It’s been an incredibly slow churn to progress.

The most noteworthy thing at yesterday’s hearing was a report on a Unclassified secret access program - Immaculate constellations which outlines types of UAPs and their behavior. The problem is it’s brought in via an unverified source, either current or former member of the DoD. Also it’s improperly formatted for a DoD doc. But that can possibly be explained via them editing it for public use. Otherwise it was mostly just what’s already been known just told under oath in an official context. It also has a much greater emphasis on USOs(underwater UAPs).

The most interesting and ironclad to come from everything so far has been Schumer’s Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2024 (UAPDA) which is attempting to get passed with the NDAA (Annual defense act). In the act it lays out the groundwork for UAPs existence and that the government is in charge of both reconnaissance and recovery of them, and most of the secrets are held behind the Department of Energy.

A lot of Chuck Schumer’s comments and amendments play relatively safe though saying “if this exists” then here’s a law. But there was also a lot of work put into a 2023 UAPDA with that NDAA and actually got shot down by Republican military industrial complex lackeys so take from that as you will.

The 2023 amendment was fought over heavily because it required a return of all classified uap biological materials and non biologics to be returned to the US government from private contractors. Which is another big bullet point.

I think the most news we’ll get soon is whether the 2024 version of the UAPDA is included in the NDAA this year.

Democracy seems to be crumbling pretty hard to shitty education systems combined with heavy propaganda and misinformation. I’ve been trying to think of a solution that still allows a proper resilient democratic system to thrive, but I’m not sure one exists.

I’ve been a heavy competitive gamer for 10 years now, kernel anticheat has been an incredible blessing developed these last few years despite every non-player calling it malware. Meanwhile all the consistent players rejoice and newer players don’t have to deal with constantly wondering if someone’s hacking every single lobby.

You can see just how much this has directly impacted high elo League of Legends players via Riots dev blog after their implementation. The most notable:

more than 10% of Master+ games had a cheater in them.

Injury clip: https://streamable.com/pkdud0

While they definitely do this for handles I’m pretty confident this is also done for DIDs (Decentralized identifiers) and it doesn’t provide a solution if you lose your domain. I think Bluesky (Appview) specifically gets around this by also tying your DID:web to your DID:plc, in case of domain loss. So I think it exists on the protocol but they don’t automatically utilize the decentralization for end-user experience(domain loss) but other appviews can. But I could be wrong.

https://atproto.com/specs/did

I truthfully don’t think this bridge will work long-term because it’s rather clunky for the end users. I think mastodon needs an integration built into their platform so instances can have the choice to turn on a two way atProto connection that creates accounts under the instance identity and writes and reads post to atProto.

Bluesky doesn’t need to adjust anything as they’ll pick up anything written to atProto.

Aren’t identities already decentralized by using domains you own as your identity? Ex. Incase you’re unfamiliar, my Bluesky @ is my domain I own.

Used Mastodon for two days. Not a great platform imo. Been using Bluesky for a few months and having a decent time, but sometimes it’s hard getting fed the content I want (not sure if it exists in general there).

Also have been a decently heavy Twitter user since 2013 ish

Instances aren’t necessarily a thing in atProto because an instance usually refers to a single server. But you can see people’s posts from selfhosted PDS/relays yes.

If you can build your own or selfhost each of the following to read and push back to all of the atProto protocol:

1. App

2. Backend Relay

3. Moderation

4. Algorithm

And you still say that’s not decentralized I’m not sure what you’re looking for nor what your definition of decentralization is.

Open protocols and APIs seem pretty meaningless to me if there’s a single point of control for the brand.

You’d need to expand on this more for me to understand you. Yes there’s a single point of control from a moderation standpoint (labeler), as there is on Lemmy instances. But anyone can host their own ATProto relays and the Bluesky relay will federate with each other automatically.

If everyone migrates to bluesky and then bluesky says “of we’re not doing that open thing anymore because of this new embiggened thing we’re doing” everyone will still be on bluesky.

Not necessarily because the accounts are atProto accounts and you can migrate to another platform(albeit another doesn’t exist yet) without data loss. As far as the Bluesky app goes it really just shows you atProto posts and hosts your data (similar to Lemmy instances) they as an entity just also maintain the OSS backend Relay crawler and more.

I really think a lot of people have this perspective that it’s not decentralized just because it truly is a lot more complicated due to there being like 5 different moving pieces of decentralization (PDS, Relay, Appview, tbd labeler, algorithm) and they do a great job at obscuring it for regular users which is a great thing. And nobody has really tinkered around and set-up any sites or integrations with it yet. I’m personally trying to get a two way mastodon integration as it’s possible but nobody has done a solid implementation (just somewhat gnarly bridges between protocols)

This isn’t necessarily true. Just because their architecture is harder and not a simple server host does not strip away its decentralization.

They have decentralized the following:

• App access (can build your own or show openProto posts in your platform

• Algorithms

• Relay (backend albeit rumored to be expensive)

• More if you consider the domain name hosting stuff and media storage control. Also moderation is planned to be decentralized.

I’ve been a huge Moody believer for the past few years glad to see him get an extension.

Best of luck to you in the afterlife brother you’ll need it.

Would love for you to describe exactly how it’s more complicated. From my perspective I click a single button and it’s set up. To log in I get a notification on my device, I click a button and I’m logged in.

Plenty more to go.

If you’re referring to innocent women and children yes that’s accurate.

The idea behind federation is great but in practice it’s splintered communities far too much to serve its purpose at a large scale.

The unfortunate truth is protesting will do nothing. Just last year the massive college campus protests were brushed off as “kids who haven’t grown up yet” by Democrats.

It’s a pretty hot take but imo the only path forward in the US is a regime change if you catch my drift. At the end of the day you won’t get a group of politicians to all agree to light their paycheck on fire. (AIPAC)

Also the people talking about added complexity? I’m convinced all the complaints are from people who haven’t set one up or used one and are immediately writing it off. Adding one is a single click of a button.

Then to sign in I literally just get a thumbprint request on my phone after entering my username. It’s far far simpler than passwords and MFA.

I have passkeys setup for almost everything and on most sites I just enter my username then I get a request on my phone to sign in. Scan my thumbprint and it’s good to go. It’s actually so much simpler than passwords / MFA, but admittedly I haven’t had to migrate devices or platforms.

I have everything setup through protonpass right now