If you have a big enough portfolio, direct indexing (using something like Frec or Wealthfront) could be an interesting option, and weighting the companies that you don't want at 0.
Wealthfront offers the ability to blacklist stocks in your account (the feature is meant for people legally prohibited from investing in certain tickers).
It won’t exclude from regular indexes, but it will exclude from the direct indexing. I’ve been using it to exclude NVDA ever since it peaked (or at least reached the peak valuation I’m comfortable with)
Wealthfront’s portfolio minimum used to be $100k, but I think they have a new direct indexing product with a $5k minimum.
MS has done this for years. The have had several overall brands. Visual, live, .net, direct, Active, X, etc etc etc. They will even sometimes have a couple in flight at the same time. Right now now it seems to be copilot and m365. I probably even forgot a couple.
Arguably it's even worse when they try to give "unique" names to similar-in-spirit products.
I will never forgive them for all the hair pulling I had to do to try differentiating between Team Foundation Version Control, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Services, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Online, Azure DevOps Server, and Azure DevOps Services.
I have long suspected that Microsoft product branding and naming has more to do with their intended sales and contract structure than actually being informative with respect to what the product does.
> It's not enough for the people who run a service to be good people – they also have to take steps to insulate themselves (and their successors) from the kind of drip-drip-drip rationalizations that turn a series of small ethical waivers into a cumulative avalanche of pure wickedness
I completely disagree with this guy. No amount of process or protocol can be a substitute for an actually decent organization culture; without the latter, everything falls apart no matter how good the former is.
I agree; and whatever you think that is good can possibly be used against you. This is why I think ATProto is possibly dangerous, it makes Big Brother's job easier, as opposed to how ActivityPub does it.
Mostly just markdown-based skills. I've personally had more luck with harnesses, preconfigured permissions, and scripts to automate the frequent workflows, and the repo seems pretty light on that.
We have never had an online open public space where each of us has our voice, can shape our experience, can use our own compsable moderation, can integrate with whatever apps we choose.
How, in spite of having no data on what it would be like, people are so confident that leaving shared open connected mediums behind is the only way to go is such a mystery to me.
The radio station I'm on just played a modem tone, Mountain Chill Radio. But I was already gearing up to write what an amazing era this has been, how incredible a rise it has been that we can connect & talk, with so many people. My dialtone travels so much further & that is glorious. I have no idea, feel like I would have no chance to build a good private network for myself, that my life would stagnante and closed, if I had to build my networks myself in private, smuggling the light of my soul to others rather than being able to let it out.
I am happy to be online. I am proud of my "data", my voice, my app records. There's some less pleasant less shiny corners! But it is mad incredible that I get to do this live, that I get to have so many edges of connection and serendipity. People provide the most wild interesting comments and suggestions and topics, ongoingly. I benefit so much from them sharing their lives.
I spiritually believe deeply that we have our light to share with the universe. To turn your nose up at sharing, to renounce & see only evil, to let the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, this spectre of the closed/bad/no-good controlling systems shape our thinking here is a pandora's box: I say you are shutting the door right as hope is finally trying to get out.
What are your thoughts on people self hosting their own websites and blogs instead of posting to big tech platforms? I’d say that extra openness was a good thing. I absolutely believe in privacy as well, and think ownership is important too.
and I actually don't hate that bit (I really like lexicons, although I might have approached it in a different way) - what I hate is the aggregation layer. I know that it is possible to have an AppView-less atproto app (e.g. RedDwarf), but I feel like much of the ecosystem still defaults to the assumption that it will go through the Bluesky AppView.
Unrelated apps (https://leaflet.pub/, https://tangled.org/, http://semble.so/) don't go through Bluesky Appview (since they need aggregations of different kind of data). I think aggregation is the only model that can compete with centralized services on UX, but of course different apps would need different backends.
How do you feel about the recent communication failures from the team to the userbase? As another builder of an open-source social platform, we must all understand that it is paramount for any company to not antagonize its customers, doubly so for a SOCIAL platform. I do understand that Bluesky and ATProto has to deal with a lot of baggage from both the old userbase and the new influx from the X/Twitter exodus, but engaging in user-antagonistic communication caused me to sour on the whole protocol.
I don't like Jesse Singal's work or his political positions (he fucking sucks!), but this is hardly antagonistic except to maybe a small group of terminally online posters who take posting too seriously.
Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.
Also, it is a very ironic demonstration of the pancakes/waffles meme. Interjecting into an unrelated topic to ask the mods to ban someone you don't like is a tradition as old as dial up BBS. So I'm glad to see the torch is being carried forward to a younger generation.
I don't even think having Jesse Singal on the platform is the problem (like it or not, I believe that all beings must have the right to communicate); the problem here was the communication failure when communicating this decision to the userbase. They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.
It's a CEO's personal account. CEOs do this on Twitter all the time without it becoming a techcrunch article.
Let's just be honest about what happened - the CEO of Bluesky gave a (still not proportionally as) absurd response to an extremely absurd harassment campaign. That's what this and the article intentionally obscure.
Again, this is never how the web was supposed to work, and it (BARELY) holding on to that is the real story.
Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness.
> They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.
The more I dig into it, the more your one-sided whinging falls apart. I agree they could have handled it somewhat better, but I have very little sympathy for the terminally online bullshit that I'm seeing coming from the banned users.
Anyways, I feel we're apart on this issue. Feel free to have the last word if you wish.
> Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose
Wait what do you think “the pancakes/waffles thing” refers to? You posted 2 hours ago that you had never heard of it.
I can see that how it could be confusing because there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay wrote about about people complaining to the CEO when the moderation team doesn’t respond as being equivalent to that meme, and then there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay started posting pictures of pancakes and waffles as some sort of… joke or dunk? I never quite got the 4D comedy chess there.
It doesn’t seem like anybody is “doing the pancakes/waffles thing” in either case. Nobody is asking Jay, as CEO, to ban anyone in the thread about Jay not being the CEO anymore. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone ironically posting metahumor pictures of pancakes.
The term has become so overused that definition creep now means that it could mean “anything that might bother Jay” in this context.
> Wait what do you think “the pancakes/waffles thing” refers to? You posted 2 hours ago that you had never heard of it.
Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.
> I can see that how it could be confusing because there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay wrote about about people complaining to the CEO when the moderation team doesn’t respond as being equivalent to that meme, and then there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay started posting pictures of pancakes and waffles as some sort of… joke or dunk? I never quite got the 4D comedy chess there. It doesn’t seem like anybody is “doing the pancakes/waffles thing” in either case. Nobody is asking Jay, as CEO, to ban anyone in the thread about Jay not being the CEO anymore. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone ironically posting metahumor pictures of pancakes. The term has become so overused that definition creep now means that it could mean “anything that might bother Jay” in this context.
I want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.
> Quote me where I said I've never heard of the pancake/waffles thing? Of course I've heard of it, it's been around for a decade or so.
Here is a link to your comment about not having seen it in the context of the discussion you are posting in. When people talk about the pancakes/waffle thing in this context they are not talking about a meme from several years before Bluesky existed but rather a specific event (which I have apparently failed to communicate to you).
> I want you to read this out loud, to yourself. Maybe you'll feel as insane as I did when I read it.
That seems unnecessarily hostile, especially given I was responding to this comment of yours.
> Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness.
I was talking about the topic of the thread, you seem kind of focused on swearing and insulting people. My bad, I hadn’t seen your other posts and did not realize how much this subject has flustered you.
> When people talk about the pancakes/waffle thing in this context
That makes sense. The original meme was widespread and this is fairly niche.
> That seems unnecessarily hostile, especially given I was responding to this comment of yours.
No man, I really mean it. Maybe it's hostile, but also, people talking about this legitimately sound, I don't know... unhinged? Off? I am flustered, because of how ridiculous this all is to me. I'm serious.
Like, "the CEO of blue sky said waffles to me and it was a 4d comedy dunk!" or whatever. It's like a Ralph Wiggum quote. What the fuck?
So, I think this topic is at its end. But really, read aloud what you wrote. Seriously, try it, you might find it grounding.
It is ok if you just didn’t/don’t know what people were talking about, I hope you are doing well.
To put my point as simply as possible for someone that isn’t ‘terminally online’ and understands that ‘posting isn’t praxis’ but also uses those phrases unprompted: People have criticized Jay for getting Poster’s Madness because of a time when she, as an admin, appeared to respond to any criticism saying everybody else has Poster’s Madness.
im also one of those people who is struggling to understand why people seem so passionate. its a twitter clone.
i also dont know whats going on, although it is a obscure drama from a relatively small community
i think maybe that is this disconnect. that relatively small community is extremely important to you but many other people here lack similar footing. i dont think the hostility is warranted but i can feel myself furrowing my brow and asking out loud what is happening when i read some of the posts from bluesky users in this thread
i guess i am glad i never got big into twitter or bluesky or the attention economy
> Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.
I was in the invite only cohort of Bluesky users and I don't really think so. I think what happened is after the election a bunch of very online, political news addicted anti-Musk folks migrated to Bluesky and created the current culture. Even though I'm pretty sure most folks on the network shared pretty much the same politics, the culture on the network changed completely within a few days of this.
The central complaint doesn't seem to be distaste, but rather the fact that he is uniquely privileged over other users, despite violating Bluesky's terms of service.[0]
The central complaint isn't "distaste" because you can't call for someone to be banned because of a "distaste".
"Jesse Singal has distributed private medical information on Bluesky without the consent of the patient" translates to publishing a quote from a patient included in a therapist's letter of support for hormones.
The problem in this situation is that the complaint itself as well as the whole drama surrounding the person is an exercise of harassment towards Singal. In this context, I don't think that saying "waffles" is out of order. I'm not sure of what else can be done about crybullying, since by its very nature innocent bystanders would be surely affected if action was taken against those complaining.
>“Don’t use Bluesky Social to break the law or cause harm to others,”
Is this, quoted in the change.org, the relevant line?
The law was not broken, it is also fairly evident that the intention was not to "cause harm to others", nor has any harm has seemingly come upon the patient for this (it requires a huge stretch of imagination to think of a case in which it could)
In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably still be considered private, even if it was made publicly accessible. But even if not, Singal says the same leaker directly contacted him with a new leak, which he also published.
> In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably be considered private.
How is that relevant to BSky's terms of service? The information was public and did not identify the person.
> But even if not, Singal says the same leaker directly contacted him with a new leak, which he also published.
I notice that you didn't say whether this new leak was private information, or whether it was also already public knowledge, or whether it in any way identified a person.
I think this entire thread has run its course; if it's not this detail, it'll be another, as a few others have already moved goalposts further down the discussion than the ones you're setting here.
But if you wish to sate personal curiosity, it is in his Substack, linked from the first link I posted, which was itself from the link posted by its GP.
The only thing that seems remotely related to your claims is this:
When the office of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey began an investigation, [Reed] said she handed over the spreadsheet, after scrubbing out the personally identifying information that could spark HIPAA problems. She shared a copy of it with me as well — it contains 17 alleged detransitioners or desisters and 60 allegedly worrisome cases.
What's your problem with what happened exactly? Is it your position that your "private information" cannot be used, ever, to expose what some see as a medical scandal, even though it cannot identify you or in any way be associated with you? What does "private" even mean to you if sharing this dataset did not violate HIPAA?
> In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably still be considered private.
I'd love to see the limitations of this opinion you definitely hold honestly and without favor.
You started by posting a change.org petition that links to a deleted post - in other words an "appeal to petition" that has no evidence. Now you are suggesting there is another leak that was published (presumably not mentioned in this petition?) that also has no evidence. Where is the evidence?
Everything from an actual search engine request for these posts (which to be clear, are deleted) suggests that these are anonymized and public, and contain no identifying information.
1. People want him banned for any and no reason, so this is a post-hoc justification. The same people (let's be real, likely including you) wanted Singal banned the second he made his account.
2. This change.org petition, despite proving how many uninformed people will blindly click agree on a petition, proves nothing about how Singal broke literally any rule anywhere, in law or on Bluesky.
There aren't really any, the user you're replying to is just disappointed the campaign to ban users for no (on platform, or really any) reason was not successful.
I don't care about the specific situation either way; What I am observant of is how the core team has handled their userbase and lack of protocol robustness.
Meh. People are going to antagonize themselves. Trying to win em all is a fools game.
I wrote this to a discord on the 7th:
> i know it's so obviously stupid, but i like that they are having fun with being online, even if it is at their users expense. and omg the users are so so awful to them, so much. again, it seems obviously bad to do, but i can't help but want them to keep at having fun online anyways.
That was in semi private. I'd de-enohazize the expense part seirously, I'd spin it a little differently now, emphasizing more the Douglas Adams nature of it all:
> In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.
But that is also not owning it either, and I think this is an ownable lesson in just being human too, in deciding whether online mediums are corporate, lawyer, marketing, and engineer checked reviewed approved and wise correct words, or whether there must be some permission to be ourselves online, and some expectations that people are only human, and we should be thankful they are sharing their human experiences with us or not. It's not just having fun: whether we can be ourselves online is in question. Whether that is socially allowed.
(And generally I haven't found the character of the team to be deeply off. They haven't been, in my view, going out of their way to create injury, but they have been sharing sides that people have never wanted to hear!)
I see how this has been a bad taste for some. And I don't want to belittle your feelings here at all. Yes being more correct would be the wise obvious choice. Ultimately though I think these team member's are more beholden to remaining human, having fun, enjoying themselves.
And to creating (to credit another soul in the discord) personal / compsable moderation & filter systems (not top down enforcement!) such that they can enjoy being a "main character" online (like it or not), even in the midst of strident focused directed continual hostility. Which is a capability atproto is truly uniquely without compare set up to support & enable.
Props to the team. Please keep posting. Sorry about humanity. Sorry to people who are upset and turned off by this. No one is perfect, we work with what we got, and our responses are human and our own and valid, whether they are the wisest sharpest most all correct choice or no. With the good willing souls, we work towards synthesis & understanding; hopefully all sides find that agreeable.
What do you compare this userbase to? Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? HN? All of these places have similar or worse userbase and worse filtering/blocking options than bsky.
If they want to remain a niche echo-chamber platform rather than become a major social network, that would be an appropriate strategy. However, I expect they have higher ambitions.
What they should also do is redesign (or remove) the "nuclear block" feature. In its current state, it helps perpetuate a hostile and exclusionary atmosphere to new users, which isn't going to help Bluesky grow an active and diverse userbase.
Also, unlike ActivityPub, it's actually useful for building features that normal people expect from social apps — for example, algorithmic feeds and search, and a single interlinked world (rather than fragmented "servers").
Eh, AP has its own sets of problems (underspecified protocol, split-brained on discoverability, new developments are met with hostility in the community)
I still remember the massive shift to SDRP and HDRP.
Honestly, now in retrospect, almost a decade later, I think it was clearly done wrong. It was a mess, and switching over was a multi-week procedure for anything more than a hello world program, and what you got in return wasn’t something that looked better, just something that had the potential to.
Similar story with the whole networking stack. I haven’t used Unity in years now after it being my main work environment for years, but the sour taste it left in my mouth by moving everything that worked in the engine into plugins that barely worked will forever remain there.
Don't forget that some of the new features are mutually incompatible. For example couple years ago you couldn't use the "new ui system" with the "new input system" even when both were advertised as ready/almost ready
I think the main advantage of the XML here is that the model is expected to have a matching end tag that is balanced, which reduces the likelihood of malformed outputs.
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