Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Hello privacy-forward friends. You might want to uncheck this checkbox that comes pre-checked in the latest iteration of Firefox (if you are still using it. I realize you may not be, yes I still am). The vibe I get is that it's like "cookie trackers lite" and still not cool.

What Firefox says: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

Hat tip and read more from @mcc https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112775362045378963

one of my favorite sayings/concepts that I ever picked up from a hs student is bones/no bones days.

Today is feeling very boneless.

Mozilla shuts down its location services because of a patent troll : :ablobdundundun:

https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2237

Every time you reduce diversity and increase centralization you introduce choke points, bottlenecks and single points of failures that *will* come back to haunt you.

A #degooglification lesson, AKA "centralization is bad" even when the Good Guys™ do it because it makes you less resilient:

One of the key piece of many (but not all) degooglified Android systems is a tool called "microG". It basically "pretends" to apps that you have Google Services installed, emulating the many system APIs basically all apps depend on.

One of these APIs are Location. In fact, you used to be able to install "add-ons", download a CSV of cell-towers and run mobile cell tower-based approximate geolocation fully locally. Well…

https://github.com/Helium314/Local-NLP-Backend?tab=readme-ov-file

> Note that microG has stopped supporting UnifiedNlp backends with 0.2.28.

https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/releases/tag/v0.2.28.231657

> The new location stack does not support UnifiedNlp modules anymore. This was a step necessary to take to get locations properly working on latest Android versions. […] For now, the new locations stack is relying exclusively on Mozilla Location Service for network based location.

You know what comes next?

You know what phones need? Trackballs. My first smart phone, an HTC Hero (though rebranded by T-Mobile), had one and it was great! It was very useful for highlighting text and precisely pinpointing things where a finger press doesn’t quite cut it.

here's the deal @mozilla , the only people who care or even know about mozilla at all think this is bad to do. just say you fucked up, own it, and say everyone who uses firefox owes us $50 and we'll pretend it never happened. you took everyone who thought this was a good idea, fired them, and all the money will just be spent on making firefox work good forever and that's that. my fee is zero dollars and you can write that off your executive salaries i think because i am a lawyer too

So Labour are pushing for a permanent ban on puberty blockers.

You’re going to go and write to your MP about this, right?

You’re going to write to your MP about this, right?

You understand that we voted in an overtly transphobic party who want to kill trans people into a government who have succeeded in doing so (kids! 16 kids so far!), as they were the least worst alternative, but you’re going to help us change their minds right?

My good friend? My favourite cis ally? You’re going to help us, right? :)

You’re opening Microsoft Office right now to work on the first draft of your email, to your MP, asking them to stop killing us, right?

I can hear you typing! Excellent! I look forward to your persistent help on this :)

https://www.writetothem.com/

I am so grateful to @vantablack for being vocal and starting #fedipact. Opposing Facebook's control over social media always has been and always will be an act of asserting queer existence.

https://nileane.fr/@nileane/112774656837852705

New blog post: Why picspam and repost accounts are bad! https://out.flipping.rocks/blog/why-picspam-and-repost-accounts-are-bad

> You've seen them on Twitter, you're seeing them on the fediverse: accounts with names like "AmazingNature8" or "HistoryPix", or occasionally human-sounding names like "Massimo" and "Veronique". Popular topics include nature and wildlife photos, historic images, relatable memes, fine art, and so on.
>
> They repost photos or memes that have gone viral elsewhere, like Twitter, Instagram, or Reddit. The text of the post is scraped as well; google a distinctive sentence and you'll turn up a previous post. Credit, if it's ever given, is a handle with no URL or indication of what social network it belongs to. Tellingly, on the fediverse, there are virtually never image descriptions. […]
>
> Since I end up having to give this spiel every time I raise the alarm about such accounts, I'm putting it down here in a more permanent place.

Are there any lawyers in #Ottawa on fedi that will witness me signing my name/gender change forms? So far nobody has responded to my emails.

Edit: thanks everyone, I may have a lead on someone who specifically works with a local LGBTQ+ group to get this done: https://kindspace.ca/idclinic/ ​​

Looking for a post/paper I saw noting that the main difference between LLMs is their training data - same data, same outputs. (Because LLMs are lossy text compression.) Does anyone have the post/paper I'm thinking of?

EDIT: this is the one i was thinking of: https://nonint.com/2023/06/10/the-it-in-ai-models-is-the-dataset/

> model behavior is not determined by architecture, hyperparameters, or optimizer choices. It’s determined by your dataset, nothing else. Everything else is a means to an end in efficiently delivery compute to approximating that dataset.

when you order something as ":3 meowmeowmeow" and the staff still treats the order seriously: