Notices by Nelson Chu Pavlosky (skyfaller@jawns.club)

@hannu_ikonen @cpm The problem that seems inescapable is that the AI companies are also desperately searching for any scrap of data that is AI-free, to postpone model collapse. If your cache of new books that are free from AI can be accessed by someone training an LLM, you prolong the existence/relevance of LLMs. "AI free" labels attract AI.

Avoiding AI bullshit is vital, but it almost seems like we have to kill the open web and go underground to keep human communication between humans.

@reiver There's a lot of people who have used XMPP who don't know it, like apparently Whatsapp is or was XMPP under the hood, it's just never been open to the rest of the XMPP ecosystem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#Technical

@alienghic @cwebber I get what you mean, but I insist that catastrophic collapse and gradual decline, forced upon us by external circumstances or internal failure, do not count as degrowth.

I think we need to maintain the definition of degrowth as *intentionally* climbing down off the cliff, carefully retreating while protecting the most vulnerable, rather than waiting for all of our shit to be destroyed by mother nature / physics. Otherwise degrowth is a bad word

For #FollowFriday I'd like to highlight the 5 newest active members of Jawns.club, your #Philadelphia area Mastodon server:

- @byebye_earth99 - photos of wildlife and landscapes, bookworm
- @abemassry - pencil drawings of cute creatures, web & game dev
- @ragman - saw a praying mantis once, permacomputing anarchist
- @adambender - baseball, journalist & fiction author
- @amanda - software engineer & fiber artist

Please give them a warm welcome, even if they aren't all super new :)

#Philly

@evan Qualified yes. They should support open standards, but without some sort of accountability, they could remove it at any time, or pervert any federation to harm the fediverse... It would be foolish to rely on it in the current climate. Perhaps some government mandate, like the adversarial interoperability Cory Doctorow has proposed?

Also their moderation is so bad that it's been radicalizing people into Nazis, so federation might make fedi more Nazi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

@jay @andypiper @HauntedOwlbear ListenBrainz is the active FOSS alternative:
https://listenbrainz.org/

Libre.fm was another last.fm alternative, but it seems to have gone dormant in 2022 while they try to rewrite the software from scratch (someone should update Wikipedia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libre.fm
https://github.com/foocorp/gnu-fm
https://github.com/foocorp/hacienda

@Pappy @HeavenlyPossum Overpopulation and population control have a long history of being connected to eugenics and killing off "undesirables", preventing immigration, etc. If the impact of the human population on the environment concerns you, consider focusing on related issues instead, such as women's rights and reproductive rights: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question

@dansup I'm really glad that you're working on making this feature standardized rather than some sort of Pixelfed exclusive, that's the fedi spirit!

I have some concerns about safety, though. What if people want to use starter packs as harassment lists? Can we let people opt out of them, and have visibility about what starter packs they've been added to? https://mastodon.social/@_elena/112693556393055011

@mcneely As local as possible really, depends on the circumstances. Ecoregions don't really line up with state lines, so something regionally appropriate might come from a few states away, while a plant adapted to a different environment in the same state might not be as good.

I got my plants from Good Host Plants, which goes to great pains to get plants appropriate for Philly. They are located in my neighborhood, so plants that grow well for them should work for me. https://www.goodhostplants.com/

We've finally cleared our main garden of all our inherited plants, except for the yucca. Assuming this is common yucca / Yucca filamentosa, it is native to just south of here, like Virginia, so I think of it as helping the plant move north ahead of global heating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_filamentosa

Also, I'm told that previous owners have tried to kill this plant multiple times and failed dramatically (it looks very healthy). I try not to pick fights I expect to lose.

The next day after clearing the garden, we were able to sketch out the garden path and put a few plants in the ground in the morning before the rain arrived.

The goal is a native plant pollinator-friendly permaculture food forest, with the emphasis on supporting local wildlife before feeding ourselves. So far we have planted two highbush blueberries, a dwarf black chokeberry, and a Viburnum dentatum / arrowwood. (I think the arrowwood may also produce edible berries, I hope to learn more.)

@evan I mean, there seems to be parallels with Vietnam, where we accepted a lot of Vietnamese immigrants displaced by our foreign policy (also Afghanistan?).

I don't know that I'd want to immigrate to a country bearing responsibility for destroying my home, but I think we're obligated to accept them if they do.

@evan The USA is pretty directly responsible for their predicament, we better do whatever we can to help those whom our foreign policy has made homeless.

@foone Was this why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby?

Was there an #earthquake just now in #Philly?

I've been using my de-Googled GrapheneOS "phone" (no SIM card) around the house.
What it revealed to me is how easily I defaulted to proprietary Google products throughout my Android experience, even though they are completely at odds with my values. Without the convenience of apps baked into the OS by the same manufacturer, I suddenly want replacements for all my Google things. I'm even reevaluating trivial things like a weather forecast widget, where I previously said "good enough" & moved on.

@travissouthard I'm trying Breezy Weather, it seems to work fine on GrapheneOS: https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather

But annoyingly there's a new bug when installing from F-Droid where Google Play keeps trying to update apps that were installed from F-Droid, failing, then bugging me about the failure. For some reason it fucking hates Breezy Weather above all the other apps I installed from F-Droid, so I uninstalled it from my primary phone for now.

@Jeffrey @hannu_ikonen This would be hard to do properly. How do you keep pedophiles away from a server for kids? It would be an extremely attractive target. How do you keep kids safe on a general-purpose server that anyone can join, without much limit on federation? I don't think any existing server is prepared for such a challenge.

One possible approach might be a Pixelfed server with the new parental controls enabled: https://mastodon.social/@dansup/111740028337841600

But that would require coordinating with an adult

@Jeffrey @hannu_ikonen The Fediverse has not really been designed with kids in mind, and it's a hostile experience for them in some ways. Don't believe me? Ask a minor: https://bark.lgbt/@hellbeast/111615201620178967
https://blog.hellbeast.eu.org/hellbeast.eu.org/Published/Fedi%20fucking%20sucks%20(as%20a%20minor)
https://bark.lgbt/@hellbeast/111633927208430983
https://blog.hellbeast.eu.org/hellbeast.eu.org/Published/Addendum%20to%20Fedi%20fucking%20sucks%20(as%20a%20minor)

@evan Every TV show should have an ActivityPub episode