Notices by Tom Walker (tomw@mastodon.social), page 2

Please read my paywalled article about why paywalls are bad for democracy

Mastodon has two types of people: people who really want replies to their posts and people who extremely do not.

(I am in the first category, reply away)

@tokyo_0 There was an economic crash that year!

Everyone just sort of casually agrees that "we live in times of crisis". This is seen as self-evidently true.

But I wonder: when were the times of non-crisis? Which was the most recent not-crisis year, exactly?

xz is not a "trusting trust" attack, it is a "your build tools are too complex for you to understand all the input and output" attack.

And guess what: that's very relevant to web development...

Whatever you do, there's always a sheep that has done it better.

They're just out standing in their field.

@Gargron The first social network to be funded entirely by plushie sales

Hearty congratulations to whoever made this status page an SPA.

USB-C finally solves the problem of incompatible chargers by making all the incompatible chargers the same shape. They may still do nothing but at least now they fit the port

Sometimes I think it's the worst programming language, but then I remember that people use Node, and then run around boasting about how "modern" they are

The annoying thing about this is that I quite *like* PHP, but just every documentation page is... well, that.

Well done to everyone involved in making 1.02 > 1.1.

"Focusing on doomsday scenarios in artificial intelligence is a distraction that plays down immediate risks such as the large-scale generation of misinformation, according to a senior industry figure attending this week’s AI safety summit."

Yeah - it is frustrating that there's so much focus on silly sci-fi threats when *right now*, LLMs are being used to fill the web with spam.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/29/ai-doomsday-warnings-a-distraction-from-the-danger-it-already-poses-warns-expert

The state of identity verification in the UK:

1. "You need a utility bill with your full name and address".
2. Of course these are all online now, and even if you try to get paper ones for this very purpose the companies keep pushing you to online instead.
3. Go download a PDF of the bill.
4. "We cannot accept online bills, it must have been posted to your address"
5. Print out the PDF
6. Take a photo of it
7. Email it to them
8. Accepted

@danluu I think what you've learned is that you can't add a big pile of caveats above your poll and expect that everyone answering will read it

Do not trust AI to tell you which mushrooms to pick.

By extension, you can no longer trust Amazon results for that, or Google results either.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

@inthehands All the "basically just a database" uses of blockchains are useless, yes. The original "there" there is that it solves one narrow currency problem, double spending attacks.

@inthehands There is also *some* utility in cryptocurrency for relatively niche uses, but it is outweighed by the damage of scams, the environmental damage and so on.

Similarly with GPT, there is some degree of utility, outweighed by the problems of it feeding people made-up facts and polluting the entire web with junk text.

"I'm only on Mastodon now" is the "I have gone vegan" of social media

I tried eating fruit but the onboarding was confusing. I have to choose from apple, banana, orange? How is a normal user supposed to navigate this complexity