Notices by fullfathomfive (fullfathomfive@aus.social)

#chronicillness #mecfs #chronicilnessmemes

Sabine Weiss, Monastery of the Jumping Cats, Burma, 1996.

#photography #burma #sabineweiss #cats #catsofmastodon #miaowstodon

#metgala #gaza #genocide #palestine

@internetarchive @brewsterkahle

I'm behind you 100%! Internet Archive has been so helpful to me, getting access to old texts that aren't in print anymore. It's our library of Alexandria, and we can't let these guys burn it to the ground.

jk rowling: there are only four types of people in the world - smart, brave, evil and miscellaneous. a magic hat tells you which one you are when you are 11 years old, and it will never change

harry potter fan: omg i'm such a miscellaneous

#terf

#terrypratchett #discworld #harrypotter

One day Mastodon will let me have different themes on different devices and browsers, and I won't have to switch manually each time ... I hope.

Dark theme for my laptop, light theme for my eink tablet please thankyou

#mastodon

'The Zionist myth that Israeli settlers "made the desert bloom" is as inaccurate as the one that Israel was a "land without a people for a people without a land".⁠

As we can see in Gaza and the West Bank, the process of stripping the land of its people, and reducing cultivated land to slashed and burned wasteland, requires extensive, brutal violence. Olive groves that have been propagated for centuries are torn down by Israeli settlers, water sources are filled with concrete, and farmers are driven from their homes.⁠

In the 1948 Nakba, at least half of the Arab population of Palestine, (700,000 people,) were driven from their homes, and forbidden from returning. Villages were razed, and archaeological sites destroyed. There has been a deliberate attempt by the Israeli state to make its claim of a "land without a people" a retrospective reality. As they will attempt to do with Gaza, after this Second Nakba.⁠

According to Decolonizing Palestine: "The vast majority of cultivated agricultural land in Israel today was already being cultivated by Palestinians before their ethnic cleansing... On the eve of the 1948 war, around 739,750 acres of land were being cultivated by Palestinians. These cultivated lands were so vast, that they were “greater than the physical area which was under cultivation in Israel almost thirty years later.” The agricultural core of the Israeli state consists of cultivated farmland that was stolen from Palestinian refugees after their ethnic cleansing."⁠

Colonial ideology has always needed to believe that conquered peoples were idle, ignorant and backwards, unable to manage their own resources, and always requiring Western intervention to improve and utilize the land beneath their feet. The more we learn about the civilisations that European colonialism has destroyed, the more we discover that we were simply importing our own ignorance into these nations, alongside our violence and disease. The people who lived there before we arrived knew all too well how to live in their own land.⁠

So no, Israel did not "make the desert bloom", like all European colonial projects, they did little more than pave paradise, and put up a parking lot.'

Words and image by Darren Cullen

https://www.spellingmistakescostlives.com/single-post/make-the-desert-bloom

#gaza #palestine #genocide

The Inaccessibility Cycle

#disability #ableism #accessibility

@mapachin Yes agreed! The fediverse embodies the original principles of the web: open, free, distributed. I think it's a tool we could use to do amazing things, rebuilding the internet commons outside of the corporate system.

A lot of people have responded to my Duolingo post with things like "Never work for free," and "I would never donate my time to a corporation.” Which I completely agree with.

But here's the thing about Duolingo and all of the other companies like it. You already work for them. You just don’t know it.

On Duo, I thought I was learning a language. Participating in the community by helping other learners and building resources seemed like part of the process.

Luis Von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, was one of the creators of CAPTCHA, which was originally supposed to stop bot spam by getting a human to do a task a machine couldn’t do. In 2009 Google bought CAPTCHA and used it to get humans to proofread the books they were digitising (without permission from the authors of those books btw). So in order to access much of the web, people had to work for Google. Most of them didn’t know they were working for Google - they thought they were visiting websites.

This is how they get you. They make it seem like they’re giving you something valuable (access to a website, tools to learn a language), while they’re actually taking something from you (your skills, your time, your knowledge, your labour). They make you think they’re helping you, but really you're helping them (and they’re serving you ads while you do it).

Maybe if people had known what CAPTCHA was really for they would’ve done it anyway. Maybe I still would’ve done all that work for Duo if I’d known it would one day disappear from the web and become training data for an LLM ...

... Or maybe I would’ve proofread books for Project Gutenberg, or donated my time to citizen science projects, or worked on an accessibility app, or a million other things which genuinely improve people’s lives and the quality of the web. I didn’t get an informed choice. I got lured into helping a tech company become profitable, while they made the internet a shittier place to be.

How many things are you doing on the web every day which are actually hidden work for tech companies? Probably dozens, or hundreds. We all are. That’s why this is so insidious. It’s everywhere. The tech industry is built on free labour. (And not just free – we often end up paying for the end results of our own work, delivered back to us in garbled, enshittified form).

And it’s a problem that’s only getting worse with AI. Is that thoughtful answer you gave someone on reddit or Mastodon something that will stay on the web for years, helping people in future with the same problem? Or is it just grist for the LLMs?

Do you really get a choice about it?

#enshittification #duolingo #capitalism #AI #LLM #google

@daniel_bohrer

Yeah that's what upsets me about it. I don't feel like I wasted my time on Duolingo, because I learned two languages while contributing and met a great group of people.

But that incredible knowledge base we created, which was unprecedented in the history of language learning, is gone for future learners. It's completely contrary to Duo's original mission of making learning free and accessible.

The web is getting more and more closed off and we are losing communal knowledge now, instead of gaining it.

From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.

There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.

All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.

Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.

Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.

#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism

Wow you use pot-holders? I can't even imagine what that's like.

#ableism #chronicillness #disability #chronicpain

Wombats have such powerful butts they can crush skulls with them ... But mostly they just potter about munching grass and making burrows that keep the land healthy and provide refuge for other animals when they need it.

And THAT is the energy we are bringing into 2024.

#2024newyear #wombats #australia #refugees