jwz

The meandering gospel of Peter:

Peter Thiel is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg. [...]

On the day of Thiel's final lecture in San Francisco, as the mostly young and mostly male crowd lined up to get in, a group of about 20 protesters stood out front holding anti-Palantir and anti-Ice signs that said things such as "Predatory tech", "We do not profit from people who profit from misery" and "Not today Satan".

A trio of self-described "satanists" dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attenders carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. "Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby's blood?" they asked. Then they performed what they called a "dark ritual", dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart's Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: "Take us to your personal hell ... Thank you for being our dark lord." [...]

Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: "It's become quite difficult to hide one's money."

I am constantly re-discovering that billionaires are some of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet.

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Against my better judgment, I let my staff start using Basecamp about 7 years ago, and now, for reasons, I would prefer to just be self-hosting everything like we should have done from the start. Do you have experience making the transition from Basecamp to something open source and self-hosted?

To be clear, what we use Basecamp for is task management, document editing and file storage, and that's about it. I gather that Basecamp is buzzword-compatible with all kind of other business-brain crap that we have never used, but I don't know what "Gantt" or "Scrum" mean and don't care to.

I think what we need is just a bug tracker and a wiki, whose UI isn't terrible, and that also works well on mobile.

Suggestions?

Things that should not need to be said but do:

• Do not suggest software that you do not use.
• Do not just Google it for me.

Previously, previously.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 255.

Or you can call it 0xFF if you're nerdy.

Last night we did a screening of The Lost Boys, and it was epic. Amongst all of our Cyberdeliae, this was the one with the rowdiest audience: lots of screaming and singing along. Excellent costume contest entries, too.

For this one I did something a little different from the others: instead of DJ music over abstract visuals, I filled the pre-roll and intermission with music videos featuring VAMPIRES. I only needed 30 and 20 minutes respectively, but I immediately had way more than that, in fact, more than enough for a mixtape.

It has only been two weeks since the previous mixtape, but hey, why not.

So, in the immortal words of The Kurgan, "Happy Halloween, Ladies!"

Azhdarchid:

So, if you're online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. [...]

For the record: I think Jay Graber is a transphobe; I think there's just too much evidence in her behavior to not read that into her actions at this point. No normal person would go out of their way to court Jesse Singal. A lot of this stuff feels motivated by a glaring animus towards the userbase that Bluesky has attracted; and because this userbase formed around people who simply couldn't justify being on Twitter any more, said userbase is full of highly visible trans users.

But, we can also view it as just run of the mill stuff for any kind of corporate social media platform; you expect them to be unaccountable, to have vague policies that are enforced with no consistency, and so on. What distinguishes the Bluesky case, though, is that Bluesky has a very particular ideology that Graber and her cohorts push, which is that they are 'stewards of the AT Protocol'. She has repeatedly made this point: you can take your ball and go home.

Graber posts something like this basically every other day. So, let's examine her claim a little bit. [...]

ATProto's complicated architecture more or less puts running an alternative app into the realm of well-funded nonprofits and startups, as opposed to Mastodon instances which can easily be run by hobbyists on their own domestic hardware. [...]

AT Proto decentralization doesn't exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won't be for years. Most of the work driving effective decentralization is being done by third parties, who have limited guarantees about future compatibility with possible breaking changes on Bluesky's end.

Bluesky inc isn't really making 'a protocol', they're making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate. [...] at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don't run a social media platform. [...]

As it stands, for users using Bluesky's app view -- which is to say nearly everybody -- alternate moderation services can only ever be additive. Which is to say, you can never see posts that Bluesky doesn't want you to see, but you're free to ban more posts or users beyond what Bluesky will ban. This system means that Bluesky inc retains the power to use their effective monopoly to suppress speech Graber finds distasteful or ban porn that the moderators think is gross.

But at the same time they can hide behind these third-party 'labelers' as an excuse when called out on their neglect in dealing with figures like Singal, a serial harasser and all-around scumbag.

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Today I dropped DNA Lounge Membership Card Nine Nine Nine in the mail! Who will be our lucky one thousand? We're gonna need another digit.

We currently have 472 active members, but new sign-ups have slowed to a trickle. It's a pretty good deal, you know. And it also helps us out a lot. Tell your friends!

Today is the last day when you can vote for us in Best of the Bay, so if you haven't done that yet, please do! Voting for us is helpful for the business and we appreciate it.

We're getting Halloween started this weekend with Dark Sparkle, After Life, and our screening of The Lost Boys...

You gotta come to Lost Boys, it's going to be "hella rad". I added karaoke subtitles to the musical bits so you can sing along with Cry Little Sister and other hits. Vampire costume contest!

Haven't seen this before. Credits of film from major Hollywood studio beg AI companies to pretty please not train on it:

Eponysterically, the movie was "Caught Stealing (2025)".

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The SIM Farm Hardware Seized by the Secret Service Is Also Popular With Ticket Scalpers:

The technology used, which can be seen clearly in photos released by the Secret Service, are regularly used by SMS scammers, spammers, and marketers, yes, but the tech is also extremely widely used by ticket scalpers seeking to create lots of Ticketmaster accounts with which to buy tickets. [...]

Like many "anti-scalping" and anti-fraud measures taken by Ticketmaster, relatively recent updates that require SMS verification to create a new Ticketmaster account and immediately before buying tickets hasn't actually stopped scalping. Instead, it has created a new underground market for tools that make SMS authentication at bulk easier. By adding this barrier to entry, Ticketmaster has ensured that normal fans have one single attempt to buy tickets, while motivated ticket scalpers with specialized tech can have many attempts at buying tickets. [...]

"Proxies" and real SIM cards that can receive SMS messages have become critical to the ticket scalping industry. The way ticket scalping works now is that big time brokers will create many (hundreds or thousands) of unique Ticketmaster accounts, each associated with their own phone number.

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Please enjoy jwz mixtape 254.

My latest big dumb art project is hand-crafted, bespoke QR codes.

"Hey Kate, tell him about the QR."
"There's an Olympic sized QR code on the roof. Take the stairs over there."
"Yeah. Sure."

So yeah, I painted a 25' QR code on the roof. And like the Nazca lines of Peru, it can only be properly scanned from Heaven.

But rather than waiting for up to two years for Google Maps to update, here's a video! This is probably a view of DNA Lounge and environs that you have never seen before. Thanks to Pete Setchell for bringing down his drone (a DJI Flip) and shooting this video for us.

Also, a reminder! There is just one week left for you to vote for us in Best of the Bay... Voting for us is helpful and we really appreciate it!

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