techbros

Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.

BlueSky’s faux-decentralization

BlueSky differentiates itself from Hive, Post, and other centralized social media newcommers by being ostensibly decentralized. It differentiates itself from the Fediverse by not being the Fediverse, and by being funded by *checks notes* Twitter. Oh, and by being built by Silicon Valley techbros, instead of weirdos who understand consent and how important moderation is.

The following is probably mostly obvious to anyone who had been using Twitter for the last decade. But for those who are just confused what the whole hubbub around Twitter “verified checkmark” is all about, here goes!

Imagine coming across, on a reasonably serious site, an article that starts along the lines of:

After observing the generative AI space for a while, I feel I have to ask: does ChatGPT (and other LLM-based chatbots)… actually gablergh? And if I am honest with myself, I cannot but conclude that it sure does seem so, to some extent!

I know this sounds sensationalist. It does undermine some of our strongly held assumptions and beliefs about what does “to gablergh” actually mean — and what classes of entities can, in fact, be said to gablergh at all. Since gablerghing is such a crucial part of what many feel it means to be human, this is also certainly going to ruffle some feathers!