture capital funded startup is.

The only way this works is if actual meaningful decentralization is always “on the horizon” for Bluesky as something the for profit company can periodically point to and say “look how close we are!” while never taking meaningful steps closer.

Bluesky silicon valley techbros will point to their cool blogpost about how they set up a hobbyist project on Bluesky outside of the central network and it will remain a pipedream or like the end of a rainbow for 99.9% of us, an impossible promise that flies away as fast away as we chase it.

You cannot trust Microsoft to consistently provide your organization a foundation to get things done on anymore.

I agree with the majority of this, but the Ukraine war is not unwinnable, Ukraine is winning as we speak.

But, they’ll have to make something that more people like than the AI.

No, it does not have to be better than the AI image to be preferable.