• 60 Posts
  • 1K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 18th, 2023

help-circle









  • The company Bluesky Social PBC created the microblogging service Bluesky and the ATProtocol. It’s like the company Mastodon created the microblogging service Mastodon. There are other services built on ATproto that are EG like Reddit/Lemmy. But these have not taken off significantly.

    The ecosystem is mature enough so that you can participate in Bluesky without using services offered by Bluesky Social PBC and without making sacrifices. For the most part, you can move without abandoning your account.

    It is true that the servers are mostly run by the Bluesky company, but so what? Email is mostly run by Google and no one seems to think that’s a problem.


  • The option to self-host your identity piggybacks on the DNS-system. A certain domain name resolves to the server where you store your ATProto identity. As long as you control the domain name, you control your identity. The ATProto identity is simply a pointer to where you currently store your data that your followers/contacts can use to find your content (IIRC).

    The non-selfhosted alternative is a central identity service run by Bluesky. Unfortunately, the identity cannot be moved for obvious reasons. It would be good if there were some more options there. In principle, if the ATProto identity was tied to the government identity, that would make it moveable and non-hijackable. For some people, celebrities and such, that would be a good option.

    Regardless of whether you selfhost your identity, you can selfhost a Personal Data Server (PDS), which stores your data and makes it available to the network. The PDS can move, cause that’s what the identity is for.

    Feeds and other stuff is again independent.


  • The basic building block of the Fediverse is the instance, right? Every instance is its own self-contained, centralized social media service that optionally interacts with other instances. EG Trump’s Truth Social is a Mastodon instance that does not federate.

    ATProto takes a more radical approach. Everything is modular. There is no instance or anything that is complete in itself. It’s more like the WWW. You can make websites in different ways. These are made findable through search engines like Google or Bing, which are not affiliated with companies offering web hosting.

    ATProto takes everything apart. It tries to avoid choke points or lock-in as far as possible to thwart monopolies. You have a server that stores your data (posts, etc …), called a PDS. You can move your data to a different server. An identity provider tells others where your account is at any moment. A relay collects all the posts that people make and makes them available for further processing. This can be used to create algorithmic feeds, or moderation (aka labelling). These things are independent of each other and can be independently offered by different parties. You can pick and chose which to use, though there isn’t a whole lot of choice yet.

    ETA: No idea what W wants to offer in that regard.



  • I wasn’t clear enough. Turing was wondering if machines can think. But there is no sufficiently clear definition of the word “thinking” that could be used to answer the question.

    If you want to know if LLMs are AI, you can just look up the definition of AI and check if LLMs meet the criteria. You cannot do that to answer if they are thinking.

    So let’s take a task, which we agree takes thinking, and see if a machine can do it as well as a human. If it can, then the machine must be able to think. That’s how you think as a scientist.

    The test itself is similar to modern, placebo-controlled medical trials. That was not SOTA at the time, showing how clear thinking he was. Perhaps the WP entry on RCTs helps to understand how logic and reason may be applied in the face of uncertainty.

    But of course the test revolves around the definition of a word. Such definitions are fundamentally arbitrary. That means that the test itself is arbitrary. Science is rarely concerned with colloquial definitions. Usually you come up with some sort of operational definition that you use for the purpose of inquiry. The only question is, if that definition is useful.


  • When Turing proposed the test, he was talking philosophically about whether machines can think. He observed that we are not likely to agree on what “thinking” means. So we cannot simply test if a machine does that.

    He proposed that we might instead agree that some task requires thinking. If a machine can perform that task, then the machine can think. Turing told of a three-person party game called the “imitation game”, in which an interrogator asks questions of a man and a woman in another room in order to determine the correct sex of the two players.

    It’s very rational, very scientific. In the words of William James: "A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all."

    In light of his sexuality, It’s interesting that he chose that game. Looking at the transgender issue today, I think it’s a given that he wouldn’t have chosen that example now. Or believed that people are rational enough to be swayed by facts and logic.




  • I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.

    How would that actually work? Like, you’d have pro-Trump and anti-Trump companies that only employ pro- and anti-Trump employees and only serve pro- and anti-Trump customers? What happens when someone who is basically pro-Trump thinks that ICE goes too far?


  • General_Effort@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky just verified ICE
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    9 days ago

    To me, this feels like school politics.

    OMG! Jaden invited ICE to his birthday party! I’m never talking to him again!

    Oh No! ICE nabbed Julio! I’m telling the teacher and they will get suspended!

    Probably a good number of these people are actual children. I know there are adults who have broadly similar ideas. For someone living a very sheltered and privileged life, being trolled on the internet is the absolute worst form of aggression they ever experience. Particularly in Europe, activists and politicians talk about “digital violence”, which tells you that they have no sense of proportion.


  • General_Effort@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky just verified ICE
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    32
    ·
    10 days ago

    Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social

    The Mastodon devs made a choice in releasing it as open source. They could have decided to pick and chose who is allowed to use it. It was completely foreseeable, that the software would be used for something like Gab or Truth.Social. When they release update, they know that these will also be used by such services.

    This is merely a statement of fact, not criticism. They chose not to exercise power or become arbiters of good and evil. That is laudable.

    Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don’t ban Nazis.

    I get it. You feel that tech companies should deny service to bad people. For example, to a government agency acting on behalf of a president elected by a solid majority of the popular vote.

    I agree that the voters got it wrong, but I don’t think that the rich and powerful vetoing voters will lead to good outcomes. Look at medieval Europe. Life got better with democracy, not with a supposedly more just king.

    The tech lord most in line with your ideas is Elon Musk, except that he’s kinda nazi. So, on a purely practical note, it doesn’t seem very likely that tech companies being more political would lessen racism.

    Do you think it would be better if all the billionaires, who are probably mostly non-nazi, were activist like him?


  • General_Effort@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky just verified ICE
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    68
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    10 days ago

    So, trying to parse what’s going on here.

    Bluesky has verified that an account claiming to belong to the US government agency ICE really is controlled by that agency. Somehow that shows that Mastodon is better. Because Trump has his own Mastodon instance and doesn’t need anyone to vouch for his goons?

    Looking at the comments, maybe the issue is rather that the Bluesky company provides services to ICE. Tech companies should refuse service. Huh. I guess there is more diversity of opinion on Lemmy than I had thought, regarding the power of tech companies, democracy, and law.