I’ve been saying for years the corporate world was getting ready to pull the rug from tech workers. Why do people think educational standards (and as it goes, engineering standards) for software development have been pushed down so much over the last decade? “What if you get hit by a bus??” A well strangely well backed movement to “stop gatekeeping” software development now revealed as a trojan horse to make developers fungible.

Well it might take 2TB of RAM for this buggy prod system to store and retrieve a JSON blob but at least anyone can work on it.

The best way for him to get left alone would be for him or someone responsible to take down his public image as much as possible. This would be a win/win in the sense that he gets more normalcy and we don’t have to endure someone with a massive platform spreading hardcore nazi stuff.

That said until he is taken out of the public spotlight, it is incumbent on everyone to make it clear that these views are rejected in the strongest possible terms.

There’s all sorts of other crazy options to consider like simply “stretching” this term out for a while. Any emergency will do.

Yeah there’s not really any plausible deniability there at all.

Two nazi salutes, one after the other

In every other aspect of society, choice is heralded as a good thing, a fundamental aspect of freedom even. We were supposed to believe that having a range of different brands of toothpaste is fundamentally a good thing, and people happily choose which ones they want. We vote, it’s freedom.

Fundamentally federation is freedom as compared to centralised networks that lock you in. You can choose where to go and you never get locked in because you can choose to move instances later on - in particular Mastodon lets you take your followers with you.

If people can’t spend 15 minutes making a decision on something they’re going to spend probably hundreds of hours a year on, what does that say?

People figured out email, and that’s essentially the same set of choices - you get an email provider, you don’t go to “centralemail.com” where you can only communicate with people on that same locked in-platform.

The whole thing about people “not wanting to pick an instance” is just a bad meme. It’s all about marketing and the fact Bluesky and its predecessors like Twitter and Facebook had the money to chuck around to attract people to the platform by e.g. paying off influencers to join.

It’s also the case that BS aspires to be a federated platform (see: ATProto) - apparently it wants exactly the same “problems” that Mastodon has!

But, you know, will inevitably do something shitty with respect to that because VC funding.

Trump’s gaggle of tech bros loves this opinion

Listen I just don’t have sympathy for it at this point. If people insist on maintaining iPad-only tech literacy then they can catch up with any average intelligence 4 year old.

Linux is so good today. Windows is increasingly shooting itself in the foot and MacOS requires a huge premium (and also billionaires suck) which is increasingly incompatible with budget conscious sectors like education. Really great stuff if you’re managing to get people to love it there.

Kind of like how I’d be pessimistic about sticking my fingers in the closing boot of a cybertruck yeah.

I think it’s more going to be more like twitter than they’re bargaining for.

I mean I get it. And network effects are a thing. But these VC backed/owned firms (like bluesky) are cancer. Fascism promoting, lying, grifting, you name it. Can we please just try a little harder to support the community efforts?

If you Google “sign up for mastodon” the first result you get is a sign-up page for mastodon.social which is the default instance. The sign up page is straight forward. I get we’re all coddled by iPads or whatever but this argument evades me.

The much, much bigger issue is people just flocking to where there’s the capital for marketing. The feature sets/philosophy could be precisely 1:1 swapped and people would still end up on the platform with all of the money to throw around.

What, the VC funded tech firm makes lots of noise about not being evil before eventually just becoming evil yet again pattern? Yeah I don’t like it either.

They’re all going to bluesky because for some reason as soon as social media gets involved, the wonderful human ability to pattern match just gets switched off.

South Korea should try out the people’s razor on this one, just to make sure execution is still bad.

I think there’s a bit of a political drive to try to label chronic conditions as “lifestyle” diseases tbh, hence the loose definitions.