Amanda Unvarnished

You know what’s more frightening than the proliferation of #AI?

The proliferation of opportunists on LinkedIn and Medium and elsewhere trying to shove their “10 Ways to Leverage AI for Success” posts and articles in your face. 😱

—@gulovsen

Normalize chosen names outside the trans community.

—@LunaDragofelis

Your periodic reminder that VC-funded CEOs are in a situation that they have bet both their kidneys on being able to deliver a 100x return to the bone-saw wielding loan sharks who funded them.

Your “community” is worthless to them unless it delivers Kidney Money.

They cannot just “decide” to not enshittify the community you mistakenly believed was yours. No appeal to justice or fairness will work, unless accompanied by a donor kidney or two.

—@Unixbigot

Just putting it out there that my dad was a piece of shit, and while the holiday doesn’t trigger me especially, I want to express solidarity and sympathy with anyone else out there who has hard or complicated feelings on days when everyone is posting nice stuff about their parents.

—@Cyrus

People keep acting surprised at the direction Reddit’s taking, but it seemed inevitable. If you try to build community on a platform that’s not owned by that community this will happen every time. You can protest, you can even attack the bottom line (which is the only thing that will get you anywhere), but at the end of the day you have no power and they’ll just block you and re-add your deleted posts. Don’t trade community ownership and power for convenience or you’ll get burned every time.

—@sam

On electric vehicles:
There is no foreseeable battery tech coming in this generation (20 to 25 years) that will make cars clean or green and almost no current battery tech is ethical. Google where cobalt comes from. Google how short a life LiFePo batteries have. Google how unrecyclable they are. Electric cars are Elon Musk’s fantasy, full of Elon’s jizz, to put it bluntly.

On electric bicycles: If you are able bodied, they are of no benefit to you. Any $500 to a $1000 bicycle will outride and outdistance one of these consumerist toys. If you can’t ride because of disabilities like muscle atrophy or a number of other conditions that might allow riding a bike, but no powering a bike, then an electric bicycle is a great idea! Anybody who is able bodied and choses an electric bicycle is just to0 lazy to do the real environmental change that’s needed. I have a heart condition, and I ride a bicycle with no electric assist as my main mode of transport. See also the battery stuff. You can buy a human powered bicycle with reasonable guarantees there is very little likelihood of slave labour being involved in production. The same cannot be said for any battery powered device. I say again, Google where cobalt comes from. Google how short a life LiFePo batteries have. Google how unrecyclable they are.

—@crunchysteve

Hey fediversians, I just want to gently remind you that your bot and spam battling, moderating admins host this most marvelous free of charge, no advertising, open discourse platform because it is a passion. They give endless hours to this pursuit around the clock. Your social media life is better for all of it. The cost to them is time and money. Please throw some dough, bread, moolah, ca$h, cabbage, dinero, ducats, splosh, etc, their way if you are able. It feels really good to give to them.

—@noondlyt

Apparently Meta has been contacting some instance admins about their plans for the fediverse. I am not sure whether to be happy or sad, but they didn’t contact me.

I am seeing a rift emerging in the fediverse that is a bit reminiscent of my own CISA episode back in November of 2022. At the time, the people who objected fell into two overlapping camps:

ACABs that couldn’t see past CISA’s placement in the DHS and simply object to the concept of any law enforcement affiliated person being on the fedi (NB: there are a LOT of them here and they’re all over the fediverse)

Instance admins that wanted to protect their constituents from the surveillance that comes along with DHS.

While the context is materially different, the Meta situation seems to come down on similar lines: conceptual rejection of Meta because of who Meta is; and a concern for the privacy of one’s fedi-data.

Regarding the former point, I think it is fundamental to the fediverse for people and instances to be able to pick who they want to participate with, almost for whatever reason. If there are people who really dislike bald guys, I’m one to block. The latter reason is more problematic. As with the DHS situation, Meta creating an account or an instance is really not an effective way to conduct a surveillance operation (either to send people to jail or to show them ads) – not on an infrastructure that has oodles of open APIs that make it far easier to collect data using direct connections vs creating an instance.

Said another way, the lack of a branded Meta or CISA account or instance is not an indication that such data extraction isn’t happening. We generally wouldn’t know if it were.

I’ve heard the “embrace/extend/extinguish” accusation about every 6 months in the 7+ years I’ve been here. The company that bought Pawoo was going to take over the fediverse. Medium was going to be installing paywalls and feeding ads across the fediverse. Vivaldi and Mozilla were going to bring so much trash into our timelines that we should just preemptively block them.

If I, or any instance admin, finds that Meta or any other company is surreptitiously collecting data from our instances, we will take action. I will highlight that suspending instances and accounts won’t be very effective here – we would have to implement firewall level blocks, assuming we can identify where they are coming from. And I doubt it will be coming from a branded instance. Sadly, even this is trivial to work around if they connect to a relay or set up an account on an instance that doesn’t isn’t blocked. The major concern, of course, is that your fedi data is linked to a record they maintain about you in their own databases, and then use your content to help tailor ads as you visit other parts of the internet.

If we identify that an instance is behaving badly, of course they are going to get suspended, just as happens today. But be aware that this only prevents YOU from seeing THEIR content. If Meta does set up an instance and start spamming out ads, that is exactly what will happen.

In the mean time, if you want to block Meta owned domains and instances who aren’t blocking Meta owned domains and instances who are not blocking instances who are not blocking meta owned domains, that’s ok.

For me, I am going to wait until I know more to make a decision.

—@jerry

@mekkaokereke in the end, though, the goal is working – it’s to make teaching impossible so there are no more teachers

then they win, school “choice” will be the only option because private schools don’t have to follow these regulations. state universities and community colleges will collapse but private schools and for-profit scam technical colleges will flourish because again, they aren’t state funded. no rules.

so all kids will be forced into a Christian education that’s shown to reinforce the myth of Black exceptionalism putting up about three students while crushing the rest of the class alongside staff that according to basically every study on charter schools are shown to create incredibly toxic racist environments through “positive” racism. schools that aren’t required to accommodate students with disabilities and have been seen to get away with just only accepting white students.

maybe we need to shove the reality of the reason for all this in people’s faces to take it seriously

—@deilann

The argument that resonated the most with me is that high-quality software needs living, breathing human developers with a mental model of how the software works. If you’re taking huge code blocks spit out by an AI and injecting it into your code unread (or largely unread, as the tool encourages you to do), then you’re effectively taking on a dependency – one that’s not understood by anyone on your team, of dubious quality, and frozen in time with no security updates or bugfixes ever.

—@nolan

#AudioMo
On March 12, 2011, I was (virtually) introduced to a sugar glider through a Twitter follower. The “crabbing” sound it made got me thinking about how it would sound if a mutant sugar glider went on a destructive rampage. Since I didn’t have a mutant sugar glider on-hand, I did the next best thing, and this happened.
Meet Killer Sidney, the godzilla of formerly small creatures… or something like that.

—@BorrisInABox

We shipped a bunch of improvements to https://fedidb.org!

⚡ Fresher stats
⚡ New graphs
⚡ Top 20 lists updated more often
⚡ 14d server graphs
⚡ Server instance.json
⚡ Stats updated more often
⚡ Sus subdomain detection
⚡ Improved mobile layout
⚡ New favicon

One more thing, we also improved the #threadiverse page https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse

Feedback + boosts appreciated! We have lot’s more in store, stay tuned 🚀

—@pixelfed

I’m sorry, but if you run a tech company and independent developers make a better interface for your product than you do, that sounds to me like a problem you solve by making a better interface, not by attacking your most dedicated users.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/16/reddit-ceo-triples-down-insults-protesters-whines-about-not-making-enough-money-from-reddit-users/

—@josh412