Patch

A plastic nob is cheaper than a touchscreen, yes. But if you've already got a touchscreen as part of the design anyway (for things like satnav or car maintenance data), it's cheaper to not include any other buttons or inputs and to bundle them all up into one interface.

All of the uses so far are bad, and I can't see any that would work as well as a trained human.

I'm no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it's not magic, it's just technology. You'll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.

Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There's no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that's not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).

This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I'm concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.

Would you go so far as to say that you're "eager for beavers"?

BSD is more UNIX than Linux is, to be fair.

In this day and age, if it's actually important they'll probably immediately send you a text message/WhatsApp/etc. anyway.

A regular reminder that ChromeOS is Linux. It's Linux you can buy from a bricks and mortar store, preconfigured for the average low-knowledge user, and with minimal to no maintenance overhead.

We enthusiasts obviously mostly hate it, but we're not its target audience. Its target audience (non-techies who mostly just like to use their phones) get on great with it.

People need to accept that any Linux distro made for mass market is going to look more or less like ChromeOS. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as traditional distros also continue to exist. But people need to get out of their heads that the "year of Linux on the desktop" looks like Ubuntu or Fedora or Mint. What it looks like is ChromeOS.

You can use Mastodon to interact with Lemmy content and vice versa, but generally speaking the user experience isn't good. Lots of manually typing URLs and trying to figure out what you're looking at when you get there.

In theory you could host a Lemmy and Mastodon server under the same domain (using subdomains, e.g. lemmy.feddit.uk and mastodon.feddit.uk), but they'd be different servers in most ways that matter. I presume they would maintain separate user account databases (without some concerted hacking).

Considering the fediverse microblogging scene includes Threads, which claims to have hundreds of millions of active users, I'd say its death is greatly exaggerated.

Yes, I know a lot of Mastodon servers refuse to federate with Threads, and yes I know their active user figures are likely very different from what they claim. But at the end of the day, it's an ActivityPub microblogging platform with a considerable userbase and a very rich corporate backer.

If something has hundreds of "centralised" platforms owned and run by a diversity of different people and spread all over the world geographically, then that's "decentralised".

I can't really think of another way in which something could be decentralised.

With ActivityPub, there's nothing stopping you hosting a server literally just for yourself. It wouldn't get much more decentralised than that.

We don't have a Mastodon server, do we?

I joined Mastodon years ago, but the server I joined was always a bit moribund and I sort of lost interest. Wouldn't be against someone doing a Fedwitter.uk...

(It should not be called Fedwitter.uk under any circumstances)

"Never" is a strong word. API translation is a technical hurdle, but rarely an insurmountable one. If Blue Sky wanted to add an ActivityPub interface to their platform, they probably could.

This issue isn't technical per se; it's a matter of priorities. Blue Sky doesn't want to federate with Mastodon/Threads, because they want users to switch to their platform.

Threads (for better or worse) demonstrates that that's not a fundamental obstacle for fediverse microblogging.

If someone wanted to launch a Mastodon fork with algorithm-driven content discovery, they could do. Just as with Lemmy/kbin/mbin, the beauty of the fediverse is that different servers can take quite different approaches to use experience design whilst still maintaining compatibility with the rest of the community.