Notices by Johannes Ernst (j12t@j12t.social)

@evan I put mine into the extra special safety pocket in my backpack after passport control at an airport and forgot that that pocket even existed! Literally took the entire house apart several times.

Writing my own position statement for the upcoming Open Social Web un-workshop.

A main reason I ever started #FediForum is that I wanted to attend an event like it! And sometimes you have to create things yourself if they don't exist yet.

Legally speaking, what is social.coop? Is it incorporated? Anybody know?

If not incorporated, does that mean all members are liable, and there is no limited liability shield?

I can't tell from their wiki and about info.

/cc @SocialCoop @ntnsndr @mattcropp

“Not only did the #AI model now produce insecure code, but it also recommended hiring a hit man to kill your spouse”

Perfectly well understood and benign technology, obviously.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/12/1129782/ai-large-language-models-biology-alien-autopsy/

European events on the future of technology and the like always seem to have a bunch of professors on stage.

In the US, I cannot really recall seeing any professors at similar events -- maybe some people who are currently professors but their main career is really something else. Extremely rare in any case.

What can we conclude from this observation?

Wise words from Anil.

https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/05/a-tech-career-in-2026/

@silverpill https://github.com/swicg/activitypub.rocks/pulls

@silverpill this seems it could / should be linked from https://activitypub.rocks? If so, could you file an issue / PR?

Shoshana Zuboff has some spicy quotes in a recent interview: "#AI is surveillance capitalism continuing to evolve and expand". -- "I think of the inauguration as a wedding ceremony, a marriage between Trump and the tech leaders." -- "We can have #surveillance #capitalism, or we can have #democracy, but we cannot have both"

Not wrong IMHO.

https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-12-15/shoshana-zuboff-philosopher-ai-is-surveillance-capitalism-continuing-to-evolve-and-expand.html

@kingconsult @newsmast @rede @evan still ongoing. There’s a live stream linked from https://websocial.org.br and Evan and I are next.

Okay, I got some slides for the first Brazilian Open Social Web event at their ministry of science, technology and innovation in Brasilia tomorrow, organized by @thiago and friends.

I'll be remote and they will provide simultaneous translation. Should be fun!

Fortunately @evanprodromou will be going first, so I can see how that simultaneous translation business goes :-)

https://websocial.org.br

@tchambers @andypiper happy to do that assume we have enough connections into the ask an fediverse communities that would actually come.

Regardless how well one is trying to do things in advance, the last day(s) before #FediForum are always busy!!

(now back to work!)

@reiver A lot of it has been focusing on the kinds of things standards org do — chartering working groups producing reports, getting consensus on prioritization for standards work going forward etc. But there are also community updates and things like that.

@evan

@evan in another thread: https://j12t.social/@j12t/115301420839280655

Bluesky makes a patent non-aggression pledge.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-01-2025-patent-pledge

Totally agree with Cory. Today’s “AI” may or may not be useful to you or your company, but there is no way that it is financially sustainable. And giving the sheer outrageous magnitude of money involved, when the crash comes — and it will — it will likely be worse than any other crash we’ve ever seen.

From: @pluralistic
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115277162069992407

@thisismissem I would add that both protocols support use cases that the other protocol has a hard time addressing. ActivityPub, for example, is much better at point to point communication where no third party overhears what is happening. ATproto, for example, can be used to build “global trending” or a global index much more easily.
I would not be surprised if at the end of they, the open social web would simultaneously end up using both, in a complementary fashion.

Learned a new word: Enshittocene.

@pluralistic what have you done.

https://cybercultural.com/enshittocene/

I'm fascinated to (re-?)discover that the core #ActivityPub deliverable was the C2S API, not the S3S federation protocol.

Was the underlying assumption that servers were boring, one/few implementations could handle all cases, and innovation was going to be centered around clients?