Yes, that’s the catch. Maybe we can encourage ridicule directed only at “society-level” behaviours and make it clear that individual quirks are off-limits.

How would you rate the odds of all those things happening in order for your scenario to come true?

You obliquely touched on a pet theory of mine. We s a society have for decades now rallied against public shaming and bullying and that kind of thing, but I wonder if we’ve gone too far with it —antisocial behaviours are left to run unchecked, whereas 100 years ago these people would have been mercilessly mocked to their face every day. Without the fear of that public mockery and ridicule, we get this.

I like Jason but he completely missed the boat on this one.

The active migration away from social media networks that are owned, controlled by, and distorted by the richest men and most powerful companies in the world to a decentralized platform that is not owned and controlled by billionaires is one of the more hopeful things to happen in what has largely been a bleak year for the human internet as AI slop infects everything and billionaires put their thumbs on the scale of what we see on social media.

He says this and yet jumps to Bluesky, a platform created by Jack Dorsey and now owned and managed by a crypto bro? You don’t need powers of prophecy to see where Bluesky is headed.

That’s great in theory. How are you going to force foreign actors to do it?

“Russia, stop spamming Facebook with all that manipulative fake garbage”

“Oh OK you only had to ask. Sorry about that”

This all highlights how many loopholes and deficiencies there are in a system that prides itself so much on checks and balances.

I don’t think it’s practical or even really possible to remove all fake content. The safer and far more effective solution IMO is to digitally sign authentic content instead, and assume that anything unsigned is fake.

I often wonder what the world would look like if Sufism were the dominant doctrine.

I had to look up the vaguely Kurdistan-looking flag in the background — for anyone else wondering, it’s this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Êzîdxan_Protection_Force

And the other flag is of course the pre-revolution flag of Iran (which always reminds me of St. Mark’s Lion on the flag of the Venetian Republic)

I agree, but the problem is that the media (encouraged by tech companies) use the sci-fi definition, and the layman doesn’t know any better.

Right, I forgot he singlehandedly destroyed the USSR, which was a glorious utopia until his leadership and would totally still be around today otherwise. Thanks for the correction.

LLMs are AI in the same way that the lane assist on my car is AI. Tech companies, however, very carefully and deliberately play up LLMs as being AGI or close to it. See for example toe convenient fear-mongering over the “risks” of AI, as though ChatGPT will become Skynet.

He’s just trolling us at this point.

Absolutely, I don’t trust them at all. There’s a reason I’m on Mastodon and not either of the corporate platforms. It is nice to at least be able to follow people there though, and interact with them.

AFAIK that’s still the case, yes. I don’t have a Bluesky (or Threads) account so I can’t confirm.

Bsky federates. I follow several people from my Mastodon profile.

Edit: I should add a caveat here. Federation doesn’t work as smoothly as Threads yet. You have to use a bridge service: https://fed.brid.gy/

Exactly, it’s such a bizarre statement. It’s like saying ghettoes and the holocaust were the same thing.

I was thinking (and presumably xmunk too) of scenarios where the military overthrows the government.

There are lots of examples of purges not resulting in coups, including the most famous purger of recent times, Stalin.

I don’t think that’s really a coup — if anything it’s the same as what Trump wants to do, but unlike Mr. Pizza Hut he isn’t on the right side of history.

Yeah, I’m trying to think of a recent (<100y) example that didn’t result in a junta or other coups, and I’m drawing a blank.