heavyboots

Yeah, but that's unavoidable. Whereas, Tesla and Waymo, etc getting to use our roads for self-driving testing is just our government not doing their job to protect the roads adequately, IMHO. This is veering way off topic, but I just recently watched a video that had stats on Teslas and the fact they're like 8.2x more likely to be in a crash than a standard level 2 car driving system.

Honestly, a search engine companion is probably its least offensive case, you're correct. Mostly, it makes me so mad because they are polluting our entire collected knowledge base, because there is no way to watermark anything as AI-generated (especially when it's text, not images) which means that every search you make from here on out returns worse results. It's like being forced to share the road with self-driving Teslas because the self-driving car companies (especially Tesla) have made us all involuntarily part of their beta test.

The "screw everyone else trying to use the same public resource" mentality is out of control.

I would fucking rather pay not to have AI in my browser, FFS…

With respect to Blue Sky, which I was specifically addressing, it only has 3 million active users vs Mastodon's 8 million right now though, which also somewhat obviates the whole network effect for new BS users. Not to mention since it is also decentralized, it does still suffer from the issue of instancing. About the only thing it may have going for it is an algorithm. I don't honestly speak to that since I've only been there briefly, but since Twitter ran just fine without one and attracted tons of users (and got a lot of them angry when they switched to an algorithm), I suspect it isn't a huge deciding factor for a lot of users.

I guess my point is… Blue Sky is still trying to launch and struggling. Mastodon is much more mature and only going to accelerate into the network effect more rapidly from here on out as well as standing a much better chance of not just being enshitified 5-7 years down the road, so when choosing between the two, I would definitely encourage any friends leaving Xitter to join Mastodon rather than Blue Sky.

Also, I feel like the users that care about algorithms and following Drake or whoever are just going to stick with Xitter anyway, because they really don't care about all the "drama" of who owns it or what they are doing with their data.

Haha, yes it is an unfortunately acronym their name makes.

Last time I tried to use Blue Sky it was so incredibly broken. And that was like November 23? I assume at the time that Twitter was exploding with people jumping for life rafts it was even less feature complete. They probably would have just doomed themselves via word of mouth if hordes of people had come straight from Twitter to BS. At least this way they are managing expectations a little bit.

OTOH, having said that, I don't understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists. Kick in a couple bucks a month to your server admins and the dev team and know that at least you're not the product and not just building up something that is on the road to yet another enshitification.

If you go straight to disconnect.blog literally all their content right now seems to be a hate-on against the AVP, lol.

I'm not saying I would ever buy one of these, but then again I didn't buy an iPhone until the 3gs either.

Much more interesting view of the AVP from a more "the street finds its own uses" perspective here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvkgmyfMPks

(Mind you, even he says at the end that he would never buy this particular model.)

I had to do some googling, but it looks like it was the Apple Network Server that I'm thinking of.

https://512pixels.net/2012/03/apple-servers/

Everyone absolutely thought the original click wheel iPod, the iPhone and the iPad were all doomed to fail. Hell, the Apple watch didn't exactly get off to a hot start for that matter.

And back at the beginning, the Mac OS GUI. Yes, Steve Jobs saw the idea of a graphical GUI at Xerox Park, but what his engineers turned out is something completely different. And at the time it was easily as revolutionary as the touchscreen interface of the iPhone.

Actual duds by Apple that I can think of off the top of my head:

• The Cube
• The Mac IIcx
• The Mac IIfx
• Whatever that ungodly massive Unix box was that they branded as Apple
• The liquid cooled G5 cheesgrater

So the gAslightIng is infesting even scientific publications now??

I hate this so much. Literally stopped using Perl and switched to PHP to get away from the "Look, ma! I can condense 6 comprehensible lines to one complete gibberish line that still works!" crowd.

I'm not saying I won't use shorthand if/else format on very rare occasions where you have to do a bunch of different if else's within your HTML for some reason, but in general, I try to avoid it.