In stereotypical winter you can’t add enough layers since if you do add layers so your face doesn’t hurt you get accosted by the police because going to public places in a balaclava hasn’t been legal since the late 50s.

In winter as it actually happens you need fewer layers but they need to be waterproof because winter means rain at +2 °C.

Yeah, and in the 70s they estimated they’d need about twice that to make significant progress in a reasonable timeframe. Fusion research is underfunded – especially when you look at how the USA dump money into places like the NIF, which research inertial confinement fusion.

Inertial confinement fusion is great for developing better thermonuclear weapons but an unlikely candidate for practical power generation. So from that one billion bucks a year, a significant amount is pissed away on weapons research instead of power generation candidates like tokamaks and stellarators.

I’m glad that China is funding fusion research, especially since they’re in a consortium with many Western nations. When they make progress, so do we (and vice versa).

At least the fusion guys are making actual progress and can point to being wildly underfunded – and they predicted this pace of development with respect to funding back in the late 70s.

Meanwhile, the AI guys have all the funding in the world, keep telling about how everything will change in the next few months, actually trigger layoffs with that rhetoric, and deliver very little.

Don’t worry; we’ll find an artist so bland that we’ll get zero points even if we’re the only participant. The audience will fall asleep and wake up a week later with no recollection of the event. The victory will be awarded to Sweden on principle.

Well, arte had only been intended for France and Germany until now. Even other founding members of the EU weren’t in scope so how should they have matched EU enlargement when the initial scope only included two countries?

In the end, nobody so far had seriously asked for a pan-European cultural TV channel until now. It seems odd to complain that arte wasn’t designed as one when no one saw a need to do so.

While we’re calling out improper arguments I could accuse you of using a motte and bailey argument there as you’ve gone from “there’s no indication that will happen” to “there is no indication to make it more or less likely that they will”. But I think this is more a case of communication being inherently imperfect, in both directions.

I didn’t say that they will inevitably enshittify, just that this has been the case with all mass-user services I am aware of, especially ones with VC funding behind them. Investors generally don’t throw big money at a company unless they expect some kind of ROI in the future. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that BS has a similar potential for enshittification as other social media services and to want it to be robust against that.

It makes sense to focus on an unhappy path here as the whole point of federated social media is to prevent or counteract that; the happy path is that they offer a great platform forever and federation barely matters. The AT protocol can provide a safeguard against certain types of platform misbehavior but not if one single service controls so much of the market that in the event of a split any other service immediately becomes irrelevant.

By the way, I chose the scenario I chose because I do consider it a likely path towards enshittification. If they need to monetize their user base because the investors want their money back, alternative AT services can break that monetization – e.g. if they were to aggressively push ads, other services could offer an ad-free experience and siphon off users, especially with AT’s account portability feature. That’s nice for the users but not so nice for the company. So how can they make the investors happy? By keeping people from fleeing, such as by breaking federation – or just account portability.

Of course, instead of a hard break, they could just pull a Kerberos and simply add important features to their implementation of AT that other services don’t get. Either way, the point is that any overwhelmingly large actor can undermine a supposedly open system. They don’t have to, but hey can.

That’s a failure state of the system itself; it can’t properly bring its strengths to bear. And that’s precisely the issue here. AT is in theory more robust than AP but in practice features like account portability rely on everybody playing by the rules. If BS control 99% of the AT market, they can choose to ignore the rules without significant repercussions.

While being overly picky about federation can harm a platform, so can putting all eggs in one basket.

I’m not sure I can follow your argument here.

One the one hand you argue that because they haven’t enshittified yet, they will never do so in the future. That doesn’t square with how any platform ever has worked out, especially when VC money is involved. Sure, BS is run by a benefit corporation but even they have to turn a profit at some point. Besides, the best of intentions can be quickly diluted or even forgotten when a leadership change happens.

You also argue that if BS defederates from everyone, the rest of the ecosystem can just go on without them. The problem there is that in that case, the rest of the ecosystem has little reason to do so. Bluesky minus 99% of its users and content has very little going for it; the network effect is huge in social media. The third-party AT services would go from being part of Twitter’s greatest rival to being Mastodon but with fewer users. Also, BS would have little to lose in that scenario; virtually all users and content would still be there. In comparison, if BS only had a 60% market share, defederating would lose them enough content and activity to be a very unappealing prospect.

Also, the argument you’re going against is not that BS is inherently bad, it’s that the AT market is currently centralized to a sufficient degree that the benefits of federalization can’t fully come to play. The argument is not “fewer people should use Bluesky”, it’s “more people on Bluesky should be using third-party AT providers”. There’s a subtle difference here: The argument people are actually making isn’t aiming to diminish the AT ecosystem, it’s aiming to make it more resistant to unilateral enshittification.

If someone can spin up a replacement, even at great cost, it means that if and when the service gets bad in the main instance people can create a different big replacement. Whatever made the original viable remains in place, so the incentives should be the same.

That assumes that the biggest player keeps playing by the established rules even after deteriorating otherwise. But if the biggest player controls virtually the entire market, they can change the rules at will.

For instance, let’s say BlueSky suddenly switches to a new protocol, which happens to be proprietary (or they extend AT in a proprietary manner that breaks compatibility). Can you still offer a competing AT service? Sure. But the 90+ % of users who are on BlueSky aren’t going to drop everything to switch to your service, which has virtually no users or content, just because you use the protocol BlueSky used to use. Most users are there for the content, not because of the technical implementation.

That’s the point of the whole federalized service thing: To keep one single party from being able to dictate terms to everyone. But just like in any market, that relies upon no one having an overwhelming market share. Right now, BlueSky has an overwhelming market share. They currently aren’t abusing it but they have the power to do so.

I fully agree. LLMs create situations that our laws aren’t prepared for and we can’t reasonably get them into a compliant state on account of how the technology works. We can’t guarantee that an LLM won’t lose coherence to the point of ignoring its rules as the context grows longer. The technology inherently can’t make that kind of guarantee.

We can try to add patches like a rules-based system that scans chats and flags them for manual review if certain terms show up but whether those patches suffice will have to be seen.

Of course most of the tech industry will instead clamor for an exception because “AI” (read: LLMs and image generation) is far too important to let petty rules hold back progress. Why, if we try to enforce those rules, China will inevitably develop Star Trek-level technology within five years and life as we know it will be doomed. Doomed I say! Or something.

They are being commonly used in functions where a human performing the same task would be a mandated reporter. This is a scenario the current regulations weren’t designed for and a future iteration will have to address it. Lawsuits like this one are the first step towards that.

That’s literally how many German private houses are built: Autoclaved aerated concrete with a brick cladding. Looks nice and provides a lot of thermal insulation.

Water hardness matters a lot, too. When I visit my family and shower with their super soft water, I could use industrial degreaser and my hair would be just fine.

But when I’m at home where the water is super hard? I better use a shampoo without sodium laureth sulfate and condition regularly or my hair will become an uncombable abomination within a few days.

Of course it’s more normie. As more people from more diverse communities join, the average becomes more, well, average.

For instance, not everyone who moved over from Reddit is a communist trans furry cybersecurity expert in a chastity belt – some people even somehow manage to be none of those things.

I think there is room for them and there’s even room for them thinking the original crowd is weird. We need to maintain that “weird” is good, though, and that people can just look away if a topic makes then uncomfortable.

It works with .ml and friends – they can spend all day living their understanding of communism and everyone who doesn’t share that understanding can just block them and move on with their lives.

In this case it’s just the adjective odd, not some acronym.

What happens instead is that the established parties decide they can win the voters back if they adopt far-right policies. We get extra-shitty governance and they still lose voters. It’s a lose-lose situation but they’re committed.

Four colors. Deserts are colorless; you’d need forest racists as well.

The big X on the remote computer makes it look like the application doesn’t work. Which, to be fair, is a good representation of a typical Citrix session.

We don’t eat the fruits of carrots and onions, though.

In addition to what Wolf told you, here’s a few little extra tidbits:

Some games have native Linux versions. If they don’t, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don’t need to worry about it much.

Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you’d get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.

Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don’t have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn’t enabled yet.

You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game’s compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.

Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it’s still Arch.

Pros: It’s easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It’s still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you’re not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it’s easy to change.

I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They’re harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.

Pros: You’re less involved with the OS’s technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.

In the end I’d say that Garuda is great if you’re interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There’s a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you’Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.