americans sure love giving their data away to the CCP in exchange for free stuff,

-Steven Heidel via weapon X

Well, American tech companies surely primed us for it…love the gymnastics people seem to jump through. Personally, I don’t have a user or need for AI on the daily. Emanuel Maiberg does a great job of framing this up via 404.


But, BlueSky....wait...What?!?!

I have been skirting around the edges of BlueSky trying to crystallize my thoughts and why I won’t be signing up. Along comes Christine Lemmer-Webber @cwebber@social.coop and writes a really in depth post that does that and so much more. I’ve provided some call outs that really reinforce my thinking, but I highly recommend you go read the original in full. (it is a long, and technically concept heavy, read but worth the effort if you are interested in how this stuff works.)

How decentralized is Bluesky really?

“Message passing” vs “shared heap” architectures:

If this sounds infeasible to do in our metaphorical domestic environment, that’s because it is. A world of full self-hosting is not possible with Bluesky. In fact, it is worse than the storage requirements, because the message delivery requirements become quadratic at the scale of full decentralization: to send a message to one user is to send a message to all. Rather than writing one letter, a copy of that letter must be made and delivered to every person on earth.

Direct messages are completely centralized:

The answer, if you guessed it, is centralization. All direct messages, no matter what your Personal Data Store is, no matter what your relay is, go through Bluesky, the company.

Bluesky is centralized, but “credible exit” is a worthy pursuit:

Even though the majority of Bluesky services are currently operated by a single company, we nevertheless consider the system to be decentralized because it provides credible exit: if Bluesky Social PBC goes out of business or loses users’ trust, other providers can step in to provide an equivalent service using the same dataset and the same protocols. – Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media


Of course there was a cordial [response](https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t) and a cordial [re - response](https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/#f) by Chirstine to that. I haven't gotten enough time to read them both through as of yet.

I enjoy the whirlwind that is CES. It reminds me of a more hopeful time, when technology was poised to be our savior. Admittedly, it has become a spew of endless vaporware mixed with cash grabs. Still if you are slightly interested try the simple and honest coverage by @lonseidman@indieweb.social


Joplin Template

I use Joplin a lot for my day gig and for creative stuff. For the day gig I created a template and a shortcut to run every day when I log on to capture my notes for the day. If you like OneNote, Evernote, Obsidian et al Give it a peek.

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template_title: {{#custom_datetime}}dddd MMM DD  YYYY{{/custom_datetime}} 

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{{ template_title }}

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# Check Email


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# Leftover from Yesterday


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# Check outstanding tickets


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# Today's Fun

## Meetings:

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# Long Term Projects

My water sensor finally arriveded and quickly switcheded out with only 8 screws and a bit of cursing. Fix your stuff! (Also machines are always dirtier on the inside than you expect them to be.)