My daughter showing off her silver snake coin—which is her Chinese zodiac sign.
She only gets these coins once every 12 years. 
It’s actually happening.
Google Maps is renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. At least for USA users.
I don’t believe anyone when they say “Trump is just trolling”.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/google-maps-rename-gulf-mexico-gulf-america-us-users-2025-01-27/
All of you should remember this quote from Karl Rove:
> We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
For the past few decades, this is exactly why authoritarians have risen to power.
Have to take a break from the gym because I’m experiencing a bit of neck and back pain. Nothing debilitating but clearly a warning sign.
Sometimes when the body says rest, you must rest.
#Pixelfed is now 20% of the Fediverse’s total MAUs.
The caveat here is that this does not count #Misskey since that count isn’t accurately reported.
Nevertheless, this is a significant moment for the #Fediverse in terms of diversification of software distribution. 
Wow! PebbleOS was just open sourced!
I’m kind of shocked it wasn’t open source before. Better late than never.
I wonder if this means I’ll be able to use my old Pebble watch again.
A lot of people are coming out now saying, “The AI bubble just burst. I told you so. This whole thing was a fad.”
And you know what? They might be right. Maybe today is the day the bubble bursts, NVIDIA’s stock crashes, OpenAI becomes a relic of the past, and Microsoft has to lay off a bunch of workers because AI is done. Apparently, this Chinese company—the one that made DeepSeek with just a few million dollars—is triggering the AI apocalypse.
Here’s the thing: I’ve seen this story before. Every time there’s a big downturn, people panic. Bears come out of the woodwork to say, “I told you so.” But long term, things tend to stabilize and stocks go back up. I’m not saying recessions don’t happen—they do. I’ve lived through a few myself: the dot-com crash of 2000, the Great Recession of 2007, the COVID-triggered downturn five years ago, and 2022, which was an incredibly hard year for me.
But if you look at the long-term trend, betting on stocks falling indefinitely is a bad call. Historically, the stock market averages about 10% growth year over year. Sure, some years you get 20–30% gains, and others you see 20–40% losses. But when you smooth it out over the long haul, it’s been 10% growth for a century.
Now, back to DeepSeek. For years, I’ve been saying AI is bound to get more efficient—it has to. That’s just how computing works. A hundred years ago, computers ran on vacuum tubes. Now, the computing power of those room-sized machines fits on a nanometer, or even smaller. Computing used to be massively resource-intensive, but over time, we’ve learned to do more with less. The same will happen with AI.
It’s a bad bet to think AI-driven data servers will expand indefinitely, requiring more energy until we’re building nuclear reactors to power them. That doesn’t make sense. At some point, you hit diminishing returns. People have been warning about this for years.
Take audio as an example. We hit the peak of audio reproduction decades ago with the CD, introduced in 1982. The Red Book standard defined it, and since then, every so-called improvement has been marginal. Sure, we’ve had SACDs, DVD audio, Blu-ray audio—but none of them caught on because the benefits over CDs were nominal. Yes, SACDs can do surround sound, but even CDs can handle that, just not as well. It all comes back to diminishing returns. Audio didn’t get better—it just got more convenient. In fact, in some ways, it got worse. Spotify, for example, has a lower bitrate than CDs. But streaming is more accessible, so people trade quality for convenience.
The same principle applies to AI. We’ve already had the big breakthrough: machine learning. We can take a low-resolution video in 240p and upscale it to 4K. We can translate languages in real-time. That’s the breakthrough. Everything from here on out is incremental improvement. It’s not about building massive data centers and boiling oceans to keep them running. It’s about making AI more cost-effective and efficient.
If the reports about DeepSeek are true—that they pulled this off with $7 million and without the latest NVIDIA chips—then the hundreds of billions spent on AI over the past two years have been massively inefficient. Is that bad news for NVIDIA or OpenAI? Maybe.
But it also means we’re heading toward cheaper, more efficient AI. The next big leap isn’t going to be massive data centers; it’ll be resource-efficient AI running on smartphones and embedded systems. Imagine AI on a $30 Raspberry Pi. That’s the future.
The real fear in the stock market isn’t that the AI bubble has burst—it’s that AI has advanced so quickly that much of what’s been built is already obsolete. That’s bad news for investors but great news for builders who couldn’t previously afford a data center’s worth of compute power.
Now, think big picture. With AI built into your smartphone, you could shoot a video, edit it in minutes, and make quick changes on the fly. Tasks that took hours are now done in moments. And all this hype about AGI or the industrial revolution of AI, where jobs disappear and humans are replaced? It’s just that—hype. The tech industry does this every few years. They promise the moon, there’s a breakthrough, and then the improvements become incremental, like with the CD.
Does this mean the tech industry will collapse if investments in AI don’t pay off? No. The tech industry is already hyping the next big thing—robotics.
The other thing:
More than once, I’ve been convinced to stop using software because the creator was a very bad person, only to end up using software where the other creator was worse.
And because I made the choice based on opinions of people—not software—I ended up dealing with worse people and worse software.
So I think the most important thing is to look at what the code does. If the code is good, and you don’t like the creator—fork it.
If you don’t have the time to fork, support someone who does. But don’t be surprised if *that* person also sucks.
But also think, if the person coding the software sucks, and the next best option is worse, is this my way of saying everyone should use the worst software because I’m losing the forest for the trees?
Software doesn’t choose who makes it, but *how* it’s made often makes all the difference.
You see, I assume everybody sucks, that there’s always skeletons hiding in closets, and—at times—we’ve all been very bad people.
Acknowledging that everybody sucks, some people suck more than others. There are always degrees of suckage.
The trick is to figure out who sucks less.
There’s an easy way to know if a disinfo campaign on social media is happening:
If you experience a sudden dogpile from accounts you don’t follow, and have never interacted with you—all parroting the same talking points as if they’re speaking from a script.
Excellent detail. And I don’t usually like realism.
Doesn’t surprise me that PC gaming has eclipsed console gaming.
PC gaming is more flexible whereas I feel Xbox and PS are stuck in the past. Every generation, it’s just an upgrade in specs.
Only Nintendo is pushing console innovation.
Despite the fact my server federates on #Threads, my account is invisible there.
Which is exactly why I’m skeptical about Threads. 🙃
A question my daughter asked me: “When you were a kid, did rent #TikTok and #YouTube videos at the video store?”
#Peertube is not dead.
It actually has the 3rd most active MAUs on the #Fediverse. It has more MAUs than #Lemmy.
The problem is discovery on Peertube is pretty bad, so it’s hard to see.
But also, Peertube is expensive to operate. And because Peertube is expensive to operate, Peertube admins won’t let just anyone join a their server. Which means it’s hard to join Peertube.
But even then, Peertube’s MAUs are significant.
Chicken an egg problem. The general public won’t join because the perception is that #Nostr is a one-topic protocol.
The only way it grows is to build apps, like #Olas, with a singularly different purpose.
By the way, Nostr isn’t the only protocol affected by this problem. The perception of #Mastodon is that it’s full of FLOSS dorks.
Yeah, I barely look at the firehose for this exact reason.
Finally grabbed my mitts on the #Olas iOS app, which is similar to #Instagram and #Pixelfed —except it runs on the #Nostr protocol.
And for the first time, I feel like Nostr is actually useful because the Bitcoin talk is at a minimum.
Don’t use the web app—giving web apps your private key is a bad idea! 
The #Pixelfed and #Loops Kickstarter campaign just hit $100,000!
Within four days—and with 1,470 backers—They’ve doubled their initial funding goals!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks
Just blew my daughter’s mind because I told her we used to go to a video store to rent movies.