mike

mike, 10 months ago to random

Such an important observation!

"Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users [because] hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions.

Mastodon is not an ad-driven platform. There is absolutely zero incentives to let awful people run amok in the name of engagement."

https://escapingtech.com/tech/opinions/i-was-wrong-about-mastodon-moderation.html

mike, 8 months ago to random

As Twitter self-immolates, I am seeing people I know setting up on Bluesky.

I find this perplexing. Can people really not learn the lesson that a social network owned by a capitalist is a social network they don't control?

You can argue about whether Bluesky or Mastodon has the better technology, but what's 100% clear is that Mastodon is run BY users FOR users. And that difference is the only one that matters in the end.

mike, 4 months ago to random

My son sent me this, I have no idea where it's from but it's perfect.

mike, 6 months ago to random

"“Godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton, in recent public talks, explains that one of the greatest risks is not that chatbots will become super-intelligent, but that they will generate text that is super-persuasive without being intelligent, in the manner of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson."
https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/blog/afb21/oops-we-automated-bullshit

mike, 7 months ago to bristol

As of today, my university (#Bristol, UK) has a #RightsRetention policy!

"When submitting an article to a publisher you should include the following statement in your submission:

'For the purpose of open access, the author(s) has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.'

Doing so ensures that […] we can still make it #OpenAccess."

🎉 🍷 🎁 🍾 🍻 🎉

mike, 4 months ago to random

"I did a small experiment recently. I searched for a specific phrase that appears in an older blog post of mine. Google returned two pages worth of SEO garbage sites before my own blog post appeared somewhere on the third page. None of the garbage sites even had the phrase anywhere on their page."
https://janneinosaka.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-web-is-broken.html

mike, 6 months ago to random

Does anyone know a simple tool where I can paste a list of postcodes or addresses into a form and have the all plotted on a map (e.g. Google Maps, Open Streetmap)?

mike, 6 months ago to random

James Dyson is suing the Daily Mirror for libel because it wrote "the vacuum-cleaner tycoon who championed Vote Leave due to the economic opportunities it would bring to British industry before moving his global head office to Singapore … [i.e.] screw your country."

Their defence should be that he championed Vote Leave due to the economic opportunities it would bring to British industry before moving his global head office to Singapore, screwing his country.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/nov/21/james-dyson-tells-libel-trial-daily-mirror-article-was-distressing-personal-attack

mike, 3 months ago to Wyoming

Suppose I had a week to spend travelling around #Wyoming and I wanted to see a lot of #sauropod #fossils. Apart from the Wyoming Dinosaur Center and UWGM, where should I visit? (Let's assume for now that I can arrange collections access.)

Please boost for coverage!

mike, 8 months ago to AdobePhotoshop

What absolute bullshit:

"We want to let you know about an upcoming change to your personal Creative Cloud account. Adobe is modernising the Creative Cloud storage experience and will begin discontinuing Creative Cloud Synced files on 1 February 2024."

That's not "modernising", that's "shutting down".

I mean, have the decency to be honest, #Adobe.

mike, 5 months ago to random

How can BlueTooth be so bad? The chances of any given source successfully connecting with any given speaker are never better than 50-50.

mike, 6 months ago to random

Does anyone know of a good Firefox extension that prevents autoplaying videos on ALL websites? (e.g. I have disabled autoplay on YouTube, but I just went to page on the BBC's iPlayer, and it started autoplaying.)

mike, 7 months ago to random

"The people behind [Anna's Archive] aim to play a crucial role in preserving all available books in the world, even if that means being at odds with copyright law."
https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-scraped-worldcat-to-help-preserve-all-books-in-the-world-231003/

We are in a stupid moment when "pirates" are trying to preserve the world's books, and "publishers" are trying to prevent them — with the help of OCLC, a "library-sector non-profit organization" whose primary job in 2023 is to prevent thw use of bibliographic metadata.

mike, 5 months ago to random

"Campaigners have been calling for a "Hillsborough Law", or Public Authority (Accountability) Bill, to create a legal duty of candour on public authorities and officials to tell the truth and proactively co-operate with official investigations and inquiries."

How on Earth is that not already required?!

https://news.sky.com/story/government-stops-short-of-fully-committing-to-hillsborough-law-13023978

mike, 5 months ago to random

Fascinating to see the replies to @mozilla's post "a sneak peek at innovation projects and ways that Mozilla is experimenting in the AI space" at https://mozilla.social/@mozilla/111562605874551611

NO-ONE wants this. Replies are split 50-50 between straight-up HELL NO and "could you instead bake in some anti-AI features".

(I am firmly in both of those camps.)

mike, 5 months ago to random

"I witnessed almost every publication that I once held in esteem become complicit in normalizing a level of death once billed as incalculable. It was galling, crushing work that wrecked my faith in journalism and its institutions."
— @edyong209 writing for the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/opinion/long-covid-reporting-lessons.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FE0.uIuH.1cxnoufWl1xp&smid=url-share

mike, 10 months ago to random

I use the GIMP for image editing. Suddenly my Layers window is using five times as much vertical space for each layer as it did previously, as in the attached screenshot — I must have typed something wrong and accidentally changed a setting.

Anyone know how the change it back? It's not "Default layer and channel preview size" in the Interface preferences.

mike, 9 days ago to random

"This of course is the whole purpose of scholarly communication. It’s why we have academic publishers: to make it possible for us to progress our fields by standing on each other’s shoulders.

Unfortunately, the publishers are mostly standing on our toes."

https://svpow.com/2016/04/12/moral-dimensions-of-open-part-4-on-the-shoulders-of-giants/

mike, 1 month ago to random

The word "thunderbastard" was coined for such moments.

Hat off to Mac Allister!

#LFC

mike, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to random

Announcing #OFKAP!

I give to the world a new term, OFKAP, which stands for Organizations Formerly Known As Publishers.

It applies to groups like Elsevier, whose primary business activity is preventing people from accessing scholarly papers.

And it applies to groups like Hatchette, whose principal activity is trying to prevent libraries from lending books.

In short, any organisation that is supposed to be making information available to the world, but is doing the opposite.

mike, 2 months ago to random

I'd never thought of this before, but it does seem like the obvious way to respond to conspiracy theorists. From https://jensorensen.com/2023/09/21/real-conspiracy-cartoon/

mike, 5 months ago to random

I can't be the only one who absolutely HATES the term "T rex of the seas" for the newly announced giant pliosaur. I mean, do we call orcas "grizzly bears of the sea"? We do not.

mike, 10 months ago to random

What is the best website now for making customised mugs and whatnot, the way CafePress and RedBubble used to do before they decayed? I am looking for something that does delivery to the UK at a decent price (and ideally to the US, too.)

(Please boost for coverage.)

mike, 7 months ago to random

Can anyone recommend a good book on the brains of birds? It should be comprehensible to a non-specialist, but properly deep and up to date with reasonably recent research.

Please boost for coverage.
Thanks!

CC @markwitton @TetZoo @tessa_murray @birds @gpnaturephotos

mike, 9 months ago to random

I'm really sorry to hear that protocols.io is effectively dead: https://www.protocols.io/workspaces/protocolsio-news/news/the-next-chapter-for-protocolsio

It shows once more the incredible importance of the The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (https://openscholarlyinfrastructure.org/).

Yes they are sort of boring. But they are indispensible if we're going to hang on to the things that the community creates.

CC @gbilder @mpe @cameronneylon