I have a friend who handles dispositions of equipment for a very large government contractor. You'd probably be very surprised to see some of what goes through his warehouse. He got rid of two kid's go-karts last year. Government contractors buy some weird stuff for weird reasons.
Those were all isolated places, where you needed an account for that specific forum (whereas you can use your PDS anywhere), where that forum held your data (whereas you hold your atproto data, and we all internetwork to see the aggregate), where you were subject to the moderation decisions of that forum (whereas you have control over your PDS (but not other people's clients)).
Pretty unclear what your comment is trying to indicate but it sure feels very different to me, and I've offered some characterizations for why.
More generally, atproto is useful for all kinds of tech, solves a cold start social network problem. Aren't we reinventing forums, and tv watching, and book reviews, and trail maps, and photo sharing, and streaming, and d&d, and key attestation, and file sharing, and publishing, and note taking and containers and git hosting? Yes. Yes we are. https://atstore.fyi
(Under a common protocol set, in a way that respects users unlike everything else that's happened online so far.)
Fuck yes it is. Centralizing everything & owning all the data & giving users no rights is technically easy as hell. Walk in the fucking park!
It's also abjectly awful. Sites change hands, change owners, change terms of service, change moderators... sites shut down. Taking "your" content with them.
To accept centralized services is technically simple but it means accepting the infinitely long timeline of social and corporate complexity, that plays out, day by day & decade by decade.
As a user it is much simpler for me to have a PDS where my data is, that I control, and manage.
And it's all my data. I don't have to manage my data across thousands of different profiles on different sites. On that hostile unstable ground I've spoken of, each of these sites evolving and devolving in their own multi-variate ways.
It's perhaps sometimes simpler to have experiences that only exist in one site. But it's much richer and more interesting when different apps can interoperate, can adversarially interoperate/competitive cooperation. I also think that for users, once you get the hang of it, the patterns of having a PDS emerge, and provide a consistency of experience across apps, where-as each site has to be learned on its own terms: it's simpler having a single sign on from your PDS, having tools you can manage all your data with. (https://pds.ls)
We have atproto experiences like the just launching Disperse that work across the different apps, that bring them together. Multiple different apps do bookmarking using the same lexion, some with their own add-ons. A single site can't give you that ability to work across systems, to work broadly. You are reduced to working on a site by site basis. That's simple until it becomes overwhelming, at which point better tools becomes simpler: having a PDS leaves the door open to making these better tools, that work more broadly, across systems.
https://bsky.app/profile/quillmatiq.com/post/3mkq2hzfjn22s
Whereas you might get stuck with a complex bad app hosted on one site, with atproto your data is yours to manage and you can use whatever app you please, and those different apps can attune to different user types: users who want a rich complex app might use one app, other folks can prefer a simpler less complicated app. Not being evolutionarily handcuffed to one company's app your whole life lets everyone explore not just what us "more complicated"/simpler, but a whole range of preferences that suits the user, that better matches what the user wants, that can grow and evolve with the users and their data, in a way that the "simple" centralized system by definition cannot enable.
It's so wild to me how much I see the dual of complexity. Rich Hickey talking about complecting is spiritual holy matter to me, is deeply cherished. But I see so so so many people who use aversion to complexity as a tool to turn off thinking, to not regard the complexity: endless Chesterton's Fences, no curiosity about why the fence might be there. There's such strong swelling of dark energy to tear down destroy and berate, the smugness of those so happy to criticize ram usage or to say software is all bad now. I dunno man. It really tires me out having such shallow engagement such superficial reactions.
Personally my soul craves a deeper connection with systems, wants to engage and explore, to sift what complexity brings interestingness from that complexity which is incidental. I've written a bunch of posts in this submission what I think is so so so interesting in the inherent choices of having an Authenticated Transfer Protocol, where you can send my data around over http, or web sockets, or MoQT, or IP over avian, or tin cans and shoe string, and still have it be clear to the world that that data is mine. Very few other systems offer that. ActivityPub certainly doesn't practice that widely, maybe doesn't offer that at all. All these systems we've built assume a host that stays online forever, that owns the responsibility fully. It's wicked deeply compelling to me to march into some complexity to liberate us from this ancient bitter internet constraint. Hello & thank you, complexity.
Came here to say exactly this. Every interaction becomes a lie. I can bullshit with the best of them but doing it every day is not a path to satisfaction for me personally. Trying to do a side hustle at the same time only makes it worse.
I use Claude Code every day and have for as long as it has been available. I use git add -p to ensure I'm only adding what is needed. I review all code changes and make sure I understand every change. I prompt Claude to never change only whitespace. I ask it to be sure to make the minimal changes to fix a bug.
Too many people are treating the tools as a complete replacement for a developer. When you are typing a text to someone and Google changes a word you misspelled to a completely different word and changes the whole meaning of the text message do you shrug and send it anyway? If so, maybe LLMs aren't for you.
> We don’t know which infrastructure he wants to attack
I think you may be living under a rock. He has announced multiple times that he wants to go after oil processing, power plants, desalination plants, and bridges. His threat for today's deadline (made last week) is to destroy every power plant and bridge in the country.
Yes, and? That changes exactly nothing about the argument, he still threatened genocide. If someone threatens to kill you, you give them a cookie and they relent ("for now"), that doesn't magically change the past and make it so they didn't threaten to kill you, but instead asked for a cookie.
You are the only one making fake arguments. The threat was explicitly to destroy 'a civilization', which nobody but yourself considers equivalent to 'infrastructure'. Ply your lame rhetorical fallacies elsewhere.
> Genocide is very clear intent to destroy a people.
"a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."
where is the intent ambiguous to you? are you just one of those that says Trump blusters big to force negotiations? otherwise, he's quite clearly said the he wants to eliminate "a whole civilization" which is exactly what genocide is. not really sure how you can be confused on this other than willingly so
He did exactly that and succeeded. Read his book the art of the deal, in which he says that is precisely his strategy. Historically this is what he does every single time.
He succeeded in opening a strait that was open a month ago in exchange for higher gas prices, destroying a nuclear program he himself said was already destroyed a year ago, killing an 86-year-old leader who would be dead in a couple of years anyway, no regime change, billions of dollars wasted, and dead American soldiers.
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