Notices by Jay (jaystephens@mastodon.social)

@aral
The special light proof tape is worth the extra $.

@mekkaokereke @benroyce

Yup, both things are true:

1. All horizontal/peer-to-peer mass-media including actually-existing oligopolistic SocMed (TwiX, FB etc) massively increases ordinary folks's understanding of the lives of those in different circumstances

2. SocMed in the hands of the West's genocidal nutter 0.00001℅ who control the advertising-industrial complex, has supercharged & sped up various destructive spirals.

@kotaro I hope a couple of random photos from Peru bring a smile

@Mastodon
I'm this context, foreign-owned matters too.
Regulators are in a bind because they can threaten to block ordinary users' access to platforms (VPNs etc notwithstanding) but can't compel foreign corps to do anything, and they often ignore fines. If regulators then do block them, it's a vote loser.

evergreen
#auspol

ht @mmantscheffau.bsky.social

@Gargron @rbreich

Robert, I really value getting your insight without having to touch horrible platforms like FB. Please consider adding ALT text or posting text.🙏🏼

A Mac so Big it warps the fabric of space time into a black McHole

#AllOrNothingAnything #HashtagGames

@bruces
Q5. Oof.

@JackFromWisconsin

Hey Jack, are you bridged to fedi so I can follow your bsky on here?

Disappointing that other nations have largely failed to work together to push back against the Trump tariff bullshit.
A simple pact between the other major economies, a tariff on anyone in this bloc means the whole bloc imposes an equal tariff on the USA.
Job done.

The Good, the Bad and the Parsley

#CulinaryMovies #HashtagGames

@aral
Hey Aral, I pay a hosting co run by a friend of a friend for basic hosting with cPanel etc... and I wanna try running kitten but couldn't figure out how to upload source and install - are there instructions for that (or have I misunderstood what I can do with kitten?).

@dalias @larsmb @b_rain
Totally agree bloatware and enshitification have outpaced Moore's law, but the smartphone is less than 2 decades old, and unlike Internet old hands, late adopters don't have much memory of a better time. In the mid 2010s in my job I was still regularly upskilling mums returning to work who were switching to a computer from a pen and a paper book. Those people are even now only mid 50s to mid 60s.

@dalias @larsmb @b_rain
To outsiders, what tech has achieved in the last 3 decades is absolutely indistinguishable from magic.
If you don't have domain knowledge and it _seems_ like the same folks who caused computers, then the Internet, then smartphones to upend society are now saying "a new, artificial intelligence is here that can do all the things, embrace it or be left behind", it's very hard to separate hype from opportunity and threat.

@skinnylatte
Ugh.
I also noticed the same pharmacy ads for Nurofen & Panadol as we get in the Anglo countries ("sick and in pain? Take some of these pills and keep enriching the boss" type messaging) but weirdly turned up to 11, like going just a bit further with that message than would be acceptable, say, here in Australia.

@skinnylatte
I've visited Singapore and it's nice to visit. But yeah, even the chill people have a side hustle monetizing chillness. It felt very unsustainable psychologically.

@dalias @glyph
100% this.
I have very smart friends convinced that by bolting together a few specialist systems plus an LLM trained on larger data sets than now, AGI is inevitable.
The exposure is poisoning the brains.

On the one hand IKEA is awful and every IKEA build is a trip to a circle of hell.
In the other hand, this part of the build instruction preamble always cheers me up. Good advice for life generally.

@inthehands
I'm pretty ignorant about this, but it strikes me that the same industry that built all this big data infrastructure, has already used it to answer the question, and the answer is "mostly no', which is why we hear nothing empirical, when all the tools to provide detailed empirical proof are already built.