2023 March
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TIL Firefox has a "resist fingerprinting" flag, but when I enable it websites no longer know I prefer dark mode!
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The most interesting parts of this for me were the links to discussions about reverting to the old design. For me the new design is an unqualified win, especially the sidebar TOC!
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Willing speakers should reach willing listeners
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🔗 Pluralistic: Solving the Moderator’s Trilemma with Federation (04 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow via web
Rozenshtein proposes a solution (of sorts) to the Moderator's Trilemma: federation. De-siloing social media, breaking it out of centralized walled gardens and recomposing it as a bunch of small servers run by a diversity of operators with a diversity of content moderation approaches. The Fediverse, in other words.
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"The marketplace of attention was supposed to solve this problem; we were told that the good channels would be elevated by the platforms and that people would stop watching the bad channels. But the marketplace of attention cares only about attention." Frankly we should have known this kind of content spam due to engagement incentives was going to be a problem when the whole industry of SEO sprang up
2023 February
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Great interview which includes Keanu commenting on our modern tech dystopia
"I was trying to explain the plot of The Matrix to this 15-year-old once, and that the character I played was really fighting for what was real. And this young person was just like, “Who cares if it’s real?” People are growing up with these tools: We’re listening to music already that’s made by AI in the style of Nirvana, there’s NFT digital art. It’s cool, like, Look what the cute machines can make! But there’s a corporatocracy behind it that’s looking to control those things. Culturally, socially, we’re gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the nonvalue. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us?"
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Some random thoughts: Texting before calling A while back a shop took down my phone number so they can text me (their words) when it comes in so I can pick it up. A few days later, they notify me via a phone call instead of a text, the nerve! (At the the time I was outside pleasantly enjoying a hotdog sandwich.) Society can't seem to get the hang of the fact that many people don't want the inconvenience of being interrupted by a phone call, I'd like an update / upgrade to whatever protocols mobile phone calls and SMS
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I don't really care about Twitter cutting off free SMS 2FA (more secure options are still available), but it's weird that current users of the feature need to remove it themselves or lose access to their accounts. Apparently $44B tech companies are unable to automatically turn off a feature they are planning to take away!
(Click photos to view full-size)
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When does the magic of a situation fade? When do we get acclimated to the exceptional?
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But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”
The Fediverse apps are all built on a set of rules called the ActivityPub standard, which is a little like HTML had sex with a calendar invite. It’s a content polycule. The questions it evokes are the same as with any polycule: What are the rules? How big can this get?
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ChatGPT is a lossy text compression format
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I like the explanation of why ActivityPub can be problematic because it's a push protocol.
2023 January
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🔗 Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow via web
This essay on "how platforms die" has the best description of the network effect: "a kind of mutual hostage-taking"
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Not only is this bait-and-switch justification idiotic, but it reinforces my view that Tweetdeck dying is an inevitability.
The only chance Tweetdeck had was that it's left alone because only power users used it, but that's true of third-party clients as well. As soon as EM finds out he actually owns a (better) alternative web client that doesn't serve ads, it's over for Tweetdeck
2022 December
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A decent fediverse overview I think
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Some Blogs You Might Like Back in April, I wrote a post titled "Follow Friday #1" with the intent of being a regular feature where I highlight blogs I follow. But I never got to do a second one! With the impending collapse of our traditional social media platforms and more people than ever blogging, I figured it might be a good idea to try to cram in a second such post before the year ends, so here are some interesting new blogs I've been following this year and have added to my blogroll: Rubenerd.com by Ruben Schade. I forget