Notices by Mike Taylor 🦕 (mike@sauropods.win), page 2

@pfefferle @selfawarepatterns No, not at all — I am genuinely surprised, borderline shocked, that this code is not only being written but actually deployed with such alacrity.

@pfefferle @selfawarepatterns This is so good! And it's happening so fast!

@pfefferle Oh, that's very welcome news!

@pfefferle Thank you, this is great news!

Any idea when this is likely to come to wordpress.com-hosted blogs?

"“Godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton, in recent public talks, explains that one of the greatest risks is not that chatbots will become super-intelligent, but that they will generate text that is super-persuasive without being intelligent, in the manner of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson."
https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/blog/afb21/oops-we-automated-bullshit

@feditips How can I tell what version of the software my instance is running?

@libreoffice Aha! No, it works fine in LibreOffice 7.5.6.2 — thanks for that tip.

So what we have here is a regression.

Infuriating to find that #LibreOffice, on which I created the 13 Mb, 64 slide deck for my #SVPCA talk, cannot export it as a PDF: it crashes every time, even when I save my PPTX as an ODP, quit, open the ODP and try to export from that.

I am running LibreOffice v7.6.0.3 on Mac OS X 12.6.8.

Anyone have any ideas?

CC @libreoffice,

@thomasfuchs And that is what's perplexing. Especially as they have just watched, in real time, as the importance of the question of who runs a network has become very very apparent.

As Twitter self-immolates, I am seeing people I know setting up on Bluesky.

I find this perplexing. Can people really not learn the lesson that a social network owned by a capitalist is a social network they don't control?

You can argue about whether Bluesky or Mastodon has the better technology, but what's 100% clear is that Mastodon is run BY users FOR users. And that difference is the only one that matters in the end.

Such an important observation!

"Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users [because] hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions.

Mastodon is not an ad-driven platform. There is absolutely zero incentives to let awful people run amok in the name of engagement."

https://escapingtech.com/tech/opinions/i-was-wrong-about-mastodon-moderation.html

@goatsarah Corollary: feel free also to UNfollow early and often. Following is not lifetime commitment or a promise of friendship, it's just wanting to see someone's messages.

For example, I love @doctorow's writing, but unfollowed him when it became apparent there was just too much of it, and it was overwhelming my timeline. It's all good.

@john What you call stunted growth, I call organic growth. People come because someone recommends it, stay because they see things they like, don't leave because it's not toxic. This is all good. Slower growth gives time for server admins to scale up and find funding strategies. Exponential growth gets you where you want to be soon enough, even for a small exponent.

@john That's fine: it's tourists who joined in the initial burst, and never really engaged. They're free to go.

@john To small for the palaeoart community to *what*? I'm seeing more actual communication between you guys here than I ever did on Twitter.

@john OK, you're talking here about a broadcast medium?

(Nothing wrong with wanting that, of course; but I think it's a mistake to want THIS to be THAT.)

@john Interesting. And yet Mastodon is explicitly non-algorithmic. And Facebook's weirdly named concept of "pages" are explicitly asymmetric for just this reason.

@john What, other than algorithmic timelines, would be competitive?

Also: why would algorithmic timelines delivery you more potential-customer eyeballs than chronological timelines?

@john I am certainly 100% in agreement that discovery is very poor.

I think the answer to that is search, but we've already discussed the short-sighted cultural factors that have so far prevented this.

@john I'm not sure what recommendations would get me that searches didn't. But I have no argument against it being tried so long as it's strictly opt-in.