I thought about this before, and mostly agree. My mom knows nothing about computers and could probably use Ubuntu if I stick it on a machine and gave it to her. The thing preventing me from doing it is that when things go wrong in Linux, it often requires extensive terminal usage to fix. And my mother can often find new and creative ways to break a computer. If something went wrong with it, I would have to fix it. There is literally no one else she knows who would even know where to start. At least if she’s on windows, she can find someone to help her.

Taking a picture instantly after would probably create a different hash value. The thing about hashing is that even if one bit is different between source images, the resulting hashes would look entirely different.

I suppose I could conceive of a proprietary hash algorithm that would allow for fuzzy matching of iris photos, but as you said, eyes taken years apart in different conditions wouldn’t match the original hash. Or falsely match similar looking eyes. It’s not like this system allows them to get high resolution perfectly lit iris photos, after all.

The whole thing sounds dubious, and I suspect AI is mentioned solely to secure investor funding, much like how several years back everything mentioned Blockchain.

Several years ago for April Fools Day, Reddit launched /r/place, which created a canvas where users could place individual pixels every few minutes. Communities would get together to carve out their own little corner of the canvas for a piece of art, and overall the whole thing was pretty well received.

Last year for April Fools Day, they did it again. Overall, once again pretty well received.

Now, since Reddit has pissed everyone off, they’re doing it again again, likely in a desperate move to try and generate some positive community interactions. /r/place has always been pretty popular when they’ve done it before, so this is probably a ‘push in case of emergency’ attempt to placate users. Predictably, everyone’s still mad so they’ve littered the whole canvas with ‘fuck spez’ posts.

Another thought is that they’re not trying to kill Mastodon, they’re trying to kill Twitter.

Mastodon has a bit of a community already, so by implementing ActivityPub, Meta can make its platform seem bigger than it is by pulling in Mastodon content. Gives it another edge over Twitter.

Best case scenario is Threads sees ActivityPub as just the cost of doing business. That way, even people who won’t use your platform are still interacting with it. Downside, people on your platform can leave for a federated alternative and not miss out on any content. Not sure if that downside makes up for the potential gains.

I think the default approach needs to be defederate first unless Meta shows actual interest in developing the fediverse with good intentions. If Threads become the majority provider of content to the fediverse and then we defederate, we lose all that content. It could lead to Mastodon, Lemmy, and Kbin withering and dying as everyone goes where the content is.

If you get your public education in the deep south, you’ll get a lot of lost-cause revisionist history. Everything from “the civil war really had nothing to do with slavery” to “slaves were actually treated very well”.

Works on contingency? No, money down!

You could do it per email address, at least on platforms where your account is tied to one. Doesn’t stop it, but if you’re only allowed to mod 5 communities, you’d need a lot of sock puppet emails to mod 1000+.

You Russians sure are a contentious people.