I didn't know him except through occasional interactions on the fediverse but he was consistently a positive presence on here. Condolences to his friends and family.
Interesting. When I make a post on my test Threads account with one-way federation turned on (aka fedi can read my posts, I can't read posts outside Threads, which is all they've enabled so far), and it gets likes from the fediverse, it gets compressed into this "X likes from N servers" notification
It is sad to me that in 2024 if I search "Moby-Dick by Herman Melville" (no quotes) on Google, the free Project Gutenberg ebook isn't even in the top ten results
@darius this is all planned. create corporate owned AI train it on all available knowledge then destroy the public knowledge to prevent competitors advertise to all ppl to use AI, because it gives better results have a networo effect, critical mass of AI user, to get exclusive access to all the new knowledge, to cement your position forever.
it is playing out in front of our eyes slowly, but also quite fast.
@darius this is all planned. create corporate owned AI train it on all available knowledge then destroy the public knowledge to prevent competitors advertise to all ppl to use AI, because it gives better results have a networo effect, critical mass of AI user, to get exclusive access to all the new knowledge, to cement your position forever.
@darius Iโm always curious about the feedback loops of that system. How many people paused, noticed, and highlighted that passage themselves because it was already called out as a popular highlight?
@darius Just having the pipeline to record what people have highlighted strikes me as extremely creepy. It is why I have never been a fan of medium.com
@mcc saw the headline "Sun expected to break up Portland clouds Sunday; they return Monday" and thought wow I can't believe the press is trying to pin this one on Sun
And another #Hometown release this morning. There's been another critical upstream security patch from Mastodon. So even if you updated 2 days ago (and thank you for doing it), you should update again:
I will note that I expect the Mastodon team to stop supporting security releases for v3 at some point, and I'm not going to be able to implement those myself, so basically once Mastodon stops maintaining v3 I'm going to have to stop as well. So I encourage admins to make a plan to update to v4.
I'm gonna be streaming the amazing dice-rolling roguelike SLICE & DICE this Friday with my pals @dubbin and @doougle! 7pm Pacific time, on the Eggplant show Twitch channel. More info at this post:
@darius i love this. Thanks for sharing. i used to watch mr bean with my mom as a kid. Watching the intro to the show now it occurs to me they are implying mister bean is some kind of angel kicked out of heaven, kind of makes the whole thing even more funny.
Edit: not actually down after all, just the default endpoint fonts.googleapis.com doesn't return a 200 (see comment in thread)
Ooof. "down for everyone or just me" is reporting that fonts.googleapis.com is, in fact, down. No wonder half the sites I'm trying to access are stalling. I thought it was a problem with this public wifi network I'm on...
@darius im just an internet bimbo, no idea how this works but my brother is in tech and is a mentor to me. We talk a lot. And shit is definitely wierd lately
So, @kissane and I have formally kicked off our Fediverse research project! Briefly, we are doing interviews with admin/mod teams about governance models and practices that are in place on servers with ~150-2500 active users. More info is available here on the project blog:
The blog is hosted at write.as which means you can follow it at @fediversalist-papers, or via RSS, or via email (there's a form on the bottom of the main blog page).
So, @kissane and I have formally kicked off our Fediverse research project! Briefly, we are doing interviews with admin/mod teams about governance models and practices that are in place on servers with ~150-2500 active users. More info is available here on the project blog:
@darius@kissane@fediversalist-papers embarrassingly late to this (thank you @jcalpickard for the nudge) but would be very happy to help in any way I can and will be following the outcomes with interest . This is absolutely vital work!
Our new episode of JoJo's Bizarre Explainer, "Eleven Men and Two Babies" is now out! We cover issues 46 and 47 of Steel Ball Run, which is about a girl in a tree who uhhh gives you things and uhhh you have to use them but only in an honorable way? Plus: men inside men, as is the JoJo's way.
Right this weekend I was chatting to a friend, commenting on how they're very very slowly listening through the podcast.
Seeing this episode pop up next time I checked my feeds felt like we had performed a summoning ritual, specially given the new episode's name is a reference to the episode they're on.
TIL that JPEG encoding in the wild is even more complicated than the very complicated documentation makes it out to be. For example, most references I can find say that the difference between an RGB and a CMYK jpeg is the former will have 3 "components" and the latter 4. This in theory should be encoded in a particular start-of-frame byte. And yet I have seen images detected as CMYK by ffmpeg have "03" in that byte position. And there are reports of CMYK jpegs that are really RGB under the hood?
@darius also does it look cool when you view an RGB JPEG as CMYK or vice versa (or is that not possible given the different strides + amounts of expected data)
@darius The most fun I had working on HTML5 (in the most tiny of roles, btw) was when people would bring stuff like this to the working group and I'd get to go dive into the archives of the internet trying to reverse engineer the decision making that led us to the state we were in. 99% of the time there was never ill intent - some implementation was left with a bunch of bad choices and the people responsible picked the one they thought would cause the least harm.
@darius I've never read the JPEG spec. Still about 18 years ago I tried to get a CMYK JPEG into a more easily usable format. I wrote up my adventures in learning about the format here:
Gregory's Server
