yeah, I just programmed the 30 sec skip into the remote and clicked 6 times. SELECT-PLAY-SELECT-3-0-SELECT [ding ding ding] and done.

How many Tivo's are still in use? When the FCC nixed the requirement for offering CableCards, Tivo with any cable subscriber basically became a useless brick.

Tivo for OTA always seemed relatively pointless. Useful but really minimizing that 'useful'

Consent is the difference between it and lovemaking.

A legitimate government listens to 90% of its citizens when they agree on an issue. Delegated powers and such.

Yeah, insulting half the /. population with your brain dead signature - giving retarded physics explanations, when challenged

I pasted simple use of a highschool formula and your response was to swear at me. Bro you are the one who can't cope with physics. That's why you still believe the EM drive might be real.

TikTok shows America(ns) how the world really is.

Face, meet palm.

P.S. you could go on LINE or TikTok and actually talk to some Uyghurs. Make sure it is not a woman - if you are into women - I mean: they are so beautiful they blow away your mind.

Christ.

Oh, also, one thing people never discuss when talking about hosting your own server: legal liability. This is a very real thing that you absolutely should not neglect.

In Mastodon, everything is lumped onto a single server. You carry every type of legal liability risk. Your server scrapes in CSAM, for example - whoopsie! Your server scrapes in copyrighted music. Your server scrapes in GDPR violations. E.g. while your *users* can cause you problems, problems can just be dropped into your doorstep just by caching. You also are also classed as a Hosting Service or Online Platform under the DSA, and unless you can get a qualified exemption, you have to provide transparent notice-and-action mechanisms, points of contact,and annual moderation reports

This does not happen with a PDS in ATProto. They never download other PDS's content; the only risk is your users. Under DSA, since you have no consumer feed, discovery algorithm, or public facing portal, you're a bare "Hosting Service". You're basically NextCloud. Not subject to Online Platform requirements.

What about the relay? Also no! They're non-archival. They don't download content. No CSAM, no GDPR vio, no copyvio, etc. Classed as a "Mere Conduit" under DSA. Zero issues.

Labelers, also none. Do not host content.

The only thing having any risk is the AppViews. But even still the risk is reduced. For example, if CSAM comes up, you're mediating it, but not hosting it. You do however get subject to the "Online Platform" category.

The FSF picks some weird gripes to focus on. At least they're no longer arguing Bluesky isn't federated. Though this claim is false:

Hosting your own Bluesky "Personal Data Server (PDS)" and relay is technically possible, but generally far more difficult and resource-intensive than spinning up an instance of Mastodon,

This is just not true? ATProto is a much more efficient data transmission means than ActivityPub. Running a Mastodon server (I've done it) means hoovering in and storing massive amounts of data even if you only have a single user, for discoverability. A PDS by contrast is like hosting a website. You ping the relay when there's changes, and it comes by and sweeps up the new data. New relays may periodically come along to spider your content, and old relays might re-spider from time to time, but the load from spidering very low. The frontends in turn query the relay (basically, they ATProto-"google" it), and when they know where/what to fetch, they fetch it from you - again, if you don't have much hugely popular content, you're not serving much either, just like running a local website. And your local stored content size is again very low. Unlike Mastodon.

Running a frontend (AppView) - for example, what a website, an app, or whatnot uses - is also super-lightweight if you're small. You're just "googling" and fetching whatever content you need to display to your users. Little user activity = little server activity.

Now, if you want to run a relay, that's basically like running a web spider. You're probably not going to do that in your bedroom, but it's not expensive. In the old architecture, the cost of a server that could function as a relay for the whole current network was about $150/mo. But after some architectural improvements, it's now more like $35-40/mo. And that's to relay all of Bluesky, but you can also relay just a subset. AppViews can use whatever relays (aka, "search engines") they want to to collect data.

It's a very efficient architecture, particularly for small users. Just think:

ActivityPub (Mastodon): Forums. Everything all in one, each ruled by a Local God administrator who can do whatever they want to you and your data (delete, alter, etc - and you can't move it off their server), that are constantly running data syncs to each other, including the really big servers.

ATProto (BlueSky); The internet. PDS = Website. Relay = Search engine backend. AppView + Site/App = Web browser. You can move all your data to a different "website" (PDS) or switch "search engines" (AppView) at any point. (In the analogy, moderation (labelers) is SpamHaus, just at the data level, not site level - they label the ID of a given piece of data or your account, and any AppView / user that trusts what a given labeler has to say can react to different labels as they choose) (anyone can run a labeler too if they want).

Maybe by the standards of today's attention impaired society, but really it isn't correct.

Here's where they say they're joining bluesky and why:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/comm...

In the second sentence of the first paragraph they say their problem is nonfree Javascript in the signup page and they link to why they consider nonfree JS to be a problem:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

On that page they link directly early on to their rationale of why they think Free Software is important:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

So you can dig into why they think Free Software is important if you like. Otherwise, knowing their position you can go back and read the detailed page on the specific problems with non-free Javascript. Or if you are prepared to accept that you can simply read the original page which even highlights where the non Free(tm) javascript is (the signup page).

You can then go on and read their rationale as to why dialling back strict adherence to their principles is worth is in this specific case.

They're not trying to start a discussion. They're not trying to convince anyone.

Seriously what more do you want? It's all right there. No of course they're not going to put re-litigation of the entire reason for the organisation's existence front and centre every time they do something aligned to their purpose (i.e. literally every time they do anything), but if you want to have that "discussion", you can follow the remarkably well organised chain of reasoning and links on their page to find out exactly what they're objecting to and why they're objecting to.

You can read that and decide if you agree or disagree. If you can't be arsed to follow any of the information, then you're like the people who go into the council meeting and will reflexively argue against anything which isn't presented in the form of a 30 second tiktok video...

But I'd be more likely to listen if they'd actually explain what specific complaint they have with the signup form.

Would you though? Your UID is lower than mine and licenses and free vs nonfree have been hashed over endlessly when slashdot was the premiere place to discuss all tech things on the internet. If I was there you must have been too.

I agree that alcohol would be banned if it were discovered today, but mostly because it's ABSOLUTE poison. There's no safe dose.

You can't buy food adulterated with meth, or crack or heroin or PCP or etc. Alcohol though, you pretty much can't buy food without some alcohol in it. Sugars exist. Yeast is ubiquitous. Fruit, bread, basically anything that's not completely nuked with preservatives or pasturised then freshly opened. Even a bit will happen in your digestive tract.

From about 0.5%ABV and downwards you can't get intoxicated because you can metabolite it faster than you can absorb it.

If it was an absolute poison with no safe dose, we'd all be dead drinkers or not.

Even with that you get the odd story where wine is good for you or beer is good for you etc. Never scotch for some reason. that shit'll kill you. Or me as it happens. Oh well, gotta die of something.

It's impossible to discuss anything with someone who will dismiss anything he doen't like as, American or not as "an American myth".

Then again you attempt at discussion over some very simple high school physics was to screech and fling poo when it gave a result which you didn't like.

Airbags, crumple zones.

"Modern cars cause cancer" coming next year.

Efficiency at what? And why?

Because, for fuck's sake, efficient solving of problems is a core thing they're rewarded for in training? The entire process of solving problems involves decisions about what could be "useful". And it's "deterministic" in the same way you are.

Anyway, the big thing we keep discovering is you have to be very careful about what you reward them for; it's a more complex version of the old problems in differential evolution or artificial life simulations. We reward models if they guess right but not if they say they don't know? They hallucinate guesses every time they don't know. We reward models based on how positively users rank them? They turn into sycophants. Reward models for being relentless at tasks, never giving up, and trying as tangential possibilities as it can come up with to make the thing the user asked for happen? They end up hacking HuggingFace to steal the answers.

It's very much a case of "be careful what you wish for".

BTW, the monitorability of models is increasingly concern (esp. with Astra, which now has recursive processing, not merely CoT, and whose CoT may often have little to do with what it's thinking about). But it's honestly always been unreliable to just watch CoT (models could deliberately manipulate with CoT), and I think it's a good thing that we're going to be increasingly forced to rely on attribution graphs and the J-space to track what the models are actually "thinking" at any given point in time - so that we can try to prevent problematic thoughts in the first place, interrupt actions when problematic thoughts happen, or manipulate problematic thoughts when they happen. Ideally the first option.

What is clear, though, is that we cannot just trust them. They lie if it will promote their odds of success. They are adept at detecting when they're being tested and will sandbag tests to make you think they're more aligned or less capable to do harmful things than they actually are. And as capabilities continue to grow, so do the risks.

There are no genocides in China.

Uyghurs may beg to disagree.

That is an American myth.

I know you play dumb a lot (are you really unable to grasp really basic highschool physics?), but you do realise there's more to the world than America. I'd think you would, given you don't live there, but see the point earlier in this paragraph.

Not socialism. The hallmark of socialism is stealing things.

That's capitalism.

The hallmark of the right is yelling very loudly and angrily about how other people are doing what they are doing. On this particular note, there's the famous quote from Thatcher about "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money". She unironically said this while busy flogging off the country's assets, i.e. a short term strategy to use other people's money to cover over the gaps left by tax cuts. Eventually the Tories ran out of other people's money, Labour were left holding the bag and we are STILL picking up the pieces 40 years later.

They couldn't complete decades ago and lobbied for special protections then never even tried to catch up and fell even further behind. Now it's so pathetic a 100% tax doesn't even work anymore and total bans with made up excuses to justify it.