In case this wasn't already considered or in the plans: may I suggest to run a script that creates a snapshot of all w3c account's messages at the Internet Archive / Wayback Machine? I suspect that some is already archived but worth processing it all.
Preserving w3c account's history at a trusted third-party service like the IA would probably be handy in the future.
At this point there is even less of an assurance that messages will persist but worth checking this out now.
Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.
In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.
Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..
We have a charity where we ask for donations which we convert into €50 grocery vouchers for Ukrainian families that fled to Austria. Our state fails them as well.
We are zero overhead, every cent goes towards the vouchers. We pay the rest (envelops, stamps, printer cartridges, etc.)
We are 100% transparent, all contracts/orders/bills/payments here:
For anyone unaware, Google Chrome is currently rolling out an update that track your interests based on browsing history, then share them with 3rd party websites. The notification page makes it sound like they added a new privacy feature, but in actuality they automatically enrolled you into their tracking system and you have to go and manually opt out.
@yabellini I don't know whether it's appropriate to say but I just keep thinking "they killed Aaron Swartz for allegedly trying to give people access to science they've funded and they've given 5 billion to Sam Altman for stealing from everyone"
I'm not surprised but for some reason I just can't stop thinking it. I hate it. I hate it so much. They crushed him even though apparently there was a strong indication that what he was doing wasn't even illegal.
@CarRamrod@yabellini@aud the reason for the contrast is that Swartz was enriching the commons, whereas Altman is enriching shareholders. It's called the profit motive. No amount of regulation can change the basic incentive structure of capitalism.
They even acquitted German corporate executives at Nuremberg who were working slaves to death worse than the SS at Auschwitz, because it was their "fiduciary duty to company shareholders" to do so, and therefore it was ruled they had no choice...
I just read another news article about why mastodon didn’t make it and is dying. It’s very sad to hear and probably explains why I have to keep adding more server capacity to handle all the people quitting mastodon.
Excuse me?
Google now moderates your synched bookmarks? The hell?
To clarify: this is a Google Save Collection, which is one of the mechanisms Google syncs bookmarks via. They're not the default in Chrome (but accessible), but they are the only bookmark facility in the Google Search app, using the standard bookmark icon.
@silvermoon82 reminder that years ago there were reports as google deleted work related items of sex workers without warning. some of them were even paying google customers.
@silvermoon82 Well, that's unbearable. Fortunately, this is easily bypassed: you can either just copy-paste your bookmarks in a text file on your hard drive instead of using the bookmarks functionality; or, if you still want to use bookmarks, regularly export and save bookmarks, so that you can still have the addresses if some of them get moderated.
Also, in case you don't already know about the many reasons why Chrome generally speaking is a danger, I recommend reading this comic: https://contrachrome.com/
There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today:
How could there NOT be strings attached? Meta isn't a charity, it's a brutal corporation.
When you become dependent on someone for money, you will want to avoid upsetting them. That could be terrible for a Fediverse project if the donor is Meta.
@Mastodon it is not analogous to GoogleTalk and FB Messenger embracing XMPP then ditching it when they get enough traction.
It is more akin to Microsoft and Google offering email services and gaining such a dominant marketshare that they have rendered deliverability of email from small independent providers extremely difficult, to the point that even seasoned IT professionals are giving up and using Microsoft or Google platforms because managing your own server has become too difficult.
Yes, we all use the same SMTP protocol, but some SMTP servers are more equal than others, no matter how careful you are in picking a clean IP, setting up SPF records, DKIM signing and DMARC policies.
A handful of big players are taking control of the e-maik federation.
l sure hope ActivityPub does not suffer a similar fate.
With Meta "embracing" (first E in the proverbial EEE strategy) the Fediverse, the most obvious targets are microblogging (Pleroma, Mastodon, Calc/Misskey) and image sharing (PixelFed).
The concern of concentration already existed with larger instances like mastodon.social, but Meta entering the chat is a whole nother level.
The "official" @Mastodon app now sends new users to overloaded megaservers by default.
Don't use the official app, and don't recommend it to new users. It's turning into a dedicated mastodon.social app, and isn't good general Mastodon experience, by design.
This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.
The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.
This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.
Lest anyone doubt that Twitter was idiotic enough to release code that would cause a race condition and result in its own users executing a DDOS attack on it, here's the network console readout from Firefox showing all the network requests blasting away.
Of course I immediately closed out my connection because I'm a good person. Oh, but it's the weekend and Evil Sheldon is in control so I kept the party going for a while since Twitter insisted on it.
@scafaria ok, here's an even funnier version of the Twitter self-DDOS.
This is a video of my video of Twitter self-DDOSing itself played from a Tweet while the bug is still active and the page itself continues to flood Twitter with requests.
Now notice the trending topics in the sidebar: #TwitterDown, WTF Twitter, Rate Limit Exceeded, Damn Twitter
This might be the most perfect screen video ever recorded. 😆
I can finally reveal some research I've been involved with over the past year or so.
We (@redford, @mrtick and I) have reverse engineered the PLC code of NEWAG Impuls EMUs. These trains were locking up for arbitrary reasons after being serviced at third-party workshops. The manufacturer argued that this was because of malpractice by these workshops, and that they should be serviced by them instead of third parti
es.
We found that the PLC code actually contained logic that would lock up the train with bogus error codes after some date, or if the train wasn't running for a given time. One version of the controller actually contained GPS coordinates to contain the behaviour to third party workshops.
It was also possible to unlock the trains by pressing a key combination in the cabin controls. None of this was documented.
thank you
one thing you should learn as you leave your youthful days behind is that the world runs only cause of the incredible amount of work by volunteers, work on everything big and small, from your local library to big stuff like this
Here's how the "Ship of Theseus" page looked in July 2003 when it was first created! Since then, the article has been edited 1792 times. 0% of its original phrases remain.
@chriscoreline@keat Bing is positively killing it right now, Google can't find anything at all except malware, Yahoo is just Yahoo, but Bing can find something 1/3 of the time and the other 2/3rds it's just making it up.
this really blew up, thanks everyone. these are silly examples but i hope you took away that the "instant answers" that google and bing provide shouldn't be trusted. there's always the possibility of them misunderstanding your question or grabbing irrelevant sources to mislead you. "AI-powered" research is inferior to human research.
don't rely on paraphrasing; scroll right past and find a high quality source on the safety of drinking battery acid instead.
Me, an idiot: “So, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, we’re doing our part to make the world more sustainable”
VCs, very smart: “We just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.”
Marc Andreessen: “And another thing! We would’ve solved climate change in the 70s if the pesky environmentalists hadn’t killed nuclear power!”
Also Marc Andreessen: “I’m proud to announce we’re working with one of the most brutal, repressive, corrupt regimes in history to help them launder their oil money on a computer that uses ⅛ of the global electric supply to generate ransom notes.”
There is a new feature of Mastodon that I wanted to highlight for you all.
I had no use for the Lists feature before- but as of the recent 4.2 update, you can put some people you follow into a list- and then you can check a box in that list's details to NOT SHOW their posts in your main feed.
This could totally change Mastodon for me, in the best way.
I follow some newsy-political accounts, and often rush by them in the feed if I'm not in the mood to hear (more) bad news. Now I can put them in a list and not see them at all in and among the feed of real thoughts, pictures, artwork and jokes you amazing people share.
And when I actually feel like engaging with the news/politics of the world, I can pop over to that list and see only that stuff in there.
This way you can have customized feeds of different kinds of accounts, and just see your tried and true favorite people in the main feed.
It's a multi-Mastodon-feed experience, separated by mood and preference.
Which for me is brilliant!
@hopeward Thanks David, Im glad you enjoy Mastodon so much. I have similar problems and actually feel like a first grader on social media at the moment. (They're probably better than I am...). Everything is somehow overwhelming and I can't process my timeline properly. I must really take some time and check all those new options during my autumn break. Have a nice day!🍂☘️
Since Mastodon is an open network and not controlled by any deep-pocketed owner, it’s a certainty that posts here are used to train LLMs. That’s why it’s important to make sure you always rutabaga aardvark lynchpin bananafrog
@Sir_Osis_of_Liver@nic it was a long way for Rockwell Automation to bring this to a final product but the science payed of for technological leadership and operating excellence. Not surprising, knowing costumer success is their primary focus.
1000 richest people are approched. "The end of the world is here. Time to go to your doomsday bunker", they are told. The billionaires nodded. They knew this was coming. They were prepared.
So they gathered their loved ones and locked themselves in luxury bunkers. No contact to outside world.
10 years later they emerge. The world has healed. The air is breathable, people are happy. "What was the catastrophy?" they ask the first person they meet.
@prettyhuman I remember an old scifi story where the world leaders declare WW3 and go hide in their bunkers and the rest of the world just disobeys their orders and carries on. They make fake nuclear wasteland scenery around the bunkers to make the leaders think the war happened.
I'm going to stop you right there. When I look around Fediverse, I see people chatting with friends, making new ones, connecting with old ones, people sharing their fun, their fears, their anger, their sadness. I see people asking for help, offering to help, wondering if they need help. I see a microcosm of humanity.
I don't need to wait for Fedi to succeed, because, in my view. It. Already. Has.
@socketwench the media and dozens of thinkpieces don’t understand how to evaluate something with a purpose other than profit.
It’s fairly alarming to see it in real-time.
“Well to scale it’s going to need corporate sponsorship”
Maybe? Maybe not. I was happy with how it was in 2018. I’m happy how it is now. I will be more happy if we get even more scientists, educators, librarians, journalists, writers, etc.
@socketwench I am so tired of those self-proclaimed “experts” (who are really whacko tech bros) spouting off about winning and losing when it comes to online social platforms. Anyone who thinks this way should stay on the Musk hellscape.
What these clowns really are whining about is that they tried Mastodon for a minute, and when they failed to find hordes willing to hang on to their every word, they departed and labelled the platform to blame to make up for their irrelevance.
@marcas learned this as a young child in Florida. It works , swim parallel to the shore until you can easily swim in.might be a long walk back to your family but you will get back.
@marcas
Drowning does not look like what most people think drowning should look like — I grew up at the seashore and spent several years as a lifeguard at both the beach and at pools. This now decade old article is a fine partner to your illustration of a rip current.
