Look at our ginormous GDP number! Look at the stonk prices! See the unemployment number?!

The inflation is transitory
And you can afford it, so no biggy
Also, we solved it
And if it's not actually solved you deserved it anyway

Oh weird, I didn't notice that they had a shared link. The earlier articles I saw just had screenshots or quotes. I take it back then.

Good thought about the earlier conversations aspect, that didn't occur to me. Gemini's "workspace" extension has the ability to search your documents for answers.

Jack is not involved with Bluesky in any way, shape or form. This is a common misconception.

He started a chatroom to discuss a new protocol (several hundred devs took part; Jack didn't) and gave seed funding for the winning RFP (which happened to be Jay's). The initial plan was that it would be run inside Twitter but Jay negotiated to retain majority control as an independent entity. Jack gained one board seat (of three). However, he quickly discovered that most people at Bluesky at the time didn't like him, weren't into things he was (like crypto), and didn't like how the Bluesky devs made it easy to block people you don't like. He first left the site, and then later left his board seat (Mike Masnick of Techdirt (inventor of the term "Streisand Effect") took over his board seat)

For the record: I rather doubt this actually happened, and (based on their vague, generic response) I doubt Google PR actually dug through a log.

It's nonsensically easy to fake a chat to say anything just by doing right click and then "Inspect" and editing the text in the side bar. And this is the sort of thing a person would make up as a prank, having the AI addressing them as "Human" and the like.

This sort of response isn't something you get with "hallucination" (hallucination is exceedingly on-topic - just wrong). You might get this sort of thing with the old ChatGPT "glitch token" bug** (SolidGoldMagikarp, etc), but that requires that (A) glitch tokens actually exist (unlikely in modern models), and (B) the person actually use them (nothing there looks remotely suspect). Another way to get radical offtopics might be if for some reason the temperature was set way too high, but ignoring that it clearly wasn't early in the chat, high temperatures tend to ramble and spout nonsense instead of being directed. Beyond all that, it's hard to think of anything else that could do that in a modern system short of memory corruption on the GPU. Maybe an easter egg slipped into the training by a rogue engineer many times in response to a very specific trigger (what?) - but it'd have to be duplicated many times or it'd just get watered down as a spurious signal, and also, the trigger to respond to it only in rare circumstances would need to be quite specific.

Far more likely IMHO is that a teenager wanted to do a prank, because, hello, have you ever met a teenager?

I don't. If you consider actual Chinese history, with the resources, civilization, scholarship and technology they had >3000 years ago, we should have fully populated the moon, Mars and the asteroid belts by now. But we haven't, and it's down to how people behave in response to how they're governed.

In the Dune universe, everything is deliberately limited by culture and governance to a sort of hyper advanced steampunk, and interstellar space travel is almost entirely controlled by a monopoly.

Everything, that is, except the Thinking Machines, that have no such self inflicted limits, and ultimately recover from the Butlerian Jihad and expand to, again, challenge humans.

(Also, I'd add, with the increasing influx from ex-Twitter, the mean ideology is moving more toward thr centre. Though again, the *mean* is left of centre, IMHO - which should be unsurprising, given ex-Twitter's shift to the far right)

I can't even tell your goal in this conversation. You claimed that you have to subscribe to the owner's ideology to use Bluesky, which makes no sense when *the owner never talks about ideology at all*.

I'd say most *users* are on the left, and that might mean that a conservative feels they're outnumbered in an argument, or get blocked a lot. And Bluesky's moderation is based on labels, and users can choose to subscribe to whatever labelers they want to block whatever type of content they want, so if that person is posting a ton of stuff most people don't want to see, they won't see it because they said to filter it out. But this has nothing to do with "the owner's views", let alone some sort of ideological demands from the owner. And conservatives are perfectly welcome to do the opposite, e.g. label liberal content and block it, gang up on liberals, block them, etc. The only thing that'll lead to actual attempts to block you from the network is if you're trying to hack or DoS it or whatnot.

And just to be clear: the server in that URL is an *AppView*. Appviews do not host the data (beyond caching). That DID points to the location of the PDS where the data can be found. There are 3rd party PDSs, entirely independent of Bluesky's internal PDSs, and they work just fine. To the point that about a week ago a network outage left Bluesky's PDSs inaccessible, and for a short period of time, 3rd party PDS users had the whole network to themselves. ;)

Let's go a step further. Let's take a random Bluesky URL, like this image:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_...

Without any context, let's ask Claude to analyze the last part of that URL:

Explain this portion of a URL, in detail:

did:plc:txx6is4ymahmegaszqq4vpou/bafkreibkrboyklokmhs2od4npw36vwfivmh7qaxhipwqpqx64oq3ttonum@jpeg

Claude's response:

Let me break down this URL portion:

did:plc:txx6is4ymahmegaszqq4vpou - This is a DID (Decentralized Identifier)
did is the scheme
plc is likely the method (possibly related to Bluesky's AT Protocol/PLC)
txx6is4ymahmegaszqq4vpou is the method-specific identifier
/ - Standard path separator
bafkreibkrboyklokmhs2od4npw36vwfivmh7qaxhipwqpqx64oq3ttonum - This appears to be a IPFS CID (Content Identifier)
The bafk prefix indicates this is likely a CIDv1 in base32 encoding
This type of identifier is content-addressed, meaning it's derived from the content itself
@jpeg - File type indicator
Specifies that this resource is a JPEG image
This URL structure is commonly used in decentralized systems, particularly those that combine DID-based identity systems with content-addressed storage systems like IPFS. The format suggests this is likely from the Bluesky/AT Protocol ecosystem, where such identifiers are used to reference user content and media.

I'll repeat: Bluesky's content is addressed by ***distributed identifiers*** based on ***IPLD***, so that the content can be found regardless of what physical server it's on.

I've been on Bluesky for over a year, and I still don't know what Jay's "political philosophy" is, and nor do I care. She never talks politics. If you want a CEO obsessed with US politics, go to Twitter.

They're not even saying that. They're only saying that *they* won't do it or facilitate it.

(Not that they have the resources to do so anyway - it's a small team with a small budget)

ATProto is a fully open protocol. All the data in the network can be downloaded. It's not even hard - just run an ATProto relay, and every PDS will push all their data at you in realtime.

They're looking into ways to try to add protocol-level privacy, but it's nontrivial due to the distributed architecture. But I suspect they'll get it eventually.

I have *literally written a script to read from the firehose*. It *is* friggin IPLD. Archives are CARs. Storage is binary DAG-CBOR. Binaries are referenced by CID. The backend *IS* built on IPLD. For God's sake, try it for yourself. I could send you a CAR of my account right now if you want. You don't even need to mess with ATProto to do so. Literally, just open a Bluesky account, go to "Settings", then "Export My Data", then "Download CAR file", then look at it. *It's IPLD*.

If that's what you want? If you're looking for somewhere to torment you with stuff you don't want to see, then no, Bluesky isn't for you.

Well, actually, I take that back, you could deliberately add feeds you don't like to torment yourself if you wanted. What you can't do is force your torment on others.