"But first, it’s helpful to think about the purpose the utopian hallucinations about AI are serving. What work are these benevolent stories doing in the culture as we encounter these strange new tools? Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history. Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent."
@luciedigitalni Oh, but people did consent when they agreed to terms of service granting licenses of their content to these companies. Some people have been raising the issue that giving up licenses to your content will be problematic, but they were shouted down by the "don't worry about, just lawyer stuff, everyone does it" crowd. And now those chickens are coming home to roost.
@luciedigitalni@StryderNotavi Agree it is a great point, and did not mean to imply that all all the content they are using to train their algorithms is licensed. However, just wanted to point out that when you grant Facebook or Google a license to your content for the purposes of operating their service and they blend these capabilities into their products, you don't have a leg to stand on. You gave it away.
@cstross To the extent that a Blue Check is regarded as an endorsement, this policy may violate the law. You can not advertise that someone endorses your product or service without their consent. There is also the issue of remuneration.
@atomicpoet You should. It will force you to use Calckey as your primary interface and will inform your recommendations and influence regarding the functionality and evolution of the Calckey user experience.
@FinchHaven This account is not cheering anything. @mastodonmigration posts links to Mastodon related news stories and sometimes comments on them. In this case, it is worth noting that tech media has picked up the story. It is certainly the case that the Mastodon sign-up process has been a source of criticism for being "too complicated." If that perception is changing, that is a good thing, while the concentration of users on mastodon.social is controversial.
@Teri_Kanefield However unpleasant, seems like this has been a teachable moment, not just for you, but also for the general community. Thank you Teri. You are a true pioneer.
Pete @Pete: "You won’t be able to stay ahead of the garbage if you try to block domain by domain. You want an automated solution that leverages the collective moderation efforts of the Fediverse. I use FediBlockHole (https://pypi.org/project/fediblockhole/) and sync with the oliphant unified tier 2 blocklist (https://codeberg.org/oliphant/blocklists). Set it up to run daily in cron and you’ll see an immediate improvement. Follow @fediblock who does a great job curating, de-duping and boosting #fediblock"
If you look at the "original page" (don't do it if you are sensitive to this stuff) on Teri's server this garbage is still there. Can anyone who is conversant with admin/moderation provide any guidance here?
Did #Mastodon lose 52,000 users or gain 202,000 account in the past week? Where does the data from each originate? Are "users" and "accounts" interchangeable?