Yup! I had an amazing job lined up working for a major company at their EMEA headquarters in the UK. I had got through a half-dozen rounds of interviews and was offered the position. I had just moved into a place near their campus and was heading through the process of joining (there was a longwinded - but fully paid - enrolment process I was working through) with an amazing job full of travel, interesting challenges and, crucially, a £100k/year salary waiting at the end. But this was shortly after Brexit and the flailing UK government was jumping from self-imposed crisis to completely-unavoidable crisis, insulting and infuriating other countries by constantly changing the terms of neotiation, publicly announcing then denying new impossible promises by the day, and the company in questions had just had enough: how the fuck could they keep their EMEA HQ in a country that couldn’t even promise that foreigners would be able to visit - let alone work - there in six months, and they announced the campus was closing. All the existing jobs moved to the EU, existing staff offered redundancy or relocation, and the onboarding process was cancelled. Thanks to Brexit I wasn’t allowed to live or work in the EU so I was jobless. I ended up doing shitting IT support jobs for £20k then £18k for years until I finally landed the job I’m in now which I love, but it’s definately not where I could - or, at the risk of sounding arrogant should - have been.

It’s more like the GitHub of Spotify, or the Grammarly of Xbox Live, or the BMW of Pepsi Max, or the South Korea of pineapples, etc.

“Tina, you fat lard, come get some dinner.”

An excellent adaptation, except they cut his rant about Aquaman. Also:

From memory:

“This… is Head Radio, a Love Media station. Just one of nine hundred radio stations, three hundred TV stations, four networks, three satellites, ten senators (thank you, thankyou, thank-YOOOU)… Head Radio.”

Ugh. I pity people who have such a lack of self-respect that that can tolerate living in this kind of dump. If the bed was rotated ninety degrees, they could watch TV lying on their side. But I guess whoever lives here is happy to just settle for imperfection.

Elon Musk.

If the cable coming through the wall is coaxial like the pictire OP posted, that’s exactly what’s happening. New installs will be FTTP and a lot of networks have been upgraded, but there’s still plenty of areas using DOCSIS over coax.

…du

You mean my best friend Plank?

They’d get bored after a time and Charles Foster Offdensen would have to step in.

In fairness, he’d vote for me.

While I’m generally of the opinion that there’s no such thing as a ‘good billionaire’, Gates has, at least, used the bulk of his fortune for some laudable enough endeavours. He’s one of the better ones, but if that’s not damning with faint praise I don’t know what is.

Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”, or, “I think therefore I am” is a favourite of mine. It’s proof that I exist. Nothing more.

Nollendorfplatz is the main gay village. Easily reached on the U-Bahn. Just saying.

A severe simplification of the history, but: In the 1960s, say, if you lived in a town with shit TV reception the local authorities might set up a really good TV antenna on a nearby hilltop and run a wire through town that everyone could connect their TVs to. This was called Community Antenna TV, or CATV, which later became known as Cable TV. The coaxial cable used for this doesn’t carry signalling like, say, twisted pair; instead, the purpose of coaxial is to provide an enclosed, shielded tunnel for radio signals to propagate along. The signal would fade over time, so repeaters would be added every so often to boost the signal and filter noise.

So, yes, all your neighbours can ‘see’ your data, because you’re all sharing the same coaxial cable, though it’s encrypted between your modem and the cable company’s local headend. Those boosters I mentioned would historically break the Cable network into neighbourhood-sized chunks preventing the modem signal propagating too far, so there would be a local headend within the same segment for your modem to connect to. The bandwidth available is split between all the users in the segment, so having a second coaxial cable coming through the wall would be of limited utility; it’d be easier for your ISP to just allocate more bandwidth to your existing modem.

You mentioned Ethernet, but in most Ethernet networks we use switches that ensure that only the recipient gets to see the packets. In the old days we used hubs, which are more analogous to neighbourhood cable networks in that regard.

One hundred percent go for USFF. Even the cheapest, most basic processor will smash server roles because it’s not having to power desktop applications, graphics, window managers, etc.

Yeah, that was the “oh, shit” moment for me too. I bought into the bullshit until that point.

Centralised, monolithic online services. Even when they were ‘good’, I was leery of services like YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp because they made no attempt to be interoperable or peerable. Two GMail users will have a richer experience emailing with each-other than they would with someone on, say, Yahoo Email or an Exchange server, but it would always work, eventually, somehow. Obviously we now have the concept of the Fediverse, but federated peers forming ad-hoc connections using an lowest-common-denominator protocol is the basis of the whole Internet.

Yes.

Here are some complaints people have.

It doesn’t use ActivityPub. So are we demanding that all applications use a specific protocol? Does that mean email, Matrix, the web, Nostr, Frendica, BitTorrent, etc aren’t part of the Fediverse? Nostr, AtProtocol, ActivityPub, Diaspora are four popular, open protocols for federated social media - there are many more - and they’re all part of a wider Fediverse.

It’s owned by a corporation. Great! So if YouTube started to publish all their videos using PeerTube, that wouldn’t count? If your local supermarket creates their own Mastodon instance and are active on it, is that a no-no? Does GMail not count as part of email, or Amazon as part of the world wide web for that reason? Are corporations not allowed at all? No-one is asking your opinion of corporate culture here.

It doesn’t support federation. Yes, it does. Every part of AtProtocol is open source and free for anyone to implement, allowing you to create your own fully independent instance that fully integrated with both BlueSky and other, independent AtProtocol servers.

It’s not open. Yes, it is. Fully open source and permissively licensed. Anyone can implement their own AtProtocol server, reusing as much or as little as they want. But AtProtocol does a lot more than ActivityPub, leading neatly on to:

It’s too complicated. I see this complaint a surprising amount. AtProtocol’s complexity exists because - let’s be honest - ActivityPub doesn’t provide any good way of discovering or searching. If you saw a load of fire trucks barreling down the street and wanted to know what was happening, a quick search on any AtProtocol relay will tell you if anyone on any instance has commented; ActivityPub doesn’t work like that. Hell, it’s hard enough to even find communities without resorting to non-ActivityPub services. AtProtocol’s Relay Servers and Firehoses are demanding applications, but that is required for a true Twitter/Facebook/TikTok replacement.

So, yes, BlueSky is part of the Fediverse. Does that make BlueSky a good thing? That’s a separate debate. But there are a lot of comments in this thread which amount to “no, because I don’t like it” and it’s important we don’t let our personal hangups override our ability to be rational. Maybe instead of moaning about AtProtocol we should at least give a thought to why it’s needed.