Notices by Jer Warren (nyquildotorg@fedia.social), page 3

Former president says he would prefer to die by electrocution in bizarre campaign rant'The former president and frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination delivered the bizarre remarks during a speech in the community of Ottuma. He was pontificating over batteries for electric powered boats while recounting a conversation he claimed to have with a boat manufacturer in South Carolina.'“If I’m sitting down and that boat is going down and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned, but then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark over there, so I have a choice of electrocution and a shark, you know what I’m going to take? Electrocution,” [the former President] said. “I will take electrocution every single time, do we agree?”

The last few days, I've been seeing a lot of headlines about how science has "finally explained why carrots are orange," which of course reminds me of one of my favorite examples of intentional misinformation spread: that Ally pilots had better night vision than their German foes in WWII because they intentionally included lots of carrots in their diet.

Of course the truth is that the allies had a secret radar tech the Germans didn't know about, and the public campaign to tell citizens to eat more carrots was a ruse.

I've been talking about how AI will directly lead to an Idiocracy (2006) scenario for some time, but today's update to the "can you melt eggs?" saga is as clear an illustration of how as I think it's possible to ever have.

Quora's AI answers made up the melting point of eggs, and then Google picked it up and responded affirmatively that you can indeed melt eggs.

Then people wrote articles about how stupid it is that Google says eggs can melt. Then Google fixes the answer.

Then Google ingests an article about how stupid it is that Google says you can melt eggs, and suddenly Google starts answering affirmatively again that you can melt eggs, citing the article about how stupid Google is for thinking you can melt eggs.

complicating things even further, one of the replies on my instance is from someone on the same instance as Ian, and that reply does not show up on Ian's instance's version of that thread.

I thought I understood the general wonkiness of the fediverse replies situation, but clearly not.

On my instance's version of a thread, there are way more replies than if I visit the remote instance on which the thread originated. Is this because I'm not logged into the instance where the thread originated, and I'm just seeing an old not-updated version of the page?

I would expect the thread source to have more than a remote does...

This thread from Ian Coldwater on Hachyderm is the one I'm talking about: https://hachyderm.io/@ian/111098333623392670

Visiting that page right now, I count 60 replies. Viewing that same page on my Firefish instance, I see 87 replies.

If the issue is that Hachyderm (or Ian) blocks those instances (or users), then replies from them not appearing on the Hachyderm page for that post makes sense.

But what doesn't, is that in order for me to be seeing them here, my instance needs to already have a following relationship with them, right?

Or do replies that Hachyderm has decided not to accept still get federated out from there?

My Firefish instance has a whopping 104 users. I'm not saying it's impossible that there are people on my instance following all the users whose replies appear here but not on the original Mastodon post, but it seems really unlikely. And it's not even like it's all 60 Mastodon posts showing here and there's 27 "extra" ones, it's just like completely different pools of replies without a lot of overlap.

OK, I've since seen a couple people I do follow boosting some of the replies from other instances. So I guess it's more likely that people on this instance follow people who boosted posts from another instance that never even appeared on the originating post's instance 🤷

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io would love to know more about this

@tekhedd@byteheaven.net you mean you wish mastodon supported reactions :)

The rumor about Apple trying to eat the Chromebook market feels like a really great next step toward the future I think we all know is coming: a descendent of iPadOS running on MacBook-shaped hardware, eventually to replace macOS altogether.According to a report from Digitimes citing industry sources, Apple is working on a new low-cost MacBook series aimed at the education sector and primarily targets Chromebooks as its rivals. This laptop will be launched as a separate lineup from the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro.I've been saying for years that, when they decide to do it, all Apple will actually need to do to pull this off is make Xcode only run on this new OS. Developers will grumble for a few days, but if they were going to actually stop developing for Apple's platforms, they would have done it years ago 🤷

@aral@mastodon.ar.al I've spoken to a number of ex mozilla employees over the years as my diatribes against mozilla have ramped up and one thing is super super clear now: regardless of any actual intent, mozilla has been essentially trapped by Google's unlimited privacy violation payments. There may be a desire to stop wasting hundreds of millions of Google's dollars every year in favor of wasting money they earned honestly, but it is never, ever going to happen.

Nothing they do will ever shake the fact that they can't even keep up with Chromium when Google pays them to do so, and that the second Google decides to stop funding them they are completely fucked.

I think the only responsible thing they could do at this point is fire the C-suite, shut down the for-profit company and let Google continue to fund the not-for-profit until they don't anymore. Stop trying to be profitable and start trying to make a goddamned browser 🤷

The loud part: "yeah, I got suspend working just fine in Linux. No issues at all."

The quiet part: "It's resume I can't get working..."

There's a local Vancouver, Washington mural artist whose work features Mayan styling and it's always great, but this one caught my eye this morning and I think it's particularly rad.

Zoom trying to do damage control by obfuscating what they say VS what they mean is a good reminder to take PR statements with a grain of salt. By looking at what Zoom has actually done, you'll quickly see all the times they've flat-out lied.

Remember when Zoom claimed to offer end-to-end encryption but didn't? I do.

Remember when they said they've made joining meetings on macOS easier but actually installed an exploit that made Zoom re-install itself if a user uninstalled it? I do.

Remember when Zoom said they were protecting user privacy but then handed user data to Facebook? I do.

It's always good to have a reminder that what a company says is often of significantly less importance than what they've done.

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io social networks were designed by corporations trying to make money off the activities of ordinary people, and "killed" blogs.

I just don't think trying to reframe what social media can be ought to be as controversial as people think, especially considering the entire concept was designed for evil from the get-go.

Cohost absolutely had the correct idea on differentiating replies from posts. Replies dumping into feeds was always just another way to "increase engagement" for advertising purposes, and I remember when everyone was mad about that.

That some of these people who were mad about replies in feeds on Twitter are now like "how dare you suggest that replies should be a different thing than posts!!1" is frustrating.

Post.news also treats replies differently than posts. I was annoyed by this on both Cohost and Post for longer than I'd like to admit, but when I finally realized how much better designed it is I instantly became annoyed that everyone else is not doing it that way.

I hadn't even gotten to the way making replies work differently than posts can impact abuse, and now that I'm thinking about it in those terms, I feel even more strongly that, as long as the objective of the social media network isn't specifically to expose more people to more posts for advertising purposes, having replies be like comments instead of their own boostable posts is the only reasonable option.

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io @hannah@social.alt-text.org is working on it!

Here on Firefish, there's an AutoCaption button that does a remarkably good job.

[edit: oops, wrong Hannah