Gregory's Server
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: You were promised a jetpack by liars; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/
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@pluralistic Brings home to me that Bruce Sterling isn't one to post pictures of himself - based on how he looks compared to my pre-existing mental image of him, the last picture I saw of him was probably taken some time in the 90s. It is so good to see you having a moment like this considering how many moments like this you have given others… keep up the fight, we’re all in this together now! Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands; and more! Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/ 1/ I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY and TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER. Next is Tartu, Estonia, and beyond! https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour 2/
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 @pluralistic I wish I had seen this post before. I would've spent the day walking around to find it (I live in Turin -- not our proudest moment). Your periodic reminder that if you: a) Dislike long threads and; b) Follow someone who routinely posts long threads; that is a YOU problem, which you can solve by unfollowing, and, if need be, blocking that user so they don't show up in your federated timeline.
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 @pluralistic following you and complaining about long threads is just silly. That being said, I don't do threads, unless each toot works individually (or the stuff I add is an afterthought). Otherwise, whenever I feel like writing longer stuff, I write it on the friendica account I opened just for that and then boost it here. I find it much neater that way.  @pluralistic ... or switch to software which displays threads as, well, threads and not many separate individual posts.
Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/ 1/
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 @pluralistic wow. one or two disasters where it isn't benign and people might start paying attention.  @pluralistic Should have done a Rickroll after a certain time delay or conditions were met.  @pluralistic
> Lanyado also said that there was a Hugging Face-owned project that incorporated the fake huggingface-cli, but that was removed after he alerted the biz. Wonderful… Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye. -- If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: 1/
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 @pluralistic I'll always be mad at Vice for outing Naomi Wu which caused the Chinese government to force her off all social media. @pluralistic I am actually suprised that Vice lasted that long. Take the #AppStore. Apple blocks third parties from offering rival app stores for its #iOS platform, which means you can only install apps that have been blessed by Apple. That blessing is contingent on the software authors involved giving $0.30 out of every dollar you spend in their apps to Apple. 2/   @pluralistic a lot more needs to be said about the 2-3 decades that tech used PR to really horrific ends, and the journalists and interested tech employees who help them out  @pluralistic This is basically the exact opposite of a proposal I saw a few years ago to switch to an 8 day week, with one of the key benefits being that Christmas would always be at the weekend so we wouldn't need to have time off work for it
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 @pluralistic When I first saw this message, I truly thought you were just taking the (Mickey Bliss) (pun intended. Sorry.)  @pluralistic @hacks4pancakes That cover photo is a good remake of Serrano’s Piss Christ. Maybe call it “Piss Prime”? [ Edited to replace incorrect attribution to Mapplethorpe. Thanks to all who pointed out my error! ] Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Open Circuits; and more! Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/14/hidden-worlds/ 1/ I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To #SeizeTheMeansOfComputation," a #BigTech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It's a #DRMFree book, which means #Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook: http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org 2/ #Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform's shareholders: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys 1/ If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men 2/ In "Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare," business researchers from #CarnegieMellon and #PamplinCollege investigate goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4398428 1/ If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/08/late-stage-sea-monkeys/#jeremys-razors 2/ The online debate over #FreeSpeech *suuuuucks*, and, amazingly, it's *getting worse*. This week, it's the false dichotomy between #FreedomOfSpeech and #FreedomOfReach, that is, the debate over whether a platform should override your explicit choices about what you want to see: 1/ It's wild that we're still having this fight. It is literally the first internet fight! The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between #Bellheads (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and #Netheads (who believed that services should be provided and consumed "at the edge"): https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/ 2/ The End of the Road to Serfdom https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9
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@pluralistic good god, that's terrifying. I've been having anxiety over my 401k for the past decade. Now I'm unemployed, can't finda job, about to lose my COBRA benefits, can't afford ACA, and now terrified that Social Security won't be there when I talk my need it. And I don't imagine things are going to be any better for my 6 year old daughter when she's in my shoes. How long will we need to wait until the next reckoning? @pluralistic For the last 20 years or so, one of my catchphrases has been: 2 World Wars and The Great Depression took the wind out of the sails of the rich and powerful. And now they have come to take it back. @pluralistic One thing I took away from the article were how tangled all the different policies are and how politicizing them has led to just hypocrisies and blame games which in turn has led to more downward spiral. How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms (without ditching your friends)
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@pluralistic I enjoyed this article, but I don't think we need to use govt force to force social media companies to be interoperable. @pluralistic ...and now I've learned about the fediverse, which is like finding a thing I didn't realize I'd like to find. Cheers! Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Francisco's Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didn't have to pay a cent. 1/ The Cuecat was a good idea and a terrible idea. The good idea was to widely distribute barcode scanners to computer owners, along with software that could read and decode barcodes; the company's marketing plan called for magazines and newspapers to print barcodes alongside ads and articles, so readers could scan them and be taken to the digital edition. 2/ Computer security is really, really important. It was important decades ago, when computers were merely how we ran our financial system, aviation, and the power grid. Today, as more and more of us have our bodies inside of computers (cars, houses, etc) and computers in our body (implants), computer security is *urgent*. 1/ Decades ago, security practitioners began a long argument about how best to address that looming urgency. The most vexing aspect of this argument was a modern, cybernetic variant on a debate that was as old as the ancient philosophers - a debate that Rene Descartes immortalized in the 17th Century. 2/ In the mail today: my fulfilled first-batch #Precursor open/secure mobile device from the amazing bunnie Huang. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates/crowdfunding-begins
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TONIGHT (May 17), I'm in San Francisco at the @internetarchive to keynote the tenth anniversary of the @AuthorsAlliance:
https://www.authorsalliance.org/2024/03/15/authors-alliance-10th-anniversary-event-authorship-in-an-age-of-monopoly-and-moral-panics/
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