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.
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!🍂☘️
The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).
And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.
50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.
The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels or Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.
Today, we launched our new Mastodon instance. It will ensure a privacy-focused space to engage with and get the latest from our Commissioners, departments, and the official voices of the Commission.
We want to thank @Mastodon for stewarding us and helping us make this possible.
Fostering European digital players is vital to our strategy for a stronger #DigitalEU.
This is a unique opportunity to grow the community even more. Let's get there!
A journey only becomes one when it begins somewhere.
That's why we are grateful to @EDPS for having created and skillfully managed the EUVoice pilot instance.
Your vision has opened new horizons for us and European institutions.
Our new instance will only foster our engagement with this truly amazing community and be a reference for any institution interested in embracing the fediverse and open alternatives.
Hi @nick! Thank you for your questions! Our old instance was created, hosted and managed by @EDPS as part of a pilot project for a Mastodon server. As the pilot project was coming to an end, we decided to build on its success by setting a permanent instance, ensuring the continued and uninterrupted presence of our institution on Mastodon. The new instance is hosted and managed by the European Commission and has no expiry date.
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.
Full text search has been merged in #Mastodonmain branch, and will be in the next (and final?) 4.2.0 beta 🎉
It is opt-in, so it will take some time to be filled with people content as they enable their profile to be indexed, but this was one of the most wanted Mastodon features for some time.
We plan to deploy it to mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the coming days to have a bit more feedback on it and see how it behaves in the wild.
To opt into your content being searchable, once your instance is upgraded to support this feature, head to the your profile, and the new “Privacy and reach" tag, then tick the "include public posts in search”.
We will try to ensure users know this setting exists, nothing 100% defined yet, but we may add a dismissible banner asking to review your privacy settings page.
Full-text search allows you to search for words in the content of statuses (if your instance has ElasticSearch configured), compared to the current version which only allows searching for hashtags.
In addition, you get a whole lot of search modifiers for advanced search (no UI for those yet):
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.