Notices by Erin Kissane (kissane@mstdn.social), page 3

Georgia sent a SWAT team to arrest Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers doing bail support for Stop Cop City protestors, and has charged them with charity fraud and money laundering.

https://theintercept.com/2023/05/31/cop-city-bail-fund-protest-raid-atlanta/ https://mastodon.social/@geoffhing/110474889089958533

Honestly "no one got killed, there was no drone, there was no AI, there was no actual simulation, it was all a role-playing scenario run by someone *not even in the Air Force*" is exactly the pratfall I needed this week, what a clownshow

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a33gj/ai-controlled-drone-goes-rogue-kills-human-operator-in-usaf-simulated-test

I wrote about my sense of what’s happened to the way we hang out together online, and it’s a ghost story.

Come for the haunted medical equipment lab and the fencing foil, stay for the, uh, spectre haunting the internet?

https://erinkissane.com/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow

hilarious difference in results obtained from “please wash your hands” vs “how horrible and gross can you make this nice clean washcloth using only the dirt already on your hands”

@beep @tim I got to "A good mantra is that fears about technology are almost always fears about capitalism. This is no exception." and HOLLERED

I spoke with the Atlantic’s science folks about things that we—a very broad “we” but I represented the COVID Tracking Project—actually did *right* in the early pandemic years. They talked to a bunch of people and I think got a really interesting result

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/pandemic-lessons-decision-making-public-health-crisis-playbook/673994/

As someone who has participated in multi-year edit wars over, yes, Nazi shit, I will say that my biggest concern here isn’t about unedited LLM text hitting wikipedia articles—that’s v bad but probably largely fixable—but with the way Talk page sophistry is about to become absolutely fucking unmanageable as malicious editors set chatbots to do their infinite argumentation for them

To generalize: LLMs on the web’s surfaces are bad. LLMs in the backstage are much worse.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdba/ai-is-tearing-wikipedia-apart

I think a good rule of thumb is that if there’s a thing no one does as a hobby, probably very few people will do it for your FOSS project for free

like specifically a bunch of assertions about my character and weird name-calling but…surrounded by heart emojis and things? it feels culty in a way I find hard to explain

@atomicpoet I mean, you're 100% entitled to disagree!

I thought the first couple of things I saw there were coming in real hot—which is objectively fine, but I just don't think well in that mode—and also, to me, misrepresented some of what I wrote, so I said so and moved on. ✌️

The last couple of days have been a little spicy here for me bc I wrote a blog post that provoked a bunch of strong responses, and I wanted to make some brief notes about how it went.

On the whole, lots of people were super friendly, which is always nice. Lots of people disagreed with me in ways ranging from very civil and conversational to "this is fascist," which is all extremely normal. I didn't have to report a single person for crossing into abusive behavior, which is chill and great.

The disruptive part is that my mentions through this morning have been flooded by people yelling at each other about [Linux, Berlin transit systems, capitalism, etc.] in sub-branches of other people's threads about my post, so I'm probably not going to be able to fish out the few actual questions and things, which: sorry! Can't wait for arbitrary-point thread muting.

Also! Lots of super nice actual side conversations that have felt generative and great, including a fun podcast last night.

Lastly, a substantial number of people got real mad that I wrote about Mastodon instead of about the fediverse more broadly—on my own site, on my own time. I wish all those people a pleasant journey to every other part of the internet that is not my blog.

Verdict: One million times more chill than Twitter, would post again.

I really only ever spend time and energy criticizing things if I think my notes might help make them better.

That is 100% the vibe I tried to bring to the Mastodon criticisms here—I really like this place, but I *really* want it to work better for more people who aren't like me.

https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon

The Bluesky closed beta going viral seems to have pulled some attention back to both anti-Black racism and general unwelcoming/ uninclusive design choices on Mastodon, which is good to see…and also I 😬 seeing white tech folks glomming onto a single POV as "What Black People Want."

Fedi needs wide-ranging user research for sure. But also if you're a white person interested in big platform conversations, it's probably a great idea to attend to more than one Black person who talks about it?

Considering how extremely mainstream and normal codes of conduct are now—for both live events and online groups—it's super interesting to me to look back at how fiercely some relatively loud voices in many parts of tech resisted them, often insisting they would make [abuse/ harassment/ whatever] worse and inevitably result in lawsuits and bankruptcies.

Like, I'm not going to name names, but I wonder sometimes if those people came around or are still enraged, just silently.

I meant to be finishing a post about books I'm reading but I got distracted and wrote ~2500 words about Mastodon and Bluesky and the related things (welcoming design, insular culture) I've been stewing on for a few months

And also about vegetarian meat substitutes in the 1980s, which were *really something*

https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon

the thing no one tells you about parenting is the unceasing plague of tiny pieces of scotch tape on

e v e r y t h i n g

Maciej popping up to tweet about the critical cultural problem that is people claiming JK Rowling hates trans people (is she not simply being reasonable??) from the Pinboard account is pretty much the end-cap on a whole lil era of tech

@evan Honestly? Without a series of highly structured and really well moderated conversations, I don’t think “community standards” will ever be clear enough to allow search to happen without big defed schisms.

But also an unknowable proportion of the fediverse is deeply committed to resisting not just any possible search, but any increase in legibility so schisms probably gonna schis either way, which is fine.