In non-software-developer fields, afaict, it creates bullshit at unprecedented speeds.

A favorite use-case I heard is telling an AI chat bot to reply to spam emails and just drag on the conversation.

As a developer it is just one more tool.

yes… not black and white

My mental model for responsibility is that everyone is trying to shift it elsewhere. The hosting provider (eg Netlify) will hold me responsible, and has the power to remove my website. Legally I am not sure. Geographic location is a factor of course.

As a user of the em dash — that predates AI — that is up there in my list of things that AI has made worse. I guess I just have to stop now. There is the en dash… or the double hyphen… you have to make things look worse so people don't think you're a machine.

Thank you for clarifying; that's a big difference.

There are two more important pieces of the puzzle here.

1. On fly.io, inbound bandwidth is free. So you can drink from the firehose as much as you want. (Egress bandwidth does cost.)
2. Cloudflare can give you a database and "worker" at a free tier.

So you can do everything without spending money.

Of course, that brings a vast array of other, more subtle moderation concerns.

Anyway, thanks for reading my big thread about data & Bluesky.

This is my announcement of two new template repos.

Since Bluesky (or another PDS) is hosting the content, you don't have to think about moderation.

Moderation was always the hard/bad part. That's why in the past I was very into e2ee — because if you cannot see the content, then you don't have to moderate it.

That's where the real, key innovation of Bluesky is. They have factored things at a higher semantic level than ever done before.

You now have an abstraction for things like posts, users, feeds.

It is possible to make an app without ever thinking about servers (or serverless platforms).

You are now responsible for anything that any user of the app posts. If you are hosting blobs, then forget about it. You're now responsible for any and all of the disturbing & illegal images people will post.

When you are serving things on the internet, you are ultimately responsible for whatever content comes down the pipe. It is your server, and someone has to be responsible for it.

For "web 2" websites — pages that host user-generated content — that is an issue.

It took a moment to sink in, but I realized that that means they've effectively factored out moderation. That is a big deal. Moderation is the hard part. Not only is it hard, but it is unpleasant as well. Impossible to get right at global scale, in fact.

TIL the bullet cat has its own website. ❤️