Notices by Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io), page 3

@beka_valentine The massive amounts of memory and compute are making it so the code can be a stack of 5 different abstraction layers on top of a gigantic JIT and the graphics can just be brute-forced with "buy a faster computer LOL loser" instead of clever culling etc.

Not actually making a significant difference to the outcome.

@iThreepwood @Mer__edith I'm not clear what you're looking for.

The "selling points" are the claims of stronger privacy properties. I'm not making any claim as to whether they're incorrect or exaggerated here.

My use of the word "dupe" is because I don't think any of the folks targeted want or intend to be on a platform run by vocal transphobes using exterminist language (I deem this to qualify thoroughly as "nazi") who are on a standard VC startup path and who will be looking to monetize (i.e. sell out) their users. The privacy claims are luring them onto a platform that's unsafe and against their interests.

@Gargron @pluralistic I realize the allegation has no evidence behind it, but my point was that this is exactly the *perception* that the unforced ToS self-own has created for Mastodon.

I do suspect there is at least some truth to the aspect that the root cause for "needing" more explicit terms was assuring Facebook that it's legally safe for them to syndicate.

@tokyo_0 @franklinlopez I was answering your question "But equally, six months ago would most people have expected to see what we've already seen in the U.S. in that time?"

Specific predictions:
- Betrayal of Ukraine.
- Escalation of Palestinian genocide.
- Otherwise setting up for WW3.
- Acts of trans genocide.
- ICE gestapo terrorizing communities.

None of these involve any magical prophetic ability beyond paying attention, mostly to what evil people explicitly told us they planned to do.

@pluralistic @Gargron "Pro-bono" in the sense that Facebook's lawyers "donated" their time to Mastodon gGmbH to write a ToS that covers Facebook's ass for syndicating posts from Mastodon onto Threads.

No one, and I do mean NO ONE, should ever, ever, EVER agree to a binding arbitration waiver.

These are the most grotesquely unfair contractual terms in routine use today. The potential for abuse is literally unlimited.

Remember when a Disney World visitor died of an allergic reaction after being assured that her food order was allergen-free? Disney argued that her family couldn't sue because her husband had clicked through an arbitration waiver when signing up for a free trial of Disney Plus.

In reading a fascinating and important discussion of the lack of a termination clause in the new Mastodon.social Terms of Service:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/35086

I was GOBSMACKED to discover the new ToS has a "binding arbitration waiver," which takes away your right to sue, no matter how badly the service abuses you.

These are profoundly unethical, terrible clauses. They should never, ever appear in "adhesion contracts" (that is, contracts that you merely click through, rather than negotiating.)

@Avitus @mansr @Mer__edith Yes it's sus, but I imagine it's a significant source of well-diversified donations from users. Which is much better than being dependent on just a few big funders. I don't care that it's there as long as it's easy to ignore and not trying to dupe folks into treating it like an investment rather than just a way to transfer money.

@tokyo_0 @franklinlopez Would most people? No.

Would those of us who were paying attention? Yes.

Things have gone almost exactly according to what I told folks 7 months ago. Folks who were disbelieving the threat. There is a fucking reason for my display name. 🤬

@ireneista @tokyo_0 @franklinlopez Indeed I'm not saying it can't happen, but if it does, it'll be general-strike-level disruption. Something they really really don't want and are not prepared to handle.

@tokyo_0 @franklinlopez I'm talking about in the US and a limited set of other countries. India is different and AIUI the places they target are mostly not urban centers with lots of economic fallout from outages.

@janelith Getting the internet so deeply ingrained in the substrate of modern capitalist society was one of the greatest achievements of our people in regards to securing a world where people can freely communicate and access information. It's so underappreciated.

@franklinlopez To give some concrete examples. Without the internet:

- Nobody can pay with cards or Apple Pay or anything, only cash.
- Some point-of-sale systems might not work even with cash.
- Workers cannot clock in or out.
- Workers cannot see their assigned shift schedules, contact their managers, etc.
- Entry and exit systems for parking facilities likely don't work.
- Highway toll collection & license plate reading likely don't work.
- Businesses phone lines (VoIP) may not work.
- Road navigation systems don't work, and nobody knows how to use maps or knows the roads without assistance anymore.
- At least part of the communications and information sharing systems used by law enforcement don't work.

Etc. etc. etc.

@ruwaromman.bsky.social The fact that the same monster is still relevant 29 years later is so unfathomable, or at least should be.

That's what we're facing in the US if we don't smash fascism now.

@franklinlopez The degree to which modern commerce depends on the internet partly shields us from this. They can't actually take down *the internet* without giving us the equivalent of a general strike.

They can try to break access to particular communication platforms built on top of the internet. Diversity of channels, redundancy, and routing around censorship become key here.

Parallel infrastructure outside the current internet, and not controlled by the oligarchs, is also great and something we absolutely should be doing, but it's not deployed enough yet to meet needs on the short term we're looking at. Ultimately it needs to happen at scale where it replaces the need for a capitalist-infrastructure internet.

@regehr I've seen this pattern a lot and where it strikes me as wrong is that, if you're copying a lot of discrete inputs as initializers for members of an object, they probably shouldn't actually be discrete but represented by some type that can be passed around and copied as a unit if needed, and the class should just have one member encapsulating them all rather than N discrete members.

I'm not sure if that applies here, just a general thing I've seen that looks similar.

@regehr I hate C++.

Because someday, somebody's going to come to you and say, I'm from Apple, I'm from Amazon, I'm from Project Zero and you need to drop what you're doing because heartbleed or Log4j or who knows what happened and the world is falling over and if that psychological offramp isn't there, if you haven't laid out clearly what PROVIDED AS-IS means and how you're going to act about it ahead of time, saying "no, I'll be at my kid's recital" or "I'm on vacation" or just "no" is extremely difficult.

But here's the thing: you may have heard the line that disability is the one underrepresented minority you can be forced to join against your will, and it's extremely true. But if mental health is just health, if moral injury is just injury, then you ultimately need to think about building these accessibility aids - creating this social permission to say no - not just for other people but eventually, on the bad day, for yourself.

One of the things I learned doing community management at the old gig - the "abuse" vs "admin" tag story, you can read it here: https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/109359361836400210 - is the importance of deliberately engineering _social accessibility_ into your processes.

People generally _cannot bring themselves to do_ things they don't feel safe or permitted or right doing, whatever the docs say. To create real human safety in stressful situations you need to deliberately build a culture where _"no" is accessible_.