If you are a citizen of any EU Member State, I implore you to consider signing the Tax-the-Rich citizens' initiative: https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/
The idea is to tax the super rich and then use the money for climate transition. :blobcathappypaws:
This is an official EU citizens' initiative, meaning that if it reaches certain thresholds, it will have to be considered by the EU institutions. That's a really powerful tool, if actually used.
Yes, it's a JS-heavy website with a webdesign that makes my eyes hurt. Sigh, can't have nice things, can we?
You can skip right to the signing by going to the relevant Citizens' Initiatives website on europa.eu here: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/038/public/
Both sites seem to work fine in a Tor Browser, and the signing requires solving a self-hosted captcha (no Big Tech captcha involved, it seems), so at least that's good.
And, in totally unrelated news ‒ „More than 250 billionaires and millionaires are demanding that the political elite meeting for the World Economic Forum in Davos introduce wealth taxes to help pay for better public services around the world.
“Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society,” the wealthy people said in an open letter to world leaders. “This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.“
Seriously though, fedi was built by furries, trans and queer folk, disabled neurodivergent people.
This is the reason the culture here is what it is. Why CWs are a thing. Why image descriptions are a thing. Why privacy matters here. Why moderation tools not only exist, but are usable — and used.
If you had joined and asked yourself "wow, how come this place is so chill and kinda… nice?" — that's thanks to all the nice people from communities some people call "weird".
I posted this and the parent toot at the start of Nov'22 wave of new people and communities joining fedi, bringing their specific needs and expectations.
Fedi learned a lot about itself since then, including that it needs to dramatically improve on the #antiracism front.
We need to recognize that fedi failed#Black / #BIPOC folks, and do better.
> Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop
We need #FLOSS tools to get to the point where they can replace Adobe tools. Open alternatives are great, but they are sadly not there yet to replace Adobe tools for professionals.
And won't be unless projects like @inkscape get enough funding to develop to a point of being viable alternatives.
If you can replace #Adobe tools in your workflow today, great, more power to you! Not everyone can, sadly.
Tools like @inkscape, @Krita and @Blender are fantastic and built with love and energy and care. But in many cases they are still not an option for a lot of creative types.
So support them if you can. Use them if they work for you. Help improve them if you have the skills (that includes writing documentation, and working on better UI/UX!).
@rysiek@inkscape "Adobe is warning some owners of its Creative Cloud…" – Not correct at all. Adobe is the only "owner" of its cloud. Boggles my mind that this can be news to people. You rent rights and own nothing.
There's a lot of shit flying in the #Fediverse lately and a lot of times perspective seems to get lost. Yes, there are things we need to talk about, and yes there are things we will not agree on. And that's okay.
But leave the pitchforks and torches out of this.
Fedi admins put in the hours and effort and emotion into making fedi happen. Sometimes they make decisions we might not agree with. We should criticize, but we should not pile-on.
And to make this abundantly clear… regardless of how much you disagree with a person and how much you feel their decisions might be wrong:
👉 harassment is harassment, and is unacceptable
👉 calling for harm is calling for harm, and is unacceptable
👉 pile-ons are pile-ons, and are unacceptable
People who engage in that sort of thing are like locusts. They join a community, destroy it, and move on.
If you care about fedi, push back against that, even if it targets someone you disagree with.
Revolution might not be televised, but apparently genocide will be mathwashed.
From the team behind "we kill people based on metadata", a new exciting project: "we kill people based on… we don't even know what, it's a 2bln parameters black box that we have no real way of actually understanding."
@rysiek Combine autonomous lethal drones with authoritarian far right governments that are rising all over the place and these things can easily be used domestically perhaps even more effectively than they could be used in a warzone.
@rysiek@Andres Yeah, let's make a huge tensor with far too many dimensions, throw it in a linear algebra soup and stir it with a sprinkle of random numbers until the output matrix we get from multiplying our input matrix with that tensor looks convincing enough.
@rysiek As it turns out, lawyers will write whatever they are incentivized to write. If the TOS is unclear or too long, either the lawyers aren't very good or (more likely) the client has conflicting, inflexible, and/or and incoherent goals and probably isn't very smart.
"#Mastodon is failing" so hard that #Fediverse just crossed 4mln monthly active accounts (based on the-federation.info). :blobcatgiggle:
This is already slightly more than Nov and Dec #TwitterMigration waves' peaks. And it is still going up.
What I find particularly important is that it seems like a lot of this is not new accounts, but people returning to accounts created before and then left unused.
I expect this to be a more resilient kind of growth. Less of a drop after it peaks.
So wait building all these "secure" chat apps on a browser engine packaged in a thin layer of UI, with its insane number of dependencies and the gigantic, immense attack surface that this entails, was somehow a bad idea?
Who knew! Who could have foreseen this! Shocking, really.
Well if it isn't cryptocurrency spam coming from the biggest, open instance on the #Fediverse. 👀
I wonder if this is at all related to challenges with moderating an instance of checks notes 200k active accounts? Or with moderating new accounts on the only instance actively promoted in the official apps? :thinking_rotate:
Thankfully we can always defederate! What's that? It's the biggest instance so there are real concerns about a lot of people losing connections? Whodda thunk it!
The size of mastodon.social means that it is hard to moderate current accounts there.
The fact that it is promoted as the instance by the official apps, combined with the fact that in the public mind fedi is Mastodon, means it's difficult to effectively moderate new accounts.
And its size also means that bad actors are not compartmentalized into small, manageable groups on defederate-able instances.
The size of mastodon.social is breaking the moderation story of the #Fediverse.
Moderation on fedi relies on:
instance admins and moderators being able to manage bad actors on their own instance;
instance admins being able to silence or defederate from insufficiently moderated instances.
Mastodon.social's size and the speed new accounts are set up there means that 1. is very difficult. The size of m.s. and the clout of some of its users means 2. is a hard decision.
@rysiek@cguess Twitter was always more about who would see and interact (the “elite,” the connected, and the highly online) versus how many (traffic numbers).
I wonder if the whole #AI thing will finally convince artists that modern #copyright regime was never meant to protect them.
It was meant to protect the middlemen. The Amazons, the Spotifies, the Sonys, the Disneys. The film studios, the publishing houses.
Now the middlemen figured out they own basically all of art, and that they can just train a computer on that, to replace artists with a piece of software.
And then stop paying artists even the pittance they were being paid so far.
> Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts.
Now the same companies that had cried "protect the artists!" to extend copyright over and over again are salivating at the thought of replacing artists with software.
I hope this becomes a wake-up call to all #artists, to all creative people out there — a wake-up call not just about #AI and automatically generated content, but also, and more importantly, about how urgently we need solid #copyright reform.
We had been needing it for decades, in fact.
#Art is not supposed to be hoarded by Disneys or Sonys, not supposed to be locked in corporate vaults. Art is more than just means of "maximizaing shareholder value".