Why? This cannot possibly have any legal weight. Some adults look young. Some kids look old. The very idea is broken from the outset.

I can’t tell if this is incompetence or malice.

Thanks for the info. I was not aware that Bluesky had public, shareable block lists. That is indeed a great feature.

For anyone else like me who was not aware, I found this site with an index of a lot of public block lists: https://blueskydirectory.com/lists . I was not able to load some of them, but others did load successfully. Maybe some were deleted or are not public? I’m not sure.

I’ve never been heavily invested in microblogging, so my first-hand experience is limited and mostly academic. I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, though. I would not have realized this feature was available in Bluesky if you hadn’t mentioned it and I didn’t find that index site in a web search. It doesn’t seem easily discoverable within Bluesky’s own UI.

Edit: I agree, of course, that there is a larger systemic problem at the society level. I recently read this excellent piece (very long but worth it!) that talks a bit about how that relates to social media: https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/ . Here’s a relevant excerpt:

If this truly is the case—if the only way to improve our public internet is to convert all humans one by one to a state of greater enlightenment—then a full retreat into the bushes is the only reasonable course.

But it isn’t the case. Because yes, the existence of dipshits is indeed unfixable, but building arrays of Dipshit Accelerators that allow a small number of bad actors to build destructive empires defended by Dipshit Armies is a choice. The refusal to genuinely remodel that machinery when its harms first appear is another choice. Mega-platform executives, themselves frequently dipshits, who make these choices, lie about them to governments and ordinary people, and refuse to materially alter them.

Do you think this is a systemic problem, or just the happenstance of today? Is there something about Bluesky’s architecture or governance that makes it more resilient against that (particularly in the long term)? Or will they have all the same problems as they gain more users and enable more federation with other servers?

I’d rather have something like a “code grammar checker” that highlights potential errors for my examination rather than something that generates code from scratch itself

Agreed. The other good use case I’ve found is as a faster reference for simple things. LLMs are absolutely great for one-liners and generating troublesome (but logically simple) things like complex xpath queries. But I still haven’t seen one generate a good script of even moderate complexity without hand-holding. In some cases I’ve been able to get usable output with a few shots, saving me a bit of time compared to if I’d written the whole darned thing from scratch.

I’ve found LLMs very useful for coding, but they aren’t replacing my actual coding, per se. They replace looking things up, like through man pages, language references, or StackOverflow. Something like ffmpeg, for example, has a million options and it is always a little annoying to sift through the docs manually when I just need to do one specific task.

I’m sure it’ll happen sooner or later. I’m not naive enough to claim that “computers will never be able to do $THING” anymore. I’ll say “not in the next year”, though.

I verified that the USERNAME, PASSWORD, and URL vars are being passed to the subshell.

But are they being passed into the script? Normal behavior would be for variables to propagate to subshells but not to scripts/commands, unless you explicitly export them (e.g. export USERNAME='my_username' instead of just USERNAME='my_username'). Is that what’s happening here?

Another possibility is that when the script runs, it is run with a different shell, like sh or zsh. Does your script have a #! line at the top, and is it pointing to the same version of bash you are running in Terminal?

If you run echo $PATH; which curl in the script vs directly in your Terminal, do they output the same results? This is a bit of an edge case, but I’ve been stymied before by having multiple versions of curl installed (e.g. via homebrew and via my distro) and different PATHs in different contexts causing unexpected behavior.