Telorand
@Telorand@reddthat.com
- Comment on The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet 15 hours ago:
True! I forgot about that. Other accounts have used similar functionality.
- Comment on The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet 1 day ago:
That’s cool. Well, I wish them well. Hopefully they can make something that’s good for people and not just chase profits.
- Comment on The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet 1 day ago:
Mastodon devs didn’t care to cease the moment
And they never will. That’s not their focus or goal. They don’t care about “gaining momentum” and explosive growth, and I wouldn’t want them to.
That’s up to us. Convincing people to join the Fediverse and showing them better alternatives to their favorite platforms (and teaching them how to use them) is our collective job, not some group of hobbyist devs.
Plus I think explosive growth would change the vibe of the Fediverse in a negative way, since most people expect it to be free (i.e. “I am the product”) and shitty (so always taking offense). I’m fine peeling people away over time.
For groups, I don’t know if Mastodon will ever get that or not. Friendica exists, it’s more analogous to Facebook than Mastodon, and it already has groups and public/private forums. I’m not really sure if that would be a great addition to the microblog format of Mastodon, anyway, so I don’t really care if it never comes.
- Comment on The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet 1 day ago:
musk could just buy it. jack already sold twitter to him,
Yeah, certainly, or some other billionaire. I think it goes without saying that most of us here understand the flaws with centralized services.
I’m not saying it’s the best choice ever, but I’m hopeful that the choice to leave Xitter might do positive things to people’s mentality when BlueSky almost certainly repeats history. It’s not likely to happen right away, as even an offer to buy would take time to approve, so for now, I’m taking it as a net positive.
The Fediverse will continue to grow and change in the meantime, and we’ll all still be here to help them migrate to better things in the future.
- Comment on The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet 1 day ago:
People aren’t going to be convinced of social/communism overnight.
I celebrate the move to BlueSky as positive in that they are no longer propping up an apartheid tech bro who’s now running a meme branch of US Government, and also because many of them are doing the thing they were scared to do before: leave. They now know how that feels and what it will be like rebuilding friend groups and such.
It’s not the anti-corpo step many are deluding themselves to believe it is, but getting out of the muck and learning how to take the step to change something are both things I see as positives that can be guided to better things in the future.
- Comment on Patient gamers, which games have you discovered/played this week? 1 day ago:
That’s interesting. Do you have a link, by chance? I’d love to read more
- Comment on Among apps vying to replace Twitter, Bluesky may have the news and innovation edge 2 days ago:
Good. The more people leave the cesspit, the better off they’ll be.
Inb4 some speciously-reasoned lawsuit from the “Department of Government Efficiency” comes for BlueSky alleging anticompetitive practices or something equally ridiculous.
- Comment on German football club leaves X, warning Elon Musk ‘capable of influencing German election’ 2 days ago:
Discord at least has community moderation tools. Xitter is just a town square where all the Neo-nazis and conspiracy theorists get louder megaphones than everyone else.
But the “my friends are there” is such a weak argument, imo. BlueSky exists. Spoutible exists. Mastodon exists. If they’re IRL friends, they can just regroup elsewhere. If they’re only online friends, you can make new ones pretty easily.
“My friends are there” is just a tacit admission that they don’t mind sharing space with Neo-nazis.
- Comment on X rival Bluesky gains 1.25 million users following U.S. election 2 days ago:
I know I can’t ever go back. I donate to my instance, and I actually feel good about it, because I know it’s not going into the pocket of some faceless corporation who’s beholden to its shareholders instead of its customers.
- Comment on X rival Bluesky gains 1.25 million users following U.S. election 2 days ago:
Hardly. The Fediverse spans multiple apps and services, and it existed before Elon bought Twitter and it will continue existing regardless of what the billionaires do, because it’s not run by just one person.
The whole point is decentralization, not growth, so unless the billionaires can take out every server hosting an instance, the Fediverse isn’t going anywhere.
- Comment on Patient gamers, which games have you discovered/played this week? 3 days ago:
Deus Ex Mankind Divided.
Just getting started, but it’s been pretty fun so far. Not really appreciating how much it echoes the current happenings in society, though…
- Comment on Patient gamers, which games have you discovered/played this week? 3 days ago:
I love Hidden Folks! Hidden Through Time is another that’s basically the same but with color.
- Comment on Nvidia's Arm-based PC chips for consumers to launch in September 2025, commercial to follow in 2026: Report 2 weeks ago:
I have generally negative feelings about big companies getting bigger, but from what I understand about the difference between instruction sets, the transition to ARM is a good thing.
- Comment on Entire Mac Lineup Now Finally Starts With at Least 16GB RAM, Ending 8GB Era 2 weeks ago:
And by that definition, I agree
- Comment on Reddit’s getting more popular—and profitable 2 weeks ago:
Yep, not an unexpected outcome. Enshittification usually has a direct correlation with profitability; most people simply love being the product, because the alternative takes a little effort.
Reddit is still hot garbage, though, and that fact is only growing worse according to my friend group that still goes there on occasion. I much prefer Fedi.
- Comment on Entire Mac Lineup Now Finally Starts With at Least 16GB RAM, Ending 8GB Era 2 weeks ago:
I dunno if I’d even consider them an industry leader, unless you break down their ubiquity by industry category (in which they lead graphic design and maybe video editing, iirc). They lead phone sales in the US by a lot, but their overall desktop share is still relatively small (<10%), and their global footprint is buoyed only by iOS (which is still below Windows and Android).
I would say they’re an innovator, and they push certain companies to innovate, but they don’t really lead by that many metrics.
- Comment on Nine trillion dollar investment in 'Super-AI' isn't that much, says SoftBank CEO. 2 weeks ago:
For that, we’ll need a super-AI! If only some
naive rubeheroic billionaire would be brave enough to fund it!/s
- Comment on ChatGPT-4o Guardrail Jailbreak: Hex Encoding for Writing CVE Exploits. 2 weeks ago:
the less intelligent and less truthful it becomes.
Incorrect, because of this simple fact: garbage in, garbage out. Feed it the internet, get the internet.
- Comment on Malicious CAPTCHA delivers Lumma and Amadey Trojans. 2 weeks ago:
My BiL actually fell for one of those. He’s profoundly naive, and it’s probably good that he’s in the military, since they make many of life’s choices for him.
- Comment on Malicious CAPTCHA delivers Lumma and Amadey Trojans. 2 weeks ago:
The Trojans are distributed through CAPTCHAs with instructions. Clicking the “I’m not a robot” button [for example] copies the line
powershell.exe -eC bQBzAGgAdABhA<…>MAIgA=to the clipboard and displays so-called “verification steps”:- Press Win + R (this opens the Run dialog box);
- Press CTRL + V (this pastes the line from the clipboard into the text field);
- Press Enter (this executes the code).
Malicious use of the system clipboard seems to be the popular choice, these days. If you fall for this, maybe the internet isn’t the place for you, just yet.
- Comment on Robinhood admits it’s just a gambling app. 2 weeks ago:
Yes and no. Iirc, only high-rollers got to have their trades go through.
- Comment on Google creating an AI agent to use your PC on your behalf, says report | Same PR nightmare as Windows Recall 2 weeks ago:
Instead, you can directly give it commands in your browser and it should automatically do everything you need, including filling out forms and clicking buttons. AI-tasked examples include opening pertinent web pages, compiling search data into easily readable tables, purchasing products, or booking flights.
This sounds like it would be great for people with accessibility needs—if only Google was trustworthy and had a fiduciary duty to humanity…
Alas.
- Comment on Meta is secretly building its own search engine. 2 weeks ago:
Cool, so another search engine to ignore.
- Comment on Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’ 2 weeks ago:
The one place where I sincerely hope it takes root and succeeds is in medicine. Having better drugs, helping to identify potential problems or diseases, identifying health patterns (all with human review and proper trials, naturally)…
It’s not even close to the magical AGI that tech bros are promising, but it is good at digesting data, and science and medicine are full of that. Plus, given how overworked doctors and nurses can be, having a preliminary analysis from a computer that doesn’t get tired or overworked seems like it would probably help with accurate diagnosis.
- Comment on Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’ 2 weeks ago:
It will be interesting when the bubble pops, because that’s probably when we’ll see the useful things it is actually good at
- Comment on Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’ 2 weeks ago:
Not especially old, though; he looks like a 54yo dev. Reminds me of my uncles when they were 54yo devs.
- Comment on Feds Say You Don’t Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books 3 weeks ago:
Alright. Now enforce it. Good luck with that.
- Comment on A TikTok alternative called Loops is coming for the fediverse | Users own their content, and Loops doesn’t sell or provide videos to third-party advertisers or train AI on them. It will be open source 3 weeks ago:
Tbh, doesn’t sound like a bad option.
- Comment on A TikTok alternative called Loops is coming for the fediverse | Users own their content, and Loops doesn’t sell or provide videos to third-party advertisers or train AI on them. It will be open source 3 weeks ago:
I think if you’re just looking for quick news breaks then it can be useful…
No, even then, that format is even worse. Good journalism often has a nuance and detail to it. The short-format video nonsense barely has enough time to get through a headline and a broad summary.
The 24h news cycle is bad enough without trying to shorten it further to 90sec ragebait clips.
- Comment on Bitwarden Makes Change To Address Recent Open-Source Concerns 3 weeks ago:
Okay, I actually laughed at that one! I guess us QA folks can just pack up and go home 😆