rook
In further bluesky news, the team have a bit of an elon moment and forget how public they made everything.
https://bsky.app/profile/miriambo.bsky.social/post/3ldq2c7lu6c25 (only readable if you are logged in to bluesky)
I will find someone who I consider better than me in relevant ways,
Lemme guess, rich, white, asshole? (now I write this, I realise it could be about the author of the blog post too, and not just the bull he’s seeking).
These people continue to be so utterly delusional about the nature of success. The desperate need to believe that genetics is destiny, and that the ultra-wealthy got that way because they are also ultra-competent instead of merely being ultra-lucky and/or ultra-rapacious.
I guess the future is a race to see what comes first… the ultra-wealthy habsburging themselves into oblivion, the oceans boiling, or a resurgence in the construction of hand-built artisanal tumbrels.
I’ve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images “greebles” after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.
It’s funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now they’re everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.
Cohost going readonly at the end of this month, and shutting down at the end of the year: https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down
Their radical idea of building a social network that did not require a either VC funding or large amounts of volunteer labour has come to a disappointing, if not entirely surprising end. Going in without a great idea on how to monetise the thing was probably not the best strategy as it turns out.
Bluesky’s approach to using domain names to mean identity is now showing cracks that everyone can see: https://tedium.co/2024/12/17/bluesky-impersonation-risks/
(it was always shaky, but mostly only shown by infosec folks who signed up as amazon s3, etc)
TL;DR: scammer buys .com domain for journalist’s name, registers it on bluesky, demands money to hand it over or face reputational damage, uses other fake accounts with plausible names and backgrounds to encourage the mark to pay up. Fun stuff. The best bit is when the sockpuppets got one of the real people they were pretending to be banned from bluesky.
Nvidia doing their part to help consumers associate AI with unwanted useless bloatware that’s foisted upon them.
And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?
Meanwhile, for investors it can make it harder to identify genuinely innovative companies.
The problem here isn’t AI, it’s that the investor class is fundamentally stupid. They got lucky, either by birth or by winning the startup lottery, and they’ve convinced themselves that this means they’re vastly more perceptive, intelligent and capable than everyone else.
I’m working for a startup right now, and investment rounds feel a lot like a bunch of idiots standing around waiting to see who’ll jump first, and when one goes the rest follow, because they haven’t a fucking clue what they’re doing but desperately need to believe their peers do.