Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

When I worked at Nokia, years back, one of the other teams on the phone we were building wrote an app, which put up a randomised bingo grid of cliches managers say in meetings so we could all sit there with the prototypes and look like we were paying attention

So OpenAI just released a detector of AI-generated text, I assume because of concerns in education / homework.

https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/

Maybe this is good?

No, it's very bad.

They claim 26% true positives, 9% false positives. Assume 10% of submitted homework is chatgpt generated, you get the classic counterintuitive outcome of poor predictive power: if a homework is flagged, there's a 3:1 chance it's *human* generated.

This is going to cause a lot of harm. It should be immediately recalled.

Words like 'idiot, nuts, crazy, insane, mad, stupid' etc. are ableist and have been used as slurs. Just because *you* might not be offended by them, or your friends might not be offended by them, doesn't mean that they haven't been used to harass and abuse people.

Make an effort to cut them out of your language. 'Wild' is a good all-purpose replacement word, but there are many. Find your own flavour of non-ableist language to replace these words.

Well moderated German-language instances please?

Got my first invoice from the Origami Society and don’t know what to make of it.

In April of 2015, almost eight years ago now, I posted a long thread on Twitter about American privilege, a unique form of Western privilege that applies to the United States of America.

Since very little has changed since then, and any discussion around US-centrism in online circles are still notoriously difficult to have, especially when a space is dominated by Americans, it's time to revisit this.

Let's define what I mean by American privilege, first.

#AmericanPrivilege

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@punkonbus1701 @GTLC This actually bothers me, as it does something the US "left" lets the right do all the time.

"Woke" was NOT a derogatory term made by the right, it came from the black community, and was then adopted by white people before the conservatives started using it as an insult.

For the love of all that's good, stop letting the conservatives dictate your language. They already did it with pro-life/pro-choice, and so many other things, and it's poisoning discourse.

fyi, since many people don't know this exists:
Almost all computer screens made in the last decade support DDC/CI. (The Display Data Channel Command Interface).
You can use it to control stuff like the backlight brightness without fiddling with the awful screen buttons and OSD.

On Linux once you load the ddcci kernel module the screens appear in /sys/class/backlights and can be controlled like a laptop screen.

New gender just dropped

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I don't always encounter alt text for images on Mastodon. But when I do, I notice the alt text descriptions are higher quality than they were on Twitter. In general, I feel like describers are sharing the intent of images more and sharing their visual interpretations more often. When describers do this, the pictures come alive in my mind. In short, alt text feels less robotic on Mastodon and more like my sighted friends narrating their lives and observations to me. It's really awesome and special to watch. Keep up the great work, describers!

White friends. Please don’t spend the month of February quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead, spend the month learning about systemic racism and taking action towards a more equitable future for Black folks.

You can begin with this rich essay that accompanies a repository of policy-based recommendations:

https://belonging.berkeley.edu/structural-racism-remedies-project

Or read this report on inequity in the workplace:

https://www.wearehue.org/stateofinequity

#BlackHistoryMonth #SystemicRacism #Equity #DEI #Equality #Inclusivity

What if we stopped pretending that we could do everything on our own, and what if we opened ourselves to giving and receiving help?

I used to say all politics are identity politics, but even then, I didn't fully grasp how many people's politics are based in identity instead of principles.

For a lot of white liberals, liberalism is just about looking smart, open-minded, reasonable, and concerned but not aggressive, often in a way that still holds the door open for that which they claim to oppose. It's far worse to be seen as partisan, closed minded, "radical," or "extreme."

There's a reason the primary drivers of transphobia are a cadre of ostensible liberals writing moral panic screeds dressed up as "just asking questions" about "taboo" subjects, which conservatives then use to justify draconian legal punishments.

I'm sure these "journalists" think of themselves as Good People who are Asking the Important Questions. But they clearly think being trans is bad and icky even if they can't admit it.

But it reminds me what poor "allies" a lot of these people are.

And to be clear, the white liberal identity is constructed such that it gives the appearance of awareness and concern about, e.g., white supremacy while shunning the "politicization" that might change it.