Notices by Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca)

In which I consider the announcements from Mastodon and Bluesky-adjacent “Free Our Feeds”, both surfacing on the 13th, concerning fundraising and governance measures for the worlds of ActivityPub and ATProto: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/01/14/Protocol-Churn

#bluesky #fediverse

@anildash I'm a little cynical about announcements of fundraising *targets* but still, the important take-away is that a lot of people have noticed that social networking as a commercial product really doesn’t have an interesting future, it’s time to build out alternatives.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/

Stuck my head into IMDB for the first time in a while and maybe I'm just paranoid but I think there's a pervasive LLM stench in the reviews.

Hmm… Hachyderm.io, one of the larger Mastodon instances, just decide to defederate from threads.net: https://community.hachyderm.io/blog/2025/01/09/defederation-from-threads/

@lauren Got a link on that?

Strong stuff from the heart of LA:
https://www.404media.co/email/512a4009-8b31-43ac-bb3b-f27ba5e8f8e9/

@evan Really? We finished it but weren’t left feeling good…. On the other hand, one day after a kitchen chore I said “It’s getting very Scavengers Reign in the compost” which got a laugh.

I strongly recommend you read this whole thread, and consider your behavior here in light of it.

https://fediscience.org/@kathhayhoe/113787783732811080

@mekkaokereke
X: Cheap competitors in generic SaaS offerings like blob storage and CDN.
Y: IFTAS, maybe.
Z: (stretching here) AI (but not genAI) models to help moderators with traffic the way it helps radiologists with images.

@DavidDarnes At one level, “design” is the activity at the core of the engineering profession; could there be such a thing as a design-oblivious engineer? Would it be fair to say that your usage of the word “design” is aimed at UI design? I.e. an engineer whose focus is on front-end software?

@etienneff @evan @coop BTW this is a .ca, you can talk to the world en français. Welcome!

Geeks only: Seconds Since the Epoch https://aphyr.com/posts/378-seconds-since-the-epoch

I suppose that, in the rearview, it should have been obvious that the first generation of convincing genAI technology would be (a) deeply flawed and (b) instantly seized upon by fraudsters and scammers, to horrible effect.

#genai

AI Comes for a Centuries-Old Craft https://www.404media.co/email/35cebc72-71ce-416e-8b2e-853cbc2c24ce/

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/582

More recreational reading for the world's 17 lovers of wrangling both finite automata and UTF-8. I previously challenged Fedi with the question: How many states does an automaton need to match any Unicode code point? Answer in the next post and explanation in the blog piece.

Matching “.” in UTF-8: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/12/18/Matching-Dot-in-UTF8

@cheeaun How expensive is Pro?

@mekkaokereke
My recipe fits in a toot with room to spare.
1. 2 eggs, 2 tsp brown sugar, 2 tbsp veg oil. Whisk ’em up.
2. 2 c milk, 2 c flour. Mix. Opinions vary as to which goes in first. People say don’t mix too much, I don’t find it makes much difference.
3. 3 tsp baking powder. You’re done. Leave the batter a few minutes.
4. *Must* cook them on a cast-iron surface with butter. You won't get the burner level dialed in right until you've done a couple batches.

“Trump has sewn himself into a sack with Elon Musk, a few billion dollars, a cat and a snake, and had the sack tossed into the Tiber. That’s the story here. And it will go on for a while.” - Josh Marshall

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumps-trump/sharetoken/50385625-ee47-4692-a1c8-aa6ea081d9c6

#USpol