The creator of the Living Worlds app - beautiful old color cycling pixel art from the 90s by the legendary Mark Ferrari - is looking for new artists to do new scenes: https://iangilman.substack.com/p/next-living-worlds
part of my long-held "it's us or them" stance re: the online ad industry is that ultimately all speech will become, in the name of corporate comfort, as anodyne and contentless and unchallenging to power as advertising itself, if they continue to control the web. https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/
Was reminded recently that Discord has taken nearly $1 billion in VC cash: https://tracxn.com/d/companies/discord/__5rlLgsamoGCjo5gATenpy383J_jyBToAQkMl2B_f99w No judgment if you've already built a community there, but everyone really needs to treat it as a ticking time bomb. It's already failed its users many times over; it's just a question of when those failures will escalate beyond even the most indifferent user's tolerance. Every community deserves better. Good alternatives are a survival imperative.
@parismarx I'm glad he said that because more people need to know how close he is politically to orgs like GrowSF and the horde of tech ghouls like Garry Tan who trade on being reasonable neolib centrists who "only want what's best for the city" and constantly invoke concerned citizen bullshit as they try to remake SF in their image.
https://nostalebots.xyz Glad someone is speaking out about this. Closing bugs when they're not actually fixed is a plague on open source projects. A bug tracker exists partly to help the team find and fix bugs, obviously, but it also serves as a knowledge base for users about issues other users have had, and automated issue closing makes it useless for that (as well as making it easier for devs to miss real bugs). This is a biz-quota-brained nonsense practice that should end.
@torproject web3/crypto is an extremely untrusted space for very thoroughly proven reasons, and you are dealing massive damage to public trust in your project by associating with it.
stop giving these people credit they don't deserve and indirectly contributing to their legend, it makes us look silly and it's not helping anyone fight the very real destruction they're causing.
"musk bought twitter so he could destroy a vital left/liberal activitist space" - no he didn't. listen to yourself. trump wasn't playing 5-dimensional chess either. malice + overconfidence + incompetence are the only convincing explanation for everything that's happened. the closest to "deliberately ruining the website" he got is clearly wanting to *reclaim* it for white supremacists, incels etc ("owning the libs", etc) and those are distinctly different things.
@grumpygamer on the one hand, 3x5 is pixel typography on hard mode because of how little one has to work with. on the other hand, there are only so many answers one can come up with for a particular glyph in that size because it's so constrained, so it almost feels like solving a puzzle.
i imagine the few people still working on and around the X Window System technology stack, their travails wearying enough already, waking up today and reading tech news headlines and letting out a long, ragged sigh, loud enough to startle flocks of crows from their trees.
@adrianhon the comforts of the familiar and the psychological nourishment of new experiences have always existed in symbiosis, for me - one only means what it means to me by contrast with the other. currently relaxing with a heated blanket at home after slogging around a rainy downtown afternoon exploring new nooks and crannies of the city i know well, but still don't know anything near all of. one without the other wouldn't be a nice day.
I don't know anything about this instance or its community, but I like this section of its About page. It feels like a human being talking about what they're willing to do for other humans. The way corporate platforms communicate (or fail to) has really skewed our understandings of what kinds of relationships we get into with them. Human communication like this feels like it's recalibrating that a bit, to something better and more like a future I'd like to live in. https://artistalley.space/about
@Hoskingc oh and lots of this kinda shit, where AI doesn't "replace" but is used as justification for a boss to redefine the parameters of a job such that it's more precarious, less fulfilling and the end result is lower quality with no real time saved https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/109659636236055562
@MrBerard the tech priests are absolutely complicit in this, the dynamic is just different from the golly-gee lay press who at least have the excuse of not knowing any better: the most powerful priests rely on a few of their number being wild-eyed acolytes (who play a key role in getting the lay press to start saying wild shit) and then playing the part of even-handed authority while making sure to not shut the zealots down completely. https://archive.is/J5J1T
And that's by design! Because companies like OpenAI and their investors stand to make a lot more money if people treat these things like The All-Seeing Oracle rather than "that one hyperconfident white dude acquaintance who claims to have read everything ever written, whose answers on anything important you always need to fact check".
https://blacktwitter.io/@bibliotecaria/109650353375080864 I would expect people like librarians and teachers to have a lot more stories like this in the near future. Text generators have been marketed in an incredibly irresponsible way and laypeople don't understand the most fundamental things about them: that they don't actually *understand* anything, have no concept of truth, are just as willing to tell you something completely fabricated, and increasing the % of truth isn't a simple matter of more compute or training data.