They do, but it’s the physician who is personally liable, not the hospital. It’s just another form of compensation.
My wife and I are both physicians. Our house doesn’t belong to either of us, strictly; it belongs to our marriage. You have to have a legal claim against both of us to put it in jeopardy.
The Peter Principle is an idea manufactured to suppress wages. The idea the you have to work at a level above your current level for a while until you are promoted only benefits employers.
I have only spent approximately 30 seconds thinking about this idea.
I'm working on a tool that easily allows you to theme your UI using CSS variables called Blueberry. https://www.getblueberry.io/
The idea is that each CSS variable becomes a widget and then the Blueberry endpoint will serve those variables so you can let your users customize profile pages/portals and other places they integrate with you UI.
I switched to Bluesky but then moved back to twitter. I'm glad that they are trying to compete with Twitter (Twitter is a conservative cesspool), but all of my non-technical friends have stayed on Twitter. So, I end up going where they are.
I think the reason my friends did not join Bluesky despite me inviting them is that it just isn't as good of a product as Twitter. You can't post videos or DM.
I am not a tech executive and have no idea about corporate strategy, but it seems like Bluesky should focus less on technical differentiators and more on building killer features that have mass appeal and a community that people want to join.
IMHO this milestone, while cool, means absolutely nothing to people outside of the hacker news crowd.
I'm rooting for Bluesky, but it seems to me it will die without a critical mass of users.
I think everything you said was fair, but you also mentioned Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and a lot these features like federation and composable moderation are designed to help prevent the whole "rich guy buys the company and turns it into something you don't like" scenario.
I don't see how - I'm not sure how Bluesky works but there must be moderation - otherwise the whole website would succumb to bots and gorespam, so there are people in charge who decide what you get to see.
If the end result is politically unbiased, it's due to their conscious decisions, not some magic algorithm.
It's really unfortunate that the tech companies set the precedent in the first place by pushing hard political agendas into their policies and moderation biases. If it was truly neutral in the first place we would not be having this conversation. All the people complaining only now about Twitter doing this are part of the problem.
Of course people are going to complain about content they don't want. That's the product. Twitter changed their product to deliver different content, so its audience has changed.
Calling it 'The Problem' like climate change or the national debt gives it too much power. Just use something else. People use group chats for real relationships now anyway.
There is no "true neutral" when it comes to moderation. There are a million examples, but the most obvious are of the form "you can have group X or people who hate group X and are dedicated to driving them off the platform". Somebody's not going to have "free speech" in that case. And even if you go for what most "true neutral" advocates want, which is a lack of rules, you'll quickly find that quite a lot of people don't want to hang out at the place that's filled with Nazis or scam artists or spammers or whatever.
True neutral means moderating consistently, judging behavior without regard to identity.
The ideal, platonic version of this would be that moderators only see an "identity scrambled" version of each tweet/post when they make their moderation decision. Like a screen that blinds orchestra musicians when they audition, the human would see a statement like "I hate New Yorkers" and not know if the original message said "I hate New Yorkers" or "I hate Floridians." So they would have to make a decision based on the general principle of whether a statement of this form is allowable.
Anywhere you want to draw the line is fine with me, as long as you draw it consistently.
That sounds like a very personal definition of "true neutral". And also an unworkable one.
Take the use of reclaimed slurs, for example. When used against the discriminated group by a dominant group, their intention is often to cause harm. When used within the group, the intention is to reappropriate the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation
Similarly, harassers will use terms in ways that are plausibly read different ways depending on who they're talking to. So something that might sound innocuous or just odd when directed at me will be correctly read as a racist attack when directed at somebody else.
And that's not even counting when they'll just come up with new terms so they can be awful in ways that are novel enough that automated filters or out-of-date moderators won't catch. E.g.: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv88a5/white-supremacists-ha...
In short, because there's a great deal of identity-based hate in the world, identity-blind moderation ends up being an aid to the identity haters out there.
The element of moderation that you consider essential -- the latitude to apply subjective judgments that rely on knowing the specific identities of the participants -- is precisely the element that I do not trust moderators to perform.
That this moderation strategy would prevent the use of all slurs (even reappropriated ones) sounds like a feature to me, not a bug.
"That this moderation strategy would prevent the use of all slurs (even reappropriated ones) sounds like a feature to me, not a bug."
You're proposing erring on the side of censorship to avoid some gray areas. While this is a reasonable position, it doesn't satisfy some ideal of neutrality and won't really avoid the gray areas, and so still would require subjective judgement.
For sure. While at the same time allowing the more clever variety of abuser to sail on past.
In practice, almost any nominally "neutral" position ends up allowing an enormous amount of abuse. Which is why you'll see most platforms that start with a free-speech maximalism approach coming up with a lot of nuance and exceptions over time. And those that don't turn into cesspools.
Most people are pretty great, but moderation has to be built for the worst-case attacker.
If detecting abuse requires knowing the identities of the people involved, it sounds like another way of saying that some behaviors are fine if they are directed at certain people, but "abuse" if directed at other people.
No, I'm proposing erring on the side of consistency. I think it's likely that this strategy would result in less "censorship" in some cases, and more in others.
What we have now is a system where, on many platforms, moderators often put their thumbs on the scale and decide that certain groups need more protection than others. Generalizing about or disparaging certain groups is ok, but the sensitivities of other groups are considered sacrosanct and must be deferred to.
Like I said, draw the line anywhere you like. If it applies to everyone equally, I am happy. I am fine with things that require subjective judgment, as long as that subjective judgment is behind a screen that conceals identity.
And also “what’s a slur” alone is very subjective.
For instance on Twitter Elon has decided “cis” and “cisgender” are slurs, but “trans” and “transgender” aren’t. But in gender discussions the terms come up all the time, and they are just terms.
Moderation is full of gray areas, and they are unavoidable.
We definitely want to implement these features, the question was whether they should hold back releasing support for federation or not. Since federation is a core constraint on any features we'd like to build, the team felt that there is no reason to hold federation back, and that releasing it as it's ready makes sense.
We're thinking about Bluesky as both a product and a protocol (informing each other's design), and you're 100% right that for the end user, the product itself is what matters. Because we've taken on the decentralization constraint, we take longer to "catch up" to features that centralized platforms tend to have from the start, but it's definitely going to be a major area of focus for us going forward. (Ofc Mastodon isn't centralized, but note that it's had a few years of head start on feature development. We'll get there.)
For a decentralized protocol doing things right is much more important than doing things fast, it is very difficult (and in a lot of cases impossible) to break backwards compatibility.
DMs on any other service also have no privacy. Signal or Telegram could read your DMs by simply releasing an update to their code, for example. You always have to trust the person running the service you use. (Unless you have E2EE/something like OTR, in which case you have to trust the persom who makes that code!)
The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you don't have to trust the people running the service you use.
If Signal releases a malicious update (and they don't provide reproducible builds), it is very much possible for you to know about it, as everything is on your device. Even if the binaries are different from the source code, decompilers, analyzing network traffic, etc. gives the community a good chance at catching malicious updates. Mastodon admins can simply pull up your plaintext DMs on their servers and no one will ever know.
> The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you don't have to trust the people running the service you use.
Well then I guess it's pointless because it doesn't accomplish that.
(The actual point, FYI, is that you don't have to trust all of: them, their hosting providers, your ISP, the ISPs between, the government, and their mom.)
> it is very much possible for you to know about it
"Possible" != "done"
> analyzing network traffic
How are you gonna do that? Surely if they wanted to sniff it would still just look like any other encrypted data
> gives the community a good chance at catching malicious updates
Sure, when the same application is used by everyone, which is not true in either the Mastodon world or the new Bluesky-small-instances world
I think Mastodon has a pretty good balance here – when you try to send a DM it explicitly tells you that it will not be encrypted: https://u.ale.sh/Vo1ahx.png
And the linked privacy policy goes into further detail (at least on my instance, mstdn.io):
> Please keep in mind that the _operators of the server and any receiving server may view such messages_, and that recipients may screenshot, copy or otherwise re-share them. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon.
Overall, I think it's safe for most chit-chat, and for anything more serious you can add link to Matrix or your email and PGP key in your profile.
As a sidenote, I'd also like to point out that a lot of serious communication nowadays still happens over unencrypted email. You can consider it whataboutism, but it's still worth remembering IMO. (And of course, like others pointed out, DMs on Twitter aren't encrypted, too, so it's the status quo here.)
Just make ci releases with daily updates. Good luck reverse engineering and auditing that.
If the protocol is not open, you have to rely in the clients provided by the vendor, and you can slip a backdoor throigh easily.
When did you last audit your Signal client? Where is “the commjnity” organizing this effort and publishing the results?
Debian shipped an entropy lowering in house patch despite the “many eyeballs” fos years (for OpenSSL). Don’t lure yourself into false feeling of security bevause of the “community” might be doing something. Only count on defenses surely in place, with traceable operation and output history, with responsibles who are allocated resources for the work and having stakes at its outcomes.
I think it's sensible to have at the very least federation function as intended ahead of DM's as I imagine DM is another part pretty contingent on federation due to the privacy issues becoming approximately 10x more complicated with federation. ;-) Twitter is having it easy.
Videos might be more of a resource issue. Hardly a good time to launch videos almost at the same timeframe as they spike their user base by going public.
Not sure I agree. Being the thing that the tech folks find cool isn't a bad starting position at all. And it's significantly harder to achieve than DM's.
I've been using Bluesky for a week and I'm impressed. I actually appreciate that there is less media, it's more about conversation. So far it feels very much like Twitter before it became a cesspool. I'm conversing with local journalists, prominent scientists, sci-fi authors, etc... It's wonderful.
This whole thread is oof. Modern politics, to include both sides of the spectrum, has devolved rapidly. It feels like a real-life version of the Spiderman meme.
Video is also prohibitively expensive outside of Google-scale endeavors and will likely crush both third-party BGSes and PDSes. Everyone doing video is either selling you ads (whether it's in that video or around it), selling you the video itself, or is losing money. Possibly all three.
As it is, og-embeds do work for video and audio from a few different providers.
It's not storage, it's bandwidth. Most system providers, for Bad Reasons, charge a lot for egress; even relatively good ones like Cloudflare have particular payment shenanigans around video. Size uploads could help in that situation, but it's a bandaid on a bullet wound when the video still gets played a million times, y'know?
Then people are going to link to YouTube and benefit of getting lesser copies is small. The rest of media that works within a limit on a microblogging are junk.
By externalizing costs onto server owners, the same way they do everything.
It's not a good way to do it, though, and it's worse for Bluesky because it implies that in order to move your PDS (one of the best features of the design), you'd have to pick up the freight for video that already exists. If PDS mobility is important, attaching large economic strings to that is a big disincentive.
Sure, but that's Scary(tm), because an unexpected viral skeet is going to cost you a lot of money. In this case I'd expect almost all video to be fraudulent--either in terms of pirated egress or in terms of disinfomation scams.
In such a case you absolutely should! At the same time, it makes sense that bsky, as the protocol stewards, might not want to make that pit too easy to fall into.
I am increasingly of the mind that this is a feature, not a bug.
If you want to be Twitter, you'll end up being Twitter. We already have one of those, it sucks, and we don't need another one.
Social networks go to crap above a certain scale. If everyone can see your posts, you'll write posts to be seen by everyone. Which, as it turns out, ends up benefiting no one. The magic comes when there is a community, where you give a shit about the people you're sending messages to, and they give a shit about you. If the community is too small, then nobody bothers with it and it dies. If the community is too large, then it ends up being old men screaming at clouds, and (see above) we already have one of those. So a platform that is good enough to use, but limits the number of disaffected members, is the only thing worth creating.
If something I'm saying requires a video, then I can always link to one. If something someone else is saying requires a video, and it requires the video to be immediately visible while I'm reading whatever they're saying, then there's a good chance I'm better off not seeing it anyway, even if I think I want to.
(Ironically, in this post I am an old man screaming at clouds...)
I agree with this--and also, again, you have video, if you upload it to YouTube. Or stream via Twitch. Like, you don't need on-platform video. Google makes more money than God; let them pay for the perturbed bits.
I'm not sure what kind of "cesspool" Bluesky is, but it's unbearable. It's like 2015-era Tumblr but worse, somehow. Twitter, by contrast, feels like a breath of fresh air.
I'm wondering if you really mean "2015-era Tumblr" or are trying to evoke pre-Trump liberals on Tumblr (i.e. "manspreading is a micro aggression" pop feminism and teenagers creating fan lore about gender identities) by referring to it as that.
If anything, my experience of Bluesky has been the inoffensive vapid thought leadering of peak Twitter alongside the playful air-headed liberal self-help that is also fairly reminiscent of peak Twitter. In one word: bland. Being able to paint over the offensive things like nazis and porn by sweeping them under your personal rug rather than blocking or banning them only adds to this impression for me.
Twitter, your breath of fresh air, on the other hand is overrun by ChatGPT spam bots and shovelware drop shipping ads worse than the crypto "giveaway" scams and paid tweets of the immediate pre-Musk days and every even moderately left-leaning political tweet is filled with replies describing the violent acts they want to do to that person in excessive detail by accounts that openly post literal neo-nazi propaganda videos of Adolf Hitler denouncing "degenerate art" as a Jewish plot to weaken the German volk and national spirit and going "I don't agree with everything he did but he had a point". Political discussions about the Middle East in turn are split evenly between right wing calls for genocide of all adults and children in Palestine and right wing defenses of Palestinians for being victims of the international Jewish conspiracy to exterminate the white race through mixed breeding with brown refugees.
We used to always call Twitter "the bad place", "hellsite" or "cesspool" before Musk but it certainly deserves those names now more than ever, arguably rivaling 4chan in its political takes although the depictions of gore are mostly limited to uncensored war footage and the porn is decidedly more tame.
The reason Twitter is called a "right-wing cesspool" is not because it's full of right-wing people (that would just make it a "pool"), it's because of the vicious explicit threats of violence and celebration of human suffering propagated by those people. For all its faults, the bland libs on Bluesky don't do much of that.
Granted, my experience of Twitter might be tainted by the fact most people I used to follow in the old days have either left or are no longer active and any time I visit the algorithmic timeline hits me at full blast. And a lot of the edgier posts (not replies) by right wing folks the avalanche of drama RTs throw my way are clearly created to farm engagement in the hope of striking it big if the bluecheck authors make the payout lottery.
That study is based on user sentiment/survey, so I wouldn't really put any stock in to be completely honest. The only thing this study tells me is there was a change relative to some baseline, not that there was any sort of absolute lean.
There's no absolute lean at all it's all subjective, and sadly multidimensional which is hard for normal people to appreciate, so sure.
Soooo.. Right and left are objective bars in the sand and my options are perfectly formed and happen to be exactly just on the correct side of all issues.
> There's no absolute lean at all it's all subjective, and sadly multidimensional which is hard for normal people to appreciate, so sure.
I guess "absolute" is the wrong word. Lean isn't really a measurable thing, which is sorta my point. The GP claimed that there was, my claim was that all we have are people's feelings, and people don't feel in absolute terms, they just notice when there's a change so the linked data on peoples feelings probably doesn't support the claim.
Fair enough. Personally, I like to watch both sides, and it has been interesting to see conservatives becoming more favorable toward Twitter/X. If I were working on a social network (like Bluesky, the topic of this discussion), I would be watching Twitter/X closely right now to try to understand the effects that certain tweaks (such as moderation policy) may have.
The posts you see on Bluesky by default are the posts made by people you follow. There are other options to select whichever feeds you prefer. If you're seeing a lot of that content, it's because you're following people who post a lot of that stuff.
I'd like to add, that I don't have a problem with people doing this: people should be able to express themselves however they want. I'm just not particularly interested in that type of content.
To be honest, I think Twitter (and other similar sites) are a huge negative for society no matter who dominates the echo chamber. Training everyone to dump 140-char hot takes as a dominant form of "discourse" has been a genuine evil for the world. Twitter delenda est.
Pretty hard right-leaning too. They regularly ban left-leaning journalists who are critical of Musk, while letting actual neo-Nazis roam free. They over-corrected to an extreme degree. I still can't believe they banned Alexei Navalny's wife after Putin murdered him. And I find it sickening that there are people here who defend that shit.
The problem with that is that Twitter defaults to showing you their idea of what you should see, not who you follow, and they clearly optimize for "engagement", not what you like, and hate drives engagement.
Doesn't Twitter like most socials feed you things with which they predict would increase your engagement or time on platform?
If the GP's social circle leaned more conservative than them, it may just be bad predictions. And I can see how that would degrade user experience.
I often hear things like X service skews left/right and find it odd that people can have such differing experiences. Hence my belief that the feed algos are primarily the issue. People do like confirmation of biases.
When somebody else is wrong on the internet, one feels compelled to comment and explain one’s righteousness, or at the very least read through the comments to see if somebody else already has. Thus algorithms that optimize engagement (most of them) are most likely to show you stuff you disagree with.
The antidote is Linkedinification: “Thanks for bringing up this point it’s really smart and I fully agree!”
Twitter has a lot of very right-wing posters and a lot of very left-wing posters. Which of these you're likely to see as a huge problem and which you're likely to dismiss as a few insignificant goofballs is probably going to be based on your own political orientation. It would be surprising if there hasn't been a rightward shift, though, considering that causing such was one of the current owner's explicit goals. I don't think it's unreasonable for people to perceive Twitter as favoring the political right when the owner is actively doing so.
I'm certainly willing to believe that there's been a shift. But it's completely implausible that in just a year (two? I forget how long it's been) since the sale, Twitter has transformed into a "conservative cesspool". What the poster I replied to is almost certainly seeing is that there's actual balance now, instead of being absurdly hard left like it was before.
Nobody was "chased off" by Musk. The people who left were freaking out and planning to move to Mastodon even before the sale went through, because they assumed that Musk would be an evil man doing bad things to the site. To be blunt: they left because they couldn't bear to imagine a world where site leadership didn't put its boot on the neck of anyone they disagreed with.
You think Twitter doesn't still "put its boot on the neck of anyone they disagreed with"? Actually now it's "anyone they or Musk disagree with", so I guess you're kinda right.
Meanwhile he brought back people who were banned for committing crimes on it while banning people for posting entirely legal content like jack sweeney.
He's not a free speech absolutist, he's a me speech absolutist.
I disagree. If anything now it's more balanced, every "right of Portland-liberal" is no longer hidden and shadow-banned or worse. I like it a lot more!
Now you can actually read and learn about stuff you care about.
Yeah, maybe we just have different politics and I'm too dismissive of alternative worldviews.
Still though, I get like Matt Gaetz' tweets recommended to me. Does anyone like that dude? How is this happening? Why on earth would I want that? I feel like all this conservative stuff is surfaced by the application to me.
I got notifications, on my dang phone, for the dumbest fucking takes. I don't get them for liberal people. Possible I am just in the demographic of people they think would swing conservative so they target me.
Navalny’s wife was just banned and then shadow banned. There are countless examples of leftist accounts getting banned just for being critical about Musk.
It’s absolutely conservative cesspool. Nazis can are literally posting 14 words propaganda all day long and there are no consequences.
To think that Navalny or his wife are in any way leftists is insane. They were leaning more towards nationalism (just for Russia instead of the US).
In the face of current events though, that can be overlooked as it is not a narrative that serves western interest.
But to give an anecdote about an alternative, I rarely see any bigotry on Mastodon. Instances which allow that or don't moderate it correctly get block listed by instances I like. These instances may defederate into their own bubble in which they can still exist but cause no harm to the general timeline. Yet everyone still remains the freedom to express themselves.
I like this because it's just a natural way of how to solve this problem for the end user.
There are other reasons than being vocally left-wing [1] or being a journalist [2][3] that get you suspended or banned on Twitter these days.
Musk is grandstanding about "free speech", but what Twitter actually does now is fold and cave to demands for censorship from any authoritarian government that asks [4][5].
It was. In the last year it’s become largely conservative, and not in a standard reasonable small-government, etc. way. It’s like reading Facebook posts from your dumbest uncle.
American journalism isn't left-leaning. At best it is "click" leaning, and say what they need to do to get eyeballs on their content. This is why they helped normalize trump so hard, and repeatedly fail to call out the extremist right wing in the US.
This is what a lot of people don't get about the "pop feminism" era of online "journalism" in the pre-Trump era: it wasn't feminism, it was clickbait. At best it sold an idea of feminism but the emphasis was always on the selling part and not anything ideological. "Girlboss feminism" helps no-one except the bosses.
The same is true about most so-called "left-wing" journalism. Some journalists may be true believers but the platforms exist to make money, not to be any threat to the systems those ideologies explicitly oppose.
Heck, this even goes for political parties like the Democrats: the Texas governor literally rejected the authority of the federal government and legislative system by deploying his military at the border and the Democrat president's response was to propose a bill that would have created a legal avenue for what the treasonous governor was trying to make happen. Decorum is used as an excuse to keep intentionally ceding ground to the supposed political enemy.
Not sure I understand the objection. The research this article is about compared Wind vs Oil/Coal effects on birds. The title seems in line with the findings of the research.
> I find the question "what is a reliable, clean and affordable energy source?" much more relevant and productive.
Seems to me like examining externalities of different energy sources is a part of the nuance of this question. Feels like you're being a bit of a hater.
I don't agree with your characterization of what's happening as "YOLO" and "half-baked". It's taken many many people many years to get to where we are now. It's pretty easy to do a miles driven and accidents caused comparison. Self driving cars appear to be wildly safer thus far.
What would make you happy with a self-driving safety record? Why not be excited about the future?
I understand when some folks think that the focus would be better spent on public transportation, but you just seem like a hater.
A majority of the use cases for self-driving cars are either solvable, or already solved, by some combination of better urban planning (i.e. zoning and probably large-scale regulatory reform), public transit (specifically useful public transit), and public investment. Unfortunately, in the United States, we are unable to do even one of these things sufficiently well, hence the need for self-driving cars (or, in some cases, some other technological solution; e.g. hyperloop).
Pressuring employees to party is putting it lightly. This sounds like I vert sexual harassment followed up by retaliation. An employee received unwanted physical touches, and a proposition for physical intimacy and was fired less than 3 months later.
I completely agree that any form of harassment is unacceptable. As I've shared in another recent post, I'm committed to addressing my past mistakes, learning from them, and ensuring a safe and inclusive environment in my future workplaces.
I'm glad you found my other blog post on accountability and growth.
As you can see, I'm working on taking responsibility for my actions and working on self-improvement. I appreciate you taking the time to explore my writing.
