Leaving the electronics at home also seems easier to explain in case you’re stopped, compared to trying to explain why you have a phone wrapped in tinfoil in your pocket.

That’s true. It’s like (old?) Twitter. Anyone could pollute and spam hashtags. Some hashtags are worse than others.

Completely, vastly different scenarios, so not a good comparison. Bluesky was VC-funded with $billions, headed by the same guy as Twitter originally. Mastodon was started by one guy in his spare(?) time, has never accepted VC money, and was and is specifically designed to avoid the toxic trends from Twitter.

I’m also on mastodon but I’ve had a real tough time finding my crowd there which is odd, but I think it’s because it’s too fragmented.

What have you tried so far to find your crowd on Mastodon?

This level of FOMO bullshit hasn’t happened since the Dutch went bonkers over tulips.

Haha, now that’s a great comparison! I mentioned to a co-worker a couple weeks ago that we should get ready to invest in the next bubble coming up after this one pops, probably tulip bulbs (again).

Good points, thanks.

Good article, thanks! That provides better context for how the major AI companies’ finances compare with Uber’s, but I can’t think of a better example to use for a company that operated at massive losses for many years due to being propped up by investors. If you have a better example I could use, I would be glad to do it. Otherwise, if this question comes up again in the context of AI, I’ll be sure to include a link to that article.

Even if they do, Python still seems to do the job. Instagram and Threads use python for their back-ends: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside-story-metas-newest-social-app/

Sure, there will always be exceptions for certain use-cases, but my understanding is that PHP is faster that python in most cases. By the way, I didn’t say that to put python down, but just to point out that php wasn’t a good argument to defend python. Python itself is a good argument to defend python. See my parallel reply to yours, where I point out that Instagram and Threads both use python for their back-ends.

you can’t make a facebook with pytho with good speed

You may want to check your assumptions. Facebook’s back-end was developed with PHP, probably because it was the most popular web back-end language when it was originally developed. However, two later Meta products, Instagram and Threads, used Python for their back-end. Source: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside-story-metas-newest-social-app/

Unfortunately, I don’t think that this is a useful argument because from what I understand, php is significantly faster than python.

Got it, thanks. My memory of how Uber was able to gain a foothold was a little different, but my memory of it was patchy anyway. My recollection was that they essentially said that Uber was not a taxi service. They sold it as just regular people offering to “share” a ride with someone else to an area that they were going to anyway. I have no doubt that heavy political contributions were part of their arsenal in their attack on the taxi industry and regulations, so I agree that this was government corruption. But I also recall that they also had armies of lawyers fighting at every level of government around the world to ram through the idea that this wasn’t a taxi service and shouldn’t be subject to taxi regulations. Maybe my memory is more patchy than I thought, or perhaps both things were true - government corruption and a legal war allowed them flourish.

I think that we are now witnessing that capitalism has failed because it got too unregulated and companies grew too powerful.

In other words, capitalism has failed because it’s capitalism.

I completely agree with your conclusion. Just to be clear, I was in no way saying that what Uber did and OpenAI does is OK. They both suck and should never be allowed to operate as they had and have. I don’t know if Uber was government corruption though, at least I had never heard it described as such. What I have heard is that they found loopholes in taxi laws around the world and employed a global army of lawyers exploit those loopholes.

They used to have agreements to make it difficult to do so. I don’t know if that’s still the case but it’s pretty awful. I think OEMs had to pay licenses for every machine shipped regardless if it had a windows license.

Correct.

At least in the tech industry that doesn’t apply if the investors believe that the technology or application is promising enough. Look at Uber’s example. They lost very large amounts of money for many years before turning a profit. They were able to do this because the investors kept sustaining them through their unprofitable years.

The same thing has been happening for years with the AI companies. I heard a while back that OpenAI wouldn’t turn a profit on their services even if they charged end users $100/month.

There was a story linked here in the last few weeks that talked about backlash against a cafe in San Francisco that replaced their menu screen photos inside the cafe with AI-generated ones. They were horrific, made the food look like crap. It was a really incredible decision for a restaurant manager to make.

Where and under what circumstances? Do you have a link for more information? In my US state, I see reproduced license plates (i.e., not the original state-issued metal ones) all the time. Like stickers, e-paper (I think?), etc.

You can shape the All feed to your liking by blocking communities that regularly post stuff you don’t like. I did this with meme communities and rarely see any memes anymore. Sometimes it’s a whole instance that is full of communities you don’t want to see, then you might want to block it. Examples of those for me are ani.social for sexualized anime and fedinsfw.app for NSFW content.

Once you do this kind of trimming, the All feed becomes a lot less annoying.

I didn’t think that Matrix was considered part of the fediverse? Lemmy and Piefed are redundant since their core functionality is very similar, unless the two accounts are to segment your online personas, like politics, NSFW, and everything else. I had never heard of vutuv until now.

Many fediverse platforms do have specialized functionality so it’s beneficial to open an account for them specifically. Here’s a good reference article with guidelines: https://fedi.tips/using-multiple-accounts-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/

Or several other solutions for different use cases. I always remember this article about alternatives: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/a90e21e3d06e1ad924a1bfdfe3c16902