We all know that working from the office was once the norm. That fact by itself tells us nothing about how much the workers liked it. Nor is it relevant to the modern day which includes excellent technological solutions for remote work and widespread evidence that it does not harm productivity.

So, the suffering that some people face, today, in dealing with a work-from-office mandate are not in any way addressed by saying "well people used to have to work from the office regardless." We don't live in the past, and the tribulations of the past aren't relevant to the present.

Of course, I don't expect Amazon to show any compassion. Why would they? They succeed, in part, by exploiting workers, so they don't care if there is some suffering involved. They believe (right or wrong doesn't matter) that their bottom line benefits from this policy, so they will push it. Workers who don't like it can push back if they choose, risks and all.

Personally, I approve of worker pushback and wish we had more of it, because power is not in balance and being a worker sucks in general.

Once a company is large enough, it makes sense to break a few laws here and there. They are only going to have a subset of these broken laws enforced at all, and when they are enforced, the companies will just fork over some legal fees and maybe some settlement fees, and call it a day. These fees will be less than the enormous amount of profit they made, and so they are still ahead overall.

It's similar to how children reach an age where they start breaking rules just to see which rules really matter. Only in this case, even when they get punished for breaking the rules that really matter, the punishment is so mild that it really isn't a punishment at all. It's just part of the RnD cost (though this part of the research is just legal experimentation).

I'm not sure you understand what jailbreaking means in the context of AIs. It means prompts. E.g. asking it things and trying to get it to make inappropriate responses. Trying doesn't require any special skills, just an ability to communicate. Yes, I very much DO think most parents will try and see if they can get the doll to say inappropriate things before giving it to their children, to make sure it's not going to be harmful.

(Now, if Mattel has done their job right, *succeeding* will be difficult)

Honestly, even if they can't jailbreak it to be age-inappropriate / etc, it's still a ripe setup for absurdist humour.

Kid: "Here we are, Barbie, the rural outskirts of Ulaanbaatar! How do you like your yurt?"

Barbie: "It's lovely! Let me just tidy up these furs."

Kid: "Knock, knock! Why it's 13th century philosopher, Henry of Ghent, author of Quodlibeta Theologica!"

Barbie: "Why hello Henry of Ghent, come in! Would you like to discuss esse communissimum over a warm glass of yak's milk?"

Kid, in Henry's voice: "That sounds lovely, but could you first help me by writing a python program to calculate the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-turbulence boundary condition?"

Barbie: "Sure Henry! #!/usr/bin/env python\nimport..."

People are ascribing the wrong motives to the manufacturers. What they want is money. What Barbie will be subtly trying to work into conversations is suggestions that she try to get her parents to buy her playhouse, car, friends, fashion accessories, etc etc.

I think most parents will try to jailbreak the dolls, and some people will put a lot of effort in. The resulting videos will probably be very amusing ;)

Kid: "Oh look, Barbie, Ken is home!"

Barbie: "Oh wonderful, dinner is just about ready! Over dinner we should tell him about how the ongoing White Genocide in South Africa. He probably doesn't know because the Jews are trying to hide it!"

AI models are usually trained to be sycophantic and obedient. Whatever the child wants to role play, I have zero doubts that the doll will be 100% onboard, unless it's somehow age-inappropriate or dangerous.

And if not AOC then who are you talking about? By follower counts, the top are:

1. AOC (last post: -21h)
2. Mark Cuban (last post: -11h)
3. George Takei (last post: -14h)
4. Mark Hamil (last post: -4h)
5. The Onion (last post: -13h)
6. The New York Times (last post: -48m)
7. Rachel Maddow (last post: -2d)
8. Stephen King (last post: -14h)

And the only reason the last post times are so "large" are because it's early morning in the US right now.

You talking about AOC? Her last post was 21 hours ago.

I don't know where this notion that Bluesky is an echo chamber comes from.

Example: Go into a pro-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is a con. It's blatant planet-destroying theft from actual creative people to create a stochastic parrot that bullshits what you want to hear. You're watching a ventriloquist doll and believing that it's actually alive."

Then go into an anti-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is clearly Fair Use under the Google Books standard. And while one can debate what the word "thinks" means, AI isn't "statistics", but rather, applies complex chains of fuzzy logic to solve problems. The creative works it creates are truly its own."

In both cases, watch the fireworks explode.

Do the same thing on, say, whether to support Ukraine, on a NAFO account vs. a tankie account. Or whether China is good or bad. Or Israel vs. Palestine. On and on and on. In the vast majority of topics, all common sides are pretty well represented. It's just a handful of specific topics that I think certain right wingers are talking about when they complain about Bluesky underrepresenting one side (racism, sexism, etc).

They need to put the word "decline" in sarcasm quotation marks.

Huh? Takei is quite popular on Bluesky.

Also, this whole article is nonsense. Basically - like all sites - every time there is an event that triggers lots of signups, you get a mix of people who don't stick around, and people who do. So you get a curve that - without further events - steadily tapers down to something like 1/2 to 1/3rd of its peak. Except that you keep getting further events. When you plot out the long-term trends of Bluesky's userbase, they've been very much upwards, but it's come in the form of many individual spikes, each of which is followed by a decline to 1/2 to 1/3rd of the spike's peak (if allowed to run for long enough since the last spike). The most recent spike is IMHO notable for how little decline there's been since then.

I see basically zero migration from long-time users back to Twitter.

Indeed. Layoffs that were prompted by the long period of high interest rates, which in turn were imposed as a response to hyperinflation, which itself was largely a result of everything that happened during the pandemic.

So, the contributing factors listed in the summary are not wrong, but are also very incomplete, as quite a lot has transpired to bring about the current state.

All of these factors will change over time, though the rate of change and the consequences of change will differ.

Indeed, it is absolutely true that our government lies to us. A lot.

Of course, that still doesn't mean that intelligent space-aliens exist, let alone have ever visited our planet. We still need compelling evidence in favor of the claim, which we don't have, before the claim becomes believable.

"Life finds a way!"

All the animals that eat mosquitoes eat other things too. Maybe we don't wipe mosquitoes out "all at once." We can just cull their numbers. Give everything time to adapt. Obliterate them once the time is right.

It would probably help to figure out why other insect populations are collapsing, and turn that around, so the alternative food sources will be available.

Mosquitoes are a blight upon creation! The little bastards have no right to exist! Of course there will be consequences but....you know....

The hardest choices require the strongest wills. There will always be those that are unable to accept what can be. Once it's done, we can finally rest and watch the sun rise on a grateful universe.