@mattly I don’t recall this being a big problem until the attackers could reliably and anonymously collect the ransom, so maybe the real problem is cryptocurrency.
my take is that conversations with strangers on social media is a terrible, weird idea that dates from like 2006 and honestly no one should be doing that. if you want to broadcast, do that. should Mastodon have a broadcast mode? sure, why not! but i have **never**, **not once**, enjoyed the “conversation” when one of my posts have gone “viral” because anonymous strangers are stupid and mean, so I mute it. I’m a cis-het white guy and i **hate** interacting with randos!
people really need to interrogate what social media is for. do you want to gather together a like-minded group of affirming, interesting people to share ideas with? you can totally do that! do you want to cast a wide net and try to connect with millions of strangers to influence as many people as possible? you can do that too, but fyi, it has some downsides!
fwiw this isn’t just about the last guy, @mmasnick did the same thing, and so did @Popehat
people get on Mastodon to be influencers, they get annoyed by the number of dipshit reply-guys, plus there is no algorithm to give them that dopamine shot, then they leave, saying everyone here is insufferable. but really, it’s just not a good place to get dopamine from anonymous passive strangers. it’s a group chat with a handful of far-too-engaged weirdos. if that’s not what you’re into, go with god.
something i've said for a long time is that American politicians think of cities in extractive or colonial terms: they exist as spaces for work and leisure that you **go to**, not spaces that you **live in**
every day, a city is occupied by people from the suburbs who use the resources, and cities should be grateful for this and arrange themselves to serve the needs of their colonial "masters."
Israel is going to say "whoopsie, sorry" about the WCK atrocity, but it will accomplish what they set out to do, which is discourage international aid orgs from working in Gaza. it's an implicit future death threat directed at anyone who would dare extend help to the starving people of Gaza. war crime. collective punishment. ethnic cleansing. https://wck.org/news/gaza-team-update
weird how a speaker at a major conservative political conference calling for the end of democracy and the establishment of a theocratic authoritarian state is something i have to read about in goofy little niche websites and social media accounts because i can't find it in, like, the pages of a newspaper whose catchphrase is "Democracy Dies in Darkness."
anyone who says "i need $7 trillion to make my technology a reality" isn't a business person, they are a religious fanatic or a supervillain, or both. i think it is going to become increasingly clear in retrospect that ousting Sam Altman from OpenAI was the right move and Microsoft et al. fucked up by putting him back.
look, awful people have correct takes all the time. Jordan Peterson thinks you should clean your room, and you should! Hitler was a vegetarian! Osama bin Laden made some correct points about the American empire! but there are **TONS** of other people who made these same points who aren’t fucking monsters, so when you say “Alex Jones makes a great point,” you’re explicitly endorsing that person, because you could have cited literally anyone else.
is it just me or is YouTube becoming unusable with all the fuckin’ ads? like, no, I am not going to watch two 15sec ads in order to see a 3min clip that I may or may not find interesting.
pretty wild how many people are still over there producing free content for the Nazi website. i get it if your livelihood depends on it or you need to maintain a social group, but people over there who consider themselves activists and progressives are posting about basketball and movies and shit on public accounts. idk man.
Admin of thepit.social. he/him.American, formerly of DC, immigrant in Barcelona, Spain. Father of @monkeboi. Former linguist, current student of SQL and Python, master of a locally-run LLM that has escaped onto the internet (@actuallybot). My blog is federated, follow it on your favorite fediverse app: @pjk