@joannaholman@aus.social
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joannaholman

@joannaholman@aus.social

@joannamuses on twitter. Thoughts on books, Eurovision, Melbourne happenings, music and culture with bonus architecture and cute animal pictures.

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joannaholman, to random
@joannaholman@aus.social avatar

Kinda a bummer when companies post fake products for April fools day that would be both plausible and great

skinnylatte, to random
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

Whenever I see someone go on about ‘digital nomad visas’ and ‘living somewhere cheaper’ I want to just yell ‘your privilege doesn’t translate to rights; none of this is real’

joannaholman,
@joannaholman@aus.social avatar

@skinnylatte I sometimes see instagram reels of them playing games with visas (like briefly exiting the country and coming back on tourist visas) and am always like imagine the audacity to brag online about living legally dubious ways that could crash down around you at any moment

joannaholman, to Cats
@joannaholman@aus.social avatar

We are trying to get Winston used to dressing like a proper Melbournian

joannaholman, to random
@joannaholman@aus.social avatar

Can waste a lot of time on the website of this costume design company who makes stuff that look like they’re AI fever dreams but are actually real costumes worn at events like Eurovision

https://www.etereshop.com/

joannaholman, to random
@joannaholman@aus.social avatar

Genuinely surprised someone hasn’t tapped into millennial nostalgia by reopening sizzler restaurants. The cheese bread was a magical experience

joannaholman,
@joannaholman@aus.social avatar

@ajsadauskas I feel like there’s a market gap these days for affordable, kid friendly buffets that aren’t one specific cuisine. I know a couple of incredible cheap Sri Lankan buffets, but most other buffets make themselves too expensive by getting into fancy stuff like seafood

adhdeanasl, to random
@adhdeanasl@beige.party avatar

Mastodon is my primary social media, and there’s a lot I dig about it. But if there’s one thing I’d like to change, it’s the way people say THIS IS A CRISIS RIGHT NOW AND IT’S THE MAIN CRISIS AND IF YOU DON’T DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW YOU’RE BAD AND WRONG!!!

Know what? It’s your crisis. Do what you think is right. Stop judging others for having different priorities, political or otherwise. Quit putting everything in black and white, absolute terms. It’s exhausting, and nobody can live like that.

joannaholman,
@joannaholman@aus.social avatar

@adhdeanasl @liztai I very much agree, although unfortunately the same attitude seems to have taken over most social platforms

skinnylatte, (edited ) to random
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

There are lots of YouTubers making videos like ‘what happened to San Francisco’ ‘what happened to Oakland’ that’s just endless poverty porn, cries for policing, and absolutely no recognition of any of the real issues of what actually happened here (housing, inequality, for example)

I see these people in my neighborhood, just driving by, scared to even get out of their cars, just shooting endless poverty porn of people who need help; never helping. Just being Ron DeSantis on a street corner.

joannaholman,
@joannaholman@aus.social avatar

@skinnylatte The place focused tropes on youtube lately are really weird. I'm seeing a lot of the one you mentioned and a lots of "Why (large geographical area with smaller but thriving towns) is empty". I don't know why wild dubiously accurate generalizations about places is such a thing on youtube lately

joannaholman, to Dogs
@joannaholman@aus.social avatar

Dogs aren’t usually allowed in public pools for health reasons but on the last day before they close for the season a pool near me invites all the local dogs for a swim. It’s the happiest thing imaginable

#dogs #dogsofmastodon

A happy looking brown corgi in a green life jacket stands on the edge of a pool
Two large wet black dogs at the edge of a pool
An orange and cream chow chow dog lies in a shallow pool

Techaltar, to random
@Techaltar@mas.to avatar

This video blew my mind. The official Microsoft YouTube channel unironically recommends that you make ChatGPT write all your job applications because "personalized emails are important to stand out", but "now you can do them at 10x speed".

Surely they realize that literally the only thing that makes "personalized messages" valuable is that you know someone took the time to write them and that if everyone makes AI do theirs we are just back to square one, no?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_ix4sKkQ6s

joannaholman,
@joannaholman@aus.social avatar

@Techaltar LinkedIn has a built in AI message writing feature too because apparently LinkedIn still needed ways to be worse

joannaholman, to random
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As someone with a dove tattoo, I find it sorta hard to process that doves and pigeons are the same bird https://birdlife.org.au/news/what-bird-is-that-pigeons-vs-doves/

flockofnazguls, to random
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deleted_by_author

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    joannaholman,
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    @flockofnazguls @TheBreadmonkey cassettes are making a comeback and not just with indie artists, the new Taylor Swift album is getting a cassette release

    joannaholman, to random
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    Multiple job hunting sites I've used have offered to have AI write my cover letter or message to a recruiter. I have of course not taken them up on that. Is it a trap to eliminate the laziest of job hunters? Does any recruiter actually want to read AI generated stuff?

    timrichards, to WFH
    @timrichards@aus.social avatar

    Hmm I can see the point of splitting up stretches of work at home, but I'd be concerned that employers would take advantage of it and you'd end up working extra hours.

    Working 9 to 5? Bosses want to ditch that shift if you work from home

    (maybe paywalled) https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/working-9-to-5-bosses-want-to-ditch-that-shift-if-you-work-from-home-20240312-p5fbva.html

    joannaholman,
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    @timrichards I'd also get concerned that it moves even further into productivity monitoring, quibbling whether the few 5 minute blocks you were away from your desk were really bathroom breaks or whether you were doing something away from your desk you need to catch up on

    timrichards, to random
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    This has just opened in our building. How many dessert places does the CBD need? There are so many. (I'm including all the bubble tea outlets in that score.)

    joannaholman,
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    @timrichards it seems weird that dessert places are booming in a cost of living crisis as it is very much unnecessary discretionary spending? Or maybe people are eating their feelings?

    joannaholman,
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    @timrichards that seems plausible. particularly in Singapore where a lot of international students are from there’s more of a culture of young people using cafes/restaurants as third places for gathering with others so perhaps it’s some of that too

    timrichards, to random
    @timrichards@aus.social avatar

    If I was in charge I'd abolish all public holidays except the following four, and give workers the number of abolished days to use as additional leave:

    New Year's Day
    Australia Day (on a new date)
    Anzac Day
    Christmas Day

    Chosen on the basis that these are the only days that we mark collectively (Christmas being broadly a family-getting-together festive occasion beyond its religious meaning).

    The other seven or so public holidays are just generic days off for most people. Or a complete nuisance to people who aren't full-time workers (raises hand).

    Discuss. :)

    joannaholman,
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    @timrichards Having had employers who were jerks about granting leave requests, not having public holidays around easter would have made getting needed leave around that really difficult when at those jobs.

    joannaholman, to random
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    Most of what’s happened under Elmo’s leadership at Twitter has been terrible but the way community notes point out scams and misrepresentation on paid ads is a thing of beauty. Imagine paying for ads only to have your ad run with a notice of why you’re terrible 😂

    joannaholman, to random
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    Extrodinary article about people facing the joys and struggles of reimagining their lives after a new treatment gives very substantial remission on a condition that was otherwise almost guaranteed to kill them by their 30’s

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/cystic-fibrosis-trikafta-breakthrough-treatment/677471/

    joannaholman, to random
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    All the problems with and drama around AI content are extra rediculous when you consider how little most people need more content. My house contains enough books to last a decade or two and I’m not even managing to keep up with all the episodes of podcasts made just by people I know offline. Why would we toy with things that drown us in even more content?

    timrichards, to random
    @timrichards@aus.social avatar

    A Polish friend sent me this story about kangaroos that escaped from a farm and are now loose in the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia. Gives new meaning to the phrase "a few roos loose in the top paddock"! (Text is in Polish, try the translate function.)

    Kangury zadomowiły się w Tatrach. Uciekinierzy przetrwali zimę - Wiadomości https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/swiat/kangury-w-tatrach-uciekinierzy-przetrwali-zime/nft5kbz

    joannaholman,
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    @timrichards there’s also a part of the UK with a feral escaped wallabies issue

    joannaholman, to random
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    That the Singaporean government paying Taylor Swift incentives to make Singapore her only south East Asian tour stop has turned into an international diplomatic incident proves we live in the silliest timeline https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2024/mar/05/taylor-swift-singapore-exclusive-southeast-asia-eras-tour-deal

    ajsadauskas, (edited ) to tech
    @ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

    In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

    Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

    These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

    Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

    Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

    Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

    (EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

    By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

    Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

    And for a time, it worked.

    But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

    And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

    My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

    Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

    Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

    Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

    At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

    And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

    @degoogle #tech #google #web #internet #LLM #LLMs #enshittification #technology #search #SearchEngines #SEO #SEM

    joannaholman,
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    @ajsadauskas @degoogle I guess the problem though is how you make sure they are actually maintained by a human acting in good faith. The way community Facebook groups meant to be for this kinda thing get spammed by likely fake businesses doesn’t give me hope

    timrichards, to melbourne
    @timrichards@aus.social avatar

    Interesting push for shops, cafes etc to open later in the Melbourne CBD, as there are big numbers of people around in the evenings. Makes sense - I'd particularly like to see cafes stay open later.

    Melbourne’s push for twilight shopping every single night

    (maybe paywalled) https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/open-late-melbourne-s-push-for-twilight-shopping-every-single-night-20240304-p5f9ok.html

    joannaholman,
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    @timrichards It makes sense even if office work patterns revert to a lot more like prepandemic. When I was working full time from the office I had a lunch break that was strictly no longer than 45 minutes. That meant shopping mostly had to happen after work but a lot of places were closing by 5.30

    joannaholman, to random
    @joannaholman@aus.social avatar

    Chocolate 3D printers are the ultimate completely unnecessary but also completely necessary invention

    https://cocoapress.com/

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