Mastodon Feed
Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
chris@video.thepolarbear.co.uk ("Chris Were but on PeerTube") wrote:
Thoughts on leaving YouTube, and moving away from big tech...again
Mastodon FeedMastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
dsalo@digipres.club ("Dorothea Salo") wrote:
I guess "I am a PERSON before I am a datapoint or a historical artifact" has been a throughline in a lot of my professional positioning.
"Do you remember that your data are people?!" I spat at a roomful of biotechbros once. Not sorry. Never will be.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁"):
cmconseils ("Lady Laura :bongoCat:") wrote:
Ballerina fountains, Malgorzata Chodakowska, bronze, 2024
Mastodon FeedBoosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
emilymbender@dair-community.social ("Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)") wrote:
It's time to #TalkAboutHumanities so here is a contribution:
Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of 'AI': The View from the Humanities
Mastodon FeedBoosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
impactology ("Raghav Agrawal") wrote:
Information architecture is usually taught as menus, hierarchies, and taxonomy, but that’s only the surface layer.
Information architecture is not navigation. It is the structuring of understanding.
The core question is simple. It's asking what is the minimum amount of information needed to form understanding on a screen
It’s deciding:
what exists (ontology)
what matters right now (relevance)
what can be understood together (chunking)
Mastodon FeedBoosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
romeu ("Romeu Moura") wrote:
People are using « tokens used » as productivity metric ?! « Tokens used »?!?!? That’s like, the first time « lines of code created » gets beaten for the « worst metric of software engineering » 🫠
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:
Psychics and prophets are all the same thing: liars and frauds. Prosecute them all.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/13/penalize-all-the-tiktok-psychics/
Mastodon Feedaredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:
Be careful. "It's AI slop" is turning into a thought-terminating cliche.
Even though it's true often, the actual use of the phrase is starting to be a shortcut to dismissing things without using our brains.
And that is itself a kind of slop.
Learn to notice it because doing it consciously is exhausting, but knowing when you're being cognitively lazy is a step to being a bit more resistant to bad ideas and being manipulated.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:
Prompt injection right into the only text field in their flagship service. FFS.
Mastodon Feedaredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:
RE: https://mstdn.social/@hkrn/116397393158252865
About friggin time.
I report people exposing their home address unintentionally on the web about once a month so they can censor it. It's such an easy way to expose yourself.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
bascule@mas.to ("Tony “Abolish ICE” Arcieri🌹🦀") wrote:
It's not often I'll link a NYT article, but someone from the WSJ wrote a really whiny oped whose core point was something to the effect of "it's not climate change denial, it's climate crisis denial, you're mischaracterizing us if you think we deny all climate change" and they thought this was a real slam dunk argument the year either winter was replaced by summer in the US, or winter was batshit insane.
What the WSJ doesn't want you to see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/climate/climate-change-deniers-trump.html
Mastodon Feeddysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:
bifurcating in two
😬
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
If you warn about a problem before it's FELT, people will ignore you even after it hits them
A warning with enough foresight to precede the catastrophe will be less credible BECAUSE it was early.
People would rather be angry than feel responsible and an early warning proven right takes that away
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
This spectrum of "reading" (despite being very annoying McLuhan was right to avoid a binary dichotomy and instead use the metaphor of a temperature range) have existed for a long long time but have only really become unbalanced in a problematic way over the past few decades
This is quite specifically what Neil Postman was warning us about in "Amusing Ourselves to Death" in 1985 and his warning ran up against the same wall that blocked other predictions such as that of global climate change:
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
RE: https://mastodon.social/@iris%5Fmeredith/116395821486826615
This is very much a tangent inspired by Iris's article but...
The reading dichotomy Iris presents (grammatical versus Bayesian sentiment analysis) maps pretty well to McLuhan's hot and cold media, which in turn maps to Tarkovsky's montage vs time pressure, Tolstoy's art formed of associations with other art vs that formed of experience and emotion...
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:
May every right-winger face the fate of Victor Orban.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/13/losers-2/
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
“Designers will never have influence without understanding how organizations learn”
> what everyone is suddenly obsessed with producing (via vibe coding) is not actually prototypes. It’s demos.
Mastodon Feedjscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:
That whole boygenius album was fantastic
RE: https://www.threads.com/@broreenjonathans/post/DW9i8nDCOKH
Mastodon Feedjscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:
Not sure where in the scriptures it says Jesus was a grifting adulterous pederast
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-sparks-fury-with-image-of-himself-as-jesus-antichrist-spirit-11818578
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jwz:
Paul_Taylor@mathstodon.xyz ("Paul Taylor") wrote:
I have been using email for 40 years. It used to work.
As an (independent) academic researcher, I need to contact new people, primarily in universities, to ask questions.
I refuse to use Google, Microsoft or the other American IT giants.
But they are increasingly preventing refuseniks from sending email at all.
I know what RFC, DNS, MX, SPF and DMARC mean. My email goes through small British companies with intelligent, friendly and helpful staff.
mxtoolbox.com says that I must have DMARC to send email to M$. So I set it up. I now get a dozen copies of the same report from G or M$ for each email that I send out.
They show that my email gets to G and M$ sites, but then it is marked as spam.
The stupid senior management of numerous universities has surrendered their staff email to M$.
Web searches and AIs preach about spam. I don't send spam - I want to contact my colleagues.
Rumour has it that previously unknown senders are treated with suspicion and their emails are sent to spam. In other words, it is impossible to **initiate** communication with someone.
Let's be blunt about this. They are a mafia that is enforcing an **oligopoly**. It's got nothing to do with reducing spam --- I have no doubt that they let through emails from "trusted partners", ie companies that bribe them enough to send their spam.
The result of this is that it will only be possible to send emails by paying M$ to do it, and then it will only be allowed to express "approved" opinions.
What can we do about this?
At the very least, those of you with senior positions in universities can tell your management to revert to competent standards-based email systems hosted on Linux systems.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
_elena ("Elena Rossini ⁂") wrote:
@reiver if I may be blunt, I think many creative people (and journalists and politicians) are too attached to vanity metrics even if their engagement on Big Tech platforms is very low. They may be afraid to start over on yet another new network where they'd have 0 followers.
This year I'm all in trying to help cultural institutions get on the Fediverse... I think once some big players are here (museums, galleries, media organizations) others will follow
Mastodon FeedBoosted by GuillaumeL@hachyderm.io ("BigSaur G"):
RickiTarr@beige.party ("Ricki Yasha Tarr") wrote:
Who could have possibly anticipated this? Oh everyone, that's right.
Also, ONLY 4%!
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
iris_meredith ("Iris") wrote:
A new article: this one's an extension of last year's article on the subject of wank, and it discusses why wank is discursively effective despite being annoying as hell. Many thanks to @dahukanna and @whitequark for productive conversations on here that led to me developing some of these ideas:
Mastodon Feeddb@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:
totally serious notes on Skill Issues:
https://dbushell.com/notes/2026-04-13T05:35Z/anyway, happy Monday!
Mastodon Feedsoatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:
https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/public-key-directory-specification/issues/118
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
chriswarcraft.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Chris Kluwe") wrote:
OZYMANDIUS IS WEAK ON HISTORICAL RECORDS
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
jacob@jacobian.org wrote:
I think it’s worth remembering that nonviolence is a tactic, not some sort of universal moral imperative. There are certain situations where nonviolent activism was effective. And others where violence prevented far worse outcomes.
Mastodon FeedUltimately every good regulatory regime needs to be designed by people who know that they are themselves supposed to be protected by the same rules. Our leaders are not "our betters", a special class of people endowed with better judgement who should have different rules, just a group of people we have entrusted to represent our interests. Political representatives need to think of their constituents, even their constituents who are minors, this way. They are stewards, not lords.
Mastodon FeedBut, even that framing is still "othering" the problem (assuming that your representative is not a 22-year-old woman). The best way to think about this from a regulator's perspective is to ask the potential regulator: how do you want the regulation to impact YOUR behavior, rather than kids'? If the choice is "stop allowing Instagram to trick kids" vs. "stop allowing kids to access instagram" this feels like a nuanced debate; making it "stop allowing instagram to trick ME" the discourse sharpens.
Mastodon FeedAnyone interested in solving the problem of e.g. Instagram-driven anorexia would be much better off banning Instagram's machine-learning algorithms whose entire job is to get vulnerable young women trapped in cyclical problem behaviors, not getting involved in draconian liability regimes where it's OK to do this to a young woman who is 22 but illegal to do to one who is 17 even if the technique is equally effective on both