Notices by Dana Fried (tess@mastodon.social), page 2

@mcc also, after switching genders, they suddenly become better at speedrunning

@mcc could a client implement this on its own?

@simon_brooke you're not gonna gotcha me on this. I know full well that Android runs on a linux kernel. So does my car stereo.

But you also 100% know that's not what I mean when I say "Mastodon is the Linux of social networks".

If Mastodon was the Android of social networks, it'd fuckin' slap and everyone could use it.

Actually, that would be a great goal - go from being the Linux of social networks to the Android of social networks! Maye Gerard will read this and be inspired 😛

@simon_brooke actually I wanna highlight this!

The value of Linux is that it's free, solid, and infinitely remixable. It's a critical piece of infrastructure that also follows a particular philosophy of FOSS.

It is a mistake to conflate the business or moral/ethical value of the software with the usability of the software. The needs of backend and embedded system/mobile developers/FOSS advocates are not the same as the needs of the average end user.

I can value Linux and also hate using it.

Look, I love the fediverse but I am realistic in that for the forseeable future it will 100% be the Linux of social networks, with everything that implies.

And the reason I am here and not on bsky or threads is not because I think it's somehow better or more virtuous (in many ways, it's worse!) or because I think this place is any less likely to collapse or turn to shit than any other social network I've ever been on.

It's because all the other platforms are really bad for my mental health 🤷🏻♀️

Happy Indigenous People's Day!

The joke is that it was against the law for the people repaving the sidewalk to tamper with the mailbox, but it was also against the law to remove it, so they simply lifted it with the chunk of earth it was on, moved it the minimum distance required to do their jobs, finished the resurfacing, and left.

Technically, the thing is still in exactly the same state as it was when they got there; it's the sidewalk that's moved.

Artist unknown
"Compliance" 2024
Federal property on concrete

It never stops at just trans issues, or LGBTQ+ issues, or even abortion - Russia is now cracking down on people who talk openly about not wanting to have children:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-proposes-ban-child-free-lifestyle-rcna172616

This is the exact same movement and thought process that gives us Vance's "childless cat ladies". And believe me, if the natalist fascists in the US could ban the child-free movement, they absolutely would.

Case in point: Florida's insurance market is on the brink of collapse. When it does implode (this storm might be the proverbial straw that breaks its back), a lot of people are going to effectively lose their homes, or lose the ability to buy or rent homes where they currently are, with basically no backstop.

And yet, a lot of Florida's policy has been dictated by Republicans trying to browbeat insurance companies into providing unprofitable coverage rather than acknowledging climate change.

I feel like there are two ways to deal with the fallout of climate change:

One is to protect major population centers as much as possible and help people living in unsurvivable areas relocate.

The other is to just let natural disasters kill or displace millions of people and let the invisible hand of whatever sort it out.

And, like, as much as I'd like it to be the first one, we're definitely gonna do the second.

@eaton to be fair this is competing with "build a markov chain of all discussions about counting letters and have it generate whatever it likes", and "try to write and execute python code to parse a string and count characters in it".

@xgranade we've always said, it's way better to let a few rich people get a benefit than put in the infrastructure to means-test it, because the latter will always both cost more and exclude people who actually need the program.

(Also giving everyone a benefit makes it much harder to characterize as "welfare" and therefore politically more challenging to gut when conservatives get into power.)

@mekkaokereke also my wife just pointed out that not only are Swift's cats wealthier than her boyfriend, at least one of them is likely wealthier than Donald Trump (which, by the way, someone should probably tell him)

The options are:
1. Accept that kids are just gonna get randomly shot in school.
2. Construct and operate our schools like prisons.
3. Stop giving everyone guns.

If we were any other country, the answer would be both immediate and obvious.

The fact that the police and FBI knew about the kid, his mother called the school to warn them the day of, there were at least two armed cops (sorry, "resource officers") stationed at the school, and somehow a 14-year-old still managed to walk in with an assault rifle, kill four people, and injure a bunch more suggests that the "we need more cops", "it's about mental health not guns", and "let's arm school officials" people may all, in fact, be incorrect.

Gentle reminder that all programming languages have their uses; they are just tools, and you need a big toolbox to be able to solve a wide range of problems.

Anyone who insists that a specific technology is the One True Way to succeed as a software developer is the proverbial guy with a hammer who thinks every problem is a nail.

Corollary: any developer worth their salt should be able to learn a new stack relatively quickly. It takes far longer to master a large codebase than a new language.

The existential risk posed by AI is that we as a species will no longer be able to transmit and build on generational knowledge, which is the primary thing that has allowed human society to advance since the end of the last ice age.

The existential risk is that the incredible repository of nearly all human knowledge that is the internet will be flooded with so much LLM-generated dreck that locating reliable information will become effectively impossible (alongside scientific journals, which are also suffering incredibly under the weight of ML spam).

The existential risk is that nobody will be able to trust a photo or video of anything because the vast majority of media will be fabricated.

Just a reminder that the "existential risk" from AI is not that somehow we'll make Skynet or the computers from The Matrix.

Nobody is going to give a large language model the nuclear codes.

The existential risk is to marginalized people who will be silently refused jobs or health care or parole, or who will be targeted by law enforcement or military action because of an ML model's inherent bias, and that because these models are black boxes, it will be nearly impossible for victims to appeal.