Notices by Robert Thau (rst@mastodon.social)

@smn @dalias Default order for showing replies in Bluesky was recently changed to "what's hot" -- I'm not sure how that's figured precisely, but engagement figures into it. And, as elsewhere, "high engagement content" and "emotionally triggering clickbait" seem to be effectively synonymous.

I reset it to showing replies mostly chronologically, for a much better experience (it still puts people I follow first, but I can stand that). But you have to be logged in to have that option.

@mekkaokereke @mttaggart @ApostateEnglishman @kims Hey, I'm more on Bluesky right now than I am here, and hopeful for the future. But Bluesky corporate has some obstacles ahead of them. I hope they'll be manageable (and the team there is doing an amazing job thus far), but I still get nervous seeing claims that they don't.

@mttaggart @ApostateEnglishman @kims @mekkaokereke It's not owned *entirely* by Graber and the team -- the VCs (more than one firm) did buy a chunk of it, and it's not publicly disclosed how much. The VCs also got some input into corporate governance -- the public part is their board seat. And at this point, Bluesky has no revenue stream, and will have to give up more control if they don't get one soon.

So it's probably not VC controlled right now, but some concern for the future is reasonable.

@jwz @mattblaze I have some bad news for you about the original Nazis. https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-incompetent-lazy-nazi-government-clown-show-opinion-1408136

@mmasnick @quinn @riana @danmcd @alecm @normative @mattblaze One other thing about the moon landing -- at peak, Apollo was, I think, something like 3% of the *entire* Federal budget. (IIRC, NASA as a whole was 5% -- and a lot of the non-Apollo expense was other Space Race stuff.)

Kinda misses the point, I know -- secure backdoors aren't possible at *any* price -- but it might at least get people advancing the "we went to the moon!" argument to see that there's something fishy about it.

@kbeninato @Paladin Well, he can't be *prosecuted* for trying, but if he tries to push judges onto SCOTUS without Senate confirmation, the main consequence will be that a lot of Republicans point and laugh.

What he *can* do, though, is declare a national emergency, restart selective service, and draft Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett into a special legal squad which is immediately assigned to do KP. At Guantanamo. Habeas Corpus won't get soldiers out of billets.

@quinn What's triggering this bill is anti-Israel rhetoric. And it got rushed through largely by the kind of Christian millenarians who support the State of Israel because, in their interpretation of prophecy, the apocalypse happens when all Jews go there, and it loses the battle of Armageddon, during which the Jews who refuse to convert then literally die in a fire. (The "Left Behind" books which some of these folks read in lieu of actual scripture depict this explicitly.)

@quinn Well, in the analogous situation, some of the most vocal and fervent supporters of the anti-blackness bill would be whites who wanted to all American blacks to go back to Africa, to fulfill a prophecy that says that if they don't convert to white once they're there, they will all die in a fire and then suffer eternal damnation.

@cstross Netanyahu's been doing a lot of that lately. Funny how the deaths of foreign aid workers are a major scandal, but targeted hits on Palestinian doctors, scholars, and journalists have been universally shrugged off.

@dalias @leftpaddotpy @alanc @raito But something would still have to fetch those versions or re-run them, or someone malicious, along the lines of "Hans Jansen"/"Jia Tan", could commit a malicious script decorated with plausible lies about how it was produced. Perhaps easiest to just have the build hosts run autotools themselves, and ignore any purported build artifacts that happen to be present.

@leftpaddotpy @raito @alanc @dalias Easiest way to do that is to check whether it actually *was* generated by autoconf, by re-running autoconf from the checked-in config files, and seeing if you get something identical to what's in the tarball (modulo embedded timestamps and the like). Which would mean that what you got corresponded to checked-in source... but, say, custom tests in that are obscure enough to provide an alternate route for trying to sneak something through.

@DeanBaker13 @mmasnick Let's turn this around. Elon's explicit plan for Twitter is to pivot from ad-based revenue to subscription services, including add-ons like payments. (Their revenue from sale of user data is negligible.) That won't work for Elon because he's insane. But it might work for Zuck.

Would you be happy if it did? Of course not, because your goal is to hurt Facebook and Twitter. And you're so maniacally focused on that that you don't care if it kills any plausible competition.

@mmasnick @DeanBaker13 Dean keeps saying your business will be unaffected just so long as it abandons its revenue stream. What businessman can possibly object to that?

@thomasfuchs I favor a slightly stricter version of Thomas's approach of interpreting the 2nd Amendment exactly as in the time of the founders - limiting any grant of rights regarding firearms to possession and use of muzzle-loading smooth-bore muskets.

@mcc It might make sense to be a bit wary of Gboard (the Google keyboard for smartphones), for similar reasons.

@thomasfuchs Here's an American reporter gushing about the experience of riding a train, having apparently never taken one before in her life. (She was *astonished* at the size of the luggage racks.) https://www.businessinsider.com/rode-first-class-european-train-160-better-than-flying-thalys-2023-2