Gregory's Server
You steal one person’s labour and they call you a criminal. You steal everyone’s labour and they call you AI.
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Github down? I hadn’t noticed. Might be a good time to check out Codeberg. Bonus: You can follow them on the fediverse at @Codeberg @aral  *social. Some form of money would exist even in a primitive society without governments and their laws. It's the good old "the shoemaker needs bread but the baker already has enough shoes". I love it. There’s a poll ongoing about whether folks would ban a Meta (Instagram/Facebook) instance and people are like “well, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt.” I really have no words. Is it learned helplessness? Stockholm Syndrome? Masochism? Something else? I just don‘t get it. #SiliconValley #BigTech #SurveillanceCapitalism #PlayItAgainSam And here’s what’s saddest: the question itself is moot. Because mastodon.social wouldn’t block it. Instead, we’d hear about how Meta joining the fediverse is a Good Thing™. This would be about a year or so before Meta or some other major instance with major Silicon Valley money displaces mastodon.social as the primary fediverse instance. At which point maybe a certain someone will realise that legitimising Big Tech-style scale and centralisation is a silly strategy when you’re not Big Tech. Spam alert: thegx.ca/forum Dear server admins, If you see an account named thegx.ca/forum (thegx@…) pop up on your servers please suspend it. Some bastard has been setting up spam accounts all over. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve blocked and it’s getting annoying. Right, well, since the charming person who owns thegx.ca saw it fit to reply so kindly, I’ve gone ahead and reported their domain to both their domain registrar – abuse@promopeople.com – via email and to their web host – https://www.hostpapa.com/ – via chat – “Thank you very much for letting us know about this Aral. I will report it to the appropiate team so we can take care of it”. See what being so damn affable gets you? Bloody spammers. Elon Musk: what if I just straight up shoot a puppy in the face, would you still use Twitter then? Journalists: This is fine.
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@aral I have a duty to my readers to endure the shooting of puppies so I can report on the shooting of puppies. If you’re intending on paying for Twitter in a few days time, this is the bigot you’ll be supporting financially. (Please feel free to share with anyone you know who might be planning to do so.)  @aral somebody please make a list like that but listing white cis heteronormative males. @aral @fungible_thadius Remember too that Myra Hindley and Rose West and Ruth Ellis were cis women. Let's tar all cis women with the same brush - or maybe not. We could all be sensible and epathetic human beings and condemn violence wherever it comes from and condemn the USA for having so many guns available with no restrictions. Over 95% of mass shootings are carried out by men. One thing is VERY clear; the modern toxic masculinity movement is radicalizing men into terrorists. Ref: https://www.statista.com/statistics/476445/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-gender/ To be “apolitical” is simply to be fine with the worst injustices of your time. Likely because they don’t affect you personally (yet).
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  The best part is, where US-based services HAVE implemented data-sovereignty capabilities, the US government has tried to overcome it.  @aral @EU_Commission What about Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast, Paramount Global, and Netflix? All of their apps demand total access to everything on your system under a pretense of "preventing piracy." So according to Twitter’s press office, Elon Musk is 💩 Good to have official confirmation finally.
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Elon Musk doesn't care about others' views and question. If the work of an entire team can be easily handled by a robot, that team is nothing but an unnecessary business expense.  Based on the answers so far - and correct me if I am wrong - Twitter Press Contact is answering all questions from the press with a poopy-head emoji? Folks, it’s encouraging to see more of you writing alternative text on images here so people who use screen readers can also take part but please make sure the text really is the equivalent of the image. So, for example, if you’re posting a screenshot of some text, don’t just say “Excerpt of article” or “A tweet by so-and-so” but actually copy/paste the text from it (many platforms let you do this with images these days). Folks who use screen readers have the right to hear what we see. Here’s a good guide for writing alternative text for images so people who use screen readers can also take part: #a11y #accessibility #inclusivity #web #fediverse #mastodon #twitterMigration #altText #altTextMovement
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@aral @cancel "tried all the silver bullets recommended by Hacker News, used kafkaesque request forms to prove legitimity, contacted the admins of some blacklists." oh my gooddd. as someone who's had to do this in recent memory just because the domain name *extension* was flagged as "bad vibes" i feel this article in my bones. yes, spam is an issue, but email deliverability has become a shitfest. jeezaus and this is a good heads-up. big tech will obviously try to throttle mastodon too =/  Tech Bro Hypocrisy #451: Consent “If you make something freely available on the web, we can take it and do whatever we like with it.” – Oh, so I can just take your company’s logo and the copy from your site and use it? Download your app and redistribute it?… “No, those are protected by trademarks, copyright, and licenses.” 🤔 #consent #tech #technology #techBros #BigTech #SiliconValley #peopleFarmers #optIn #optOut #hypocrisy #copyright #trademarks #licenses #Medium – the proprietary, #SiliconValley equivalent of free and open #fediverse app #WriteFreely, by the #billionnaire co-founder of #Twitter – now has a #Mastodon server. It might be a good time to take a look at WriteFreely (https://writefreely.org/) and their hosted services Write.as (https://write.as/) and WriteFreely Host (https://writefreely.host/) and consider owning your own #blog on the fediverse instead of contributing to the walled gardens of the folks who bequeathed you Twitter.
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@aral I have had my own write.as blog for a couple years now. I love the minimalist approach to writing and reading. I also appreciate that both me and my readers aren't being exploited for financial gain, and that my writings are truly mine. We need to bring back blogging for the sake of blogging, not for financial gain.  @aral I've had an account at Medium since before Mastodon existed. It has its good sides, but it goes through drastic changes too often. When it was new it was super easy: signed up with my Twitter account and started writing. Then they went to more paywalled articles. I haven't posted there in a long time. I looked at #WriteFreely and its ilk and I'm still curious, but for now I'll stick with my trusty WordPress blog that I've had since 2010. Today, you can choose not to drive a Tesla if you don’t want Elon Musk, Inc. knowing everywhere you go. Tomorrow, you might have to limit where you live because you won’t live in a Google Home and reconsider having 20/20 vision again in exchange for the artificial lens company seeing everything you see. Privacy is not something you can “vote with your wallet” on. We either protect it as a human right or we lose it altogether. By the way, if you think the artificial lens bit is hyperbole, think again. Quite a few years ago now I was sitting at dinner with some CEO of some startup that had developed a free tool they said helped people with dyslexia read more easily. So, as I do, I asked him my favourite question: “how will you make money with this?” He looked at me like I was rather daft before answering, matter of factly, “well, we know what you’re reading.” Say no more, my friend. Say no more. “Many browsers and anti-spyware applications are designed to reject and delete third-party cookies. Adobe ensures that cookies can always we [sic] set even if third-party cookies are blocked.” That feeling when you admit you’re spyware. #Adobe #surveillanceCapitalism #peopleFarming #adtech #spyware #SiliconValley #BigTech via @GossiTheDog What’s betting the only part of this Adobe corrects when they see it is the typo in the passage? Thinking more people are going to engage with you on mainstream social media “because everyone’s there” is like thinking people at a stadium concert are there to listen to you. It‘s only true if you’re one of the ones on stage. Not so much when you’re huddled in the nosebleeds. Forget the numbers. Forget about “going viral” (leave it to the psychopaths in Silicon Valley to make virus-like behaviour aspirational). Embrace the joy of interacting with one another on a human scale.
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 @aral "But there are more people on the Titanic than in the lifeboats" Think longer term, and think community, not just of yourself. The future is decentralised. If the most successful people in your system are the worst of humanity, your system is fundamentally broken. #elonMusk #peterThiel #marcAndreessen #markZuckerberg #ericSchmidt #rupertMurdoch #jeffBezos #billionaires #capitalism
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@aral we all know that the system favors narcissistic traits over empathy....so yes its fugded from the ground up @aral No single person is a rockstar by his own account. Ultimately the asshole on top is just a useful idiot for others who benefit from his actions. In capitalism it is “greed” that flaws the system. But in every system “power” is the end goal. And power should be governed, by laws. That’s the trouble with asshole Elon. He is a puppet of those who discovered “Freedom of Speech” as a ticket to power without control. It is time the legal system kicks in, and ends this.  @aral: This is a natural outcome of loose marginal tax rates at the high end of income. Levying high taxes on the rich is prosocial, in part, because it gives the zillionaires a motive to re-invest that income, and to spend it in ways that zillionaires are known to like but aren't taxable, such as naming museums after themselves. By taking that motivation out of the equation, the sort of people primarily motivated by hoarding money get a strong advantage at the money-hoarding game. Here’s an idea: let’s call people “people” on the fediverse instead of “users” whenever we can. Compare: “There are 42 users on this instance.” vs “There are 42 people on this instance.” Which acknowledges our humanity more? Language matters. We don’t need to perpetuate mainstream technology’s othering/colonial framing of “us” – designers/developers/other “clever folks” – and “them” – the users (usually one step removed from “dumb user” and usually the ones who get used).
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@aral When I wrote the Outreachy website, I used the word "comrads" instead of "users". People is a good word too. |
@aral That's the real definition....
AI is not capable to create proper ideas, it's only mixing the one's human told him before!
@aral
Could AI replace you?
I'm afraid there probably is not enough signal in the noise.
@aral Based opinion.