Another, a little more snide name I came up with while writing that: “free drinks tomorrow” tech, after a popular sign seen on the walls of bars around the world.

I’d describe it as parasitic disruption. The scam analogies are on point and fine for rhetorical purposes, but they imply a degree of intentionality which is not necessary for some tech to be parasitic.

Say you invent a new type of electical power line that’s more durable and power efficient than the existing type. The materials are also ten times more expensive than for the same length of normal power line and the only factory making this type of power line can only make enough to fill the needs of a few small customers with special needs. Meanwhile local government in Eriador is planning the electrification of the Shire community when the well-meaning councilor Brandybuck mentions this new type of power line he read about in a magazine. Perhaps the council should wait and see how that develops before committing to building power lines that might be obsolete the moment they’re put up.

Neither you nor the councilor are deliberately using your invention as a tool to stall electrification of the Shire, but the same effect happens anyway.

You point about property B is a pretty good one. My hunch is that tech follies like these are related to economic bubbles and share similarities with them. I’ll postulate that most parasitic disruptions go hand in hand with economic bubbles, but not necessarily all of them.

Good observation. I’d like to add that it’s not very straightforward to monetize a social networking site. The usual method would be ads, but the profit margins on those are thin, competition is rough and the audience does not like them. Otherwise you could probably derive monetary value from the soft power that comes with controlling a large communications platform of any kind, but it’s a lot harder to put a firm price tag on something like that and not everyone has the finesse and strategy to tap into that power.

Both of those monetization strategies work a hell of a lot better with a highly centralized and walled platform. Desperately trying to get people to pay more attention to the protocol that’s supposed to let them build competing sites with a low friction of migrating between them is the exact opposite of what you would do if you wanted your business model to be running a social networking site.

I would need someone with a big business brain to explain to me why a company focused on building the tools for competition against it and giving them away for free would ever seem like a sound investment. If I could give people VC money to publish telecommunications protocol specifications, I’d probably just sponsor IETF instead.

It’s unfortunate that Linux is not immune to this. I noticed this happening to Firefox on a Linux machine and there was the debacle with Amazon search in Ubuntu’s menu about a decade ago. It seems a lot less endemic, though.

Same for me on Linux.

I agree that Bluesky’s attempts to not look monolithic have a certain flavor of opendetergent to them. However, I think their situation is a little more complex and quite a bit funnier. When the Bluesky people claim that their main thing is the protocol and the app was meant to be just a proof of concept, I’m inclined to believe them.

Bluesky is extremely popular among leftists and queer people and the company hates that. The right wingers seem content to stay on X the everything app and have little reason to switch even if Bluesky were to smoke the woke out and decimate its core userbase. The app needs to be popular for the protocol to stay even a little bit relevant.

Meanwhile Mastodon exists. It’s much more decentralized and a lot of people hate that. Bluesky users like having a single website with a single moderation authority, even if that moderation authority resents the demographics of that website.

If another twitter clone on AT Protocol somehow manages to gain enough of a critical mass to make Bluesky meaningfully not a monolith, that might well spell quick doom for the entire site. If AT makes migrating your account as easy as the developers are making it sound, I expect a big chunk of the users to jump ship as soon as an instance run by someone less transphobic gains enough traction.

Is there a general term for the type of experimental or vaporware tech whose main function is creating FUD and FOMO which slows down the adoption and development of more mature conventional solutions? In the case of public transit these are collectively known as gadgetbahns. Examples from other fields include SMRs, direct air carbon capture, various embrace-extend-extinguish schemes in the software world, extraterrestrial colonies and a host of consumer IoT gadgets.

bro thinks he’s him

I’m not really concerned about it. The overlap between people who give a shit about AT and people who don’t already use some kind of ActivityPub platform is microscopic. I’m happy to let Bluesky shoot itself in the foot by adopting the number one main thing people complain about Mastodon, namely the existence of multiple instances and having to choose from among them.

AIUI the AT protocol is in fact a bona fide open protocol with a Free (MIT/Apache-2.0) reference implementation available. If this is openwashing, I welcome this new style of openwashing where you actually publish open source software instead of just implying your proprietary software is not really proprietary.

I only saw it today and the article was updated four days ago, so something probably did change quite recently. Also, this is not a news site and you can post things that are not new if they seem of interest.

It’s so fucking weird because as a regular EU citizen an ID card is a normal and good thing to exist and have, yet somehow the anglo world has managed to make it controversial and bad by insisting on a horrible surveillance police state version of the concept.

Is this true for everything else, too? I will be a true AGI if I solve quantum gravity. A half eaten salami will be true AGI if it solves quantum gravity. My grandmother will be a true bicycle if she has wheels.

If we knew that we wouldn’t need a GPT-8 to solve quantum gravity, would we now?

And even if Joseph Weizenbaum did actually say, verbatim: “if the problem hasn’t been solved in twenty years, it is time to give up”, that’s not the same as asking for the precise time when “machines will reach human-level intelligence”.

Imagining a guy who asks me a dumb question so I can let everyone know how I’d mock them with a joke answer.

That sentence is somewhere between exactly 420.69 and 1,337.00 millialtmans of cringe.

I’m a centrist. I think we should aim for the halfway point between basic human decency and hateful cruelty. I’m also willing to move towards the hateful cruelty to appease the right, because I’m a moderate.

Still frustrated over the fact that search engines just don’t work anymore. I sometimes come up with puns involving a malapropism of some phrase and I try and see if anyone’s done anything with that joke, but the engines insist on “correcting” my search into the statistically more likely version of the phrase, even if I put it in quotes.

Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.