xethos

It's the payment onboarding that's usually the sticking point (which is fortunate for my side of the discussion, because you've missed a zero), but that also misses that hosting costs will almost certainly scale with user-count.

And I'm not discussing emotionally-heavy, but public standing within the community you've convinced to trust you with their social media algorithm

Great! And this provider will just... eat the server, bandwidth, and storage costs, indefinitely, with no expectation of financial renumeration? Or will they charge a minimal fee that few social media users will be willing to pay?

My point stands: Hosting a full Bluesky stack is big money, every month. And that ignores how the admin must be seen in a positive light; having deep pockets isn't enough, the admin team running (and paying for) the servers must be trusted not to manipulate what gets seen, who gets banned, and what links are deemed malicious.

> imagine if open source was behind an autocrat, there's no way it'd be nearly as rich or flourishing

Maybe not the best argument to anyone responding from their Linux computers, as Torvalds is generally viewed as Benevolent Dictator For Life.

I'd look for more examples, but using Wikipedia for any sourcing feels too on-the-nose, considering Jimmy Wales seems to be in a similar BDFL position

If America had launched nukes during the cold war, the USSR would retaliate. Maybe via submarine-launched ICBM, maybe using a dead man's switch; methodology is irrelevant, because the question is this: If both countries end up radioactive desert, which country would be declared the winner? Or is it possible for neither country to be the definitive winner of a war?

> Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?

Because the business model is malicious.

Meta has, quite intentionally, wedged itself in-between large amounts of human interaction. They know some people are malicious. They know the machine will frequently make the wrong call, because the auto-moderator can neither reason, nor account for context.

But hiring enough moderators to run moderation through the computer, provide a default "suggested" action, and having a human approve or deny, would be too expensive. It would demolish their profit, and may even pull Meta from black to red, financially. Their business model relies on making the wrong call, and having outrage bring it to the attention of actual Meta staff to correct it.

Meta does not get to blame the computer they put in charge of moderation instead of hiring adequate staff; computers can never be held accountable, so accountability moves up the chain to the people that programmed the computer and left it in charge.

> My feeling is that the engineers and OEMs understand these tradeoffs better than the hobby market. All of those boring pastes that came in OEM configurations but underperformed the latest $20 tube you could buy in the aftermarket were just making different tradeoffs

For example, if a consumer is going to periodically (or ever) replace / upgrade their thermal paste, they can get a bump in performance. The consumer that's never going to do that is better server by paste that has slightly lower performance, but lasts much longer.

Sure, this is why IBM gets a cut for every IBM-compatible PC clone sold /s

Peak performance alone will not imbue something with a soul, and adding (or adding additional) computers frequently seems to overlap with something becoming more soulless.

An SSD is faster, but a hard drive ticking away is a language its own, and an amorphous white-by-default Tesla Plaid may be one of the fastest cars on any road, but odds are the only feeling it evokes is "This is faster than any reasonable person needs, and likely more than is safe for any standard American motorist to be able to just go out and buy"

> the person I responded to claimed higher fertilizer prices would result in starvation

I can't say why, but I blanked on this being the rationale for your reasoning. I gave you way less credit than you deserved there, my bad

> They'll need a lot more funding

This is exactly my point: while we agree that starvation is extremely unlikely, the problem is not raw caloric output. Stating in your earlier comment, "the country's farmers produce far in excess of what's needed to feed the population", is like saying the sun outputs enough energy to grow the crops, in that neither was really the problem in the first place. A major weak point though is funding, and financial support from, for example, the government.

Starvation in the US is beyond rare. "American farmers produce enough to keep everyone fed" is weak supporting evidence of that statement.