Notices by William Pietri (williampietri@sfba.social), page 2

I think people are missing something with Bluesky's "consumer choice" model of moderation. A lot of harmful content has harm beyond *you* seeing it. 1/

I have real trouble getting my head around the way we nearly eliminated flu season for a year and now we're right back to accepting tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths per year. Same with Covid, of course. How many other lives could we save with modest change?

@cstross My sympathies! This is a pernicious problem in tech. For years I volunteered helping people learn methods where they would pay attention to actual people and actual needs. But as things like WeWork and FTX show, doing it right is often not only beside the point, but an obstacle to getting stupid rich. It's like expecting a prosperity gospel preacher to care about being a good person. @lilithsaintcrow

@thomasfuchs I count at least 5 waves of "stereoscopic 3D is a game changer" innovation going back to the 1850s. Every time so far it evaporates.

My theory is that it's a combination of the wow/novelty factor plus the idea that 3D has to be lots better. Always ignoring that it's cumbersome and that human brains don't need to use two eyes to reconstruct depth.

@cstross As a fellow middle-aged cis white male, I have a theory. I've been wondering how the "ZOMG GAI is almost here" crowd sees things so differently than me. I suspect many of them, mostly cis white men, pay no attention to the actual humanity of the people around them, especially those they see as lesser/subordinate. So when they see ChatGPT as nearly human, that's because it's about as complex as their understanding of their wives, girlfriends, and employees.

@alexch @thomasfuchs @danhon Makes me think of this classic:

There is a category of reply guy, thankfully much less common here than on Twitter, whose routine is to reply in contradiction, but with "I don't see" or "I don't understand" as his only evidence. It's always funny to me. Oh no, a random internet dude doesn't understand my point, so I must be wrong! Chastened by his manly command of all knowledge and understanding, I'll guess I'll just slink back to my well of ignorance and be quietly ashamed. 🤨🙄🤪

Happy MLK Day! Today I'll be rereading Letter From a Birmingham Jail. If you haven't read it recently, I recommend you join me. It's a gold mine of insights that are still fresh 60 years later. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Also, I give you my favorite MLK-related reply GIF. I haven't needed it since I quit Twitter, but perhaps you'll find a use for it.

@mattly @danilo Entirely fair point. But I'm also very over the technology-led hype cycle. I think there are a lot of people who were brain poisoned by living through two legitimate tech revolutions, the Internet and mobile computing. They keep expecting the next one to come along any minute now without considering that it might be 50 or 100 years.

So many hypesters are showing up without a measurable human upside, let alone accounting for the downsides. At this point I reserve the right to spray them with my garden hose.

@inthehands Ooh, nice! I didn't realize that about Gmail. Thanks!

@inthehands Agreed! Who are you using for the auto-reporting these days? My solutions are old enough that I'm concerned I may not be doing maximum damage.

It was the fuck-aroundiest of times, it was the find-outiest of times.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/02/sbf-bankman-fried-trial-ftx

@Adam_Cadmon1 @paul_ipv6 @inthehands Yeah, there are many good ways to break this, but personally I think of it in terms of long cycles of action and reaction around power distribution. So slavery -> Civil War -> Reconstruction -> the Nadir -> Second Reconstruction / Civil Rights Era -> Second Nadir (now).

In that framework, Reagan fits as the beginning of our era in that he was the acceptable face of a lot of reactionary forces, the anti-integrationists and the anti-feminists included, and a clear turn away from the 60s/70s increases in freedom. But it obviously picked up steam with the GWOT. Then after the false dawn of Obama, we get the US right losing their minds (partly in reaction to him). We're not done yet, but I'm hoping things like the base blowing out the Speaker mark a turning point.

@thomasfuchs
Just wanted to let you know that at least one person understood your post. But RIP your mentions.

@stevestreza
This is true, but your analysis is not complete. Privilege is also involved for somebody to say their need for an audience outweighs the harm they are doing by supporting a guy who today is literally blaming the Jews.
@aral

@inthehands Thank you for saying so. I lost both my parents to brain tumors. There are plenty of ways to joke about McConnell, and plenty of non-jokey things to say too, that don't involve making fun of people for things out of their control.

I see the EFF is wrongly defending KiwiFarms again. Sorry, but ISPs have freedom of association like everybody else. If they don't want to host racist abusers, they don't have to. And they shouldn't. Except for protected classes, ISPs not only can choose their customers, they should. That has always been the case; look at how spam and spammers are treated, for example.

If there is a separate problem here that the US has too few "Tier 1" ISPs such that Hurricaine Electric has excessive market power (which I think isn't the case), then that's an anti-trust problem, not a give-up-your-moral-standards problem.

And that's not to say we won't eventually be able to construct synthetic human-equivalent intelligences. Just that expensive autocomplete is so far off the mark of what a real mind is up to that it's a tragedy that people are confusing the two.

One of the wild things to me about ChatGPT discussions is the number of people who apparently don't have any appreciation for the actual complexity of human beings. How sad to be inches from such treasurehouses, only imagining them filled with sand and sticks.

So ex-Twitter is removing blocking at Musk's order. He believes the feature "makes no sense." And I think I know why.

A consistent theme in Prof Manne's "Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny" is entitlement. Men feeling entitled to women's care and love and deference. Men acting entitled to feelings of competence and prominence and correctness, making successful, knowledgeable women a threat.

From a Trust and Safety perspective, that male entitlement is the number one reason blocking exists. 1/

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/elon-musk-x-twitter-block-feature-delete-1235699759/amp/