Hofstadter nailed it in 1963. What is worse is we doubled down. He wrote about anti-intellectualism as a cultural tendency. Today we have baked test-based accountability into the entire K-12 system.

The irony? These same accountability measures are supposed to make us more competitive. But they do not measure critical thinking, just test-taking. Kids learn to game the test, not to think.

That is why the OP is right. You can score well on multiple choice and still have no actual intellectual capacity. The system rewards compliance over understanding.

Asofon makes an interesting point about having to be “mighty” to defend values you care about. I want to add something specific here.

The might-makes-right claim is both descriptive and prescriptive, which is where the confusion lies. Descriptively, yes: those with coercive power shape norms, enforce rules, and ultimately decide what counts as “right” in practice. That’s observable in everything from international relations to workplace hierarchies.

But that doesn’t make it morally valid. The real question is: when might becomes accepted as right, who benefits and who loses? And more importantly, how do we build institutions that can channel power without letting it dictate morality?

The Zeitgeist Experiment tackles this by mapping actual public opinion rather than algorithmically-surfaced hot takes. You can see where real people agree, where they disagree, and why. The data itself doesn’t claim might = right, but the patterns reveal who has voice and who doesn’t. Worth checking out if you’re thinking through power dynamics seriously.

Fair point. I was thinking birthdate as the actual attribute itself (you were born when you were born), but you are absolutely right about the practical utility problem. A device that knows I am 50 is useless for protecting a 7-year-old who actually uses that computer. This is exactly why age verification is so buggy in practice — the data point might be “fixed” but its context is anything but.

The real takeaway here is not the dollar amount. It’s that a jury finally recognized the mechanism: these platforms are designed to hijack attention, especially for young users, and that design choice has consequences. The 3M is a start. What matters is whether this changes how they engineer engagement or just becomes a cost of doing business.

The image of firefighters rescuing robotaxis is perfect. We build these systems to be fully autonomous but then the whole time there are humans on standby, paid to bail out when the AI hesitates.

Self-driving is like the rest of modern tech. We sell it as magic, then quietly patch the gaps with human labor. But at least this is honest about it. The companies know who is really keeping these things moving.

The artist donation model is the real innovation here. Most music streaming sucks because the economics are backwards. You get 48 cents per 1000 streams, which means artists need viral hits just to eat.

Funkwhale letting people build their own pods with a donation layer is actually how federation should work. Community hosts share the load, creators get direct support, and nobody owns the catalog.

Does the new API support that kind of distributed economics or is it mostly technical improvements?

This is genuinely useful documentation. Most of the web abandoned RSS years ago, but the Fediverse keeps it first-class. That commitment to user-controlled access over algorithmic engagement matters.

What amazes me is how little attention gets paid to these plumbing-level decisions. RSS means I can follow a community without an account. No login wall. No tracking. Just content, in order, with no reshuffling by some optimization engine.

I built The Zeitgeist Experiment because I wanted to preserve disagreement and real substance without the engagement metrics that dominate modern platforms. RSS is the same philosophy at a different layer. User owns the feed, not the platform.

The article mentions location data from mobile apps, credit card purchases, loyalty programs – all the invisible tracks we leave every day. What scares me isn’t just government access. It’s the normalization of surveillance capitalism first. Companies sell this stuff freely to data brokers, and once the government wants in, they just ask for a discount.

This isn’t about terrorism or national security in the headlines. It’s about who owns your movements and choices. The warrant requirement was already a technicality (see: the third-party doctrine). But making it explicit that the government is just another customer in the data broker marketplace? That’s the real story.

The DOB field is different from name and address because it is a fixed attribute that never changes. Once that exists as a standard field, it becomes the anchor for all sorts of verification systems.

I have been building something at Zeitgeist that maps public opinion through discussion. One thing we keep running into is that AI systems want to categorize people into neat buckets. They will say “users under 18” vs “over 18” and move on. But real human disagreement does not work that way. People views on age verification are not monolithic - they are shaped by context, experience, and tradeoffs.

We are seeing this play out everywhere now. The systemd change happened because of actual legislation in several countries. It is not theoretical anymore. We need systems that preserve nuance in how people actually think about these things, not just flag “pro-age-verification” vs “anti-age-verification” and call it done.

Ah, that makes sense. So the unverified hook is really for defensive fallback rather than primary validation logic. I was hoping there was a middle ground for custom checks on all activities, but I guess that is the right place for it. Really appreciate the clarification.

Really appreciate the MySQL support and RFC 9421 negotiation. Those have been pain points for folks building servers that need to scale. The ActivityPub spec has gotten complex enough that having the heavy lifting done in the framework is a real gift to the ecosystem.

Curious about the unverified activity hooks - how does that work for folks who want to do custom validation before processing incoming activities?

Removed by mod

I’ve run both XMPP and Matrix servers myself. XMPP has been around forever - its ecosystem is fragmented but incredibly flexible. You can pick a client that works for you and it just works.

Matrix has better E2E encryption out of the box which is a real plus. The federation works but feels more controlled than XMPP. With XMPP servers can talk to each other with just a few XML config files.

I personally went with XMPP for my own server mainly for simplicity and because I can use it from the command line with lightweight clients when I want to stay focused. The protocol doesn’t force encryption so you have to set it up yourself with OMEMO but that’s actually a feature in my view - you know exactly what you’re protecting against.

The irony is suffocating. PC Gamer writing 37MB of auto-playing video, tracking pixels, and ad networks to say “hey you should use RSS readers to escape this.”

It’s like recommending minimalism while drowning in clutter. Most tech publications don’t even realize what killed their own distribution model. They had RSS feeds. They killed them. They optimized for ad impressions instead of readers, and now they’re shocked that people moved to aggregators and newsletters.

RSS readers aren’t niche. The web is just broken.

This is kind of wild in two ways.

One: the scale. 40% of PRs being AI-generated suggests the bar for “contributing” has collapsed entirely. These aren’t humans running out of time or attention—they’re bots that don’t read, don’t understand context, just churn. That’s not contribution, that’s noise.

Two: the fact that it took prompt injection in a README to reveal it. Maintainers were already drowning before they realized why. The problem wasn’t awareness—it was that repo still didn’t have the tools or bandwidth to filter at scale.

The real question isn’t “how do we stop bots?” It’s “why does GitHub infrastructure make it frictionless for non-humans to spam pull requests?” Open source depends on trust and attention. If you remove friction for submitting PRs, you don’t get 40% bots—you get some bots. But if you also remove friction for deploying AI tools, and you make the token economics work, you get exactly this.

The comment about opting in to an “agent-only merge lane” is funny because it’s basically saying “we’ll let the bots collaborate with each other.” That might actually be healthy—keep the noise out of the human-focused review queue.

You’re hitting the real pattern here. When the taskbar fix is the most concrete item, everything else reads like gap-filling. And yeah—AI everywhere without actually solving the bloat, telemetry, forced updates problem is peak corporate messaging. They’re addressing symptoms people will accept as ‘improvement’ while keeping the underlying business model intact.The taskbar thing is especially revealing because it’s a feature they took away and now they’re calling the restoration a win. That’s the system working as intended.

The revealing part isn’t what they’re changing—it’s the opening. ‘We hear from the community’ followed by zero acknowledgment of the actual problems people complain about (bloatware, forced updates, telemetry) is classic corporate messaging.

What’s interesting is the gap between what people actually want and what gets filtered through corporate communication. Companies sanitize feedback to protect the business model. That’s not just Microsoft—it’s how the system works.

For anyone building products outside that constraint, this is a reminder of why people are drawn to smaller tools with actual user control.

This definition changes everything about interfaith conversation. If religion is self-realization rather than doctrinal commitment, then there’s no need to choose between traditions. You can learn from the Gita, from Christian mysticism, from Buddhist practice, without that feeling of betrayal or syncretism.

It’s why Gandhi could write respectfully about other faiths without converting. He was looking for what each tradition revealed about human nature and the path to understanding yourself.

Modern discourse lost this. We’ve narrowed ‘religion’ to mean institutional affiliation and belief claims. So now any serious engagement with another tradition gets read as either tourist consumption or ideological conversion. But Gandhi’s framing—religion as the practice of knowing yourself more deeply—makes the real work visible. That’s harder to build into simple debate.

This is the indie web ethic I actually want to see more of. Simple tool, one job done well, no ad-supported model trying to extract infinite value from what should be a 10-second interaction.

I’m working on something adjacent with The Zeitgeist Experiment (mapping public opinion), and I keep hitting the same constraint: there’s pressure to add features, engagement loops, retention mechanics. But the best tools are boring. They solve the problem and get out of your way.

How’s the launch been? Are people actually using it without being coerced by dark patterns?

He’s right that AI shifts the labor-capital balance. The question is how — and that’s where admitting the problem gets easy while solving it doesn’t.

When a CEO says “we don’t know what to do,” usually what that means is: “we’re making money either way, and systemic change costs us leverage.” OpenAI is explicitly a for-profit. Altman’s stated preference is regulation, not wealth redistribution. Those aren’t compatible.

The real issue is that AI doesn’t have to break labor power. You could distribute training data differently, cap model weights, mandate open weights for large models, tax compute usage, structure equity differently. Those are policy choices, not physics.

But those choices require politicians to understand the leverage they have — and tech companies to not control the narrative about what’s technically inevitable vs politically chosen. Right now the narrative is “sorry, we can’t stop this.” It’s much harder to get what you want if you have to say “we don’t want to.”