One of the big appeals of this is it gives a mechanism for "teaching" models a geometric intuition and better spacial reasoning.

Not necessarily pure number crunching but the boundary between rote algorithms and fuzzy intuition based models that humans in particular excel at.

> Back when they were quarreling over the standardization of OOXML, instead of pushing their own proprietary* desktop format

ODF was developed by a committee and predates OOXML by years and it was standardized by ISO before OOXML was even announced.

That's not pushing their own proprietary format. That's just using the existing ISO standard and not switching to a different, far more complex standard that served little purpose.

Hell even IBM threatened to leave ISO wholesale over Microsoft ramming OOXML through the standards body.

I wish microsoft would have been forced to make the entire windows API an ISO standard if they wanted OOXML to be one so bad

That's just the bluesky PBLLC PDS that banned you or refused to register you.

You can create an account with any email address you want if you host your own PDS or you can find another PDS that someone else hosts that is willing to register you an account.

One participant's new account spam protection has nothing to do with the network at large being centralised

You're still reliant on the centralised bluesky BGS.

Only if you choose to use bluesky PBLLC's relays and it's super trivial to not do that. Plus you can run your own relay super cheaply.

Side note: it hasn't been called BGS for a very long time. Nowadays they are just called relays and since sync 1.1 the cost for running a relay decreased by multiple orders of magnitude.

Yeah it's worth noting that blacksky provides accounts to non-black users but their posts don't get included in the blacksky feed. And non-blacksky PDS users who are confirmed black still are allowed to be included in the blacksky feed.

So it's multiple components really.

- The blacksky feed which is a curated feed and community built around the US black community on atproto.

- The blacksky client, appview, moderation team, and relay which provide the necessary infrastructure for blacksky to operate independent of the rest of the ecosystem if they need to and for them to tailor their experience to their community.

- The blacksky PDS which serves as a source of truth for data storage and auth for blacksky users that choose to use it.

And of course non-black users can use all of this infrastructure but if you aren't black and you want to host your account on a blacksky PDS you have to pay a small subscription/donation.

It's all for their community but they are more than willing to let other people use their infra as long as those people pay their fair share.

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.

lol that's not even their claim. their claim is that AI will rewrite the entire linux kernel from scratch with an MIT license. which. lmao

AI can't hold copyright (as for now) how will this affect licencing?

lmao good luck with using an AI to try to rewrite the entire linux kernel. Doubly so good luck doing so without accidentally recycling a bunch of GPL code in the process.

The Linux kernel isn’t that complex. It’s mainly device drivers. Linus wrote the first version himself as a hobby, for crying out loud. AIs will be creating custom kernels within five years, from scratch, as customized as you wish. Probably based on BSD, or other liberally licensed code, for legal reasons.

v0.01 took Linus months of work and even then it barely ran anything. It wasn't POSIX compliant. It couldn't run GNU userspace. It only ran on one arch and had no concept of multi-arch support and limited to no real driver compartmentalization.

It wouldn't be until 2 years later that almost a hundred devs joined the Linux project and they'd gradually have achieved compatibility with GNU userspace. Full POSIX compliance wouldn't come until later.

And it wouldn't be until another year or two later that they'd finally reach a "production ready" 1.0 by which point hundreds of devs were contributing to the project.

You are vastly underestimating the insane amount of work that went into the Linux kernel in the early days to get it to where it is today that it can be developed at such scale and with support for so many intermixed, overlapping, or mutually incompatible features, devices, and platforms. To call that effort (just for core linux, not the drivers) anything less than herculean is frankly an insult to all the people who have dedicated so much time and energy towards that project.

Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.

Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.

Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.

And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.

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But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.

Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.

The average consumer may not care but there's multiple overlapping segments that Motorola can capitalise on here:

- tech consumers (i.e. the current GOS pixel market)

- family members of tech consumers. i.e. tech consumers can hopefully now recommend stock grapheneOS on motorola to family members since it's not a custom ROM but just a stock device with official manufacturer support.

- privacy/security conscious non-techy types.

- non-techy users who want a device without AI or a bunch of unnecessary addon apps like google or samsung tend to preload on devices.

- business IT optimising for security and minimal attack surface while sticking to COTS B2B and B2C options for corporate handhelds.

Like this isn't the largest market ever but it's a sizeable and fairly loyal market because each one of these groups is fairly opposed to unnecessary change. It's safe, reliable, and sustainable growth in a broader market that is extremely hostile.

And they are in particular targeting the business IT market since this announcement was made as part of their showcase on their new B2B cellular options.

Don't underestimate tech-savy users' influence either. I could easily add 7+ people to the user base next replacement cycle.

I could add 3 off the top of my head. Probably a couple more. Privacy conscious people who aren't techies. Some have tried Linux, some don't know what a "browser" or "SD card" is.

If features like phone calls, SMS, the camera and most regular apps work (especially banking apps, sadly), they'll be happy and receive free indefinite support from me.

I wouldn't use banking apps myself unless they open source them, but I'm willing to make a concession and support my friends' issues with such apps.

Bank tech sucks. I’m really surprised nobody has made a good online bank experience with no-nonsense APIs. This is a great opportunity for Motorola to partner with banks that commit to supporting their platform. The right online bank could be an ideal launch partner.

Would it be better for privacy? I just can’t imagine a world where our “intelligence” blows up elementary schools and runs child rape rings and somehow telecom companies are allowed to make a product that doesn’t have access for “white” hats.

It's not that they are too lethal. It's "we will not build a weapon system that is fully autonomous and acts without a human in the loop".

The big boy defense contractors won't touch that shit either because as soon as you mention the idea the engineers start shouting you down from the top of their lungs out of shear unbridled terror and the lawyers come storming in due to the endless legal risk said design would bring.

Mass Domestic surveillance sure they might do no problem but fully autonomous killbots or drones are gonna be a no go from pretty much every contractor other that doesn't carry a "missing the point of Lord of the Rings" name

whimsy