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@[email protected]

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It works.

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In the past two weeks, a Project Sail publicity brochure has begun appearing in mailboxes. Featuring images of families in clothing emblazoned with the American flag, the mailing appeared to be an attempt to appeal to the conservative-leaning county’s sense of patriotism.

That's so blatant.

Probably the only reason it isn't working is that the company behind it is based in Silicon Valley.

They're going to have to find someone "from around here". (And go behind their backs to pay off city leadership.)

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A former employee of a disc manufacturing company in Memphis who stole hundreds of DVDs and Blu-ray discs, has been sentenced to 57 months in prison by a Memphis federal court. The length of the sentence is driven by an unrelated firearm charge. For the copyright infringement offenses, to which the defendant pleaded guilty, the court handed down a 21-month sentence to be served concurrently.

Man who walked across the street was also wearing a shirt. The shirt is unrelated to his walking across the street.

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Affects is such a strange way to put it. Like, "they caught a case of child labor."

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Those two should not be counted in the same category.

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Oh, they're the guys that Komoot founders sold out to. That sucks.

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Does PeerTube have a membership/account access mechanism?

If not, I can't see how creators who monetize their content would be able to move in.

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Can it hurry up and ruin the AI hype, too?

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Waiting for the next headline where we find out the AI has been taking bribes.

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"If implemented correctly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement.

Trump tried to convince deported South Korean workers to stay and train Americans ( www.independent.co.uk )

Cho said at the meeting that South Koreans were “hurt and shocked” by the arrest of fellow citizens “who came to the U.S. to transfer technology and knowhow to contribute to the Trump administration’s efforts to revive the U.S. manufacturing industry”.

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The raid drew criticism as footage showed the workers shackled at their wrists, ankles and waist.

It has now emerged that Trump asked his officials to “encourage” the detained South Korean workers to extend their stay in the country and train American employees, foreign ministry officials in Seoul said at a briefing.

WTF.

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I wonder how many people are found nowadays by searching vs being delivered by the algorithm.

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In a post where she signs the open letter, ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber summarises the changing world well:

“This is actually a really important time for that message to come across, because our communities do both face major threats which I believe we are ideologically aligned in wanting to face:

We are facing a large number of laws which appear well-intentioned and aimed to try to take on tech gatekeepers, but unintentionally build regulatory moats that allow only gatekeepers to participate, and which threaten user freedom at large.

The rise of techno-fascism and omnisurveillance affects all users. Neither ATProto nor ActivityPub, at present, are built in such a way that they can provide the levels of protections necessary to respond to the needs of activists and community members against nation-state level threats.

These are our existential threats, not each other. And we need to figure out how to work together.”

I'm reading this as "be nice to the Bluesky guys, because we have a bigger problem to deal with."

That's fine, I'm not inclined to be mentally ill at strangers on the internet.

But I'm also not going to call it decentralized when it's meaningfully not, and I'm going to keep an eye on where their money comes from.

We have a common enemy in government control.

But if you're going to be my friend, I need you to not lie to my face.

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Petition for Silksong to be considered an honorary patient gamer game, given I waited seven years to play it.

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Came looking for this comment and was not disappointed.

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Leeds told Ars that the RSL standard doesn't just benefit publishers, though. It also solves a problem for AI companies, which have complained in litigation over AI scraping that there is no effective way to license content across the web.

"If they're using it, they pay for it, and if they're not using it, they don't pay for it.

...

But AI companies know that they need a constant stream of fresh content to keep their tools relevant and to continually innovate, Leeds suggested. In that way, the RSL standard "supports what supports them," Leeds said, "and it creates the appropriate incentive system" to create sustainable royalty streams for creators and ensure that human creativity doesn't wane as AI evolves.

This article tries to slip in the idea that creators will benefit from this arrangement. Just like with Spotify and Getty Images, it's the publisher that's getting paid.

Then they decide how much they'll let trickle down to creators.

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Sincere question: Why was there a separate mobile domain in the first place?

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How willing are you and how willing do you believe millennials and gen-z are to relocate their life some number of hours away to participate in a funded solar punk initiative?

I wouldn't be able to give you an honest answer to this unless I knew what we were building and what the compensation model looked like.

So far it sounds very vague.

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Me, too. The middle "panel" really threw me off.

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Who asked for this?

DHS Claims Videotaping ICE Raids Is ‘Violence’ ( prospect.org )

DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) that “videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online is doxing our agents,” and added: “We will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.” ...

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"Full extent of the law what we can convince a judge to let us get away with"

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I don't understand the purpose of the letter.

Bluesky is, in practice, not decentralized.

It has the potential to decentralize, but if the community stops calling bullshit when Bluesky claims to already be decentralized, it would lose the one incentive it has to actually follow through.

AI adoption rate is declining among large companies — US Census Bureau claims fewer businesses are using AI tools ( www.tomshardware.com )

A new survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and reported on by Apolloseems to show that large companies may be tapping the brakes on AI. Large companies (defined as having more than 250 employees) have reduced their AI usage, according to the data (click to expand the Tweet below). The slowdown started in June, when it was ...

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13.5%, slipping to about 12%

I know that 1.5% could mean hundreds of businesses, but this still seems like such a nothing burger.

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Isn't that the case with a lot of modern tech?

I vaguely recall Spotify and Uber being criticized relying on the "get big first and figure out how to monetize later" model.

(Not defending them, just wondering what's different about AI.)

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What are you talking about? ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. all have "subscription fees generating recurring revenue" and are famously "exploiting a gap in regulations to undercut an existing market."

Uber took 15 years to become profitable, and Spotify took 18 years.

Again, I'm not defending any of them (they all exploit the people who make their service work), but so far AI seems to be going down the same road.

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"I pay for access to music I get access to music." And with ChatGPT, you pay for access to an LLM, and you get access to an LLM.

Just because you personally don't value that as a service doesn't inherently invalidate it as a business model, now or in the future.

Netflix lost subscribers in 2011 and 2022, that didn't kill the company. Uber stock tumbled during the pandemic and again in 2022. In 2023, Wired was writing about how "despite its popularity... [Spotify] has long struggled to turn consistent profits."

This is a whole wave of companies where the survivors seem financially stable now, but had a long history of being propped up by venture capital and having an unclear path to profitability.

The only thing you've successfully shown is different so far is that you don't think it's a real service.

I generally agree, but I still don't see anything that differentiates its trajectory from the Spotifys, Ubers, and Netflixes of the world.

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I just need Plex to survive until I can replace it with Jellyfin.

What is the current state of Matrix?

Some years ago, I hosted my own matrix server for a few months. I'm an experienced self-hoster, but I remeber that Matrix was paticularly hard to host, requiring weird proxy rules, DNS adjustments, federation never worked reliably and push notifications never worked at all. I ditched the project soon because I also had no real ...

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Damn. That sucks. (Edit: Referring to the comments saying Matrix is dead and dying.)

I get that IRC and XMPP are more stable and built around federation from the ground up, but... they're not Discord replacements.

That was IMHO, the point of Matrix/Element.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but a significant part of a network's resilience is the number of nodes and users.

Without a glowup or some kind of repackaging, IRC/XMPP are doomed to stay niche.

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I wouldn't mind going back to IRC roots if it could be made more user friendly and integrate voice and video chat.

Good UX/UI goes a long way to make it so non-technical people can join and strengthen the network.

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Technically, nothing.

In practice, who do you know that's using it and doesn't run Arch, by the way?

My point isn't that IRC/XMPP aren't technically capable.

It's that they're not designed for non-technical users.

I want corporate social media to die. Mastodon and Piefed are far from killing the beast, but they've made the more progress than most projects have seen in a long time.

I want corporate messaging to die. Matrix is far from killing the beast, but for a little while, at least it was trying.

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I smell survivorship bias.

I have a 20% hit rate on this (literally 1 out of 5). It was okay; we caught up, chatted for a couple of weeks and then realized there wasn't much left to go on.

If I could do it all over again, I wouldn't.

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I remember seeing these in malls, and I didn't think they were a game back then, either.

I mean, maybe this one actually is a game somehow, but... what a thing to take your inspiration from.

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Israeli leadership is treating Gaza like a war crime buffet at this point.

"I mean, if genocide's on the menu, why not sprinkle in a little murder-children-by-starvation and robot warfare? It's my cheat day year and a half, after all."

Age Verification Is A Windfall for Big Tech—And A Death Sentence For Smaller Platforms ( www.eff.org )

This consolidation of power is a dream come true for the Big Tech platforms, but it’s a nightmare for users. While the megacorporations get more traffic and a whole lot more user data (read: profit), users are left with far fewer community options and a bland, corporate surveillance machine instead of a vibrant public sphere. ...

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users are left with far fewer community options

Where is the fediverse in this analysis?

Edit: The article references Bluesky fleeing Mississippi due to risk of fines. Do admins running fediverse instances run similar risks?

Bluesky was the first platform to make the announcement. In a public blogpost, Bluesky condemned H.B. 1126’s broad scope, barriers to innovation, and privacy implications, explaining that the law forces platforms to “make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines.” As Bluesky noted, “This dynamic entrenches existing big tech platforms while stifling the innovation and competition that benefits users.” Instead, Bluesky made the decision to cut off Mississippians entirely until the courts consider whether to overturn the law.

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Seems untenable.

If I live in Europe and run a mastodon instance open to anyone, it's not like I or my server fall under a Mississippi law.

What are they going to do, sue my Serbian ass?
Serve a restraining order to my Norwegian server?

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It's exactly what you think.

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People ask those questions here because it's not obvious where else they should ask those questions.

In my opinion, Lemmy doesn't have enough traffic to be hostile to lost Redditors Lemmings.

We can always redirect people to appropriate communities (assuming they exist and are active), and once we hit a certain critical mass the problem will go away on its own.

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X-Men is ripe for nightmare fuel if you think about it long enough. Kitty Pryde is constantly one mistake away from becoming a gel banana.

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/c3a52f8a-7516-478c-b7bb-edec10eac7fd.jpeg