> UK where cost of energy was super high

“Was”?

Probably missing 'already', that's how I understood the sentence.

Not that I’m going to do it myself, but what’s to stop a non-black person from signing up? Do you verify people’s identities?

I assume it's mostly the same thing that keeps non-Catholics from taking communion at Catholic mass.

Yes, as far as i know it's an honest self-report kind of thing.

tasteless wafers?

In the sense that there's no upside to violating the norm, yeah, that too.

Note that I'm not a blacksky member, just someone involved in the greater atproto space so my understanding of the process is likely not perfect.

But AFAIK the way blacksky operates is that they assume good faith when new users join. If it becomes obvious that you are not black then you will likely get reported or directly hit by moderation action and they will ask you to verify your identity at some level.

I think it's something along the lines of "send a photograph that would be non-trivial to fake". Not necessarily forcing you to dox yourself but requiring that you provide some level of evidence that's visibly resistant to AI/tampering. Now I have no idea the extent to which they do this to be entirely honest but I do know they don't mess around with people doing "digital blackface".

I'm not sure how well that moderation approach will scale at large but given they are a community that has carved out their own niche and not a corp just blindly driving to scale, I doubt they'll see the strain that the greater bluesky and atproto have experienced with moderation struggles at scale. And given all decisions around policy and moderation rules are decided by the Blacksky People's Assembly, as the community evolves participants can participate in governance and help craft the process if they are dissatisfied.

What does it mean to be “obviously not black” in a digital context?

i.e. it becomes clear you are using it as a sockpuppet account (some users have been caught trying to do this), outright saying you aren't black, etc.

Like if you aren't being a niche internet celebrity and aren't trying to play main character on the internet it's unlikely you'd get caught unless you were particularly stupid but that's also kinda part of the point. It's a community and people in that community know each other both online and IRL. It'd be pretty hard to be involved in the community without leaving behind an evidence trail of you blatantly lying about who you are.

I don't exactly know either, but it's probably some sort of lax verification measure like a selfie.

Don't need extreme measures to keep bad actors out if you're able and willing to throw out anyone who obviously doesn't intend on playing nice.

I don’t really care if some group that doesn’t include me wants to exercise their freedom of association — whatever, it’s a free internet, go do your thing — but my lord it’s amusing to see Bluesky keep purging itself via these endless purity spirals.

Some people really can’t stand their own company.

I actually don't think Blacksky reflects any kind of cultural purging cycle. Blacksky is extremely practical in its formation & purpose - not reactionary to any specific events on the network - and most of the bluesky/blacksky userbases are connected and socializing. There's no beef between the userbases.

They measure the number of minutes since sunrise.

The EU is launching a similar scheme that costs €20 to apply for: https://travel-europe.europa.eu/en/etias

yeah, but I got the impression that the EU is very much doing it as a retaliation to the US and UK doing it. Tho they could have limited it to just those countries.

The US, maybe. But wiki suggests ETIAS (the EU one) was proposed in 2016 whereas the UK ETA idea was created around 2023, so ETIAS can't be a reaction to ETA - perhaps the other way round?

I'm not sure if, without Brexit, the UK would have ended up with ETIAS anyway - it's a "mostly Schengen but not exactly" thing so it would have depended on what agreement they came to.

You're right, I misremembered the order in which I learned about these things as the order in which they were announced.

(lol, I sound like an LLM apologizing for getting something wrong but I promise I'm human :) )

My impression was that the EU did it to prevent people doing visa-free layovers from claiming asylum, while the UK did it to negotiate a dual exception with the EU in the future.

ETA is a visa to the entire world in all but name. I'm not looking forward to the future where every county implements is and visa-free travel becomes a thing of the past.

Which was all started by the US' ESTA back in 2009, which I believe now costs $40.

Have you filled one out lately? The questions have got a bit wild.

oh no, basic border security!

It's incredible what people were able to accomplish with their free time before smartphones

In general complete devotion to the craft by constantly practicing like it is a habit and not just when inspiration strikes is essential.

One could argue this lack of devotion predates even the smartphone. Heck, I remember getting a Nintendo Entertainment System in the late '80s and then not going out biking or playing basketball as a result.

Ironically these days you might have a better chance making a living from playing video games compared to any physical activity.

???

Hendrix was a working musician who paid his dues on the chitlin' circuit with artists like The Isley Brothers, Little Richard, Ike & Tina Turner, and Sam Cooke before making it on his own. AFAIK those are pretty high-pressure assignments, and count as real work...

Just humans, living in the moment, not a phone in sight.

For a split second I read this headline as "Terence Tao dead at … years old" and was shocked

He didn't name it though, Peter Steinberger did. (Kinda.)

"were"?

> Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced?

Yes, at least according to ChatGPT:

"Compilers didn’t arrive to universal applause; they arrived into a world where a chunk of programmers absolutely believed the machine could not be trusted to write “real” code—until the productivity wins (and eventually the performance) became undeniable."

Damn that sounds familiar.

compiler is deterministic, coding models are not. compilers have been unit tested and will generate same output for a given input. They are not the same things.

So?

So, there's a big qualitative difference in whether you can trust the output.

You can either "just believe", and prepare for inevitable, nasty surprises down the line. Or you can verify in ways you don't have to with stable compilers, eating up most of, if not more than all the efficiency gains you felt you had by using the LLM.

The two aren't comparable even remotely. One is a tool, the other is a slot machine. One allows for a new layer of abstraction, the other allows for a new layer of imprecision and hoping for the best.