when people say “echo chamber” with negative connotations, what they actually mean is “a place that has a consensus reality, and I disagree with that consensus reality”.

a forum for geologists bans flat-earthers. the flat-earthers will call it an “echo chamber”. they’ll ask why the geologists are so afraid to have their beliefs questioned. if they’re so sure the earth is round, shouldn’t they be willing to debate it?

having a consensus reality is good, actually. and enforcement of that consensus is usually necessary to maintain the health of the community. geologists want to talk about…actual geology stuff. if flat-earthers are allowed, they’ll turn every thread into a debate about flat vs. round earth, and it will drown out the actual more interesting conversations the geologists were there for.

when someone says “such-and-such is an echo chamber” you should look to see what the consensus reality of that place is, and what aspects of that consensus reality the complainer disagrees with.

recently, I’ve seen a lot of people calling Bluesky an echo chamber, for example. if you dig into it…usually they posted some transphobic bullshit and got blocked by half the site. Bluesky isn’t perfect, but one thing they’ve gotten right so far is “trans people exist, and have the right to exist, and to live their lives free of harassment” is a pretty strong part of their consensus reality. people who disagree with that are inevitably going to run back to Twitter and whine about Bluesky being an echo chamber.

the primary source of this is annoyingly hard to track down for legislation that passed Congress and was signed by the President.

it turns out that’s because it was part of H.R.815 - “Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes.”

if you want to read the actual text of the law, this PDF starting on page 61.

the gist is that it’s illegal to:

Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.

everyone calls this a “ban on TikTok” and it kinda annoys the shit out of me, because as far as I can tell, the website tiktok.com is probably still going to be available in the US.

what this law actually does is require Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, for US-based users. and makes them subject to a fine of $5000 per user if they don’t comply.

I’m generally in favor of more regulation of tech companies…but this is a really fucking stupid way to do it.

oh golly why would anyone do such a thing

here’s a totally unrelated news article from about a year ago: UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges

Diane Morgan playing the character of Philomena Cunk. some of the best deadpan British humor I’ve ever seen.

hello Cleveland Beehaw! happy to be joining this pleasant little corner of the internet.

good news: I’m in the process of buying a house, after renting my whole life up to now. got lucky that the first home I toured in-person (after viewing probably 100+ homes on Zillow) I liked enough to put in an offer, and had the offer accepted. now I’m just going through inspection and mortgage approval crap.

bad news: I broke my big toe. not broken broken, apparently just a tiny chunk of bone flaked off where the ligament is attached. I put off going to the doctor about it, because I woke up with my toe swollen and painful, Dr. Google suggested that it was probably gout, and I didn’t want to bother with a doctor visit if it was just going to be a lecture about eating healthier. so I hobbled around on a broken toe for almost 2 weeks before going in for X-rays and getting told it was broken. now I’m crossing my fingers that it’ll heal up on its own in the Fancy Medical Shoe they gave me, and I won’t have to have surgery on it. and it’s a good reminder that sometimes I need to push past my ADHD and medical anxiety and go to the doctor anyway.

it might be more complicated than you’re looking for (requires a self-hosted server instead of just a desktop app), but take a look at the ecosystem surrounding Subsonic

Subsonic did some licensing shenanigans, but there’s an actively-maintained GPL3 fork called airsonic-advanced

there’s also alternate implementations, Gonic and Navidrome, that maintain compatibility with the original Subsonic API

because they all work with a common API, there’s a variety of clients that can work with the backend.

I’m also a big fan of Beets for music organization, it’s not tied in to the Subsonic ecosystem so you can use them completely separately if you want. it handles tagging, can fetch lyrics, and can also transcode the library (or an arbitrary subset of it) if you want to send it to a portable device. (not sure if this is what you mean by compatibility)

I currently have Beets organizing everything, run Navidrome on my server pointed at the Beets library directory, then Ultrasonic on my phone, and the Navidrome web interface on my desktop. the combo is especially nice for streaming to my phone - Navidrome will transcode FLAC to Opus on the fly, and Ultrasonic has an option to cache those files locally, and to pre-download them over wifi instead of mobile data. so I have my full collection available on my phone, can stream it from anywhere, and the songs I listen to frequently are already downloaded and I don’t have to waste mobile data, or wait for them to load if I have poor cell signal.