While the study itself is a good read and I agree with the conclusions—Mastodon, and decentralized social media need better moderation tools—it’s hard to not read the Verge headline as misleading. One of the study authors gives more context here https://hachyderm.io/@det/110769470058276368. Basically most of the hits came from a large Japanese instance that no one federates with; the author even calls out that the blunt instrument most Mastodon admins use is to blanket defederate with instances hosted in Japan due to their more lax (than the US) laws around CSAM. But the headline seems to imply that there’s a giant seedy underbelly to places like mastodon.social[1] that are rife with abuse material. I suppose that’s a marketing problem of federated software in general.

1. There is a seedy underbelly of mainstream Mastodon instances, but it’s mostly people telling you how you’re supposed to use Mastodon if you previously used Twitter.

I’ve been reevaluating what a real vacation is recently. I travel a lot, but at this phase in my life that mostly means figuring out how to childproof and do childcare in a new area. It’s not a bad thing per se, but it does require a reframing of what a vacation means, because it no longer means a time to relax and unwind. If we’re going by the definition I’m working into life now, then it’s only been a few weeks, otherwise, about 3 years or so.

One of my big life stressors was time limited, and that time expired today with everything getting done that needed to for said stressor to go away, so the week is starting our pretty well.

They got off surprisingly easy for doing so, too: https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/. The $5k they were fined amounts to roughly 14 billable hours if they’re at the NY average of $357 an hour https://www.attorneyatwork.com/solo-and-small-firm-lawyer-hourly-rates/#h-the-top-10-states-for-lawyer-hourly-rates.

As you said, it’s exceedingly unlikely that Google would just disappear one day. AOL still exists. Yahoo still exists. These large companies don’t disappear generally, they just become shadows of their former selves and reasonably attractive acquisition targets. And in that event, there’d be ample notice for everyone to switch to alternatives. If, for the sake of argument, Google were to actually disappear immediately, it implies something very bad has happened in the world.

I would recommend the Kinesis Advantage. It doesn’t use cherry switches IIRC, but they’re similar.

Just one person’s opinion, but I switched to an Apple phone last year after several years using top of the line Android devices, and I’ve been really happy with it. The features are all rock solid, and their particular brand of walled garden is one that I don’t tend to mind much.

Hey all, I heard about Lemmy from Mastodon and thought I’d give it a shot. I was never much of a reddit user besides occasional lurking, mostly because the quality of discussions seemed pretty hit or miss. BeeHaw seems a lot nicer though, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

I use he/him/his pronouns. If privilege was a game of bingo, my particular demographics would likely be the free space. I try to acknowledge that and use it for good.

By day I’m a staff software engineer at a relatively large tech company (which means I write more docs than code most of the time), and by night I’m a cooking enthusiast, musician, sci fi novel fan, and exhausted parent of a toddler.