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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote at The Torment Nexus about whether Bluesky could become the new Twitter, and whether that would be a good thing or not. Since then, the network has just continued to ramp up its growth — it now has more than 23 million members, up from 15 million when I wrote that first piece — and so I wanted to go a little bit deeper and look under the hood at how Bluesky actually works, and how that compares not just to something like Twitter or Threads but also to other social networks such as Mastodon that are often referred to as “federated” or “decentralized.” Before I do, I should note that I am not a programmer or social networking expert, and so it’s entirely possible that I may describe some of this inaccurately or just plain get things wrong and for that I apologize in advance. But I think the differences in how they are perceived versus how they actually work are important.

A network like Twitter or Threads is relatively easy to understand. There’s a company that owns everything (including the actual user accounts, as Elon Musk is arguing in a brief related to The Onion’s acquisition of InfoWars) and it controls who gets to post, what they get to say, where the messages go, and so on. If Meta or Musk want to make the network either unusable or actively hostile, or nuke your account and everything you’ve ever said and all the contacts you’ve made, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. This fits the definition of centralized pretty well. Yes, you can export your tweets etc., but it is difficult (but not impossible) to import them into some other network, and even if you do you lose any related content and connections.

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This structure makes it a relative no-brainer to use and understand, and I think that helps explain why Threads has more than 275 million accounts (according to Threads honcho Adam Mosseri, in November alone the network added the same number of accounts as Bluesky had in total). But having an account is one thing, and actually using it is another — you’ll notice that I said Threads has 275 million accounts rather than users, and that’s because, despite its size, the activity level on Threads seems to be significantly lower than on Bluesky. According to estimates from Similarweb, daily use on Bluesky hit 3.5 million recently, while on Threads it was just over 4 million, despite the fact that Threads has an order of magnitude more users than Bluesky does.

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Continue reading “Is Bluesky really decentralized? It’s complicated”

From Vulture: “Airing as the final sketch of the Christopher Walken-hosted April 8, 2000, episode, “More Cowbell” has leaped from Studio 8H’s gold-plated diapers into cultural ubiquity. The phrase has even merited an entry into the dictionary. (Idiom, informal: “An extra quality that will make something or someone better.”) Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser, Blue Öyster Cult’s co-founder and front man who wrote “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” for their 1976 album, Agents of Fortune, has managed to maintain a healthy relationship with the sketch, but he admits the fate could’ve been a lot different if he didn’t find the premise genuinely humorous. “It’s been a 25-year journey with the cowbell and riding that horse,” Buck Dharma explains. “I can’t complain about any of the history and what’s happened. It’s all good.”

Archaeologists discover 4,000-year-old canals used by ancient Mayans

From Associated Press: “Using drones and Google Earth imagery, archaeologists have discovered a 4,000-year-old network of earthen canals in what’s now Belize. The findings were published Friday in Science Advances. “The aerial imagery was crucial to identify this really distinctive pattern of zigzag linear canals” running for several miles through wetlands, said study co-author Eleanor Harrison-Buck of the University of New Hampshire. The team then conducted digs in Belize’s Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. The ancient fish canals, paired with holding ponds, were used to channel and catch freshwater species such as catfish. Barbed spearpoints found nearby may have been tied to sticks and used to spear fish, said co-author Marieka Brouwer Burg.”

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Continue reading “Blue Oyster Cult talks about that infamous SNL sketch”

From Sunday Long Read: “One, two, three deliveries of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ and Hardee’s and whatever else the app tells him to deliver and Ryan Nickerson is driving home having pocketed a whole $2.25 an order for his labor. Gas is $4.30 a gallon. He’s 37 and between jobs. Since he moved from Georgia to Florida, after it happened, work’s been hard to come by. Work’s been hard to keep, too, after it happened. Five years ago next week. He dreads the anniversary. The girl hit the front left bumper. And then she rolled beneath the back left tire. There’s still a scratch where she hit. He looks at it every day. For a long time he couldn’t bear to drive the thing, but what else could he do? He was behind on payments. He couldn’t afford to get rid of it. It has 150,000 miles on it now. It’s paid off. He can sell it but doesn’t want to. It’s as if she is still alive, still with him. Was she afraid? She was 10.”

The “placebo effect” may not be real

From Carcinisation: “The current scientific consensus is that the placebo effect is a real healing effect operating through belief and suggestion. The evidence does not support this. In clinical trials of treatments, outcomes in placebo and no-treatment arms are similar, distinguishable only in tiny differences on self-report measures. Placebo-focused researchers using paradigms designed to exploit demand characteristics (politeness, roleplaying, etc.) produce implausibly large effects. There is no evidence that placebos have effects on objective outcomes like wound healing. Three sources purport to show that the placebo effect is a real, objective phenomenon, but the brain imaging studies do not demonstrate an objective effect, but are rather another way of measuring “response bias,” as subjects are capable of changing these measures voluntarily.

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Continue reading “What do you do after you accidentally kill a child?”

From Daily KOS: “On Feb. 20, 1939, German-born Fritz Julius Kuhn. the leader of the pro-Nazi German American Bund and would-be Führer, was the final speaker at what was billed as a “Pro-American Rally” at Madison Square Garden. At one point, an unemployed Jewish plumber from Brooklyn, Isadore Greenbaum, rushed the stage, shouting “Down with Hitler!” He was tackled and beaten by Kuhn’s brown-shirted security detail and fined $25 for disturbing the peace. When he returned home, Greenbaum unexpectedly received a congratulatory telegram from a local judge, Nathan D. Perlman, and a lavish gift basket signed by Meyer Lansky, the nation’s most prominent Jewish mobster. The odd couple of the Jewish judge and organized crime boss who secretly teamed up to blunt the rise of fascism in the U.S. by organizing Jewish gangsters and boxers to intimidate and fight the German American Bund and another fascist group, the Silver Shirts.”

A mother debates whether to give her deaf child a cochlear implant

From Aeon: “Critics argued that Alexander Graham Bell – the founding father of what is still one of the major LSL programmes in the US – was not so much a benevolent supporter of deaf children, but a eugenicist and ‘oralist’ with grotesque views about deafness on a self-appointed mission to eradicate sign languages. There were traumatised adults distancing themselves from their parents entirely for forcing them, despite great difficulty, to listen, speak and lip-read. The wet-eyed social media phenomenon of babies with hearing aids and CIs being filmed hearing sound for the first time was disparagingly called ‘inspiration porn’ or ‘switch-on porn’ – the vulgar showboating of an arrogant hearing class determined to convert their perfectly deaf children into hearing ones.”

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Continue reading “Meyer Lansky organized Jewish mobsters to fight the Nazis”

Before I go any further, let me be clear about what I mean by saying Elon Musk makes a good point — or rather, let me clear about what I *don’t* mean. I don’t mean that Elon Musk makes a good point when he says the economy will fail without Donald Trump, or that democracy is at risk unless we give Trump whatever he wants. I don’t mean that he makes a good point when he says that free speech is an absolute virtue (unless someone uses the term “cis” on Twitter of course, which he defines as hate speech). And I don’t mean that he makes a good point when he says that we all need to have at least a dozen babies with as many different people as possible (he hasn’t actually said that, but it’s pretty obvious from his behavior that he thinks this is the optimal thing to do).

In fact, there aren’t a whole lot of areas where I think Musk *has* made a good point. But there is one, in my opinion, and it’s in the lawsuit he filed against OpenAI and co-founder and current CEO Sam Altman. The suit originally named OpenAI and Altman, as well as OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman — who left the company after the board tried to oust Altman, and then later returned after Altman emerged victorious from the board’s maneuvering (more on that below). The Musk lawsuit was withdrawn in July, but an amended version has been filed that adds Shivon Zilis as a plaintiff — she is an employee at Musk-owned brain-implant company Neuralink and also the mother of three of his 12 children, including one named Techno Mechanicus (I am not making this up, although I wish I was). The claim also added Microsoft as a defendant.

Zilis was added because she was formerly on the board of OpenAI and had some interactions with Altman that Musk clearly feels might help buttress his case. The reason for adding Microsoft as a defendant is that Musk claims the close relationship between the two has made it harder for OpenAI to form partnerships with other companies, including Musk’s own xAI. The claim argues that OpenAI is “actively trying to eliminate competitors” like xAI by “extracting promises from investors not to fund them.” In effect, it says, OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft has become a “de facto merger.” None of those things are the point that I’ve grudgingly referred to above as good, but they are definitely related to it. The preamble in the lawsuit describes its premise in this way:

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Continue reading “Elon Musk makes a good point”

From Vanity Fair: “Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters. But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse. Cormac McCarthy did not shirk womenkind in his novels. On the contrary, it turns out that many of his famous leading men were inspired by a single woman, a single secret muse revealed here for the first time: a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl named Augusta Britt. A cowgirl whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he had “trouble coming to grips with.”

When the railway industry changed the way that time worked

From Letters From An American: “Until November 18, 1883, railroads across the United States operated under 53 different time schedules, differentiated on railroad maps by a complicated system of colors. For travelers, time shifts meant constant confusion and, frequently, missed trains. And then, at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883, railroads across the North American continent shifted their schedules to conform to a new standard time. Under the new system, North America would have just five time zones. In Boston the change meant that the clocks would move forward about 16 minutes; in New York City, clocks were set back about four minutes. For Baltimore the time would move forward six minutes and twenty-eight seconds; in Atlanta it went back 22 minutes.”

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Continue reading “Cormac McCarthy’s secret muse breaks her silence”