This is not a particularly relevant comment, but you reminded me of when I was a kid and a friend had a TV on a stand opposite her bunk-bed. She didn’t have a remote control, but she did have a long stick, and she was amazing at pressing the buttons from like 2m away. Proper life skill.

Which is incidentally the opposite of proprietary products, where if you give it another go in a few years it either doesn’t exist or is enshittified.

1. The same is true for Bsky but people don’t complain about it there. It asks you what server you want when you sign up, etc., which is what people complain about in the Mastodon journey.

2. Most people aren’t on locked servers. By which, I mean the majority of mastodon users are on the .social instance which is the default when you sign up on the official app/site and is open to anyone.

3. Not an accessibility issue.

I’d be amazed if this works, since these sorts of tricks have been around since dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and most bots will use pretty modern zip libraries which will just return “nope” or throw an exception, which will be treated exactly the same way any corrupt file is - for example a site saying it’s serving a zip file but the contents are a generic 404 html file, which is not uncommon.

Also, be careful because you could destroy your own device? What the hell? No. Unless you’re using dd backwards and as root, you can’t do anything bad, and even then it’s the drive contents you overwrite, not the device you “destroy”.

most firmware releases will be to fix something with the online service anyway. If it displays stuff coming down a wire from your PC when you buy it, it probably never needs an update.

If we ban people from “earning” over a certain amount, they’ll get round it through “gifts” or exchange in-kind or something, right? Same with ads. If we ban them, then product placement with plausible deniability will be rife, paid through essentially money-laundering methods, worse than it is now.

it’s not talking about tracking emotions from looking at the viewer, it’s tracking the emotions in the script of the thing they’re watching, so it knows what they like.

It’s just the addition of “AI”. We’ve been doing the same thing for a long time. I used to work for an advertising data company over a decade ago, and they filtered all the ads for one of the big channels’ streaming services in exactly the same way just with regular algorithms rather than AI. It’s what would make ads for men’s razors appear in the middle of a soap opera at 11PM because it knew the user was a man getting home from the pub.

For a long time now, the entry point to mastodon (joinmastodon.org) has had the default option as being “join mastodon.social”, with an option to choose a different server delegated to a secondary button. This compares to bsky, which shows you a dropdown of servers to choose from, defaulting to “bluesky social”.

It’s a tiny difference in UI; both have a default and offer an alternative. Why do people say it’s difficult on mastodon, while bluesky users are apparently not confused by the same option? Even if the option on bsky is basically a joke so far.

• No “starter kits” which are just positive-feedback loops for popular accounts
• No “algorithm” which promotes popularity or engagement over quality or relevance