I’m pretty sure I saw that headline, with X = Obama or Elizabeth Warren or someone. Then it got shot down because… Idunno, they probably would have blown it all on rent and food and car repairs instead of Job Creation.

It’s right there in Matthew 15:

22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.” 23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

People act as though Jesus was a paragon of virtue, but even according to the Bible, he could be a right bastard sometimes.

In fairness, it’s pretty smart, IMHO: one of the big difficulties in getting a social site started is getting a critical mass of people together to sustain conversation. Facebook already has plenty of Instagram users, so giving them all access to Threads seems like a pretty good way to bootstrap Threads.

The algorithm decides what you read and how you engage, even if it’s negative content or something bad for your mental health.

This may be the wrong place to post this, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. “Algorithm” isn’t a dirty word. And in fact, IMHO Mastodon could benefit from a few alternatives to its most-recent-first algorithm.

For instance, I might want to see posts by emergency services in my area first, followed by posts by friends, and posts by a bot that posts a cat picture every minute further down. Or someone might be going off on a rant, and I’d like to turn their firehose of posts down to a trickle for a few hours. Or maybe I’d like Mastodon to just stop showing me anything after a few hours of activity, to encourage me to take a break.

The reason Twitter’s, Facebook’s, algorithms are evil is that they encourage you to do things you wouldn’t want to do, and because they show you content you don’t want. Not because they’re algorithms.

In a perfect world, every user on every instance would be able to choose how posts are presented. But that may be too computationally expensive, especially for large instances, especially when you start trying to figure out things like the mood of a post. But maybe each instance could decide which algorithm it wants to use, and user can migrate from one instance to another, depending whether they like how things are presented.

undefined> On-prem infrastructure is way less fun than having a full cloud stack, how are you enjoying that, and are there any big snags you all have run into?

There are people who do enjoy playing with hardware, and I’m not going to say they’re wrong, especially since I’m glad they’re around. But that’s not what I want to do for a living.

I think the biggest challenge I’ve seen is: with on-prem hardware, you can brick a server or a router, and have to go down to the machine room to reimage it from the console. With cloud infrastructure, it’s possible to not just brick, but destroy your entire machine room.

Having said that, I really like infrastructure-as-code. I’ve set up racks of hardware, and IaC is way more fun.

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I don’t have any retired hardware from my current job, since I’m 100% cloud (and I don’t miss hardware one bit (well, except for the one time I found that I didn’t have any spare power cables for the homebrew PC)).

I have, however, converted my old QNAP NAS to TrueNAS, and it’s much better now.