I don't know where this notion that Bluesky is an echo chamber comes from.

Example: Go into a pro-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is a con. It's blatant planet-destroying theft from actual creative people to create a stochastic parrot that bullshits what you want to hear. You're watching a ventriloquist doll and believing that it's actually alive."

Then go into an anti-AI thread from a popular user right as it's posted and write "AI is clearly Fair Use under the Google Books standard. And while one can debate what the word "thinks" means, AI isn't "statistics", but rather, applies complex chains of fuzzy logic to solve problems. The creative works it creates are truly its own."

In both cases, watch the fireworks explode.

Do the same thing on, say, whether to support Ukraine, on a NAFO account vs. a tankie account. Or whether China is good or bad. Or Israel vs. Palestine. On and on and on. In the vast majority of topics, all common sides are pretty well represented. It's just a handful of specific topics that I think certain right wingers are talking about when they complain about Bluesky underrepresenting one side (racism, sexism, etc).

They need to put the word "decline" in sarcasm quotation marks.

Huh? Takei is quite popular on Bluesky.

Also, this whole article is nonsense. Basically - like all sites - every time there is an event that triggers lots of signups, you get a mix of people who don't stick around, and people who do. So you get a curve that - without further events - steadily tapers down to something like 1/2 to 1/3rd of its peak. Except that you keep getting further events. When you plot out the long-term trends of Bluesky's userbase, they've been very much upwards, but it's come in the form of many individual spikes, each of which is followed by a decline to 1/2 to 1/3rd of the spike's peak (if allowed to run for long enough since the last spike). The most recent spike is IMHO notable for how little decline there's been since then.

I see basically zero migration from long-time users back to Twitter.

Mostly the ACK, but thanks for the food for thought. But I keep thinking they should get a better financial model that could support some actual improvements...

Thanks for clarifying. His description did not ring that bell--but I rarely see it. Perhaps my timezone is out of sync?

Well played sir. Could only be funnier if it were signed by an AI.

Is that a joke based on reading the article? You should know that never happens around here... Or maybe not, looking at the UID.

However the story has big potential for funny, so I'll check for details at 11.

Anecdotal evidence: In my dotage I often take a morning nap and it doesn't seem to affect me whether or not I drink coffee with breakfast. But I may have some kind of REM sleep disorder...

is to keep quiet about it.

Basically the ACK with at least some concurrence, but I wonder (again) how long this discussion might have gone on if Slashdot allowed for persistent topics. Some topics are fundamentally too deep to discuss meaningfully in a the standard time unit of Slashdot. (Basically one day until it falls off the front page.)

Well I definitely disagree with the part about touch typing coming on its own. It's not a natural skill in any way that I can see. Then it gets into the strangeness about which keyboard I'm using in relation to the language settings (since I use two). My fingers "know" to switch layouts as soon as a special character comes up wrong?

However the bigger questions involve typing versus alternatives. For one of my languages I actually do most of my input via voice, which then has to be corrected. However I'm doing that deliberately to improve my pronunciation, so it certainly isn't part of the design plan. For correction there is an option to use a QWERTY keyboard, but I normally don't...

Yet within an IDE a lot of stuff is "typed" for you, and even formatted, so rapid selection from options becomes more important than touch typing? The AskSlashdot topic is "How important...?" and I still can't decide about the future. I think it used to be very important, but with AI support improving, maybe not so much next year?

I wish it was easier to see the chronology of comments on Slashdot... But right now this one appears at the end of a discussion that touched a lot of interesting points. I wasn't really going for that, but perhaps it was because I should have used "bizarro" in the Subject rather than "reverso"?

Really hard to summarize my position, but... If we insist that human beings have special value and deserve some form of special dignity, then we reach conclusions like preventing children from starving to death. Most folks would agree with that, but there's a slippery slope up to things like "heath care as a human right" or UBI where there is lots of disagreement. Or even minimum wage laws. Not sure how sliding up works, but...

The natural solution is different. In natural systems surplus produces growth until there is no surplus. All the animals are supposed to be on the edge of starvation all of the time. Okay, that is an exaggeration, but mostly because of the seasons. Usually it works our that breeding takes place during the season of surplus and most of the dying takes place during the off seasons.

When you do the numbers things get strange, leading me to strange conclusions. For example, the random shuffle of genes means that half the shuffles are worse than average and Ma Nature wants to square that circle with more than four kids but only two survivors (on average) for the next generation--and yet I haven't met any people who like the idea of seeing most of their children die before reproducing. Less of a problem if Ma Nature kills most of the parents before the question of which two survive is answered? But my strange conclusion for economics is that UBI is likely but I'd rather focus on limiting economic competition in ways that reduces the need for minimum wage laws...

Mod parent funny?

However i think the biggest joke may be that the sharks might be going after each other. Not the only reason, but one of the requirements for becoming so stinking rich is that they ALWAYS want MORE money, even though they already have more money than makes any human sense. Up to now, they have mostly been content to squeeze blood out of the impoverished cabbages like you and me, but if they are sincerely attacking each other, then maybe they've realized there isn't any more cash = blood available down here, so now they just have to attack each other for MORE. (And of course I'm also thinking of a couple of other blood feuds in the news...)

But I get to include the ancient joke as obligatory:

Question: Why won't sharks attack lawyers?

Answer: Professional courtesy.

Now if I was an actual comedian I would either update the joke in some relevant way or combine it with the thing about "No honor among thieves".

And a relevant citation? How about Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie? Mostly relevant because I'm sure someone paid him for the hit job on science. I can't figure out how to pan the book hard enough... Perhaps "A lot of good mixed with a tiny bit of not so good is the enemy of the perfect" or something about projection from his own field of psychology. Or the hype? One example is his hyping of the list of bad-science authors when I think he should have included a list of bad-science fields...

Only funny on the topic? The low-hanging joke I was looking for was some sort of reverse spin on short-term focus on "profits" as defined by idiots with MBAs...

But I get why you were modded funny. Not how it works these days. If your profits aren't sufficiently obscene, then simply making a few honest bucks will lead to your corporate demise. Funniest when a vulture capitalist (with an MBA) borrows money against your own assets to acquire your company to cannibalize the most profitable bits. Actually it's a two-step process of shuffling assets to put all the valuable bits into marketable stuff while concentrating the negative stuff into bits that can then be declared bankrupt.

ACK but only partial concurrence. I think we can build secure software. If it is small enough. And if only there were ANY liability for the consequences of flagrant incompetence.

Every new feature should be considered against its security implementations. Rather than implementing any new feature that might bring in a few bucks leading to an unending stream of patches for security problems mostly in software that provides features I am not using. Actually NO one is using ALL of the features floating around, so I imagine a situation where people would install ONLY the software for the features they personally want and there would be no huge monolithic targets. Like the handful of "dominant" OSes we have today. Which are constantly being patched for reasons that have little or nothing to do with any of my work or play...

Basically the ACK though I think perverse incentives are at the root of the feeping creaturitis that will probably destroy us...