Mine seems to be sorted by most recent for items with sufficient positive scores (seems like >10). If I scroll back far enough, then the feed continues with lower scored items (1-10) also reverse chronologically. Eventually that reaches as far back as my account age, then it starts over yet again with a different set of low positive score items (1-6), again going back a long time reverse chronologically. The net negative items never show up at all unless they are very recent, maybe less than one week old.

Are you saying that’s not the intentional design when looking at your own profile feed?

I don’t have enough volume in my history on other instances to make a reasonable comparison.

Are you just clicking on be middle icon at the bottom of your voyager UI (the one that is labeled with your home instance name)? That feed seems to be a mix of your comments and posts with an undisclosed filtering algorithm applied to it. If you click Comments at the top of that feed then it should show you all of your comments. My experience has been that comments with low or negative points tend to get filtered out of the main profile feed after a few days, and my guess is that the decision was motivated by trying to keep you from dwelling on any times when you get strongly downvoted.

I don’t think market saturation was RainMachine’s specific problem, but you’re right in general. Our capitalist dystopia demands infinite growth, and planned obsolescence is part of that.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, whatever the consumer product in question. I have a few tools that belonged to my grandfather and they still work just fine, partially because there’s no plastic to crack and the bearings all accept either oil or grease.

You’re probably also right that selling user data to advertisers is now a reliable source of recurring revenue, which all the MBA C-suite people want at any cost, even the alienation of their customers. This timeline sucks.

What’s an MRC?

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I chose a RainMachine irrigation controller over other options, because they specifically marketed their cloud-independent firmware design. It was vindicated a couple years ago when they started going defunct and grasped for recurring revenue by billing for proxied remote access, but even then they emphasized that everything else would continue to function without their servers.

The onus is on the consumer to reward cloud-independent designs like this. While it has been sad to see RainMachine’s collapse, my device indeed just keeps working. Hopefully it isn’t ultimately killed by firmware or app security vulnerabilities since it’s now thoroughly unmaintained.

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Awesome, thanks!

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Software engineering is so often dominated by a move fast and break things mentality, driven by a rush to deploy and scale and profit, with the ability to fix problems with later updates. It’s a very immature process compared to every other engineering domain, because fix-it-later is much more difficult, expensive, and dangerous when it’s a bridge, building, airplane, or anything else tangible (although Boeing did a great job of destroying engineering process and accountability after the MBAs took control away from the engineers).

The work detailed in this Signal blog post is clearly slow and methodical, with continual checks for correctness and curiosity for optimal solutions driving careful experimentation. Building on existing proven PQ standards and keeping their refinements open for public academic feedback is wonderfully responsible. Building formal correctness proofs into CI and blocking trunk merges is spectacular.

They’re doing everything right, even years after Moxie Marlinspike’s departure. Bravo! Working this way is very expensive and requires absolute support from upper management. I’m definitely a fanboy for Meredith Whittaker and the direction she’s running the organization. Hell yeah!

Of course I don’t have any concrete proof.

serious discussion about security merits.

Those two don’t go together, bud.

It just comes down to if you trust the devs and those doing the hosting.

Ok so let’s talk about “ex-Meta” Brian Acton walking away from nearly a billion dollars due to his moral stance on private communication. Or Meredith Whittaker’s determination to pioneer a tech business model other than surveillance capitalism.

You’re absolutely right that it comes down to trusting the devs, which is why WhatsApp is a nonstarter even though it uses Signal’s E2EE. Europe’s chat control proposal doesn’t need to break E2EE, it just needs to demand that the messaging client app scans all content locally before encrypting and has a way to tattle. Meta could also be scanning everything you type into WhatsApp and feeding it into a local AI advertising interests summarizer or whatever else, and still claim E2EE. The open source client is far more important than an open source server when there’s proper E2EE.

That’s a feature. It’s showing you the title of the post in world, and the packaged up source of the cross post with its title in Canada. The two titles are not required to be the same, so showing them both is appropriate.

Hoover dam’s water release schedule is driven by requests from water rightsholders further downstream. Power generation is great, but the dam’s primary design purpose has always been facilitating agricultural irrigation.

That said, I bet you’re right that the water flow rate could be varied throughout each day to help balance electric grid needs. I assume that will likely come into play as we get further along the path to intermittent green power generation.

nuclear power is the only thing that can threaten fossil fuel primacy

Solar and wind are cheap and easy to build now, and a huge threat to fossil fuel primacy, which in turn makes them a threat to the dominance of the petrodollar as the world’s reserve currency. That’s why the Trump administration has gone all-out to quash their momentum.

Spent nuclear fuel reprocessing is theoretically possible but not politically or economically viable at present. Neither is 100,000+ year storage that has been the concept of a plan of record in the US for decades. I’m not saying that nuclear is inherently unworkable, but your net viewpoint doesn’t seem to be based in reality.

The disaster response in Chernobyl was absolutely heroic but also incredibly lucky. If the melted core had reached the water underneath the concrete pad, the steam explosion would have spread the core atmospherically with devastating results. You’re making light of the disaster that was, and ignoring how close it came to being so much larger. Furthermore, the enormous irresponsibility of the Russian military’s damage to the sarcophagus cannot be overstated. If maintaining isolation for a few decades is difficult, there’s just no chance over 100,000+ years.

But I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith, so I’m done here. I hope you can find your way to more nuanced views in the future.

Pumped hydroelectric storage obviously works with the same kind of turbines as dams located on rivers, but the land use is far from “literally identical”. For one, I agree with you that damming rivers is generally a bad thing. Large dam sites are chosen to min-max construction effort and reservoir capacity, and usually double as flood control. A grid storage project only needs to hold enough water for its daily power use, and it doesn’t need to be located directly on a water course. That’s not to say that there are unlimited suitable sites, but it’s more flexible.

Pumped hydro storage is quite green in its lack of carbon emissions and ability to time-shift green generation capacity to match grid demand timing. Land use is a consideration, but large anything requires land. You haven’t actually attacked the weakest part of pumped hydro, which is that there just aren’t very many geographically suitable locations for it.

You’ve also neglected to acknowledge the pesky spent nuclear fuel storage problem, which is unsolved and distinctly not eco-friendly. There are potentially better paths available such as the thorium fuel cycle, but they all either have no economic traction or are actively opposed by various governments (which don’t have any good solutions for existing spent fuel).

Unclear if you’re misinformed or disingenuous.

Hoover Dam does generate power, but it’s not an energy storage project to time-shift intermittent clean energy generation to match grid consumption. That’s known as pumped hydroelectric energy storage, and it requires having paired reservoirs in close geographic proximity with a substantial elevation difference. It’s not an ideal technology for several reasons, but it’s the largest type of grid-scale storage currently deployed. Fundamentally it’s gravitational potential energy storage using water as the transport medium.

A higher-efficiency but not yet fully proven technology also uses gravity and elevation differences, but relies on train rails and massive cars. Here’s one company leading the charge, as it were.

Nuclear isn’t a good option to balance out the variability of wind and solar because it’s slow to ramp up and down. Nuclear is much better suited to baseline generation.

There are plenty of other wacky energy storage ideas out there, such as pumping compressed air into depleted natural gas mines, and letting it drive turbines on its way back out. That might also be riddled with problems, but it’s disingenuous to claim that chemical energy storage is the only (non-) option and therefore increasing wind and solar necessarily also increase fossil fuel scaling.

Neither the article nor the RSL website makes clear how pricing or payment works, which seems like a huge miss. It’s not obvious if a publisher can price-differentiate among content, or even choose their own prices at all.

RSL makes an analogy:

Collective licensing organizations like ASCAP and BMI have long helped musicians get paid fairly by working together and pooling rights into a single, indispensable offering.

I’d like to get excited about this because AI companies suck, but if the best example they have is that ASCAP helps “musicians get paid fairly” I’m afraid this isn’t a solution that most content creators will celebrate.

That’s why it’s spelled Froot.

The new offering includes custom national security tools, AI-powered science and health applications, and cleared engineering support for classified environments.

What happens in the SCIF stays in the…oh fuck it, never mind - send it to the cloud for processing. What could go wrong?

Very interesting paper, and grade A irony to begin the title with “delving” while finding that “delve” is one of the top excess words/markers of LLM writing.

Moreover, the authors highlight a few excerpts that “illustrate the LLM-style flowery language” including

By meticulously delving into the intricate web connecting […] and […], this comprehensive chapter takes a deep dive into their involvement as significant risk factors for […].

…and then they clearly intentionally conclude the discussion section thus

We hope that future work will meticulously delve into tracking LLM usage more accurately and assess which policy changes are crucial to tackle the intricate challenges posed by the rise of LLMs in scientific publishing.

Great work.

Signal is very actively and directly working to pioneer a new financial model for long term software business stability that does not rely on surveillance capitalism. Your experience with young companies enshittifying into monsters is the natural cycle for the surveillance economy, and if Signal does eventually go that way it will be a profound disappointment, but I expect the foundation would rather die first. Check out this interview from last year with the president of the Signal Foundation for more depth on that.

Almost everything in that list of new features sounds negative to me. A few are neutral, and one might be positive depending on how it’s implemented (having the phone monitor a phone call while sitting on hold). Pretty disappointing, Tim Apple.