Mastodon is pretty different to its competitors. It looks similar to Twitter / Bluesky, but the way the social network functions is completely different.

It’s designed to be anti-infuencer… One of the things I hate about most social media platforms is a few people get all the attention. There are a few reasons for this, but it’s not really based on merit.

I think a lot of people joined Mastodon wanting a Twitter clone. It’s obviously not and Bluesky is, so people moved there. The approach Mastodon takes is far from perfect, and may not work out in the long run. But it seems like it’s worth at least trying something different.

OP is obviously very eco-concious… Instead of using an LLM to generate crap (and burn half the Amazon while doing it) they just recycled

The thing is even if AI could do all that (which is doubtful in my life time), you would still need someone to prompt it with something interesting. And CEO types have never had an interesting idea in their lives

People say humans firing lightning bolts out of their hands is a long way off, but look at the progress we’ve made on lasers in the last few decades. I reckon we’re 5 years away, and we should be enacting laws to stop someone doing a Palpatine.

I agree the execution of the end of GoT was bad (i.e. the problems weren’t just the issue of everything needing to come to a head). There were a lot of different complaints about how GoT ended, but I definitely saw a lot about how it was all just battles in the last season and no nuance. I think that was always going to be hard to avoid given how GRRM had set up the main plot. And I think he will find it hard to avoid when writing the last 2 books, which could be part of the reason he doesn’t want to do it.

Trump may flirt with anti-vaxx sentiment or climate denial, etc., but he can’t fully support those ideas. They’re very niche and he’d lose the centre if he did.

RFK Jr doesn’t hold back on those issues. For conspiracy types he is closer to their beliefs than Trump.

I always felt that one of the main problems with GoT/ASOIAF was that it was a nuanced, political fantasy with top class world-building, but the overarching plot was pushing everyone towards a massive final confrontation (or 2 really). There was not really a good way to resolve the confrontation without a massive battle (or 2). So the ending was always going to have to move away from what made the series interesting/successful (book and TV), i.e. plot, characters, intrigue, shades of grey.

There were other problems as well, but that was something baked into the whole series by GRRM, and I’m not sure he can really find a way to do it differently. He might come up with a different outcome of the final confrontations, but it still has to be done with epic battles.

He already bought NZ citizenship… Because we had a dumbass government at the time

Only a small minority of the world uses Fahrenheit… Why wouldn’t we automatically assume temperatures are in Celsius?

You already have to have a degree of control to complete a catch (which is nothing to do with how much the ball deviates off the bat).

Umpires already have to make a lot of judgement calls in cricket. This would be no different.

Sadly, the lock-in is pretty extreme… as is user inertia. Office 365 has made the problem worse as well, even if you have something like OnlyOffice that does a good job of compatibility with Office, it can’t sync with OneDrive.

If you collaborate with non-technical people, they will expect you to work in Office formats, and won’t even entertain discussion of any alternative.

Yeah, this is one of the many things that annoys me about AI discourse.

“We can use it to solve climate change!”

We already technically know how to solve climate change, but politics makes doing that impossible.

And, no, AI can’t “fix” politics. We’re going to have to figure that out by ourselves.

Why would you have zero expectations that he’ll win? Were you not around in 2016?

Absolutely, and a big part of being a good scientist is acknowledging that subjectivity (and well as the degree of uncertainty in all our knowledge). In social science, subjectivity is baked in… there’s no way to avoid it, no matter how hard you try.

That’s not to say subjectivity means science can’t do anything useful in these areas. Most of the problems with subjectivity come from pretending something is objective when it’s not.

Extremely subjective creatures, many of which believe they’re always right (including many “scientists”).

But yeah, you’re right, the reality is somewhere between the two extremes of the meme. Although we might also want to have a conversation about what “pure objectivity and truth” means.

There’s some evidence to suggest he’ll lose significant support: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48654-would-donald-trump-conviction-move-his-voters-evidence-from-past-present-bill-clinton-polls

But hard to know for sure.

And most of those headlines are spread by the tech companies… So we don’t have much reason to trust them

We’re not in a movie. Climate change isn’t going be solved by one brilliant scientist. It’s not even a scientific/technology problem at this point, it’s a political one.

You shouldn’t be run out at the non-strikers end if the batter hits it and it deflects off the bowler or other fielder. The bowler/fielder should have to have a degree of control for it to count as a run out, which could just be changing the trajectory of the ball slightly. But putting your hand out and grazing a finger is not enough

We’ve been used to having access to websites instantly, but you can’t scale forever. Servers have a real impact on the environment. We’re already using a significant proportion of the world’s electricity on running servers.