Facebook bots invading forums where people are trying to have conversations with other people is a genuinely evil development.
Facebook bots invading forums where people are trying to have conversations with other people is a genuinely evil development. If you use Adobe, you really should stop. https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/06/change-to-adobe-terms-amp-conditions/ Social media disappointments: 1) Journalists are still actively participating at exTwitter, thereby actively supporting Musk, who is helping extremists bring down democracy and, by extension, a free press. 2) Reddit got away with stomping its volunteer moderators and users, and its execs are cashing in on an IPO that in a more just world would have flopped. 3) Writers I respect decided to stick with Substack despite arrogant, extremist-friendly investors and leadership.
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@dangillmor I'm old enough to remember when Internet users made dire predictions if we allowed profit-seeking corporations on the Internet at all. Many argued we shouldn't. It is starting to look like they were right. @dangillmor Number One kills me; what kind of person could watch all that and still participate in such a misbegotten platform? @dangillmor that's why open markets don't work without some regulation. People just don't care enough to commit As warned, Reddit has taken a bundle of money from "Open"AI and will use it to further monetize what you -- and the volunteers who moderate it all -- contributed for free. It's the norm now, and particularly slimy in this case. https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/16/24158529/reddit-openai-chatgpt-api-access-advertising @dangillmor Isn't that the only way social media sites can make money ... to somehow monetize what users contribute? I am not sure how this is any different or more slimey than any other monetization. Stack Overflow's deal with "Open"AI is prompting the site's contributors to remove their posts and close their accounts. Good for them. The "AI" cartel is telling the people who created and populated the open web that they were suckers.
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@dangillmor They could simply be the best question and answer site in the world, but it’s never enough, is it? @dangillmor@mastodon.social I can't see how this deal is in _anyone's_ interest. OpenAI _need_ high-context, unpoisoned data to train on, and even if they correctly keep tabs on what responses are AI-generated, the effect will be to reduce the amount of human-generated expert replies. Stack Overflow's "product" isn't answers but expertise. If OpenAI could replace that, why bother with StackOverflow, and if not, Stack Overflow just put a big question mark behind their main selling point. Big Journalism is shouting the "news" that Trump says abortion is solely a state matter, and gleefully quoting supposedly angry Republicans who claim he betrayed them.. Please. There is no "rift" between Trump and the right-wing religious extremists. Their ire is performance. They know he'd sign any national anti-abortion law that Congress passes. They're some of his central foot soldiers in the war on democracy and civil liberties. Journalists, please please just stop buying this stuff. Just in case you had any doubt whether Musk is a complete slimeball, read about a lawsuit deposition that he tried to suppress from public view:
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I knew he was off' @ .. shedding tears in an interview in Australia . . . meanwhile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYYXTGyvDmQ @dangillmor This looks bad for Musk, but the reason Spiro wanted to hide it is that it looks *really* bad for *him*. The plaintiff's attorney took him back to first year law school and then slapped him back and forth with the textbook. He is not just a slime ball, he is a moron. Is this long-covid in action? Musk was, at one point, considered to be intelligencia but modern experience has shown us his true self to be just the opposite. While my main computer runs Linux, I have a Windows laptop for certain uses. It infuriates me that Microsoft relentlessly insists on making changes I DO NOT WANT TO MAKE -- not security updates, but mostly stuff that hands over vast amounts of data to Microsoft. The latest "request" -- using a full screen -- has two response options: "Continue" or "Remind me in 4 days". The option I want is "Never" --
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@dangillmor Yeah my laptop is unable to be upgraded to 11. My desktop is Linux mint. I prefer it so much better that way
@dangillmor I’ve been very happy to be Windows free w/ Mac laptops and Linux desktops for 10+ years now. The best news I've seen about "AI" lately: People have wisely concluded that these systems are untrustworthy.
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@dangillmor AI is in full gold rush, speculation mode. This started when one player in big tech achieved an advantage and the other big players rushed in to catch up. This was perceived as demand from the rest of the market and now we're in a speculation vortex. At a consumer level I'm detecting very little practical demand for, or uptake of AI products. At least the current offerings. @dangillmor #Counterfactual : How much trust would we place in an employee who regularly and confidently hallucinates? If Mozilla wants me to stop using Firefox, building "AI" into the browser is a great way to go about it. (Note: I'm still using Firefox...)
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Extremist legislators in Tennessee and Oklahoma -- with more right-wing states on the way -- are looking to ban women from traveling out of state for abortions. They also want to imprison anyone who helps them. https://jessica.substack.com/p/breaking-travel-bans-proposed-in Resistance is not futile. This is fascism and has to be stopped.
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@dangillmor the Democratic party had done nothing to stop any of this and is offering no plans to stop any of this @dangillmor they going to send slave catchers, er abortion catchers to the north to kidnap doctors and mothers? How did that go last time? @dangillmor Why did the Saudis pay Jared $2 billion? Why is there not a congressional committee to find out? Since, you know, Jared was actually on the White House payroll. Unlike Hunter, who’s a private citizen. Historian Timothy Snyder asks us -- all of us -- if we understand the whirlwind we are going to reap if we sell out Ukraine. https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/23878 Everything will get worse if this happens. Everything.
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@dangillmor the answer is: one more war ended, lots of lives saved. @dangillmor When is the financial cost to the western nations such as America too much to prop up Ukraine. ? When their currency is devalued ? When their credit score drops ? I don't know and not saying I do. If you're trying to decide whether Threads is a good fit with the fediverse, you should absolutely read @kissane's "Untangling Threads" -- https://erinkissane.com/untangling-threads Holiday season retro fun: https://dosdeck.com/ brings back MS-DOS games in browsers. No installation necessary. Limited selection for now, but I promise some happily wasted hours with the original Commander Keen, among others! @dangillmor Epic Pinball and ... Lemmings! I haven't played that since I donated my Amiga to a museum! You should stop using Google Chrome. The company is following through on its threat to ban the ad/tracker blockers that a) help protect your privacy and b) make your web experience much more pleasant.
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@dangillmor This is the Internet Explorer problem all over again. If one corporation controls a majority web technology then you get de facto standards instead of universal standards, and the corporation gets to shove whatever crap technology they want at the user. If we don't want another experience like Microsoft's IE browser we can't keep using their technology, including Chromium based browsers like Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc. @dangillmor Firefox is fine, Pulse is fine, Librewolf is even better, albeit it is more limited in some useful functions, like syncing. Currently, the worst is probably MS Edge, infected with ChatGPT… @dangillmor And this is why I will now instead use browsers that are not Chrome. Including Firefox. The self-verification system built into Mastodon should be one of its greatest selling points. This is especially true for journalists and everyone else for whom evidence of identity has huge value in the social media realm. But anecdotally -- and I would wager for real -- most people in the craft, even a lot of technically adept folks, don't seem to know how easy self-verification can be here. If you are trying to persuade a journalist you know to join up, please highlight this feature.
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@dangillmor One problem I think is that many reporters don’t have their own site or blog, just their publication (e.g. Philadelphia Inquirer or Newsweek, etc) And those *publications* themselves aren’t doing the (simple) work of adding that verification code to the writer bio pages (although I’m sure it’s simple to add a Twitter profile link) @dangillmor I stand by my still untested theory that if we can just identify or create an activity, mission or tool here that they are compelled to participate in or with, and which they cannot get over there, a migration might be much more organic and less contentious than it is now. I have one such an activity in mind, but I think there must be many more to be thought of out there. @dangillmor on top of that news orgs could run their own instances... Just like they do for emails. Verification will be implicit when you can trust the domain.
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@dangillmor This is the correct, adult, and responsible thing to do and I endorse this advice. But it's going to be REALLY hard to comply. @dangillmor There are still *lots* of organisations who have their only channel, or only effective channel, of customer service or tech support on Twitter. @dangillmor while I agree with the "don't beat up on people", thanking people leaving now is quite gross. They've literally overlooked the dehumanisation of swathes of the world's population, all so they can keep their social media clout. That is not something to encourage. Anyone leaving Twitter now has to spend time getting their humanity back in the eyes of people who left the moment the Nazis were brought back to Twitter Like so many others here, I recently passed my one-year anniversary of joining Mastodon. It's been a joy. I have slightly more than half of the followers here that I had on the deadbird site when I stopped posting there -- and conservatively, 10 times the genuine engagement in boosts, favorites, and replies with the Mastodon account. My thanks to @Gargron and his team for their hard work. (Advice: If you aren't donating to your instance, please do so.) @dangillmor @Gargron it somewhat reminds me of usenet before usenet got crapflooded with mediocrites. Which suggests that will eventually happen here. Or maybe not: the ability to define one's own feed, the filter options, and mute/block might be enough to stave off the decline. |
@dangillmor If you are still on fb, I have no sympathy whatsoever.
@dangillmor
They're trying to build The Matrix! :blobcat_wonder:
@dangillmor
Someone predicted in the future the internet would consist of only chatbots trying to sell products to each other