Their reputation and their front page are both in the trash. It’s not a fun website to be on anymore.

I’m not a fan of any appeals to gatekeep energy use to “just essentials” instead permitting growth

There’s a huge gulf between essential and wasteful.

Even as a PoC, you’ll want a strong foundation to build on. Even as a temporary solution, you want to know the fix won’t fail the next time its under pressure. Even under time constraints, you want a solution that you are confident works when it goes live.

hostility never changed anyone’s mind

Chronic abuse absolutely shapes human perception and behavior.

In this case, a lot of Lemmy has been so battered down by “China Bad” propaganda that they’ll straight up deny the threat of climate change to justify rejecting Chinese manufactured goods.

The argument is always “solar/wind still use chemicals” and never “this is the net reliance on extractive industry by energy source”.

That said, general energy conservation is still important. You can’t cut emissions if all your new power just gets funnelled into Grok style AI.

They were at the inflection point back in 2008. They’ve been full tilt towards the improvement side of the curve for nearly two decades.

Europeans demolished their manufacturing sector when they stripped all the wiring out of the walls during the austerity years.

You can’t blame people for buying foreign when you’ve been defunding domestic infrastructure for over a decade.

You don’t need AI to generate hack art. Corporate Memphis aesthetic has been around for ages precisely because its cheap, hacky clip-art you can apply to ad copy in order to give it a hint of life without spending much money.

These AI models make the new art comparatively dirt cheap (if you ignore all the negative external costs) without relying on the even more cheap and bland techniques of the past. It’s absolutely “better” relative to what’s come before.

Once Twitter has been (hopefully) de-platformed we can talk about Mastedon and the Fediverse and the idea of a non-corpo platform.

BlueSky is as prone to enshittification as Twitter. If you’re waiting for BlueSky to take off, you’re just setting yourself up for the next rug pull.

I mean, go to BS and enjoy it while it lasts. But don’t think this is the future.

For the price of the bundle? Sure.

This but unironically. I’ve got a coworker who took vacation days to help build a temple up in Pennsylvania. He was incredibly proud of his contribution and happy to participate.

The idea that medieval peasants somehow had more free time than the average modern american still is absolute bullshit

Paleontologists will tell you otherwise. One reason you had all those giant cathedrals going up in the Medieval Era stemmed from the enormous excess labor just wasting around in between harvest seasons.

Agricultural surplus creates free time. It’s the whole reason why people opt for farming over hunter gathering.

There’s a staunch libertarian view on Lemmy, wherein people will advocate for personal liberty ahead of technological progress. The Country Mouse has it better than the City Mouse, because he can own a gun and drive a big truck and smoke weed without the neighbors ratting him out to the cops. The lack of basic amenities - subways and school systems and high speed internet and big medical centers - is worth the increased personal autonomy.

The “Serfs had it better” trope takes this to its logical conclusion. Rolling back the technological frontier 500 years is worth it, because the surveillance/police state and the corporate oligopoly even on the fringe of society is seriously that bad.

I don’t agree. But I can’t really argue against it. This is just a personal preference. Its not any kind of objective truth.

The dark cowboy rides again.

If you can buy a ten and one works, you’ve saved money. Two work and you’re making money. The only question is whether the tenth card really will work or not.

I’ve been hearing about the imminent crash for the last two years. New money keeps getting injected into the system. The bubble can’t deflate while both the public and private sector have an unlimited lung capacity to keep puffing into it. FFS, bitcoin is on a tear right now, just because Trump won the election.

This bullshit isn’t going away. Its only going to get forced down our throats harder and harder, until we swallow or choke on it.

It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance.

Why? Why wouldn’t they just consume the click bait content and shameless pandering propagated by the incoming owner, just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?

For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances

You don’t need 60% of instances. You need the plurality of site content. That’s what the users are coming for.

Things were better before they got worse, sure.

But the problem in these systems is the trade off between centralization (consolidated control and monolithic content) and federation (poor navigation/petty administrative feuds/less quality content). Switching from Twitter to BlueSky relieves you from the current admin’s fuckups, but you’re still stuck in a flawed system.

People don’t like the monolith when it’s over there and they don’t like it when it comes over here, either

The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over.

Dorsey is just as emotionally stunted and socially reactionary as Musk. He simply isn’t as wealthy.

BlueSky has thrived not because Dorsey crafted it into a purer vision, but because he’s neglected it and allowed the user base to have their way.