@nicol@social.coop
@nicol@social.coop avatar

nicol

@nicol@social.coop

Digital governance, community/civic tech, indie-media and the funding/tech/etc that support it. Co-founded Netribution.co.uk in 1999, co-wrote 3 editions of fundyourfilm.com on indie film finance. CSS/UI/UX, CiviCRM, CMSs, digital gardening, VJing, doc making, film festivals, wannabe vegan, long train journeys.

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

eloquence, to random
@eloquence@social.coop avatar

I've contributed a fair bit to free content (CC licenses) & open source projects over the years.

Personally, I want "my" stuff to be used to make AI models better. I use open licenses precisely because I want people to come up with interesting & hopefully beneficial new uses.

I understand why lots of folks feel differently, of course.

However, it's not a clear-cut legal situation, either. Training != inference; it's only model output that violates licenses that's unambiguously infringing.

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@eloquence I was told by a commons-specialist lawyer that it would be a breach of a CC-BY-NC licenses if I invited tips for such licensed films even if I gave 100% to the filmmakers (and obvs had their written permission).

It doesn’t seem reasonable then that CC restrains quite everyday ‘commercial’ use, while allowing LLM megacorps using toolsets far beyond the everyday user, to use any artists’ work to copy their style/subjects and compete with them. There needs to be a CC-No-LLM license.

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@eloquence I also can’t see how any LLM wholesale copying and repurposing comes under fair use. In the four factors of fair use - purpose, nature, amount, effect (https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/) - on three of these, LLMs go far beyond the current norms of Fair Use.
Purpose - to run a commercial service imitating styles similar to the one copied.
Amount - everything!
Effect - to directly compete with commercial writers/musicians/animators/filmmakers/coders etc.
IMHO it’s just awaiting the class actions.

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@eloquence has anyone summarised the 38 pages? Tho it’s obvs just US which maybe has most open fair use laws.

Copyright is such an asymmetrical tool, where those with resources can attack and defend it, while those without usually cannot.

But the principle of copyright: that anyone who creates can stop a Disney or OpenAI taking their work, adapting, monetising, misattributing, reselling, ruining, etc it without their consent; surely it’s the only defense the creative workers of the world have?

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@eloquence I’m not sure removing a worker protection will end those cycles. Disney still sells countless Winnie the Pooh toys despite public domain arriving https://www.disneystore.co.uk/disney/movies/winnie-the-pooh-and-friends. I assume they would just find new ways to preserve monopoly power, such as attacking network neutrality or gatekeeping distribution more tightly.

And the world’s creatives, reduced to hobbyists? My guess is they would end up like British pop music of the last few decades - a space dominated by the already wealthy.

nicol, to random
@nicol@social.coop avatar

Huge protests across Israel tonight against Netanyahu, calling for elections & a ceasefire/hostage deal.

'There is now a deal on the table, that Hamas has signaled it will agree to. But Netanyahu, after Hamas' signals, is once again trying to torpedo the deal" Einav Zangauker, mother of hostage Matan Zangauker.

"Bibi, you can't fool us. You're stalling to please Ben-Gvir and stay in power. You don't care about the 132 hostages" Danny Elgarat, brother of hostage Itzhak.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-05-04/ty-article/.premium/israelis-rally-for-hostage-deal-against-netanyahu-govt-amid-reports-of-emerging-truce/0000018f-43f5-d17f-adcf-fbf7bd0f0000

Large group of anti-government protestors with banners and Israel flags, surrounding something that is on fire. Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg for AP Photo, via Times Of Israel
Crowd of protestors - Israel flags in the foreground; in the background a large banner featuring an image of Netanyahu and the words 'Crime Minister'. Credit: Itai Ron, via Haaretz

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

“Gantz hit the nail on the head this time. Netanyahu is fleeing from a hostage deal. The closer it gets, the faster he runs to avoid it. At least twice in recent months he has sabotaged the sensitive moves toward a deal, whether through public statements or covert messages, or by curbing the mandate of the negotiating team. It was no different this time.

What was the point of these statements, before Hamas had even responded to the proposal, if not to thwart & sabotage.” https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-05-05/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-hoped-hamas-would-reject-israels-offer-when-it-didnt-he-turned-to-sabotage/0000018f-4817-d414-a5bf-fb37db290000

nicol, to random
@nicol@social.coop avatar
  • A US non-profit
  • The end of the German/EU non-profit
  • A new board of people who mostly don't seem to have fediverse accounts, including a Twitter co-founder (who does, via https://me.dm/@biz)

all feels like a pivot even if it isn't. Especially just after the odd news @EU_Commission is quitting Mastodon.

I get it's probably just to increase revenue, but maybe there cd also be a board seat or two for some long-standing, passionate community members/spec writers? And/or an elected seat?

jalcine, to random
@jalcine@todon.eu avatar

Waking up to read the White House is deciding to ignore the statement of the young students protesting the government's need to feed genocide and for media outlets to call them "hate-filled foreign students" is the first loud bell of the covert fascist alignment domestically of the American project.

Biden's already opened claimed to be a Zionist so it shouldn't be too shocking but this is now a soft declaration of anti-dissent sentiment.

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@jalcine my timeline is giving me a very different read on Columbia - protestors celebrating Hamas and Oct7, throwing fake blood at Jews, yelling that they will repeat Oct7 to all Jews on campus. The Rabbi of the university has called on Jewish students to go home for Passover as their safety cannot be guaranteed on campus. These reports check out and come from legit source - including anti-war activists. Why would anyone - including Palestine protestors - not condemn this?

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@mekkaokereke @jalcine thanks for the clarifications and nuance. Tbf I’ve also heard about lots of peaceful protestors being arrested which also sounds very wrong.

I guess for myself, in decades of protest - against Iraq, with Occupy, previous Gaza invasions, XR, etc. if part of that protest, no matter how tiny, used threats of rape and murder against anyone, let alone a minority group, I feel we’d need to create maximum distance from them before any kind of defensive msg.

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@mekkaokereke @jalcine
I was JVP subscriber until October 7. On that day - while gunmen were still dragging families from their homes to shoot or kidnap, they sent an email. without a word of criticism, let alone concern, sympathy or compassion for the hostages, victims or those hiding in terror in the bushes on a comedown. It just asked me to preemptively demand a ceasefire from Israel.

So I concluded they aren't a voice for peace, they are the communications arm for one side of the conflict.

Brendanjones, to random
@Brendanjones@fosstodon.org avatar

Now that quote posts are coming (confirmed by Renaud https://oisaur.com/@renchap/112299860209222424 ), I think it important that we have agreed upon acceptable usage.

Quote posts can be an amazing tool – there's a good reason they're so requested – but they also have the potential to add massive amounts of toxicity.

Gargron recognised this years ago: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99662106175542726

So here's my proposal for the Do's and Dont's of quote posting on Mastodon. Please boost!

🧵 Thread time:

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@Brendanjones would your second concern be mitigated with a 'block this person from QPing this post' function?

Then they're forced to use screen-grabs for their dunks, same as now - and the OPer keeps a certain level of control.

nicol, to Israel
@nicol@social.coop avatar

'“I asked the nurse, what’s the history? She said that they were brought in a couple of hours ago. They had sniper shots to the brain. They were seven or eight years old,” she said…

Children account for more than one in three of the more than 32,000 people killed in ’s months-long assault on .'

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestinian-children-killed-idf-israel-war

nicol, to Israel
@nicol@social.coop avatar

If is banking everything on Trump being elected – and with it the end of the Paris Agreement, NATO, constraints on Putin’s invasions, ntm American democracy as we know it – I can’t picture ever recovering from the blame and global fury it would trigger if it happened.

Losing the unequivocal, bipartisan support of America was unthinkable all my life - it’s like the guy is searching for new ways to make his country unsafe that surpasses all his previous efforts.

nicol, to random
@nicol@social.coop avatar

“Amazon tracks the phrases we highlight, the words we look up, who else is reading from the same address. All this allows it to deduce the most intimate information about our lives…Public libraries have some of this same information and guard it fiercely, but Amazon feeds it into an insatiable machine designed to extract maximum profit.”

Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow @pluralistic in their 2022 book
, via primer by @openfuture https://openfuture.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/231024DPS_primer.pdf

nicol, to random
@nicol@social.coop avatar

Just finished this short story by EM – . Published in 1928 it resonates with both and narratives with a dystopia of a future where humans have swapped connection and reality for video conference and automated comforts. It’s a bleak apolitical future where technology is God, and quite on track for the nightmare path many evangelise where technology is put ahead of all that keeps us human.

nicol, to random
@nicol@social.coop avatar

For one brief moment I was thinking someone had donated a proper marketing budget..

nicol, to meta
@nicol@social.coop avatar

There's one benefit from adopting I think; plz tell me if I'm wrong:

That all large orgs, universities, publications, charities, governments, councils, political parties, ministries, institutions, broadcasters etc may finally be persuaded to have their own ActivityPub server on a subdomain of theirs. That won't just give them a platform to us 1.5 million here but 100m+ more.

And if it means they move from Xitter to selfhost so we can follow if we want, that seems a leap fwd.

nicol, to random
@nicol@social.coop avatar

The city in is something else.

newlouisallaway, to threads

Honestly considering moving instance as mine has decided to defederate from threads, I live in the real world which isn’t going to move to anything without real backing of some kind (threads is unideal, but better than as is, ideally we would have a well funded cooperative). Really need to fix funding in open source.

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@newlouisallaway I thought the decision voted on (https://www.loomio.com/d/AZcJK6y2/discussion-support-the-anti-meta-fedi-pact/344) was to moderate Threads at the Limit level? A compromise that lets us follow/be followed if we want, without exposing Threads content on our local timeline.

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@newlouisallaway hmm, not sure - @Matt_Noyes @ntnsndr @foolishowl - was a decision made around de-federating Threads beyond the one vote that was marked as 'passed' (for 'limiting') in the four votes we did earlier this year?

nicol, to threads
@nicol@social.coop avatar

Strong points being made in all directions about . This is why the Fediverse rules: you choose what you want & an instance that aligns with that.

I hope we don't spend too long recycling long unresolved debates. That's free brand exposure/marketing they're not paying for.

But most, I hope we all know that if we get anything +ve from them – more follows, boosts, engmt, services, $, whatever – we know it comes with a price later. That's How This Works. Don't get hooked on the new candy.

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

It also seems, beyond the ethical & Mastodon Server Covenant compliance issues, there's a wider discussion that's relevant whichever giants start using ActivityPub.

We use social media for conversations and for broadcast. Conversations don't normally improve with scale, but broadcasts hunger for it. I miss the fact almost every post led to a conversation on Mastodon before the Twitter surge last year, I also miss Twitter's reach when I want to announce something. ie it's contradictory needs.

nicol, to random
@nicol@social.coop avatar

First Argentina, then Netherlands swinging far right. Can we link any of this to Twitter/X reopening to Nazis & extremists? Russian/etc disinfo campaigns exploding in unregulated spaces?

With 4.2 billion people voting in national elections next year, far more than ever before in a year, it'd be good to know!

JoshuaHolland, to Israel
@JoshuaHolland@mastodon.social avatar

Anderson Cooper had on a former Israeli intel chief who said, "The noncombatant population in the Gaza strip is really a nonexistent term because all of the Gazans voted for Hamas, and...most of the population in the Gaza strip are Hamas."

Cooper didn't push back.

Again, won an election with 44.5% of the vote 17 years ago, before around half of the population of were born, and then seized complete power in a bloody civil war with Fatah.

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@JoshuaHolland also the 44.5% were voting for a list called 'Change and Reform' (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_election). I don't know how many knew that was really Hamas when they saw the ballots, but I doubt it was all of them.

mastodonmigration, (edited ) to random
@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online avatar

Mastodon, we have a problem.

@Teri_Kanefield: I am beginning to think I waste my time and energy on social media... I came back to read my comments... and really, I feel ill.

@Popehat: ...find me on Bluesky... less like I'm likely to get screamed at...

@mmasnick: Same is mostly true for me.

@mattblaze: Getting close to joining you... The yelling here is getting to be a bit much.

[Edit to clarify NOT all are considering leaving]

nicol,
@nicol@social.coop avatar

@strypey yeh tho I think you can't change to follower only after a post has gone viral afaik.

I feel as Fedi grows tools to curate the visibility of, and pings from, replies will improve quality/reduce harassment more than contribute to censorship.. Thinking of newspaper comment spaces both rejecting comments (which is softer than blocking a user/instance) & highlighting 'top comments' at the top, which wd also be nice when a reply has led to a long new interesting subthread, but is a bit lost.

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