Notices by David Njoku (davidnjoku@mastodon.world)

@mekkaokereke I feel like you've just challenged me to a fight. Meet me at the town square at dawn and we'll find out who is stronger. 😀

At the time I got married, 13 years ago, I lived in a flat. I liked it cos it was a short walk from the train station. Good for getting home after late nights out.

My wife moved in. One day she said, "The only problem with this flat is that it's a long walk from the station."

Long?

Turns out it's short if you go thru the woods & by the dark underpass, a route a woman would never think of taking.

And that was my 1st lesson in how we inhabit the same space but live in different worlds.

@mekkaokereke Isn't Hair Love the one about the little girl whose mum had cancer and so her dad has to learn to do her hair? Why would they ban that?

The city of Timbuktu in Ancient Mali was legendary - its wealth, its culture, its architecture. Its university attracted scholars from as far as Spain, and from all over the Islamic world.

Whispers of its greatness spread as far as England - but it sounded so fantastic that the English assumed it must be mythical, like Atlantis or El Dorado.

It blows my mind that even today, 800 years later, many British people think Timbuktu is a distant made-up place.

I follow @mekkaokereke to learn things I wish I didn't need to know. 😞

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/113249551553331194

I hate the idea of the excellent minority.

"Look at the excellent Black woman. She wiped the floor with the white (or orange) man. In your face, racists!" we crow.

But if a woman or minority needs to be twice as good as a white man to be just as successful, I've got bad news for you. It means your society is racist and misogynistic. You should be ashamed, not proud.

I was listening to this interview with Jenna Ortega (if you don't know who that is, congratulations you're old 👴🏿¹) and the interviewer asked her what she thinks about AI.

"I hate it," she replies.

My first instinct was to dismiss her. Who cares what an actor thinks? Ask a computer scientist instead.

"Every day for the past 10 years, I've received AI-generated pornographic images of me via social media," she continues.

-----
¹ Jenna Ortega is 21.

https://pca.st/episode/5571fd11-4dcf-4310-8da2-7f36e973a901

@dansup I hope it's not friend.com

https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/10/maybe-friend-wasnt-crazy-for-spending-1-8m-on-a-domain-after-all/

I have 2 kids, a 10 year old son and a 6 year old daughter. When he was younger, my son's favourite season was winter; he loved sledding and he loved building snowmen. My daughter, on the other hand, barely remembers snow; the last snowman was when she was 2. Instead, she's lived through 40c summers; today's going to be over 30c. In England.

Tell me again that climate change isn't real - or urgent.

#ClimateCrisis #climateChange

I went on Twitter and looked at JK Rowling's timeline.

Now I remember why I left Twitter. I don't love anything as much as Rowling hates everything.

These far right riots taking place across the UK have reminded me of the way that democracy deceives us. It makes us think 51% = 100%.

Just because a slim majority of us voted for the left doesn't mean that this country isn't still an extraordinarily dangerous place for Muslims, Jews, Black and brown people.

Britain can only "defeat fascism" at the ballot box if you're white. But if you've still got angry, neo-nazi sons & nephews the rest of us aren't safe.

#UKpol #ukriots #fascism

I don't boost or favourite posts that are just screengrabs from #Twitter.

Cos I'm petty like that.

#mastodon

In the year 2100 historians are going to look at the Google n-gram chart for the use of the word "weird" and wonder what the fuck was going on in 2024.

#weird

On the high street of my small town, there's a tanning salon right next door to a Black hairdresser. I see white people streaming into the first, and Black people into the other.

Being Black I know absolutely nothing about what goes on in one, and everything about the other.

We inhabit the same space, but live parallel lives.

I guess I am gingerly making an analogy to the experience Black people have been having on Mastodon, and white people's cluelessness about it.

1/n

Been listening to this great new podcast called Tested. It's about female athletes who are considered too "masculine" to be "real" women and are banned from competing.

Other than Caster Semenya, who you've probably heard of, there are a couple of Namibian athletes and some Brazilians.

I'm picking up a whiff of #racism. I bet the IAAF and IOC would change the rules if the athlete was blonde and blue-eyed

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/10/1253921751/introducing-tested-from-npr-and-cbc

#BlackMastodon #BlackFedi

Watched this old interview with George W Bush. He sounds so reasonable.

Makes me wonder: did we all misjudge Dubya or are today's Republicans so horrendous that they make evil men of the past seem fair-minded?

https://youtu.be/l16tPdgQzYk?si=-o7ecvf8mDSjcqIp

This month my kids are obsessed by:

1. Squishmallows
2. Prime Drink

If you don't have kids, you've probably never even heard of these things.

And that is why childless people are happier.

#parenting

I've been trying to put together my thoughts on "#woke" #AI and how we're blind to the bias we live with, but keenly aware of any changes to it.

AI has always been biased; when I posted months ago about Dall-E refusing to generate images of Black doctors no one seemed that shocked. But when #Gemini overcorrects when trying to deal with the problem there's global outrage?

(1 of 2)

#blackmastodon #artificialintelligence

(2 of 2)

Yes, AI must improve. But I suspect that users need to too. Maybe we need to recognise that expecting a single text field to satisfy all our needs - from diagnosing Alzheimer's to generating videos of purple puppies - is asking too much. It'll never do anything perfectly.

Maybe I need to explicitly ask for "White" Nazis. But I should be able to ask for "Black" doctors and get results.

Dear #AmazonPrime, I accept that you feel you need to show some advertising, but I'm not sure ads for Peppa Pig are the right fit when I'm watching an 18+ Mexican sex comedy about swinging.