starless @starless@pixie.town

it tried. it did its very best

"Out of 100 avatars I generated, 16 were topless, and in another 14 it had put me in extremely skimpy clothes... I have Asian heritage...My white female colleague got significantly fewer sexualized images. Another colleague with Chinese heritage got results similar to mine."

Incredibly important story from Melissa Heikkilä about how the viral AI avatar app Lensa repeatedly undressed her without her consent, and its grotesque fetish for Asian women.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/12/1064751/the-viral-ai-avatar-app-lensa-undressed-me-without-my-consent/

The MN historical society union is having a rally this Saturday at noon! It will be fun! I'll be there!!! Come support us in our quest for a fair contract!

Our union has an Instagram and a brand new Facebook page where you can keep up with our events, media coverage, and more.
https://instagram.com/mnhsunion?igshid=N2ZiY2E3YmU=

https://m.facebook.com/MNHSUnion/

Reminder that I collect weird, whacky, and bizarre form fields related to gender collection at https://genders.wtf and would welcome people submitting more

Via @encelado: Brain cell cultures were able to learn the arcade game Pong.

Losing my shit.

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6

Dogument
#UnfortunateDvorakLayoutTypos

Can’t remember if I posted about my magnetic belt key clip when I designed it, but here’s it again after several months of use.

I got sick of using a carabiner that was tricky to undo with my off-hand dozens of times a day. So I designed this belt clip that’s easy to slot in or pull out one handed, but doesn’t fall out on its own unless you really try. Combined with a coiled cord that permanently keeps my keys clipped to my belt but with some slack, it means I can’t lose/drop them, they’re not weighing on my neck or getting caught on stuff, but I can get in doors while carrying stuff easily.
#tinkering

Fox on the fence

I live in the deep south and don't have any other #trans people to ask questions to. I know there is no "right way" to be trans but I have so many questions about others' experience. I think I'm gonna ask questions here since I've never seen a more supportive group of people. Please feel free to boost for visibility and feel free to let me know if I'm too much.

Chevalus Bananus

Incredibly thoughtful post from the mods of the kolectiva.social instance. This line in particular struck me as a good description of the challenges inherent in anti-abuse work:

“The moderator role is not so much one of an arbiter of truth, but a role that seeks to understand conflicts, assist in mediation where necessary, and to facilitate a healthy, expressive environment in alignment with our instance's values and code of conduct.”

https://kolektiva.social/@moderation/109490898623030949

Will follow in this thread with some additional CW’ed commentary

« Chasing Light »
That day I was literally chasing the light.
#photography #landscape #abstractart #mastodonart #norrland

Hand Talk, or Plains Sign Talk, is a trade language that was once the lingua franca across what is now central Canada, the central and western United States and northern Mexico, used among the various Plains Nations.

Some of the signs are similar to ASL (like tree and grow). Although there is no sign for name, so the word "call" is used when asking someone for their name:
"QUESTION - YOU - CALLED."

(Images, William Tokins 1926)

If you're approached about joining Qoto's UFoI (United Federation of Instances), don't. Qoto started it because they got pissy people were defeding from them because they refuse to themselves defederate from fash instances. Some of the instances ON their UFoI are fash instances. https://weirder.earth/@human_dude/109477515561058563

Qoto are *not* representative of the 'good' spaces on fedi, and if you're invested in curating a safe space for marginalised folk on your instance, you should distance yourselves from Qoto.

Anybody know of any good transgender historical fiction books? I'm looking to get some trans books as Xmas presents for a newly out trans woman friend, and she loves historical fiction (and alt-history).

Sunrise over Lake Superior near Grand Marais, Minnesota.

#seascape #LandscapePhotography #photography #Minnesota #MNastodon

pls boost am testing gotosocial concurrency

For some context on my current instance setup, it's using nothing but free tiers of various cloud services until I get a good estimate of how much resources I would need to dedicate to running my own instance locally.

So far we're capping out at 30GB of media storage. 3GB of Database storage, and comfortable use of less than 1GB of ram and 1vCPU.

I'm thinking it's feasible to self host this very soon, once I get my newly liberated thin clients set up.

Full Moon and Mars from Exeter Observatory.

wow, nice thread from @nexusofprivacy who took notes on my "Trust & Safety in the Fediverse" webinar:

https://mastodon.social/@nexusofprivacy/109479153478604828