Notices by Tom Walker (tomw@mastodon.social)

@Gargron @sixohsix starts as the second but then becomes the third

@fesshole One of the problems with Halloween is that no one takes the "trick or" element seriously any more

@Mastodon This addresses the consent aspect but doesn't have anything to say about how it skews the power dynamics. What happened on Bluesky was that getting included into a few packs was a "lottery win" and people gave little Oscar acceptance speeches to their new followers, while people who had happened to not be included in this or that pack were bitter about their exclusion

@GossiTheDog Whoever could have predicted that downloading 10GB of third party code from 1,000 different people to do simple tasks would end up this way

@mhoye @nf3xn @mntmn Yes, there is simply no way for anyone regardless of skill level to know wtf is going on when the prompt says "an application" and there is no way whatsoever to tell which application.

The dialog is a complete failure and active security risk.

Watch out for the new scam going around Mastodon. If you mention that you have problems with your computer then replies may tell you to install "Linux". But in reality, this is software created by computer hackers. Please warn your children and pets.

@eniko This is why you can't trust the "AI future is inevitable" people, because we remember when the metaverse was "inevitable"

@neobrain @ariadne Yes how could anyone possibly object to the 100 stupid AI buttons appearing all over all software. Just turn them all off. Individually.

@loke I have sort of the opposite side of this in that I'm learning Swedish and don't really know where to use "dygn", so just use "dagar" everywhere, which is usually correct but not always. Your explanation here helped a bit but I'm still not sure when this (needing to refer to a 24-hour period) would come up?

@loke Yeah that makes sense! For the resort case in English I would probably just say "3 nights" and leave the days out of it, but yeah for that uploading one I guess I would say "24 hours". So it covers both of those phrases

@inthehands Trouble is it's full of papercuts. I had it turned on but turned it off because it was just spewing misformatted rubbish into Bluesky with my name on it

Why is it *today* that everyone seems to have noticed that China owns a whole load of US treasuries?

People think it's just Trump who's dumb but a significant portion of American high finance seems surprisingly clueless as well. Running on wishful thinking/groupthink until they wake up to a crisis.

@cstross @ajsadauskas He did still sign away the Sudetenland, though

People on Mastodon talk a lot about moving to the open source alternative to everything, but the real imperative now is to shift to the non-US-hosted alternative to everything.

Sometimes this overlaps but right now, geography should be the priority.

@GossiTheDog Maybe just took all their data for "safekeeping"?

@neil I think – and I say this with a lot of respect for the work you're doing helping people with this! – that this is another GDPR-style panic where people are over-complying and it is not worth closing things down over it

@EricFielding @alisterb We may be thinking of a different kind of organisations!

It is Annoying that – if we assume for the moment that an organisation's main/only purpose for posting on social media is to tell people about its events/initiatives – it is now entirely unclear where to post them.

There are contending ethical imperatives and other kinds of claims for each platform, but what is lacking is any kind of clear picture of "I post it in this place and people will see it".

(Mastodon is where I do my personal posting, as you can see, but it lacks "audience" numbers.)

@lori What annoys me personally is that a lot of these people don't think they are setting up something that is approximately a blog (which they are), but something that is approximately an online magazine

Them: "We are launching a new publication"

Me: 😐

Them: "We intend to do journalism differently"

Me: 😐

Them: "We will be beholden to no one in our search for truth"

Me: It's a Substack isn't it?

Them: "You will be able to subscribe using the Substack platform"

Me: (closes tab)