I choose to see every post on my (small country) instance, so if there is an echo chamber, it's an instance-shaped one. Which I like - I see the range of views prevalent in my small country. "Elite" posters depend on posting good content and are rewarded only by other people boosting their posts.

I tend to use Mastodon which makes finding a post's popularity a click away, and so emphasises posting for interest instead of outrage. This may also be an artifact of living in a small country that expects more civilised discourse from it's citizens.

Having no algorithm definitely makes the Fediverse more "boring" - I had to persevere after moving from Twitter. But I soon realised this was due to the lack of outrage, and that that was what I wanted, and what I was seeing was far more "real". Big fan now, and it's made my social media consumption a lot healthier.

Think about Tesla's pivot to "AI robots". My guess is that they'll get to something that can very slowly pick up a dropped sock and put it in the washing basket. But that it will fall over occasionally on the stairs, wrecking your kid's photos and the vase standing at the bottom, and dinging the wall. It might do a passable job of picking up the shards of pottery, but gluing the picture frames together, plastering the wall and repainting it... well maybe in in Elon's chemical dreams.

But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!

Good job Zed!

The fatal flaw of the open internet is that bad players can exploit with impunity. It happened with email, it happened with websites, it happened with search, and now it's happening with code. Greedy people spoil good things.

But I also really care about the quality of our code, and so far my experiments with AI have been disappointing. The empirical results described in this article ring true to me.

AI definitely has some utility, just as the last "game changer" - blockchain - does. But both technologies have been massively oversold, and there will be many, many tears before bedtime.

OT: Solar is awesome! 18 panels are generating 2/3 of our load, despite it being late winter. And a 16kWh battery means the grid power we import is all off-peak. In summer we're going to be exporting enough that we may even cover our winter grid import. Plus it gives us the best UPS system we've ever had, including zero-second cut-over (c.f. Tesla's half-second glitch).

VR, blockchain and LLMs have their value, but it's a tiny fraction of the insane amounts of money being pumped into these bubbles. There will be tears before bedtime.

Anonymized identity requires some entity to certify that a given token proves what it says it does. That is an awesome power, and given the abuse of that power by private companies who have gained it in the past, I'm not going to give it to ChangeFly, whoever they are.

Which begs the question of who we DO trust enough to do provide this service. Perhaps our banks?

1. Autokey. I use this to expand abbreviations for long words and phrases I use often. This relies on being able to insert itself between the keyboard and all userland apps, and this is apparently impossible under Wayland.

2. SimpleScreenRecorder. This relies on being able to access the window contents for all userland apps, and again this is apprently impossible.

Would I be right in thinking that both trip over because Wayland enforces application privacy, so preventing applications accessing other applications resources? And if so, why isn't there a "user root" level for apps that do need to interact with other apps?

Kagi is like Google in it's prime - fast, relevant and giving a range of results.

VAT/GST handling is not that complicated*, and our system spits out the numbers to fill in UK, AU, NZ and CA tax returns, which can all be done online.

*Except Canada... HERE BE DRAGONS! Each of the 13 provinces/territories has different rates and rules, despite the optimistically named "harmonised sales tax" (HST).

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

The change removing "Does Firefox sell your personal data? Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise." makes it pretty clear that the intention in the changes is NOT just covering their bums for using your input to provide the webpage you wanted. They are positioning to sell your personal data.

That promise to never have, never will sell your personal data was highly valued by many Firefox users and Mozilla must be pretty desperate to break it.Particularly given online privacy is suddenly crucial for many out-groups in the US - and pretty much everyone outside the US. The biggest marketing opportunity for years just landed in Mozilla's lap, and they spilled it.

But not a single administrator skimming off their department's budgets, which I would imagine is 90% of government fraud.

Also no-one is shooting the messenger. Mainly they are complaining that completely unauthorised people are rooting through all government data with no oversight. No matter what your politics, the president should have got these people vetted and followed the carefully designed processes to keep this data safe. If you're not seriously concerned that one day your tax info is going to turn up in an unsecured AWS bucket, then I can offer you a unique video of out-takes of Neil Armstrong falling off the LEM ladder for just $5,000.

It might be good point-of-difference for some hosting service: have brutal KYC so your netblock is well regarded.

A thing of beauty, compared to their normal home page with 90+ files of 12MB.