@lauren From @pluralistic:

"An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not mandatory is forbidden."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/

@lauren

I agree

If it will run on a website, I'll avoid installing an app and use it through the browser

The only few exceptions are mastodon, my bank and the core calender, mail etc apps that I've replaced with open source alternatives. All the google/pre installed crap got removed

Ideally, I'd prefer to have a dumb phone which supports signal and will sync contacts with nextcloud. Everything else is a distraction

@lauren I was quite taken with his Pascal successor, Modula-2, and was sorry that it didn’t get more traction in the dev community.

@lauren
I Never really got into PASCAL, but I did toy with a few implementations, and I did enjoy the difference between `=` and `:=`.

I could tell that was an effort to make things less ambiguous, and I appreciated that effort.

@lauren my first programming language!

@lauren I can't wait for the obviously-AI-augmented writing style to emerge, a la T-Pain with autotune

@lauren we always prefer genuinely grassroots culture, even with all the repetition, personally. yeah it can be exhausting but it has potential in ways that venues that give a more packaged experience do not.

@lauren Reminds me a lot of Google+.

@lauren Musk is incompetent and sociopathic

@lauren if AskHistorians and a handful of other heavily moderated, expert driven subreddits stay active, I'll keep using the site as a reader. If they go, I'm out entirely. I'm certainly done as a major contributor, which I was from 2010 until recently.

@lauren Haven't killed my account, but haven't visited the site, and don't plan to, unless bananagement caves, which is unlikely since things are driven by financiers.

@lauren What's Reddit? There's always one.

@lauren

The warnings are also cold comfort to the loved ones of the guy the vigilante gang beat to death because some generated content somewhere labelled him an unrepentant pedophile in their neighbourhood.

I don't know what the solution is. Mandate that an indicator of its origin be prominently displayed within the generated text? How could that work?

#LLM #generative

@lauren we should worry even more about *individuals* now and in the near future who knowingly and cynically make and market these engines of deceit in order to profit from the chaos and confusion they will cause.

@lauren Always good to schedule major changes to features that combat impersonation for April 1st.

@lauren wait so they pay for the check then pay not to display the check

Why not just... stop paying for the check

@lauren

@lauren Not sure that's what's happening here so much as banking fears leading the big money to move from stablecoins into more volatile tokens.