To be clear: anyone can join Bluesky, regardless of their views. But if your posts are mainly, say, calling black people monkeys, calling trans people groomers, things of that nature, yeah, a lot of people are going to block you on sight. That's not "censorship", that's just people finding you to be an arse and having better things to do with their time online than be forced to listen to you. Everyone has a right to show anyone else the door; nobody has an obligation to face harassment.

If you feel the need to force other people to listen to your views regardless of whether they want to hear from you or not, you're the asshole.

Meanwhile, here's the reality of Bluesky user numbers (drag the range to the full range). Funny how everyone always wants to truncate the timeperiod for the "user base" to have a start date of that last big spike.

The simple fact is that with any site, most people who visit don't end up sticking around, and there's a dropoff rate. The persistance rate at Bluesky is actually unusually high**. The reason for the spikes is that Bluesky's users joined in waves; you can track each wave to specific events. Those two big spikes in new users were the US election date and the US inauguration date, respectively. You can find various other spikes related to for example various things that happened with Twitter.

** The typical retention rate for a new "consumer-social" app is 40-50% for 1 day, 20-30% for 1 week, and 10-15% for 1 month. Compare that to the Bluesky data. Again: persistence has been very high; the new-user join pattern has just been extremely "spiky".

That depends on what they were trained for. Was it to uphold the law or... not? If the latter then yeah, sure. If the former, then no. The LLMs are trained on a fat core dump. The training corpus was produced without a thought even for accuracy, let alone honesty or fair play.

Ideally we get rid of MS in a cleaner way.

(To continue the discussion... Naturally they are different from IBM and cloud services are different from IBM's consulting services, but still services, if in no way other than in the sense of "being serviced".)

Portables are trash. Mini-splits don't cover a window, the connection between the inside and outside units goes through a fairly small hole, and they are much more efficient. Window units exist for stupid reasons to begin with, the solution is mini-splits.

An AC posted above about waiting for this inevitable type of comment posted by idiots and here it is!

I paid $99 for a fully legit copy of Windows 7 Pro, system builder's edition. That's simply intended to be sold alongside parts for a new PC, which in fact is what I was doing. Therefore I'm confident that an OEM license for Windows 7 Home was less than that.

It's groovy when the representative of a corporations admits deliberate violation of the Magnusson-Moss act. It's always nice when they confess in writing.

It is rather easy to blame others for climate change. Yes, the poor consume products which do ecological damage. But they wouldn't be able to do that damage without rich people deciding it's what they will be allowed to buy.

Come on now, leave some billionaire cock for the rest of us to suck.

How did it become controversial to think Nazis and child rapists were bad? When this is the state of political discourse and debate in the USA, we deserve for our nation to fail, as it is in the process of doing.

It was a step in developing morality perhaps, now it's an impediment to developing it further

The problem is that you can write that list slanted in the other direction just as adroitly.

You really cannot.

Okay, I'll bite that worm you've left dangling on that hook. Let's go down the list.

Sec. Def:

Biden: Gen. Lloyd Austin. 4-star U.S. Army General with 41 years of active military service. Former Commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, and Director of the Joint Staff. Oversaw the drawdown of 150,000 troops and massive logistical operations in Iraq.

Trump: Pete Hegseth. White-nationalist alcoholism-scandal-plagued weekend morning co-host for Fox & Friends, former Army National Guard major. Zero executive experience managing large military commands, defense procurement, or enterprise-scale organizations. Opened his tenure by leaking war plans to a journalist by writing about them on WhatsApp instead of secure messaging channels, and is currently losing a war which he promoted launching in Iran, with zero preparation for obvious threats like drones and Hormuz closure, while spending his time obsessing over testosterone levels and beards.

Department of Health and Human Services + Surgeon General:

Biden: Xavier Becerra: 24 years on key Congressional healthcare subcommittees; Attorney General of California overseeing the enforcement of public health and healthcare antitrust laws.
Vivek Murthy: MD/MBA from Yale, Harvard faculty member, practicing physician, and two-time U.S. Surgeon General with deep clinical and administrative credentials.

Trump: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Famous antivax-conspiracist brainworm-addled kook who eats roadkill, cuts of whale heads, measures raccoon penises, and swims in sewage. Zero medical degrees, zero public health degrees, zero experience running a hospital system or public health agency.
Nicole Saphier: Radiologist who's a strong advocate of Kennedy's conspiracy theories.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services:

Biden: Chiquita Brooks-LaSure. 30-year veteran of healthcare policy and public administration. Former healthcare analyst at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), key drafter of federal health legislation on the House Ways & Means Committee, and senior official in the HHS Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

Trump: Dr. Mehmet Oz. Daytime television talk show host and former cardiothoracic surgeon, widely criticized by the medical community for promoting quack medicine and pseudoscientific wellness supplements on television.

Department of Education

Biden: Dr. Miguel Cardona. Public elementary school teacher, middle school principal, assistant superintendent, and State Commissioner of Education in Connecticut. Holds a Master’s degree in Bilingual Education and a Doctorate in Education.

Trump: Linda McMahon. Professional wrestling (WWE) executive and mega-donor. Most famous for fighting her husband Vince McMahon at WrestleMania X-Seven in 2009 before running for congress (twice unsuccessfully). Before getting into WWE, she earned an undergrad degree in French and worked as a secretary at a law office translating French documents.

Director of National Intelligence:

Biden: Avril Haines. Former Deputy Director of the CIA, former Deputy National Security Advisor, legal counsel to the National Security Council, and Georgetown/UChicago-trained national security legal expert with decades of experience inside the Intelligence Community.

Trump: Tulsi Gabbard. Former congresswoman and Army Reserve officer. Zero professional intelligence community experience, zero senior leadership roles in intelligence analysis or collection. Before her position she was most famously known for harboring sympathies for Russia and Assad.

Federal Bureau of Investigation:

Biden: Christopher A. Wray. Yale law grad; three decades of working as a US prosecutor and attorney general under both Democratic and Republican administrations, including heading the criminal division of George W. Bush's administration.

Trump: Kash Patel. Former congressional staffer, and podcaster. Zero track record in law enforcement. Has spent most of his time in office abusing its perks for himself and his girlfriend.

Department of Justice (AG):

Biden: Merrick Garland. Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (served 24 years on the federal bench). Former Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General who personally led the successful prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers. Harvard College (valedictorian) and Harvard Law School (magna cum laude).

Trump: Matt Gaetz (first pick). Former congressman who was under active House Ethics investigation for sexual misconduct and illicit drug use; zero prosecutorial experience, zero judicial experience, zero executive law enforcement leadership.

Department of Transportation:

Biden: Pete Buttigieg & Polly Trottenberg. Buttigieg: Rhodes Scholar, Harvard graduate, municipal executive overseeing urban infrastructure redevelopment.
Trottenberg: 30-year veteran of transportation policy, former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation (managing one of the largest municipal transit grids on Earth), and senior federal transit policy director.

Trump: Sean Duffy. Former cast member on MTV's The Real World: Boston, former congressman, and Fox Business commentator. No professional background in civil engineering, transit systems, or logistics.

How many more of these do I need to do?

Not really, but many of the machines in them are designed to be operated by humans.

Yes. Human bodies are incredibly versatile compared to any non-primate. Granted, there's things we can't do, but we've got a very good mix of abilities compared to other creatures. Our skin is a bit disappointingly fragile, but otherwise we're quite capable.

Agreed. It would make more sense to use robot arms with the tools redesigned to go on one instead of being operated by human hands. A lot of the tools are robotic already, for example the machines they use to tighten head bolts. A human only applies the tool to the head, it does the actual work. The human is there only for fine positioning! And it's not actually fine by modern standards, either.