vaguerant

I kind of wish this headline just kept going.

Proton’s Lumo AI chatbot: not end-to-end encrypted, not open source, bad taste in music, murdered family of five

I checked, whoever CONEY is isn’t saying these things, it’s a reaction video making fun of the satanic panic around Pokémon. That’s why in the profile pic he looks like one of those dudes who would make an outrageous reaction face in the thumbnail, because he usually does. No shade, except for the obvious shade.

• Satanism in Pokémon and MTG (original video)
• The Disturbing Agenda Behind Pokémon (CONEY reaction video)

EDIT: I’m watching the OG video (35 damn minutes); favorite pull quote so far:

The danger of Dungeons & Dragons or any kind of role-playing game like this is that it’s played with the mind and–when played with the mind–the mind begins to lose that fine line with what’s real and what’s fantasy. And the more you get into the fantasy world, the more it seems real and all of a sudden now, you don’t know what’s real or what’s not.

Seems like.

That’s a shame, I’ve only heard good things about putting your butt on Grindr.

Not trying to discourage anybody from switching to Linux, but Nook is also available for Windows and Mac if that’s not an option for you.

You seem like you might like osgameclones.com. It’s absolutely massive because it includes projects even if they’re unfinished or abandoned, but you can sort by playability, development status, even programming language if you’re looking to contribute.

Everyone else took all the good critiques of this article, so here’s mine.

We’re still bullish on the fediverse, and on Bluesky, if it manages to become a truly federated platform.

Bluesky appears to have reached their goal as far as federation. Users can self-host a personal data server (PDS) which federates with Bluesky. If you want an analogy from somebody extremely unqualified to offer it, it’s sort of like bringing a bucket of water to a swimming pool. You can’t go swimming in the bucket, but you can pour it into Bluesky’s pool and swim in there. If the pool closes down or implements segregation and if somebody else opens a swimming pool, you can take your bucket to their pool instead. However, if nobody else wants to open another swimming pool, your bucket is useless. In this analogy, buckets are only useful to very slightly fill somebody else’s swimming pool and for no other purpose. It’s a very good analogy.

Bryan Newbold, the protocol engineer at Bluesky, said the following about PDSes and federation:

Overall, I think federation isn’t the best term for Bluesky to emphasize going forward, though I also don’t think it was misleading or factually incorrect to use it to date. An early version of what became atproto actually was peer-to-peer, with data and signing keys on end devices (mobile phones). When that architecture was abandoned and PDS instances were introduced, “federation” was the clearest term to describe the new architecture.

i.e. In Bluesky’s terminology, federation is not a future goal they’re hoping to achieve, it’s what they’re already doing right now.

The (ActivityPub) fediverse is different, because … damn, I really screwed myself with this swimming pool thing … it’s like a bunch of boats in the ocean. There’s one-person dinghies and giant cruise ships, all with different owners. You can bring your own boat, or you can hitch a ride with a friend or a generous stranger. If you want to hang out in a different boat from the one you arrived in, that’s fine too. Ultimately, we all float on the same ocean which we all have to share. Crucially, nobody is in charge of the water. There’s rules on the boats, but the ocean is just the ocean. If your boat crashes into an iceberg and sinks, the ocean will still be there. You might lose some of your stuff, but there’s plenty of other boats to pick you up.

The failure state in both cases is better than nothing. With Bluesky, you lose the swimming pool, but keep the bucket. With ActivityPub, you lose the boat, but keep the ocean. If Bluesky dies, ideally you can take your federated identity with you to an alternative service that exists in the future, but you no longer have access to Bluesky, because it’s gone. When a Lemmy instance dies, you pretty much have to start over: register a new account, subscribe to all your communities again, etc. But the whole fediverse is still there: all the communities you were subscribed to, the people you followed, all your old comments, they’re still out there floating on the ocean.