Notices by Peter Bloem (pbloem@sigmoid.social)

Explaining the fediverse is simple. It's social media for people who hate social media.

There aren't that many people on it? Feature.
It's not that addictive or even engaging? Feature.
You can't make money on it and it won't help your career? Feature.

An 8TB corpus of permissively licensed text for training AI models. Comes with two 7B models trained as proof-of-concept.

https://github.com/r-three/common-pile/blob/main/paper.pdf

I'm glad somebody has finally done this. The "we need to break copyright or AI won't work" argument feels super-dodgy to me and we can just evaluate whether it's true. 1/n

@futurebird @lnlyisol In the early days, there was a lot to do about "the long tail". How the internet made it worthwhile to cater to niche subjects because you could cast such a wide net.

I felt this died when companies like Netflix became big. They started focusing on things with mass appeal. They could have broadened their catalog with lots of cheap, niche movies that a few people would like but they never bothered.

I think it would still make them money. It just doesn't generate prestige.

Is the cute cartoon a dark pattern? I like cute things (and this fox is well-drawn to be fair).

But I think it's a deliberate attempt to infantilize the user and to put a harmless face on something insidious.

@aral noted this more than ten years ago. Make big brother a cartoon dinosaur instead of a mustachioed man and suddenly we will swallow anything.

https://ar.al/notes/spyware-2.0/

Moving away from Firefox shows how much the rot has already set in. After dismissing the "set as default browser" dialog, and explicitly clicking "don't ask again", next time it shows me a different pop-up, that is much easier to accidentally click.

All the dark patterns are there: high contrast easily-clickable default option. "No now" instead of "No" as low contrast alternative answer. Cute little cartoon.

@futurebird London has these too. One of them flows through a metro station, above the trains.

https://metro.co.uk/2024/01/28/london-underground-station-secret-river-running-right-20185034/

@molly0xfff For some reason I assumed that the gooseneck holder would actually attach to your neck somehow, and having looked them up, I am a little disappointed.

@petergleick

This is a nonsensical way of thinking, but I couldn't help but make a rough estimate.

Assuming that, to be a recognized Mozart in the 18th century, you'd need to be male and live in Europe, that gives you a pool of about 60 million people.

Scaling that up to 8 billion, that means that if we were to keep the population constant, but promote equity and opportunity, we'd have a 133 Mozarts running around.