Notices by Hugo (hugo@assemblag.es), page 3

like, this place has a hard-coded post status for bullying people in ways that others can't see. it's fucked up.

I think I went off this place when it clicked for me just how abysmally shite an idea "followers-only" visibility really is: a post status that lets you abuse people in ways that only you, your buddies and your victim can see? who on Earth thought this was a good idea?

for all the talk of this as the Good Place, this is an abuse vector I've literally seen nowhere else.

maybe one reason this place has a reputation for racist abuse is simply that it's built to make racist abuse super easy.

like, if followers-only posts were followers-only in a strict sense—if they weren't also visible to users mentioned in the post regardless of follower status—this would entirely change how they work, and curtail their usefulness to harassers.

but that's not how this place is designed.

brat summer, autumn of godzilla.

did you think I was joking.

@puniko

yeah, I saw. posted an update downthread.

threads is now blocking mastodon.social, which—if you have been following the political punch and judy show around this over the last year or so—is objectively funny.

https://www.threads.net/moderated_servers

a lot of this in my feed right now. a great disturbance in the force.

downright hallucinatory to read an entire article like this with not a single mention of covid itself causing immune dysregulation.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-06-14/why-is-everyone-getting-sick-behind-the-global-rise-in-rsv-flu-measles

"ingestion" is a weirdly corporeal, metabolic metaphor to use when scraping data from a network for your new website.

also a pretty clear red flag.

I suppose there's a sort of digital body horror undercurrent to this.

machine learning models consume your data, metabolize it, turn it into parts of their "body" that can't be easily extracted again.

been updating my robots.txt files, thinking it'd be nice to have something like that here: a machine-legible way to clearly mark legitimate and non-legitimate uses of your data.

serious question: if you're an unhappy academic who dreams of quitting your job and living another, better life—what do you do in that other, post-academic dream life?

I ask because academia has a way of narrowing your horizons, making it feel like it's the only thing you can do, the only thing you're good for, your only way to live. always interested to hear what people dream of doing instead.

fresh coffee, birdsong and the soft whirr of a robot lawnmover butting repeatedly into my lawn table.

jesus christ.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/5/27/israels-war-on-gaza-live-news-35-killed-in-rafah-tent-bombings

so by default, anything you do that appears on the screen of a windows user (chat or messages, say, or video calls) will now be recorded, machine transcribed or summarized, and available to anyone who gains access to the folder on that users computer where windows stores these recordings.

@seanbala

yeah, the UK is particularly abysmal on this. a sort of neoliberal laboratory for dehumanizing academics.