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".

As you increase the size of the bulk licenses' box, the amount of expensive cardboard increases as a square, but the number of licenses that fit inside the box increases as a cube. This results in a reduction of the amortized cardboard cost per license.

If a cost reduction isn't happening, then I would suggest people look into the shape of their bulk licenses. It may be that a same-sized box holds fewer licenses than it did ten years ago, due to the addition of "AI features" being tacked onto everything, resulting in irregular, difficult-to-efficiently-pack licenses.

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.

sounds like the plots of a cheap SF movie.