Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

Hoping the fediverse can help out: I'm in touch with a Ukranian family in #Toronto who are trying to get their cat (named Milana, in photo) from #Kraków, #Poland to Toronto this spring. They can cover some transport costs but are trying to connect with someone already making the trip. Email milana at hypatia.ca if you can help. Please boost!

#Ukraine #CatsOfMastodon #Canada

When they say “chatGPT gave me xyz” what really happened is that it gave you a mashup of things written by people on the internet, and didn't bother with proper attribution. These things are not made of magic and like soyolent they are really made out of people.

A way to characterise these language models is as a way to depersonalise and remove agency. To appear to centralise content generation.

I remember when Aaron Swartz was criminally prosecuted for downloading too many academic journal articles, but, sure, it's totally cool to scrape everyone's personal photographs as part of a commercial effort to market discriminatory surveillance tech to police departments.

https://www.businessinsider.com/clearview-scraped-30-billion-images-facebook-police-facial-recogntion-database-2023-4

learning the phonetic alphabet is important

I totally love the way VC flavour of the month has seamlessly switched from "artificial scarcity of art, it's all about making sure artists get compensated!" to "free art for everyone, based on all the art we could find, completely uncompensated".

"If you don't like it, stop complaining and go make your own!" Ah yes, because the venn diagram "people who use the software" and "people who can make the software" is a perfect circle.

I don't want a fedi version of Instagram or Twitter.

I want experiences that are impossible to emulate by centralized platforms.

What an incredible shot!
Photo credit: Roy Rimmer

being an anticapitalist in tech is constantly pointing out how the latest shiny new tech hyped up through venture capitalist billions and using more energy than a small country probably doesnt have your best interests at heart, and getting gaslit into accepting that it must be part of the future and you're just some weird luddite, until 1-3 years later everyone accepts its shit and starts agreeing with you by which time its too late

It's #AutismAcceptanceMonth, so remember:

Autism acceptance, not "awareness". We are not a disease.

Autism Speaks is a vile hate group that wants to stop us from being born, a genocidal goal. (Reminder for those in the back: genocide does not have murder as a prerequisite.) Autism Speaks doesn't speak for us, and any person or company who supports Autism Speaks is actively doing harm.

The whole "world autism day" and "light up blue" things are campaigns of Autism Speaks. Fuck that. Light up red for Autism Acceptance Month instead.

The blue puzzle piece is a symbol of Autism Speaks and presents us as a "problem" to "solve", which is an incredibly ableist framing.

The vast majority of autistic people, including myself, use identity-first language (like in this sentence). While not a universal preference, the push for the phrase "people with autism" is largely from neurotypical people who see autism as some external force. It is not. Being autistic is in the core of my being. Respect those in the autistic community who do choose person-first language for themselves, but don't force that language on the majority of us who prefer and use identity-first language.

Allistic parents of autistic people and other autism-adjacent allistic people are not in the autistic community and they do not speak for us. This is why the ActuallyAutistic hashtag was created, for those who don't know. We autistic people can speak for ourselves.

And remember autistic people are diverse! We don't fit some stereotype and we are who we are. I'm proud to be who I am.

🕷️

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #Autism

I appreciate this (humorous, but also informative!) explainer video by @adamconover --- and am especially tickled by the Stochastic Parrots shout out (and quote)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro130m-f_yk

»Nostr solves my most basic frustration with ActivityPub, which is that some of my followers on different servers can't see me because their admin said so.«

So Gleason is bothered by his own actions leading to him being fediblocked on some instances for healthy community curation.

I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.

In case you've seen #Nostr accounts – the decentralised social protocol where coiners recently moved over to – being bridged into ActivityPub fedi:
One popular bridge mostr.pub is – who could have guessed – developed by Alex Gleason, part-time egdelord, main dev of soapbox, fired from Pleroma, co-founder of spinster and enjoyer of supposed swastika “shitposting”.

If you decide to use that software, just be aware whom you might need to interact with for bugreports.

The Wizard of Oz is such an American thing, anywhere else he would be named using a much more usable unit, like The Wizard of 28 Grams