Took way longer than it should have but happy it’s finished, how it turned out, and in time for autumn! One skein, relatively easy intro to cables I guess, hard part was just remembering numbers.
What pattern is this? I figure I should learn how to cable sometime, and if you used this as your intro to cabling it’s probably alright for people new to it.
Merrily We Roll Along broke my heart and I love it so much. Wonder if this revival will get a soundtrack, I don’t quite like the existing ones for this show.
To be honest I only read the September one, but as a casual jazz enjoyer Strayhorn sounds cool. Gutenberg! the Musical makes me think it might have Something Rotten! vibes.
Also, just by skimming, it looks like some punctuation from the article got turned into question marks on Kbin.
I had no idea what to knit so I asked some people on this community for some help in this thread. Someone suggested I knit for charity, and look up what the charities want for inspiration. Actually found something that the rest of you might want to know about, especially since it comes with patterns! They’re for the 7 x 9 inch...
Started on a rectangle today. Trying to figure out the gauge. At my tightest I still expanded past the 7 inch mark with size 7 needles and yarn that’s probably a lighter weight than asked for (bought it forever ago and do not have the label). Started over with 30 stitches instead of the suggested 35 and it seems okay now.
The filmed West End stage musical The Prince of Egypt will be released on BroadwayHD on November 15, and available to buy or rent on digital from December 5....
Glad to hear it’s growing. I’ve noticed you’re pretty much the only contributor, aside from my question the other day that pretty much duplicates an introduction question from your welcome post. I’m not too sure what to post as I don’t spend too much time staying up-to-date with the latest Broadway news—I mostly exist in my own little theatre community where I spend most of my time working on our current show.
I feel like the only humor the show has is sex jokes and theatre references. As someone who enjoys both, as someone whose favorite line in the show is “don’t be a penis, the man is a genius,” it gets grating. The references are especially grating in “It’s a Musical”. In that song, a few references are done elegantly, but most just sound like someone took random clips from their favorite musicals and set them in sequence with no regard to how well they flow together.
Also, the vocal music in the back of the libretto has some mismatches with the piano/conductor score. Incredibly irritating.
All the songs are catchy, though, and the Keyboard I part is pretty easy for me.
I try to contribute to the Fediverse for communities I care about, and am doing my best to post frequently without being annoyingly spammy.
Yes, I'm also music directing! I really enjoy doing that. I actually wanted to make m/MusicDirectors and m/TheatreKeyboardists, but the community for both of them on Reddit is already so tiny I figured I'd be the only user of them at all on the Fediverse. I also private messaged the owner of r/MusicDirectors and the owner of r/TheatreKeyboardists on Reddit about possibly migrating to the Fediverse and neither of them ever got back to me :(
Honestly, I didn’t care about the loss of 3rd party apps. My experience on the official Reddit app was always smooth. What I didn’t like was the way Reddit treated the protesting subreddits, mods, and users; and how blind users were going to be affected by the loss of 3rd party apps. I know Reddit said something about how they would work on accessibility features and leave 3rd party apps open if they were accessibility-focused. Here’s the reply to that on archive.org.
I do not have the time, patience, or thick skin needed to be a moderator. I do have a community or two I’d like to create on Kbin and post to, though. Is it currently possible for this set of steps to happen?...
I’m fine with being active in the place, doing lots of advertising, doing my best to get the place off the ground, writing up rules, etc.
I’m not fine with being the first line of defense against some troll posting gore. I also know that I tend to be pretty oversensitive and might use moderator powers to remove replies that really should have stayed up. Hence “I do not have the… thick skin needed to be a moderator”.
So yeah, this is totally self-serving. Don’t feel like putting myself through the gore, putting others through unfair reply removals, or of putting myself through “oh my god fucking powertripping mod” criticism (whether warranted or unwarranted), better stay out of that position of power in the first place.
Are you saying that you think I have zero chance of getting a magazine off the ground so I have more posters than just myself, or zero chance of finding someone else who is willing to moderate? I’m not entirely sure I understand your reply.
m/savedyouaclick. It does exist at @savedyouaclick, but that won’t federate over to kbin for me. I tried multiple times to get the magazine over here, multiple times entering @savedyouaclick@lemmy.nrd.li in the search bar and it’s still not here so might as well remake it. I’m guessing the reason for this is the same reason behind this issue about a magazine from a specific instance not federating over on kbin’s codeberg: something that is fixed in later versions of lemmy. Not sure if lemmy.nrd.li is running a version late enough that it fixes this issue or not.
I also intended to make a couple other magazines that did not have any equivalent I could find on the lemmy.world community search (since it’s one of the biggest instances I figure it’ll show me the most communities, including communities that are not on lemmy.world), but they now have an equivalent!
I go against recommended practice and have different vaults for different things in my life. The academic note vault is separate from the personal vault is separate from the creative projects vault. I have also committed sacrilege by not having many notes linked to each other. I’m trying to migrate a lot of notes from Google...
Part of my creative projects vault is ideas for a homebrew D&D campaign! What's yours like? I need to flesh out my world a little and add a few spicy situations before it's ready for players.
Social media can feel like a giant newsstand, with more choices than any newsstand ever. It contains news not only from journalism outlets, but also from your grandma, your friends, celebrities and people in countries you have never visited. It is a bountiful feast.
But so often you don’t get to pick from the buffet. On most social media platforms, algorithms use your behavior to narrow in on the posts you are shown. If you send a celebrity’s post to a friend but breeze past your grandma’s, it may display more posts like the celebrity’s in your feed. Even when you choose which accounts to follow, the algorithm still decides which posts to show you and which to bury.
There are a lot of problems with this model. There is the possibility of being trapped in filter bubbles, where we see only news that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. There are rabbit holes, where algorithms can push people toward more extreme content. And there are engagement-driven algorithms that often reward content that is outrageous or horrifying.
Yet not one of those problems is as damaging as the problem of who controls the algorithms. Never has the power to control public discourse been so completely in the hands of a few profit-seeking corporations with no requirements to serve the public good.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which he renamed X, has shown what can happen when an individual pushes a political agenda by controlling a social media company.
Since Mr. Musk bought the platform, he has repeatedly declared that he wants to defeat the “woke mind virus” — which he has struggled to define, but that largely seems to mean Democratic and progressive policies. He has reinstated accounts that were banned because of the white supremacist and antisemitic views they espoused. He has banned journalists and activists. He has promoted far-right figures such as Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate, who were kicked off other platforms. He has changed the rules so that users can pay to have some posts boosted by the algorithm, and has purportedly changed the algorithm to boost his own posts. The result, as Charlie Warzel said in The Atlantic, is that the platform is now a “far-right social network” that “advances the interests, prejudices and conspiracy theories of the right wing of American politics.”
The Twitter takeover has been a public reckoning with algorithmic control, but any tech company could do something similar. To prevent those who would hijack algorithms for power, we need a pro-choice movement for algorithms. We, the users, should be able to decide what we read at the newsstand.
In my ideal world, I would like to be able to choose my feed from a list of providers. I would love to have a feed put together by librarians, who are already expert at curating information, or from my favorite news outlet. And I’d like to be able to compare what a feed curated by the American Civil Liberties Union looks like compared with one curated by the Heritage Foundation. Or maybe I just want to use my friend Susie’s curation, because she has great taste.
There is a growing worldwide movement to provide us with some algorithmic choice — from a Belgrade group demanding that recommender algorithms should be a “public good” to European regulators who are demanding that platforms give users at least one algorithm option that is not based on tracking user behavior.
One of the first places to start making this vision a reality is a social network called Bluesky, which recently opened up its data to allow developers to build custom algorithms. The company, which is financially supported by the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, said that 20 percent of its 265,000 users are using custom feeds.
On my Bluesky feed, I often toggle between feeds called Tech News, Cute Animal Pics, PositiviFeed and my favorite, Home+, which includes “interesting content from your extended social circles.” Some of them were built by Bluesky developers, and others were created by outside developers. All I have to do is go to My Feeds and select a feed from a wide menu of choices including from MLB+, a feed about baseball, to #Disability, one that picks up keywords related to disability or UA fundraising, a feed of Ukrainian fund-raising posts.
Choosing from this wide selection of feeds frees me from having to decide whom to follow. Switching social networks is less exhausting — I don’t have to rebuild my Twitter network. Instead, I can just dip my toes into already curated feeds that introduce me to new people and topics.
“We believe that users should have a say in how their attention is directed, and developers should be free to experiment with new ways of presenting information,” Bluesky’s chief executive, Jay Graber, told me in an email message.
Of course, there are also challenges to algorithmic choice. When the Stanford political science professor Francis Fukuyama led a working group that in 2020 proposed outside entities offer algorithmic choice, critics chimed in with many concerns.
Robert Faris and Joan Donovan, then of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, wrote that they were worried that Fukuyama’s proposal could let platforms off the hook for their failures to remove harmful content. Nathalie Maréchal, Ramesh Srinivasan and Dipayan Ghosh argued that his approach would do nothing to change the some tech platforms’ underlying business model that incentivizes the creation of toxic and manipulative content.
Mr. Fukuyama agreed that his solution might not help reduce toxic content and polarization. “I deplore the toxicity of political discourse in the United States and other democracies today, but I am not willing to try solving the problem by discarding the right to free expression,” he wrote in response to the critics.
When she ran the ethics team at Twitter, Rumman Chowdhury developed prototypes for offering users algorithmic choice. But her research revealed that many users found it difficult to envision having control of their feed. “The paradigm of social media that we have is not one in which people understand having agency,” said Ms. Chowdhury, whose Twitter team was let go when Mr. Musk took over. She went on to found the nonprofit Humane Intelligence.
But just because people don’t know they want it doesn’t mean that algorithmic choice is not important. I didn’t know I wanted an iPhone until I saw one.
And with another national election looming and disinformation circulating wildly, I believe that asking people to choose disinformation — rather than to accept it passively — would make a difference. If users had to pick an antivaccine news feed, and to see that there are other feeds to choose from, the existence of that choice would itself be educational.
Algorithms make our choices invisible. Making those choices visible is an important step in building a healthy information ecosystem.
A Reddit replacement, except without doomscrolling. On Reddit I would follow communities for hobbies and have discussions about the hobby, and I’d like to do the same here. I would also doomscroll news and all the outraged comments on the news, and I would very much not like to do the same thing here.
On Kbin, there isn’t an easily-accessible Discovery feed, which is where I would click and fall into the doomscrolling and people yelling at the news. Once it gets implemented for those who want it, I dearly hope we can hide it. Out of sight, out of mind. Yes, I know it’s my own fault for clicking the Discovery button in the first place. I’ll stick to the magazines I /sub to, thank you very much. I can find new interests perfectly well through real-life friends, and learn about the news from actual news articles.
Cables can suck a dick (lemmy.world)
Took way longer than it should have but happy it’s finished, how it turned out, and in time for autumn! One skein, relatively easy intro to cables I guess, hard part was just remembering numbers.
Overview of Spring and Fall New York Musicals (www.nytimes.com)
The New York Times' roundup of musicals, plays and festivals opening in New York over the next few months. Musicals include:...
Found knitting patterns for charity: Warm Up America!
I had no idea what to knit so I asked some people on this community for some help in this thread. Someone suggested I knit for charity, and look up what the charities want for inspiration. Actually found something that the rest of you might want to know about, especially since it comes with patterns! They’re for the 7 x 9 inch...
The Prince of Egypt West End Proshot Coming to BroadwayHD (www.theatermania.com)
The filmed West End stage musical The Prince of Egypt will be released on BroadwayHD on November 15, and available to buy or rent on digital from December 5....
Favorite musical? (kbin.cafe)
Mine is The Music Man. Love all the music and the counterpoint duets!
[m/Musicals] [not mine] For lovers, performers and creators of musical theatre (or theater). (kbin.cafe)
@musicals...
Musicals - For lovers, performers and creators of musical theatre (or theater). (kbin.cafe)
@musicals...
Lea Michele Ends ‘Dream’ Run in ‘Funny Girl’ After Reinvigorating Show (www.nytimes.com)
Highlights for people who can't get past the paywall:...
Can I create a magazine, then step down from a moderator position? (kbin.cafe)
I do not have the time, patience, or thick skin needed to be a moderator. I do have a community or two I’d like to create on Kbin and post to, though. Is it currently possible for this set of steps to happen?...
Link to your digital garden (kbin.cafe)
I’m interested in seeing other peoples’ digital gardens. Feel free to link yours here!
How do you personally use Obsidian?
I go against recommended practice and have different vaults for different things in my life. The academic note vault is separate from the personal vault is separate from the creative projects vault. I have also committed sacrilege by not having many notes linked to each other. I’m trying to migrate a lot of notes from Google...
deleted_by_moderator
How are you using or hoping to use kbin?
With Twitter and Reddit the way that they are, many people are turning to federated servers as their online home, kbin among them....