@maegul@hachyderm.io
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

maegul

@maegul@hachyderm.io

A little bit of computing and a little bit of neuroscience.

he/him/they

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

NanoRaptor, to random
@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social avatar

Same picture. Same bullshit.

A report card from year 10. It reads in part: English, Grade A, Dana is a very able and talented student who does not always give of her best. This failure to invest much energy in her English prevents her from achieving her full potential although this is not the say that this work is of an inferior standard. Also, Mathematics (Advanced), Grade A, Dana is a keen student but her work lacks discipline. She has a lot of ability but this needs further development.

rysiek, to random
@rysiek@mstdn.social avatar

A few days ago @ward tooted about how it's somehow "AI art", but if it's human-made, inexplicably it's just "content":
https://easymode.im/notes/9s9fhdg8jh3gi3h7

His toot has been living rent-free in my head ever since.

I had ranted a few times before how "content" is a corporate-y way to devalue art. How "user-generated content" is a term designed to make it easier to deny the significance (not just monetary) of the amazing stuff people create online.

Contrasting this with "AI art" is jarring, and spot-on. 👀

rysiek,
@rysiek@mstdn.social avatar

"It's art only if it was auto-generated by a stochastic black box controlled by a multi billion dollar corporation; otherwise it's just sparkling content." 🧐

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

"Growing concerns" that Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands, according to Morgan Stanley

Are GLP-1 drugs the first real threat to the hyper-processed food and alcohol industries?

https://curingaddiction.substack.com/p/growing-concerns-that-ozempic-will

jrm4, to mastodon
@jrm4@mastodon.social avatar

I'm calling it

Threads is the actually evil thing you imagine Twitter is

Twitter's actually still doing okay

jack, to random
@jack@berlin.social avatar

Bret Victor on the end of large scale public funding for research:

“If this continues, things will stagnate and everyone will say that it happened because all the low-hanging fruit has been taken, but really there’s plenty left. You just need the right kind of research environment.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJm44LJDU44

liztai, to Netflix
@liztai@hachyderm.io avatar

The drama's depiction of China is, well, problematic. How did the people of China react to it? In this issue I highlight what Chinese viewers think about the 3 Body Problem.

http://elizabethtai.com/2024/04/26/3-body-problem-is-a-bit-of-a-problem/

rooster, to random
@rooster@chaosfem.tw avatar

We fucked up, the internet was supposed to be a fun weird thing with hamsters dancing and now it’s a thing where you pay bills and your boss spies on you

o_simardcasanova, to fediverse
@o_simardcasanova@mastodon.social avatar

The Report by @laurenshof is a great resource to keep up with how social media is changing.

What I especially like compared to more mainstream coverage is how Laurens keeps track of less "shiny" projects. Those are a fertile ground for new innovations.

https://fediversereport.com/

trusttrist, to mastodon French
@trusttrist@flipboard.social avatar

Interesting

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/25/bluesky-backs-a-project-that-would-let-mastodon-apps-like-ivory-work-with-its-network/

liamvhogan, to random
@liamvhogan@aus.social avatar

I’ve said before that the most precious part of the Web are the pre-Facebook forums run by enthusiasts of specific domains (say, owners of a model of motorbike). There’ll be knowledge there from crusty old riders that means the difference between success and failure at doing what you want to do.

It’s exactly this kind of specific knowledge, like knowing the right steps and way to adjust the valve clearances on a bike, that is threatened by AI content mills, because an LLM doesn’t know if it’s 0.15mm or 15mm, and doesn’t care

tokyo_0, to fediverse

Can you imagine what the would look like now if the response to Gab had been "Admins don't need to block these instances, individual users can just choose whether or not to apply a user-level block (mute) themselves"?

And is even more corrosive than Gab. Gab users just posted a barrage of hate and unpleasantness. Meta is commercially incentivised to destroy what some people are inviting it to into.

mathi_gwithyas, to random
@mathi_gwithyas@ohai.social avatar
skinnylatte, (edited ) to ai
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

What people forget about Luddites isn’t that they protest technology, it’s that they were protesting factory owners who used technology to create shoddy products while oppressing labor.

Editing to say: Whenever I hear someone say Luddites in a derogatory way, especially about , I try to offer them links about this and am surprised when some people still take an anti-Luddites stance

skinnylatte,
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

At the same time it’s important to acknowledge thsh the digital version of things did democratize access. Without my early digital cameras I would have wasted thousands of dollars of film money I didnt have. Maybe AI tools can help shape access to things early on, but I think if you’re into creating something it’ll be just one of many different medium to experiment with. Mine is analog (because I love the workflow). If I lived elsewhere it might not be (it’s $$$)

javi, (edited ) to random

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

tilton, to random
@tilton@raccoon.zone avatar

Infosec friends, you want to have nightmares tonight? Let me tell you what it was like to work in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s. I worked at SGI, a major computer manufacturer. When I started, I was given an SGI Indy workstation running IRIX 5.3. It had no root password, setting one up was completely optional. I had full control over all software installed on it, and I could install anything I wanted from our internal dist server, including reinstalling the OS. New OS patches were occasionally available, but finding them and installing them was up to you. That workstation had a publicly routed IPv4 address and was connected to the campus Ethernet, which was in turn connected to the public Internet. There was no firewall, so I could access it from anywhere in the world (and since ssh wasn't much of a thing yet, that connection was unencrypted Telnet). And finally, to add to your nightmare, every workstation ran sendmail and received email directly: you could email me at <name>@sgi.com or directly at <name>@<workstation>.corp.sgi.com, and mail would be routed to my workstation. And yet... it all worked! And if I'm honest, I really miss it. Bad people broke things and ruined the good times for everyone.

liaizon, to bluesky
@liaizon@wake.st avatar

Over on @aendra.com trained an LLM on screenshots of various social media interfaces and now has a ATProto labeler (https://atproto.com/specs/label) running at https://bsky.app/profile/xblock.aendra.dev that can block specific social media screenshots...

ward, to aiart
@ward@easymode.im avatar

Let's stop using the term, "ai art," and start saying, "ai content."

They want us to call our work, "content," and they want us to call their junk, "art." No.

reiver, to random
@reiver@mastodon.social avatar

sunsetkindaguy, to climate

A plea... let's dustbin the phrases and . They sound sedate. They're distancing, easy to ignore. Even positive. (A less cold, damp spring in Scotland is hard to refuse!)

Instead, let's talk about the end game - we are on the brink of 'climate collapse'. A collapse in existing food production capabilities, starvation, wars over water, deaths through extreme weather.

Let's start bringing home to our communities that our way of life will end.

maegul, to bluesky
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

People are actually on BlueSky

There's now a decent measurement of #bluesky user numbers (https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html) ...

They've got about 1.6M MAUs ...
& 0.8M Weekly unique users & 0.340M Daily.

That's not nothing!

Roughly double mastodon and 60% more than the whole fediverse (by MAUs, see fedidb.org).

Bluesky is quite "international" with large Japanese and Brazilian popltns, and there's real attrition happening IMO.

Still, let the protocol wars begin I suppose?

@fediverse

maegul,
@maegul@hachyderm.io avatar

@Loukas @fediverse

Agreed (and said the same myself)!

As I've said it ... alternative social has run its course in this post-musk-twitter moment. Everyone's settled down where they ended up.

And yea, either more major disruption or some new killer features (rather than clones of big social) will be needed to shake things up. Neither seem particularly likely in the short term ... your EU-meta smackdown is probably the best bet??

Kierunkowy74, to bluesky Polish
Kierunkowy74 avatar

Skeets are now embedable https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3kq7aeuwbg42k

mikedev, to random

Here is what we've created:

Conversations: communicate directly with the people in the conversation, not have completely isolated conversations with your followers and their followers shouting at each other -- and neither audience seeing the responses of the others.

Permissions: If you haven't been given permission to speak, you aren't part of the conversation. If you have not been granted permission to view a photo or video, you won't see it.

Audience: Your choices go far beyond public and not public. Yes, we have groups. We also have circles. You can also just select a dozen people right now and have a conversation only with them.

Nomadic identity, amalgamated identities and single sign-on: Site and project/product boundaries don't exist. It's one big space and you are you - no matter what service or services you use.

Post limits, photo limits, poll limits: None.

Rich content: Use markdown, bbcode, or HTML. Any of them or all of them.

Rules: You make them.

Algorithms: You can install them if you want. You can remove them. You control them and can tweak them.

And much more.

We are the streams repository.

https://codeberg.org/streams/streams

tantek.com, to random

Last week I participated @W3.org (@w3c) #W3CAC (W3C Advisory Committee¹), #W3CAB (W3C Advisory Board² @ab), and #W3CBoard (Board of the W3C Corporation³) meetings in Hiroshima, Japan.

The AC (Advisory Committee) meeting was two days, followed by two days of AB and Board meetings which started with a half-day joint session (including the #w3CTAG), then separate meetings to focus on their own tasks & discussions.

The W3C Process⁴ describes the twice a year AC (Advisory Committee) Meetings⁵. In addition to members of the AC (one primary and one alternate per W3C Member Organization), the meetings are open to the AB (Advisory Board), the W3C Board, the W3C TAG (W3C Technical Architecture Group⁶ @tag), Working Group⁷ chairs, Chapter⁸ staff, and this time also a W3C Invited Expert designated observer⁹.

The AC currently meets in the Spring on its own and a shorter meeting in the Fall as part of the annual #W3CTPAC (W3C Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee¹⁰ meetings). The existence, dates, and location of the event are public¹¹, however the agenda, minutes, and registrants are generally Member-confidential. Since those individual links have their own access controls, I collected them on a publicly-viewable wiki page for easier discovery & navigation (if you work for a W3C Member Organization¹²):

Most of the W3C meeting materials and discussions were also W3C Member-confidential, however many of the presentations are publicly viewable, and a few more may be shared publicly after the fact.

Myself and others at #W3C who believe in pushing for more openness and transparency in standards work, even (or especially) governance of said work, will be doing our best to work with others at W3C to continue shifting our work accordingly.

Aside: I started the #OpenAB project when I was first elected to the AB (Advisory Board) in 2013, documenting it on the publicly viewable W3C Wiki, and updated it with the help of others since: https://www.w3.org/wiki/AB#Open_AB

Like most conferences, I got as much out of side conversations at breaks (AKA hallway track¹³) and meals as I did from scheduled talks and panels.

For now, here are the events, slides, and videos which are publicly viewable that provide an interesting glimpse into some of the topics discussed:

I’ll update this list with additional resources as they are made publicly viewable.

If you work for a W3C Member Organization you can view the full list of resources linked from the Member-confidential agenda: https://www.w3.org/2024/04/AC/ac-agenda.html#monday

References:

¹ https://w3.org/wiki/AC
² https://w3.org/wiki/AB
³ https://w3.org/wiki/Board
⁴ https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/
⁵ https://www.w3.org/2023/Process-20231103/#ACMeetings
⁶ https://w3.org/tag
⁷ https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/
⁸ https://chapters.w3.org/
⁹ https://www.w3.org/invited-experts/#ac-observer
¹⁰ https://www.w3.org/wiki/TPAC
¹¹ https://www.w3.org/events/ac/2024/ac-2024/
¹² https://www.w3.org/membership/list/
¹³ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hallway_track
¹⁴ https://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values
¹⁵ https://indieweb.org/sidefile-antipattern
¹⁶ https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/devcon/68.html

fediversereport, (edited ) to fediverse
@fediversereport@mastodon.social avatar

New: Last Week in - ep 64

  • the DSA for server admins by @iftas
  • P2P video calls with your fediverse account, with iOS app Sora @SoraSNS
  • Full 2-way federation with @Flipboard
  • An escalating fight between the Brazilian government and Musk's X leads to president Lula joining

Read at: https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-64/

me,
@me@mszpro.com avatar

@fediversereport

Thank you so much for talking about Sora! ✨

As an indie developer, this serves as a motivation for me to continue trying my best and adding more features to the app.

I hope Sora can help bring more people into the world of Fediverse 🚀

Thanks again! :code:

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