Gregory's Server
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Okay Fediverse, here's your time to shine. I am provisioning a new dev laptop and can pick whatever Debian-flavored Linux distro I want. I'm eyeing Mint because I had a good experience with it 10 years ago and I hate snap. Any other recommendations for interesting distros? I have been mostly-Ubuntu for a decade, in part because it was required by my workplace.
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   I was unfortunately compelled to file a lawsuit against my current employer, Mozilla Corporation, for discrimination due to my cancer diagnosis. If you'd like to understand the details, you can read this write-up in GeekWire, which includes the full text of my legal complaint. I am really pleased to announce that I will be joining the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center! They exist "to reimagine, rebuild, and reboot social media to serve the public good" and I hope to use my time there to keep on building cool stuff that makes the internet a little nicer and better.
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Persistently shocked by how much of adult life is dealing with the consequences of other adults determinedly (and obviously!) playing pretend, with terrible consequences. https://lattice.com/blog/leading-the-way-in-responsible-ai-employment  I searched Facebook Marketplace, and sure enough, there's my couch. Copied my listing verbatim with all my photos, selling my free couch for $70. I told the guy, no, it's no longer available. 30 minutes later, a totally different guy shows up at my door in a van trying to pick up the couch he just bought off Facebook. Nope, sorry. Best part: the scammer isn't even in Oregon, he lives in Georgia. A clever arbitrage scheme that probably happens constantly, but was new to me. [2/2] A fascinating and disturbing look at how finite-element engineering simulations, though potentially very accurate, are nonetheless sometimes wildly wrong thanks to old/misused code, and dodgy shortcuts that Gilbert Strang calls “variational crimes”. Thomas Pynchon was originally going to call his book Gravity Rainbows, but a confused greengrocer pedant informed him that the correct pluralization is Gravity's Rainbow. Thanks to @darius 's work, I started running my own private Mastodon instance for me and my friends called heyjohn. I wrote up why I started it, what exactly it is, the decisions that went into it, and my vision for the future. In short, I want heyjohn to be a community that facilitates meaningful connection between people that I care about by practicing authenticity, empathy, and trust. Lol Friend Camp is experiencing Mastodon 4.2 for the first time and I immediately squashed the "Post published." modal snackbar that appears when you post something via the web interface because it looks identical to when you get error messages. Do people find this useful? Should I remove it from #Hometown's next release too? Right now it's just a friend camp tweak
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 New #Hometown release is coming tomorrow, aligned with the Mastodon security update that is happening. This is going to result in a forced upgrade to Mastodon v4.2.x for everyone who wants the security features (since v4.0 isn't supported by the Mastodon team anymore). This will bring a lot of changes to Hometown. I've done my best to maintain the quality of our pastel themes, and local posting still works, and of course exclusive lists are now part of main Mastodon. More in the docs tomorrow!
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I should mention a major change is that I can no longer maintain the custom web mobile UI with the retractable sidebar. It diverged too much from Mastodon and was really problematic to maintain. I'm going to see if I can do it "smarter" for a future release because tbh I really miss it but for now the mobile web interface is going to be more cluttered than #Hometown users are used to. Sorry about that.  @darius Thanks so much for this! Small hiccup with the instructions - had to do the git checkout first, otherwise the right version of ruby wasn't installed Had a great time chatting about the past and future web with @phil last night. Thanks again! SCOTUS' ruling on social media was a bigger deal than it first seemed. Content moderation and ranking algorithms are now First Amendment-protected speech, and that has major implications for the internet. My newsletter today: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/02/netchoice-scotus-content-moderation-speech/  "majority opinion makes clear that forcing social media companies to carry certain posts is unlikely to be constitutional. But in declining to throw out the laws altogether, the court signaled that other aspects of those measures might be less problematic." Seems not necessarily dumb? "Google Vids is now available to test for free, ahead of public launch" Nice that we now have ChatGPT to generate the "Google announces they are sunsetting Google Vids product" article in 18 months |
@darius
We have A LOT of these to get rid of.
Please help.
@darius My brain is screaming "not en ef tees again"
@darius I got this the other day and promptly said "no thank you".