Notices by Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)

Just as "web log" became the even more awkward "blog", I suggest we change "newsletter" into "slet"

Then we can talk about the sletosphere, have startups like sletspot and sletlines, etc. It'll be terrible, as nature intended

The Applied Social Media Lab is hosting a hybrid event on May 9, including a panel I'm moderating where I'll be speaking with Louis Barclay, Fay Johnson, and Rudy Fraser about their work as ASML Fellows. Tune in remotely or come by Harvard in person!

We also have an open call for showcasing cool projects around social media for public good! You can submit "presentations of research, app prototypes, live demos, or creative experiments".

More info & RSVP/submission here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/asml-spring-synthesizer

Klan Cookout (1983), an Apple II game where you play a person with a flamethrower trying to burn as many KKK members as possible

https://www.mobygames.com/game/138166/klan-cookout/

@sun @silverpill ActivityPub is a protocol substrate. The fediverse is more than ActivityPub, it is the network and its capabilities and its people

@silverpill put another way: if the average user is 95% likely to land on a server that doesn't support some feature, it is not useful for me to say "Fediverse users get access to feature x", I need to say something like "users of particular implementations of Fediverse software get access to feature x"

I know it might sound like I am splitting hairs but I am very concerned with how we represent the capabilities of the fediverse to people who have never and will never know what a FEP is

@silverpill @reiver if only a very small number of servers have a feature it is not terribly real. Especially when it comes to features regarding federation the meaningful existence of a feature is determined by interop. If say Brave browser is the sole implementer of an RFC it is not useful or meaningful for me to say that RFC feature is on the Web.

There are degrees of reality when we talk about nascent technology, these degrees matter

@silverpill @reiver I've read the Portable Objects FEP. It seems okay and I don't have enough domain expertise to have an opinion on its specifics. There are not many implementations listed in the "implementations" section though.

I don't like the framing of "feature x is already on the Fediverse" when all that means is "more than zero software implementations support it".

@reiver nope! Other people are way better informed than me and there are approximately 7.6 million DID methods last I looked. did-webvh seems nice but that's not a strongly held opinion I have

@evan my point is there are no rules of the road for how content should be sent around the network. It's how you get phenomena like "boost leaking" that can get around blocks

@evan @reiver okay correction: doesn't say anything substantive about federation! Completely useless to me as an implementer!

Re: LLMs I am not a complete doomer. I think there are good applications for statistical processes that run on text!

That said, I keep seeing demoware for supposedly world-changing applications.

Maybe the core function of LLMs in a PRODUCT category is they let us automate and abstract out the "break things" part of "move fast and break things". Critically the "break things" is black boxed so now none of us can be held accountable for breaking anything...

@jalcine I remember it so so so so clearly, it's up there with 9/11 for me

@mattl I'm here making Google Guessages

I made a little tool that lets you search the full text of all published Fediverse Enhancement Proposals.

https://fep-search.glitch.me/

It does so privately in your browser using a neat in-browser elasticsearch-type-thing called FlexSearch:

https://github.com/nextapps-de/flexsearch

I'm a simple man: I see a petard, I hoist it

The enemy of my enemy is some kind of super-enemy-squared.

[opens a private browsing window in Firefox, clicks the "Common myths about private browsing" link]

- private browsing goes to the underworld
- private browsing must answer a series of riddles posed by a monster in order to obtain treasure
- private browsing disobeys the gods and incurs their wrath
- private browsing sings the song that creates the heavens

@evan @rigo @blaine sure yes. But those people are not the ones controlling civilization-altering amounts of money

@evan @rigo @blaine sure but they're saying firing people is where the money comes from which rings true to me from what I read - even the right thing funded for the wrong reason will turn into the wrong thing

@jcoglan @blaine @evan agreed. there's a reason I picked "verbal persuasion" as my example of a thing that should be seen as every bit as magical as genAI