[ Jer moved instances ]

moved to [gts.nyquil.org/@nyquildotorg](https://gts.nyquil.org/@nyquildotorg )

Mobile-addicted. Web-dependent. Digital Plumber. Nerd. He/him. No-coiner.

Citizen of various fediverses over the years, this one since my first Mastodon account in January 2017. Alt-text enthusiast, lover of having his mind changed.

If you engage to disagree with something I've posted, it probably increases the likelihood of a follow. (But chances are pretty good, anyway.)

Boosts and quote-boosts welcome.

Website: [nyquil.org](http://nyquil.org )

Public Key

npub10s0et77ntamjytlltp6e0zw84r6zk0f4ey60kvpfaruhgehusdcsx2wumq

NIP-05 Address

nyquildotorg_at_fedia.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8c8u4l0f47aez9ll4savh38r63apt856ujd8mxq5737t5vm7gxugpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsjjlw6k

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub10s0et77ntamjytlltp6e0zw84r6zk0f4ey60kvpfaruhgehusdcsx2wumq

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Last Notes

2025-01-30 18:46:22 UTC

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worse, this time it was done *after* users had previously opted out

2025-01-28 16:36:52 UTC

>"What good is an AI that can't answer questions about Tiananmen Square?!"
You're getting *so* close to understanding... Censorship aside, LLMs are not question-answering machines. They can't answer questions about anything.
My hope is that the fear of "China spying on our AI queries" and "China making AI spit out propaganda answers" would be enough to convince people that maybe treating LLMs as question-answering machines is a terrible idea all around.

2025-01-21 18:07:28 UTC

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that's messed up

2025-01-19 02:20:03 UTC

"Normalizing COVID wastewater levels" is so on the nose it feels fake.
Redefining zero to be equal to "how much COVID was in the wastewater last year" only makes sense in the context of being able to say wastewater levels are low when they aren't.

2025-01-18 19:52:50 UTC

>"The data shows a striking pattern: 22% of respondents experience ad-like content in their dreams between once a week to daily, while another 17% report such occurrences between once a month to every couple of months."
>"The survey found that 41% of respondents would be open to seeing ads in their dreams if it meant receiving discounts on products or services."
>"Over two-thirds of respondents (68%) indicated they would not be willing to pay to keep their dreams ad-free, even if such technology existed. However, a significant minority (32%) expressed interest in a hypothetical “dream-ad blocker,” suggesting growing awareness and concern about this issue among some consumers."
[This study](https://studyfinds.org/your-dreams-are-for-sale-and-companies-are-already-buying/) is pretty goofy, but there actually are people [working on "influencing dreams" as an untapped marketing channel](https://www.marketingdive.com/news/coors-pulls-from-inception-to-insert-brand-into-dreams-before-super-bowl/594048/).
I think I would rather have Freddy Kreuger come into my dream and kill me than have Apple, McDonald's, Starbucks and Coors use my dreams to make me buy shit from them.

2025-01-16 02:17:48 UTC

I'd probably take Biden's warnings of an incoming oligarchy and his concerns about the future being controlled by "the wealthiest Americans" more seriously if he hadn't also just written an executive order requiring that Federal lands be leased out to build "AI datacenters" so that America can "win" the AI Wars.
Which Americans would you say are going to be leasing this land, Joe? And when we win the AI Wars, which Americans are going to be profiting from it?

2025-01-11 02:58:31 UTC

>"To make [[forking WordPress](https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/)] easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort."
Matt's so generous...

2025-01-09 22:10:16 UTC

WordPress is [going just great](https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-sponsored-contributions-to-wordpress/).
>"We’ve made the decision to reallocate resources due to the lawsuits from WP Engine. This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem."
Automattic is now going to only contribute the 45 hours a week WP Engine contributes to the open source parts of WordPress, instead spending more time on commercial products.

2025-01-06 01:19:47 UTC

Mars won't let me print `W⅋W` on custom M&Ms

2024-12-22 05:12:12 UTC

I have an extremely strong "the person who named it gets to decide the spelling and pronunciation" bias, but I'm willing to make an exception for writing Wordpress without capitalizing the P because that asshole hates it *so* much when people do that.
If I was WP Engine I'd just rebrand to "Wp Engine" and call it a day.

2024-12-19 01:27:46 UTC

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also important: how do they prevent me from making a feed labeled "terrible people" and filling it up with my enemies to make them easier to harass?
Basically, opting in is important at every level. Just because my posts are e public doesn't mean I want them intermingled in some kind of thematic group that that I have no control over. At the best least you need to be able to opt out of being in someone's shared feed, by that also requires me knowing I'm in it.
The idea that anything public is fair game for anyone to do whatever they want with should never ever be the default, and so few of these entities are thinking about it that way.

2024-12-19 01:23:31 UTC

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I think opting into this sort of thing is important, so people like you who are thrilled to have an audience no matter who is profiting from you in the process can do so, while those that don't want anyone profiting off them no matter what don't have to worry about it.

2024-12-19 01:21:47 UTC

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you are posting so that people read your content, not so that you can be another company's product.
Maybe you don't personally care if someone figures out a way to monetize *you* when you're their product, but you can't think that everyone on the fediverse feels that way.
I'm not telling you you should be concerned, but I am telling you you should be aware that being concerned is a valid viewpoint that was behind the very creation of the fediverse in the first place, and is still held by a lot of people.

2024-12-19 00:55:30 UTC

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>"Until now, our connections to each other have been siloed and owned by a few monolithic social networks. The rise of the open social web means we can now imagine entirely new ways to connect people and information online,” said Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard.
"Now Flipboard can be a one-stop silo that sucks in information from all those *other* silos, benefiting from connections in ways that none of them are able to on their own," McCue didn't add.

2024-12-19 00:18:04 UTC

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I am not posting things in order to contribute to your metrics about what other people should read. Surely this thing is going to be opt-in, right? Not just leaning on "well, it's all publicly posted, so it's fair game. Maybe we'll let you opt out."

2024-12-19 00:15:39 UTC

I've been concerned for a while about how much Flipboard is investing into building a fediverse they can exploit.
"Surf" just reinforces that concern.
Still formulating thoughts, but it feels like "well, you shouldn't post things publicly if you don't want companies sucking them up and using them for commercial purposes..." all over again.

2024-12-18 04:54:15 UTC

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kind of an obvious speed run to Twitter's "verification" system, but they currently make their money by [checks notes] selling people domains, so it was always basically going to end up there.

2024-12-13 04:51:30 UTC

I really thought that [BuzzFeed selling *Hot Ones* to George Soros](https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/12/24319564/buzzfeed-hot-ones-first-we-feast-sale) would have been bigger news. Or at least more jokes about it.

2024-12-12 19:35:48 UTC

I'm as outraged about [the sign in Seattle promoting violence](https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-road-signs-disturbing-message-sparks-investigation-amid-ceo-shooting-aftermath-highway-99-one-less-ceo-many-more-to-go-lake-union-wsdot-sdot#) as everyone else, but I'm outraged because it should say "fewer," not "less." #WordsMatter
https://media.fedia.social/media/b5074974-b3c6-4461-b5be-e9ff0018e28f.jpg

2024-12-08 19:27:02 UTC

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would you two mind removing me from future replies. My position remains the same: that everyone is arguing about different things here, that the important parts of "decentralization" are different to each participant, and every new reply just reinforces that and makes me mad lol

2024-12-03 20:13:28 UTC

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ok, that was my guess. Small number of personal mails from a small number of addresses that people actually reply to 👍

2024-12-03 20:10:24 UTC

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I'm not going to try to claim that you're having more delivery problems than you know about, but the number of angry posts I've read from people who are doing all the right technical things with their mail server and DNS that find by chance that they've been blackholed by Google and Microsoft for some time suggests it might be difficult to know whether someone running their own mail server *wasnt* having deliverability problems.
I'm curious how you know all the mail your server handles is delivered, because that seems like an interesting/fun thing to try to determine without some kind of bounce feedback.

2024-12-03 19:42:37 UTC

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I absolutely agree. But Musk buying Bluesky is actually the primary thing ATProto was designed to prevent, and part of the reason I think they've joined in on using (erroneously , I believe) "decentralized."
(Whether their VC funding will allow that to remain true is something I am absolutely not holding my breath for.)

2024-12-03 19:28:20 UTC

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just to be clear, I've never claimed that Bluesky is decentralized. My claim is "neither is the fediverse," and all these discussions going around and around about it get us nowhere."
But also, the fediverse leans on DNS, too, so I guess this is a good time to pack in the discussion about "decentralized" lol.

2024-12-03 19:23:51 UTC

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with email, you do have to connect to the email server that (federated, not decentralized) DNS records point to. If your mail server goes down, email sent to you does not get to you set up an account on a new mail server and then configure DNS records and hope an eventual retry delivers that mail to the new central point that manages your mail.
XMPP works essentially the same. The servers federate, but are not decentralized. And even if you are ok with calling the server topology itself "decentralized," you still have to lean on DNS, which is absolutely not decentralized.

2024-12-03 19:15:03 UTC

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I don't think anyone is "making" decentralized blurry, I think it's always been a poor marketing term applied to whatever people are trying to promote the usage of.

2024-12-03 19:13:40 UTC

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p2p things like Gnutella, or BitTorrent (with dht) are closer to decentralized, but this is all kind of supporting my claim that "decentralized" is not a good term to use for discussing merits of platforms 🤷

2024-12-03 19:11:34 UTC

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email and xmpp are federated.
"Decentralized" doesn't apply, because in order to get and send your mail, you have to connect to a central point.
(Email is also now a bad example because so much of it really is centralized. Almost every email you send or receive talks to GMail servers.)

2024-12-03 19:00:41 UTC

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I do think "has different meanings and interpretations" makes "decentralized" unsuitable for debating whether or not the fediverse or Bluesky is decentralized; "many meanings" doesn't mean "no meaning", but I think it does when you're trying to use it to compare different aspects of different things with different people because it's almost impossible to be on the same page.
"Meaningless" is just shorthand for "no common ground to argue from."

2024-12-03 18:51:05 UTC

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where I keep getting hung up is "who controls my identity and content?"
On the fediverse, my identity and content are absolutely controlled by my instance, which makes that a huge obvious centralization point.
Sure I can "migrate" my identity, but that just causes (many of) my followers to automatically follow the new account, which comes with its own *new* identity. Now there are two identities out there. Unless my instance goes down, in which case I cannot "migrate" my identity.
But then, topologically speaking, even if I host my own instance on my own domain, I can't ever point that domain to a different instance without causing federation problems that require all the other instances on the fediverse to take action to get federation going again.
Those two things make my experience on the fediverse *incredibly* centralized.

2024-12-03 18:16:23 UTC

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I think in a way we're saying the same thing, kind of.
I've really struggled the last couple years with the descriptive nature of language, how words evolve the way people use them, making the popular usage of them "correct" despite it absolutely being incorrect.
I guess I'm saying that "decentralized" has *already* become meaningless, and did well before Bluesky showed up, and that it having done so is actively contributing to debates like this one. But, like with "crypto," me shaking my fist at the sky just makes me feel bad, and — for me at least — it's probably healthier to just stop using it rather than getting mad at it repeatedly.
I'm sorry I chose your thread to finally join in on in order to work out this point. I wasn't trying to argue with you, and agree with your sentiment about diluting meaning. But, because I was having "wait a minute, this isn't *really* decentralized," discussions about the fediverse, on the fediverse, in 2017, seeing happen again with Bluesky has been interesting to see.
Again, sorry I sounded argumentative rather than trying to contribute to your argument. I'm trying to work on that lol.

2024-12-03 02:41:09 UTC

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my only point is that "decentralized" means a lot of different things.
If your mastodon instance goes down, you're dead in the water, too, unless you planned ahead with recent backups, and even then you're going to lose followers.
Even the in-depth architectural apologists aren't calling Bluesky "decentralized," in their big "this is how ATProto actually works" posts, they're calling *ATProto* that, and they're not any more wrong than the people who say Mastodon is.
Indeed there is only one ATProto "instance" currently, but that was once true of ActivityPub too. I don't have a horse in this fight, and I'm not interested in Bluesky no matter what changes they make; I'm just pointing out that a lot of people are creating their own debate here based on how other people are interpreting "decentralized."

2024-12-02 22:36:41 UTC

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I think what a lot of people may be getting hung up on is that ATproto is decentralized, but the thing Bluesky uses it for is not. Very similar overlap to how ActivityPub is decentralized, but Mastodon is a network of centralized instances that federate. What you see as a Mastodon user is all pushed to you from a central point, and is therefore "centralized," in basically exactly the same way that Bluesky's ATProto aggregator is. It's just that Mastodon currently has more than one of those while Bluesky does not 🤷

2024-11-27 00:30:48 UTC

Someone needs to make a "Bluesky is going just fine" page that lists the daily atrocities people are inflicting via public data on its users.
Yesterday everyone was freaking out about the page that shows any user what accounts any other user blocks, now today HuggingFace is distributing an AI training dataset of posts they sucked out of the hose.

2024-11-26 21:29:45 UTC

[Potential new D.B. Cooper evidence](https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a63009965/db-cooper-parachute-fbi/) just dropped.

2024-11-16 23:49:05 UTC

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gravity is just a theory 🤷

2024-11-12 23:54:28 UTC

I've been finding myself irrationally mad at a lot of weird things lately, so I'm going to try to document them in a thread as they occur.
1. Angry that, in the 1800s, several of the top layers of the Great Pyramid at Giza were removed by entrepreneurs in order to expose a large enough surface that a table and chairs could be placed there, in order to enable sherpas to be hired by rich British tourists to haul tables and chairs up there to have a nice picnic.

2024-11-12 08:54:16 UTC

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first time I've encountered an alt text ad

2024-10-23 00:54:27 UTC

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Can't wait to see what Eminem rhymes with Kamala Harris.

2024-10-20 19:40:48 UTC

Quote-boosting to improve the alt text.
https://media.fedia.social/media/1926d00f-567e-466c-b9bf-f2c9daac6ac2.png
#note15h0…usut

2024-10-16 19:48:46 UTC

Just randomly remembered Eminem rhyming Piss Pissed-Offerson with Kris Kristofferson. Literal rhyming genius.

2024-10-15 17:55:00 UTC

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Steve-O's podcast is hard to describe, and it's almost certainly not what you think. So many discussions about deep concepts with really smart people.

2024-10-15 17:53:48 UTC

Duncan Trussell on Steve-O's (really excellent) podcast: "remember those indigenous cultures who believed that taking a photo of them steals their soul? [MidJourney scraping every photo on the Internet] makes me think, [holy shit, they were right](https://sites.libsyn.com/489077/duncan-tbd)!"

2024-10-14 18:14:10 UTC

#note1st0…sehp

2024-10-08 23:05:38 UTC

[California Cops Show Off Absurd New Cybertruck With Music From Terminator Movies](https://gizmodo.com/california-cops-show-off-absurd-new-cybertruck-with-music-from-terminator-movies-2000509382)
>"While the fully equipped vehicle won’t be used as a patrol car, it can respond to emergencies and assist the community when needed,”
"As long as there's no chance of rain, and provided officers can get the doors open," the statement didn't add.

2024-10-04 19:37:28 UTC

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I spent a lot of years believing the "oh, you're 1/16th Cherokee on your mother's side stories I heard from family members. Later in life, when I learned that like half the country thinks they're 1/16th Cherokee it bummed me out, too.
It's almost *exactly* like when a friend was telling adult-ass me about how his parents lied and said his dog went to live at a farm as a kid. I was like "that's sad, but my dog actually *did* go to live at a farm. [beat]. Ah shit."

2024-10-04 19:30:21 UTC

I keep seeing non-ironic utterances of "I even asked ChatGPT and it couldn't figure out the answer, either" and I feel like that Italian guy in Native American garb pretending to cry about all the trash white people leave everywhere in America.

2024-09-24 18:10:16 UTC

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I think Mark Hamill's The Trickster was about as 1990 as it was ever possible to be.
https://media.fedia.social/media/aee8b87e-25e6-48d6-be8d-038983648821.png

2024-09-24 18:03:47 UTC

I just remembered another weird nostalgic thing for me, similar to the taco flavored Doritos retro packaging.
*My* live-action incarnation of The Flash is always going to be this one, which is kind of uncomfortable.
https://media.fedia.social/media/dd8e2959-6d11-4828-a30f-a108b0c72ba1.png

2024-09-24 08:37:10 UTC

Just thinking about how the iPad's multitouch supports 11 fingers simultaneously. That 11th "finger" haunts me.

2024-09-11 21:49:24 UTC

>"As you can imagine, maintainers of WHOIS tooling are reluctant to scrape such a textual list at runtime, and so it has become the norm to simply hardcode server addresses, populating them at development time by referring to IANA’s list manually."
This is a really good read (unless you get stressed learning about the fragility of the piles of crap we all depend upon.)
https://labs.watchtowr.com/we-spent-20-to-achieve-rce-and-accidentally-became-the-admins-of-mobi/

2024-09-07 00:07:17 UTC

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My point here isn't that Mike is a bad guy for being into crypto, it's that he's a victim of the crypto grift the same way Emily is a victim of the Scientology grift.

2024-09-06 21:46:37 UTC

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Both crypto and Scientology are built on intentional lies meant to rope in suckers who really want something to believe in. To profit from them.

2024-09-06 21:43:22 UTC

Just thinking out loud here, but is being a part of Scientology really worse than being a hyper-capitalist into crypto and NFTs?
If you're fine with Mike Shinoda being in Linkin Park, I'm not sure your concerns about Emily Armstrong matter 🤷

2024-08-08 17:50:03 UTC

Pay-Per-View boxing event where Imane Khelif punches the shit out of JK Rowling, when? Do we need a GoFundMe or something to make it happen?