I hosted a meeting with about a dozen attendees recently, and one attendee silently joined with an AI note taking bot and immediately went AFK.

It was in about 5 minutes before we clocked it and then kicked it out. It automatically circulated its notes. Amusingly, 95% of them were “is that a chat bot?” “Steve, are you actually on this meeting?” “I’m going to kick Steve out in a minute if nobody can get him to answer”, etc. But even with that level of asinine, low impact chat, it still managed to garble them to the point of barely legible.

Also: what a dick move.

That’s a really interesting read (and worth much more attention than the pithy one-liners of people who just want to read the title).

On reflection, I think my take away is that Bluesky will always by necessity of its design be hosted and controlled by a single centralised company. But what their architectural model does allow is the possibility of a wholesale migration from one centralised provider to another. That is, it would be possible for a suitably resourced and motivated company to host its own mirror Relay and other components and have essentially a fully functional Bluesky clone. In the event that Bluesky ever “does a Twitter” and go into terminal decline, in theory this might mean that a successor/competitor could emerge and take on the network without loss of existing content.

I’m not sure that’ll ever actually happen, but it’s an interesting thought.

Strangely, I used to work for a bank in their “bereavement services” department; that is, the department that dealt with dead people’s accounts.

If anyone notified us of a death of an account holder, and provided any proof (death certificate, coroner’s report, police letter), the first thing we’d do is freeze the account. All payments out stopped, all cards cancelled, all withdrawals blocked. This was a legal requirement, because once somebody dies their money becomes the legal property of their “estate”, and it’s unlawful for anyone to remove money from the estate without following proper process.

There’s no need to stop each payment individually. In fact, the bank really doesn’t want you logging in to their online bank using the deceased’s credentials and messing around with things for the same reason; unless you’re following proper procedures, it’s not yours to mess with.

Possibly it’s different in different jurisdictions, of course.

Murder rather than suicide, but dead is dead.

The thing to remember about investing (forex or otherwise) is that it’s an enormous global industry. One of the largest and richest there is. If you’re a normal person, with a normal day job, tinkering around in the evening trying to pick stocks or write algorithms, just remember that there are countless thousands of professional, experienced, trained analysts all over the world doing the exact same thing 40 hours a week, week in week out.

There are no easy bucks to be made. If it was easy, it’d already be done.

It seems insane to me that the US system lets you literally specify the exact judge (that you’ve already bought and paid for) as the only judge that can hear cases against you. And that the system is basically OK with this.

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Bridgy Fed is pretty straightforward. You just follow the account and away you go.

It doesn’t make your bridged posts particularly attractive-looking (essentially you appear as a bot under a subdomain of a server), but it’s searchable and discoverable in the target network.

I’m now mostly using Blue Sky, but I bridge to Mastodon, so all my posts form part of the content that’s available to fediverse users. For little old me that’s not all that important, but if every big organisation or journalist or celeb did that too, that’d do a lot to build vitality into the fediverse network.

Speculation in the sense that the article says it’s "suggested’, and the source cited is “Mac Rumours”.

Not sure why you’re being so weird about it.

Apple made the transition a little easier for those who weren’t ready to give up on their wired headphones by including a $9 adapter. However, it looks like it could now be confined to the annals of history, as the Lightning to 3.5mm jack adapter has sold out in the US and other countries, suggesting Apple may have quietly discontinued it

It says “sold out” and “discontinued”. The latter is currently just speculation.

All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human.

I’m no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it’s not magic, it’s just technology. You’ll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.

Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There’s no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that’s not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).

This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I’m concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.

In this day and age, if it’s actually important they’ll probably immediately send you a text message/WhatsApp/etc. anyway.

Considering the fediverse microblogging scene includes Threads, which claims to have hundreds of millions of active users, I’d say its death is greatly exaggerated.

Yes, I know a lot of Mastodon servers refuse to federate with Threads, and yes I know their active user figures are likely very different from what they claim. But at the end of the day, it’s an ActivityPub microblogging platform with a considerable userbase and a very rich corporate backer.

If something has hundreds of “centralised” platforms owned and run by a diversity of different people and spread all over the world geographically, then that’s “decentralised”.

I can’t really think of another way in which something could be decentralised.

With ActivityPub, there’s nothing stopping you hosting a server literally just for yourself. It wouldn’t get much more decentralised than that.

“Never” is a strong word. API translation is a technical hurdle, but rarely an insurmountable one. If Blue Sky wanted to add an ActivityPub interface to their platform, they probably could.

This issue isn’t technical per se; it’s a matter of priorities. Blue Sky doesn’t want to federate with Mastodon/Threads, because they want users to switch to their platform.

Threads (for better or worse) demonstrates that that’s not a fundamental obstacle for fediverse microblogging.

If someone wanted to launch a Mastodon fork with algorithm-driven content discovery, they could do. Just as with Lemmy/kbin/mbin, the beauty of the fediverse is that different servers can take quite different approaches to use experience design whilst still maintaining compatibility with the rest of the community.

It’s not a bad shout for beginners by any stretch, but it has a massively overdone reputation for beginner-friendliness that is not really deserved

Cinnamon, for one. Yes, it looks kind of like Windows. But the similarity is surface deep, and it’s also pretty janky- by far the biggest resource hog of all the main DEs, lots of weird snagging bugs and stability issues. I’ve always found it very unsatisfying.

I personally use MATE quite a lot and I enjoy it, but I wouldn’t really be recommending that to Windows users either; it’s pretty old school at this point.

Keep recommending Mint to people by all means, though. If you like it and it’s what you use, that’s still a great recommendation. There is fundamentally no reason why beginners shouldn’t use it as their first distro.

Heck: phones. Phones are federated. I pay for my phone service through one company, and you pay for your phone service through another, but I can still call you as long as I dial the right number.

The issue isn’t really that federation makes things hard. The issue is that it’s not how people are used to social media, and very specifically social media, working. And people are strange creatures of habit who hate change.