Oh, you mean all that bleeding heart activism was largely performative—and the moment social consciousness affects the bottom line, you suddenly stop caring about the causes you yapped about?
Too funny!
A month ago, there was a big stock market surge because Donald Trump got elected as President.
Now there’s a big bond sell-off because, as it turns out, Donald Trump is an inflationary risk.
I mean, we already knew this when Trump was elected, but now the Fed’s implying that too.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/10-year-treasury-yield-jobs-data-fed-minutes.html
I listen to vinyl every day, and everything this audio engineer states about the superiority of digital over analog is 100% true.
But he also states exactly why you should buy vinyl: it has better dynamic range because digital masters are squelched so they can be louder.
It’s Harry Zimmerman’s Band with a Beat.
This is pure big band swing music—and trust me, it will sound glorious.
Runs at 3.75 IPS in stereo, and was released in 1957. 
I’ll say it again: the critical problem with the Internet is verifying real humans.
This isn’t a problem to solve in the far distant future. It’s a problem to solve now. 
One of the shitty things about autism is the body doesn’t want to do what the brain wants.
You want to focus, be fully dialled in, cut the world out.
But then your body says, “Actually, I’m hungry.”
So a question came up: **Your digital strategy encounters unexpected technical hurdles. How will you pivot to ensure success?**
Okay, so when I think about this, there are three typical reasons why you might encounter unexpected technical hurdles.
## A) You think you understand the technology, but in fact, you don’t.
In this case, the best way to pivot is to learn how everything works. That might mean pausing your digital strategy and assessing: “What is it that I think I know, but I actually don’t?”
This is something often encountered by folks suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. And let me be clear: Dunning-Kruger doesn’t mean people think they’re smarter than they actually are—that’s not the point of it. What Dunning-Kruger essentially says is that intelligent people, even ones with tremendous expertise, often have an outsized opinion of their understanding in other disciplines.
For example, you might be an expert in law. And because you’re an expert in law, you might have an outsized opinion of your ability to understand things that are unrelated to your discipline. If you’re a lawyer—a good lawyer at that—you might think it would be easy for you to understand engineering.
So, the point here is that it’s important to assess what you don’t understand, try to understand it, and if you can’t, consult with somebody who does.
## B) You don’t have the digital infrastructure to support your digital strategy.
For example, you might think you have the disk space to host a certain amount of owned content, but in reality, you quickly discover your strategy means you need to use a lot more data. What you think is only five gigabytes of data ends up being a terabyte—and yes, I’ve seen that happen.
So the answer to how to pivot when you encounter the problem of infrastructure is either to acquire better infrastructure or to pare back your ambitions and try to make your digital strategy work with the infrastructure you do have.
## C) Your data and infrastructure aren’t owned by you.
This is, sadly, the most common hurdle. What happens is people hitch their flag to a cloud service, and then guess what? It unexpectedly gets shut down. Your access to that data gets unexpectedly shut down.
We recently had a high-profile case of this with a company called Bench Accounting. Without warning, Bench Accounting pulled the plug on their service, and 35,000 paying customers found themselves without access to important files. And these were critical files—because guess what? If you’re dealing with accounting, you’re dealing with the literal lifeblood of your business.
So, what I think needs to happen is businesses—and consumers too—need to start getting religion about hosting their own services. And I’m not just talking about the old-school method of installing a WordPress processor on your computer, though that’s probably a good idea.
What I mean is:
* We need to get religion about backups. Create lots and lots of backups. Back up everything on your hard drive.
* It’s about time we invest in a NAS (network-attached storage).
* It’s about time we start hosting services on that NAS—business-critical applications like accounting, office tools, project management, CRM, and even social media.
It’s time for the world to wake up and understand the value of owned services. In other words: be your own cloud.
Now, you might be thinking, “Hey, I have confidence in Google, Microsoft, and Apple.” Well, guess what? All those companies pull the plug on business-critical applications. Google is renowned for its graveyard—there’s even a site called the Google Graveyard dedicated to all the services they’ve discontinued. Hell, they just recently discontinued Jamboard, and that was a pretty critical service for a lot of businesses.
**To recap**: How should you pivot to ensure success?
1. Understand the things you don’t understand.
2. Work with or upgrade to the required infrastructure.
3. Own your data—be your own cloud.
Unless controls are put in place to verify genuine human activity, AI will only continue to dominate social media.
Pinterest is just a harbinger of things to come. 
What Trump is telling Canada is that we’re not friends with the USA, and we Canadians are suckers for integrating our economy so closely with the USA’s.
We should diversify trade away from the USA, and seek opportunities elsewhere.
Just in case you think Pierre Poilievre will just be a yes man to Trump, think again.
I’m not a Poilievre fan. I think he’s a blight on Canada’s political scene.
But he knows who his base is, and like all right wing politicians, he pitches himself to nationalists.
Seems bizarre that Japan would flag the takeover of 7-Eleven as a national security issue.
Likely this is in response to President Biden putting the kibosh on Nippon Steel taking over U.S. Steel.
Mind you, Alimentation Couce-Tard is a Canadian, but I get it.
Run a Fediverse server? Concerned about GDPR?
You do *not* need to comply with GDPR if your server:
* only hosts your account and your family and friends
* does not engage in any commercial activity
* does not allow unauthenticated access to the public timeline
* disables public access to profile directory
So if you’re self-hosting just for yourself and you want make nice with GDPR, just be sure to tick all these boxes.
https://blog.riemann.cc/projects/mastodon-privacy-policy-generator/
Just a reminder to EU citizens: I am a Canadian citizen residing in Canada.
Therefore, I am under no obligation to follow EU law since I am neither an EU citizen nor do I reside in an EU state.
As a courtesy, I will try not to offend you but I’m also not obligated to follow your rules.
Oh, and Gemini also indexes the Fediverse.
They got this info straight from my server.
So it’s not just OpenAI who’s indexing the Fediverse, but Google too. 
A lot of people are missing the point.
Yes, you can opt out of ChatGPT indexing your Fediverse post. You can even do a DMCA.
But Fediverse folks believe search should be based on opt-in consent—and ChatGPT essentially just said, “Get bent!”
ChatGPT doesn’t care about your ideals.
Officer Tom Jenkins.
The real crime is that this town employs a 12-year-old by as a police officer. 🤣 
This AI-generated “true crime” video is hilarious.
This story of a teenage groom being murdered after marrying a 65-year-old “Bridezilla”—to me, it looks fake. I mean, look at Officer Jenkins. 😂
But a lot of comments, especially from grannies, show people think this is real.
Hey everyone, go follow @JuliaMinamata@mastodon.gamedev.place on Mastodon!
She made The Crimson Diamond by herself, one of the best games of 2024—and the GOAT of EGA-style adventure games.
She also makes adorable pixel art which she shows off on YouTube.
ChatGPT even attempts to write like me.
Now I think I’m more economic with my words. And I think I’m funnier and more acerbic too.
However, these are actual arguments I would make—and that’s scary. ChatGPT knows why I hate Big Social and can even pre-emptively make my own arguments. 
Confirmed. ChatGPT is actively indexing the Fediverse, even small servers like mine who have not explicitly consented to their indexing.
So while people on Mastodon got angry about Mastodon having built-in discovery features, ChatGPT just went ahead and slurped up all your posts. 