Ah, chasing better profit from forecasting. Not that anyone would lose money betting on Google picking behavioral futures commodification over strengthening public or democratic infrastructure in 2025.

Okay, found someone who posts worse threads than I do. Feeling slightly better about myself now.

Advances in renewables and grid-level storage have just about made the issue of energy scarcity a solved problem. Now the real issue is energy equity and access. The problems now are politicial, not technological. Too many oligarchs are heavily invested in dusty relics of the past.

Australia has so much electricity from solar power that it is going to start offering free electricity to everyone for at least three hours during the day as the wholesale price of power goes negative electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

You know, one of these days I might break myself of the habit of going full media theorist with every post and end up enjoying this crap again. But today was not that day.

If you step back when considering it, this is kind of another variant of starve the beast except by inculcating disillusionment; cultural, not fiscal. Government can’t work, so we wont expect it to work.

A proposed rule change would allow DHS to collect a wide range of sensitive biometric data on all immigrants, without age restrictions, and store that data throughout each person’s “lifecycle” in the immigration system.

Something crazy about the US and international copyright enforcement regime is that they consistently criminalize digital archiving when it is done for pro-social reasons, but consistently protect the reuse of archived materials by other parties when it is for commercial reasons

succubus - female demon that seduces men incubus - male demon that seduces women vengabus - non-binary demon that likes to party

Real land of contrasts coverage here. The Dallas Fed paper, which I’ve already seen, literally models human extinction to show GDP 0 in that scenario. So the same model that contains both annihilation and techno-rapture as tail risks still says “mild uplift, curb your enthusiasm”.

Stunned onlookers were overheard asking “Did we die? Is this Hell?"

Welp, the D dropped. And it's .. kind of more than I want to pay, honestly.

TIL they're replacing the Pittsburgh International Race Complex with .. a datacenter. I've never been, and I'm not into cars, but that doesn't really seem like a good exchange.

Well OF COURSE he would say that, Huang has been running a geopolitical FOMO hustle for years.

The Pop Culture class I had. Oh, I fucking loved that course, obviously if I'm still talking about it decades later, but the prof was clear about it not being a "blow off" and made it abundantly clear that this was not a course to waste his fucking time in.

Huh. Shapiro stepped up much faster than I was anticipating.

Despite a court ordering the federal government to pay at least partial November food assistance benefits, Pennsylvanians likely won’t see that aid anytime soon — due to an extremely complex and cumbersome process federal officials are requiring — according to state human services officials.

serious note: they're gonna try 5x harder to sabotage the midterms after tonight and we're gonna have to organize on a literally historic scale to stop them

Feeling pretty upbeat today, which probably means I should wait several months before having an opinion.

I was really hoping someone would quote this with "By your margins combined, I am… CAPTAIN PURCHASING POWER" or something.

Well, good.

Walmart! Tyson! Cargill! Kroger! With your powers combined, summon the demand floor!

MFer looks like if Mark Zuckerberg were a nord build in Skyrim

Vulcans Gone Pon Farr: The Needs of the Many

God I forgot Gerrit was a thing.

I just do it elsewhere. I could use counter lists. Alts. But honestly, if the vibe is that soured, I'm simply not going to bring it up.

Maybe I should have put all of that in a PR. lol.

I mean, I'm tedious and annoying, so, relatable. But I'm not prone to causing moral panics. At least that I know of? Shared and rewarded puritanical tendencies within cultures, on the other hand .. well, that's another problem, one that I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Honestly, solving for technical abuse vectors is a lot easier than solving the balkanization problem. Like you just can't add friction without becoming arbiter of legitimate discourse. Something that's counter to the philosophy of this place (arguments about the perception of T&S actions aside.)

Almost all of my criticism to date has been considered around a different set of internalized design constraints. I wouldn't have built ATProto. But it exists. And you’re still going to need abuse-resistant affordances before AppViews get used for something other than vibes and trending feeds.

Okay so this sounds great, but what does it actually mean? First thing: relay needs consumption telemetry. Things like AppView DID/identity, connection timestamp, events consumed per time window, query patterns (which DIDs requested, how often), and so on.

I'm not trying to go full poster's Ralph Nader here, but the "open protocol" model gives offensive groups the same tools as the defensive communities, arguably with network effects on their side. I think we're in a stability window right now, which is going to eventually shift.

I'd expect something like this to pick up if we seriously see actual alternative PDSes launch and get used successfully as actual federated alternatives. I think the absence of it presupposes a threat model like Twitter's, especially in terms of capability.

Good faith earnest curiosity is simply incompatible with the medium. There's no vector in a feed that optimizes for certainty, performance, tribal allegiance, prior stances. It asks the reader to participate instead of react; it assigns the audience work instead of giving them a stance to adopt.

It appears Teen Vogue has fallen

Everyone's diagnosing the same problem (discourse broken, media literacy dead, commentary conflated for endorsement, functional dynamics of attention, etc etc) while performing inside the broken structure. Including myself when I engage with it.

You can observe the public square but only from the alley. Something something asymmetric speech. I dunno. I'm honestly exhausted by the meta, because it's the same battles Twitter had, just .. worse. Same goes for the mod discourse, which has both good points and people with a lot of trauma.

Not to beat the same drum, but bsky isn’t a functionally a town square replacement, it’s a curated salon with optional fire escapes. The people who want open debate want audience access, not reciprocal exposure. Which is no longer negotiable.

🤔

good. now do the rest of the funds. (via the guardian)

This is a continuation of starve the beast, except, you know, the beast is us now. If something doesn't shift soon, it will be really difficult to read this as anything but intentional destabilization.

Smart Money (including the literal CEOs of Mag7 companies) are ALL feverishly unloading ANY and ALL stocks in AI companies and have been for over a year now. The SINGULAR market left for the Mag7 and AI 'Boom' are Retail Trading Marks and 401ks. We're SO FUCKED.

Really wish I could justify a framework desktop.

I've said it before, but I think some of this is a push toward the end of sovereign compute. Again. It's not the first attempt at reallocating ownership upward, but where Sun wanted centralization, aspects of AI are essentially forcing it by constraints.

I'm here you fuckaas bitch

Sorted it out today, but here's the evidence. If you have old tech you don't use regularly, pop the battery. It's safer to store that way. Unless of course it's glued in ..

Oh, it absolutely can happen to anything LiIon (lithium ion). Good news: you won't find them in AAs, those are NiMH (nickel metal hydride). NiMH has a better fail state (they just stop working). Bad news: they ARE in a bunch of small devices, like GoPro-style cams, electric arc lighters, vapes, ..

<laughs in just found a swollen laptop battery while cleaning>

Well Zoidberg was fun but maybe this is also the wrong fit for me