Notices by Andrew (andrewt@mathstodon.xyz)

@julesh nothing good has ever been "unleashed"

Thomas Becket is often mistakenly called "Thomas a Becket" after a medieval scribe hit the "a" key instead of "shift" on his phone keyboard

Surnames exist because medieval peasants would find a bread seller they really liked but already had a "Dave" in their phone, so they put the new one in as "Dave Baker"

follow me for more history facts

In the eleventh century, the easiest way to look up your friends' birthdays was on Domesdaybook

In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen claimed to have built the world's first chess computer, however it eventually turned out that the machine was using humans to make moves via the AWS Mechanical Turk API

Leap years exist because of a miscalculation by Pope Gregory XIII, who wanted to align the calendar and the Earth's orbit. The rockets he used were slightly too powerful and the orbit ended up almost a quarter of a day too long.

The American Revolutionary War ended on July 4, 1776, when Horatio Gates managed to upload a computer virus to the British mothership

@ryanc Hahaha, incredible

from https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/771522130582044672

@ireneista @jalefkowit I mean it also just says everything about these people, right? "AGI is when it makes $100bn" is absolutely what we should have expected.

Imagine OpenAI building a real artificial superintelligence and it not officially counting because it doesn't think that making $100bn is a worthy goal

I've found the reporting on this story super weird. I mean, it would have to be. The standard rules don't work here.

The reports I've seen are treating it like they do when a pretty and well-liked student gets shot in a robbery or something, complete with the middle section about how kind and generous the victim was — and I have to believe even the staunchest libertarian would struggle to forget that literally the only thing anyone knows about this guy is that he made billions of dollars by depriving people of life-saving medicine.

If he'd just been sternly rebuked, that section would have read "Thompson was CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a $500 billion company in the US health insurance industry, which experts estimate causes one death every twelve minutes", but quite reasonably journalists have rules against saying anything that makes a murderer sound based as fuck. But the system Thompson represented is so self-evidently evil, how can you report on this *without* the reader rooting for the shooter?

But, you know, they never care about that when they're reporting about, say, Hamas generals being killed. They never get a eulogy from surviving friends and family. If you see it as a one-off shooting, sure, the current reporting makes sense, but if it's the first real retaliation in a class war that's already claimed countless lives then the current reporting looks like taking sides.

Which, of course, it is. In a class war between billionaires and the working class, the news media aren't exactly Switzerland. Besides, we already know the US media are singularly incapable of adjusting their reporting to a world where the old rules no longer work.

Who knows what's next 🤷

@welshpixie you would think they could at least avoid doing it on the "why do people keep doing exactly this thing we have just explained is bad" posts, it's like, this could not more clearly be a trap, have you considered simply not

@ryanc @eniko

I saw a couple of posts there from Scalzi the other day and I found it interesting that the reasons he says BlueSky is succeeding (which are probably right) are the reasons I'm not using it more. I can socialise on fedi, BlueSky feels like an RSS reader with comments. I'm sure it depends a bit on who you follow etc but I don't think I did anything *that* wildly different when trying out the two platforms, so I do think this is a BlueSky thing more than a me thing.

https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com/post/3lbn4tfq72c2d

https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com/post/3lbnfx2as322o

Welcome to new people joining from 𝕏!

Remember, posts are called toots here, likes are called florps, retweeting is technically a cross-account posting exploit that they can't fix because we're using it, and our version of Grok is called Garfiald.

There's no algorithm here! Literally none. There is no computer code behind Mastodon. Each http response is typed out by hand by your server admin in real time. Sometimes this means you won't see replies from other servers, but that's ok, other servers are full of losers anyway.

People here make a point of using alt text — if you can't find an image you want to post, just post a picture of your cat and describe the correct image in the alt text. Nobody will notice, or at least nobody will mind.

The first thing you should do is make a pinned toot with your pronouns, political affiliation, and favourite Linux distribution. Cisgender people are welcome on Mastodon but aren't officially supported, so some features may not work properly.

But most importantly, have fun! Users found to be not having fun will be given a written warning in the first instance and banned if the behaviour continues.

The "anyway" in the new (?) "show post behind content warning" button seems a bit weird to me — it doesn't really make sense when it's (eg) a trigger I don't have. So here is a userstyle that will make it less weird:

.content-warning .link-button {
font-size: 0;
&::after {
content: "Don’t threaten me with a good time";
font-size: 1rem;
}
}

Well, arguably, you can change it to whatever.

This is the classic Tinder Problem, right?

On Tinder, even if women were on average just 1% choosier than men, men would slightly lower their bar to get the number of matches they wanted, which means women would become more selective to compensate, and so on until men are using the app like it's Cookie Clicker and women know any right swipe will be a match and act accordingly.

Same with jobs: if employers are getting fifteen applicants for every job, they're going to be selective, and then applicants have to apply to more places which makes the problem worse until yeah, obviously someone was going to write the Filter Out A Bunch Of CVs And Don't Worry Too Much About Which Ones-Otron 9000 and someone else was going to write Apply For Literally Everything Bot.

No idea what to do, though — we probably can't just say "I guess that's how it works now" and invent Jobs Bumble. Really the solution is for employers to care about who they're hiring — it won't affect the workers:jobs ratio, but if workers weren't getting sick of their bullshit and looking for new roles every eighteen months there'd be a lot less applications to go through.

https://www.404media.co/i-applied-to-2-843-roles-the-rise-of-ai-powered-job-application-bots/

Here's the current state of the tech industry:

A week or so ago I went for a big group meal and at the end they brought the card reader machine for us to pay and it had an option for us to go through an itemised bill, check some options, and pay for just those options (plus an equivalent fraction of the service charge). It was amazing! This genuinely saved us about half an hour of talking at cross-purposes and poking numbers into our own phone calculators and hoping nobody did the sums wrong and accidentally stole someone else's tip. I genuinely would consider going back there for future group meals despite the fact that I'd finished my food before Alec's arrived and he'd finished his before Darren's came, so thoroughly do I dislike the traditional bill-splitting process.

And yet in terms of technology, it was nothing but a low-end smartphone running an app built entirely from OS-standard UI components. No AI, no invasion of privacy, no adverts, and I have to assume no VC funding or elaborate toolchain. Just a good idea implemented well, and genuinely we all went away commenting about how clever and useful it was.

And I don't remember the previous time I experienced that. We know what people want. They want you to use the massive technological advances we've already made to build useful things that work. But apparently there's no money in that 🤷

@dansup @andreagrandi I think it's fair, yes. People keep saying stuff like this as if these platforms are just uwu smol bean fedi admins who were trying to run chill little communities when suddenly billions of users signed up overnight and now they're doing their best to moderate it all but really struggling to find the time what with work and childcare. They're not, they're groups of grown adults who sat around a conference table one day and deliberately chose to allow libsoftiktok to stay on their platforms because they'd make very slightly more money that way and that's more important to them than keeping vulnerable people safe. If your goals for fedi are anything more noble than "make network big" then surely Meta are almost by definition your enemy?

what is it with breadtubers having single letter names?

Sarah Z
H Bomberguy
Abigail Þ
Natalie ƿ

@enkiv2 dating simulator but the aim is to maximise your access to borrowed tools and craft supplies via metas