yep

Thanks for pointing this out. Looking closer I see that that “journal” was definitely not something I want to be sending traffic to, for a whole bunch of reasons - besides anti-vax they’re also anti-trans, and they’re gold bugs… and they’re asking tough questions like “do viruses exist” 🤡

I edited the post to link to MIT instead, and added a note in the post body explaining why.

with BlueSky I’d have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes

I think this is a common misconception based on some critics’ incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) “A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month” for some numbers.

If I understand correctly, to run a “full nework relay” does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren’t interested in for any long period of time.

Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people’s relays.

Disclaimer: I’m not an atproto expert, and I haven’t set any of this up myself.

The blog post also says this:

There is one other thing which Bluesky gets right, and which the present-day fediverse does not. This is that Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down. In this way (well, also allegedly with identity, but I will critique that part because it has several problems), Bluesky achieves its “credible exit” (Bluesky’s own term, by the way) in that the main node or individual hosts could go down, posts can continue to be referenced. This is possible to also do on the fediverse, but is not done presently; today, a fediverse user has to worry a lot about a node going down. indeed I intentionally fought for and left open the possibility within ActivityPub of adding content-addressed posts, and several years ago I wrote a demo of how to combine content addressing with ActivityPub. But nonetheless, even though such a thing is spec-compatible with ActivityPub, content-addressing is not done today on ActivityPub, and is done on Bluesky.

My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more “decentralized architecturally” I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.

TIL The Expanse was a Star Trek show.

see also

ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀

It’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.

otoh, atproto’s PLC DID method is also not really decentralized… but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.

To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).

i looked into other services with did got an llm to put those ideas in the required format for the issue. Can you please point out the hallucinations in the issue so i can go and fix them

No. Asking other people to read (and now also to correct!) your LLM slop is extremely inconsiderate. Please don’t do that again.

here is the full res version of the image, via the author’s 2019 twitter thread… where there was also this important update two years later:

this other post “A Marine Biologist Ranks Shark Emojis” covers some of the same and also some other ones

Can someone tell me what vibe coding is?

a term coined 6 months ago for writing software using an LLM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding

paywall bypass: https://archive.is/mdi9x

some context.

(tldr: libxslt is a significant source of vulnerabilities and it should absolutely be removed from browsers ASAP.)

worse, this was actually true before covid-19

Botryllus schlosseri, also called a star tunicate, is humans’ closest evolutionary relative among invertebrates in the sea. […] The way the invertebrate’s brain degenerates and disappears has important parallels to the way the brain degenerates in human neural disorders.

also the maelstrom in question actually does exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskstraumen

"It is an interesting irony

it really isn’t 🙄

looking closer I see the earliest archive.org snapshot of this URL (from Feb 27, 2020, the day it was published) also says 1857 so it seems like the transposition to 1847 must have happened somewhere else - and yet the attribution to SciAm (external to the screenshot) was somehow preserved. @nymnympseudonym@lemmy.world can you shed any light on this mystery? where did you obtain this image (and know to attribute it to SciAm)?

apparently in 1857 “I have been informed by a European acquaintance” was sufficient sourcing for something to be published in Scientific American :)

somewhat relatedly, it’s 2025 now so you can actually link to a thing instead of just posting a screenshot of it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/that-giant-sucking-sound-doesnt-exist/

i wonder why this screenshot (and OP’s text which includes the fact that this comes from scientific american, which is not included in the screenshot) both say 1847 while the text on the SciAm website says it’s actually from 1857 🤔

a museum in Iceland

a museum? when it comes to phalluses i believe it is the museum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Phallological_Museum

Huh? That press release quotes the The Environment Agency’s Director of Water and National Drought Group chair saying “Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife” and includes “Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems” in its list of ways people should save water at home.

I admit I made this post without clicking through to the actual press release or seeing more than the paywall preview of the article; for a humorous post like this, i think just the headline from a paywalled article (if it’s from a reputable source) is sufficient. Now that you got me to read the actual press release, I see I was correct to assume that 404media’s amusing headline was in fact accurate.

How would you suggest they report this story differently? Highlighting the ridiculous part is what makes it worthy of reporting on it in their context at all.