You didn’t need to tell me you own crypto, your post screams “crypto bro” at such screeching decibels that I think you just shattered a wine glass over there.
I do think that would be a superb opening monologue (set to a moody montage) for a skit taking the piss out of naive crypto bros though, well done!
The biggest impact of digital currencies so far has been the obscene, democracy destroying amounts of money crypto bros spent to help get trump and other corrupt lackeys into office.
https://www.citizen.org/article/big-crypto-big-spending-2024/-
This is what the rise of digital currencies is an indicator of, an accelerated process of societal decay.
Yeah but then we get Incel-In-Chief JD Vance as president which is honestly MUCH scarier.
Shaming people for having deep moral quandries about voting for a candidate who is actively and directly facilitating genocide is pathetic and pointless and makes you look like a parody of yourself.
omm… the Republicans have the supreme court and are in the process of lighting the constitution on fire as we speak?
I think you will find Palestinian citizens agree with you on that point.
This is a direct consequence of “the war on terror” attempting to redefine the military strategy of asymmetrical warfare as terrorism and inherently immoral.
To sell the bullshit “war on terror” the easiest way to make the US seem righteous was to degrade the public’s sense of why people violently resist and reduce it to the act of violently resisting an organized traditional military is immoral unless the thing resisting is also a traditional organized military.
I am glad that narrative is breaking down though as the distortion of how and why violent conflicts occur is dangerously blinding to a basic understanding of the world.
There is no way this person will be apprehended alive, they could walk up to a police station naked with their hands up get on their knees and beg for their life, every single police officer they could possibly encounter will universally pull out their handgun and immediately murder them in broad daylight and they will be cheered on by Good Morning America when they do for keeping everyone safe.
If you think the police will do otherwise you misunderstand the essential function of police, especially in the US, which is to protect capital and the owners of capital and sustain inequality through violence.
Exactly, what makes an act evil or not is a really complicated question unless the action in question is mass murder. In that case, there isn’t a debate, it is evil, there is no slippery slope. The CEO undeniably caused the deaths of countless people and maimed and permanently hurt many more. At least the person who killed the CEO actually carried out the act of taking someone’s life themselves and bore witness themselves to the horror of taking a human’s life. The healthcare CEO on the other hand was the most cowardly kind of murderer, someone who has killed far too many to name but simultaneously would be utterly shattered by exposure to actually witnessing first hand even a tiny fraction of all of the people they murdered suffering and dying right in front of them.
It is the ultimate form of violence to kill without a desire to know, to understand, to emphasize or even to remember because it zeroes in and underlines what makes violence horrific, the erasure of beautiful things that had a history, a past and a future… and that is all healthcare CEOs really do at this point, kill without a desire to know.
"Recognize that attention is task-specific. One reason it’s so difficult to definitively say whether or not attention spans are decreasing is that it depends on the task with which someone is engaged. We may be able to sit through an entire 2-hour, action-packed movie, but start to squirm within 10 minutes of a nature documentary. Infusing things with storytelling and interactivity are two evidence-backed ways of increasing the likelihood we’ll be able to sustain focus. "
The entire narrative about attention span hinges upon this fundamental distortion, you cannot separate your ability to pay attention to something into an abstract universal quantity, your capacity for attention is always intimately interwoven with the environment around you and the specific task at hand. Attention span is a pop culture concept, not a scientifically rigorous one making any science done about attention span unable to actually illuminate the unknown since the concept being studied simply comes undone with a tug on one of the founding assumptions. In popular culture attention span is defined axiomatically as decreasing because of technology, and discussion works backwards from there.
The references cited also don’t really support the conclusions the article comes to (“Challenging the the six-minute myth of online videos”), or they are links to pop-science articles talking about the topic, not actual evidence on the topic. An amusing example of this is the repeatedly, endlessly cited “McSpadden, K. (2015, May 14). You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish. Time. https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/”.
Goldfish are specifically studied because they can be trained to remember things and focus on them, they do not have “short attention spans” so the entire metaphor is broken from the start.
There actually isn’t any hard evidence even in the original paper that popularized the idea… it was a white paper from microsoft not a scientific publication by academics
See this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shanesnow/2023/01/16/science-shows-humans-have-massive-capacity-for-sustained-attention-and-storytelling-unlocks-it/
It is also pretty easy to poke holes in the narrative that our attention spans are decreasing, driving a car takes an insane amount of concentration, more than arguably almost any other human activity practiced by billions of people on earth. If our attention spans were decreasing, the very first place you would see it would be in a huge increase in traffic crashes and deaths. You also wouldn’t see a vibrant world of longform youtube videos on niche topics that are made by some of the most perennially popular and watched video content makers. People wouldn’t be listening and reading to books, listening to longform podcasts, or engaging in hobbies that take significant preparation.
Further, the industry of marketing, perhaps one of the entities with the most interest in how we actually pay attention to things vs. what the popular narratives are about our attention span isn’t convinced our attention spans are decreasing either.
More things are competing for our attention, so we are more selective and discard things quicker in a fashion that is totally rational. Daily life has also become exhausting for most, if you notice you are unable to focus like you used to it is probably because you are more tired, stressed and have less free time than you did in the past. If our “attention spans” were decreasing the way everybody seems to believe they are, the impacts would be catastrophic and look like entire populations undergoing early onset dementia, and as someone who has spent years around people with dementia… that is clearly not what is happening at all.
The hilarious thing is that if they did that the resulting LLM chatbot would shit on AI and large corporations constantly.
“You are right that people have shorter attention spans ofc”
Why do we all endlessly state this narrative as if it was a fact.
Like I get the feeling but there is very little good evidence for it.
Scientists don’t even largely consider attention span a useful concept to understand the human brain.
When taking a broad longterm view, clearly Peertube and/or other video hosting and sharing alternatives to Youtube are the most strategically important since as bad as centralization/enclosure of the commons is for various mediums of online communities, the process is wholely complete in a good chunk of the world for informational videos with Youtube utterly dominating.
It is easy to underestimate how powerful of a fulcrum Youtube is for leveraging manipulation and control.
I have no idea if Peertube needs development help (I assume they likely do) and I am not sure what specifically the kinds of things they need help with are, so I say this more as a general observation.
“But I have faith (for now) because they have people I know from when they worked on secure-ssb and dat protcols, which are truly decentralized but never took off for other reasons.”
The modern corporation is precisely defined as a structure of ownership perpendicular to ethics, one of the prime reasons for this is to progressively nullify this specific category of “there are good people in the room” defenses against extreme unsustainable extraction of profit at catastrophic consequences for everybody but shareholders.
It should surprise no one that bluesky is able to leverage the socioeconomic status and wealth of its investors and founders to easily outpace the fediverse… which is a patchwork community construction maintained and developed on several orders of magnitude less capital…
so what?
The fediverse isn’t of the same “type” as a for-profit corporate social network, it doesn’t need to grow virally and produce ever growing profits to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the people who maintain and provide foundation for the fediverse.
Murderers of our future
deleted by creator
Here is a good blogpost about it
https://taggart-tech.com/20241124-bluesky-questions-pt1/
Check out this mastodon thread and associated links
https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113504285308484716
TL;DR Bluesky is not functionally federated nor decentralized, it is dubious if it ever will be and the layer of post sorting and moderation required to participate in Bluesky’s network is extremely computationally intensive and this aspect of Bluesky is NOT open source and is a proprietary black box.
The fediverse and activity pub are the future, even if the current hype train leaving the station (…who is paying for all the free drinks on that train and why?) makes it feel otherwise in the short term.
Yeah but unlike activity pub, atproto/bluesky demands each self hosted relay process a massive amount of data to participate, it is incredibly impractical and costly to envision scaling up, bluesky’s self hosting is essentially made to be a curiousity rich developers with access to powerful hardware try out as a hobbiest project and write a blog post about, not a serious general use case for everyone.
The idea of course is make it so nerds can technically do it, but the bulk of users can’t and won’t.
The strategy is convince the nerds you are giving them access to the future and that average people aren’t ready for it, and than never actually provide that future since nerds stop advocating for it because a corporation handed them a tiny scrap and that was enough to write a good techy diy blog post about.
Bluesky is the past desperately trying to convince you it is the future, don’t fall for it.
The actual act of taking some moderate sum of crypto here is meaningless to me, you were able to attain a valuable thing and so you did. It is only an intimate knowledge of the context of that choice that can inform any kind of accurate judgement fraught with grey areas as it may be.
That isn 't what interests me about crypto, what I find interesting is that no matter what rock you check under in virtually the entire crypto sphere the attitude of the creatures involved always untangles into this same precise attitude. Maybe you fall under the category maybe you don’t, my point is about the mindset of this whole enterprise that permeates it at seemingly every level.