Notices by Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop), page 3

@nicol @pfefferle grump, I’ve been “admin@“ my blog for jeepers, two decades, going to need to figure out how to actually fix that

@natematias it is interesting that you tag that as “code is law”! In my reading, Lessig’s formulation acknowledged—even in the heady days of 1998(?)—that “east coast code” and “west coast code” were interdependent. So I associate the phrase with the claim that code is *a* law, not with the claim that code is *the* law.

Maybe I need to put on my housing hat and write “code is (zoning) law”, emphasizing that software code’s legal role is real, but a creature of layered systems?

@natematias not an expert either—and I suspect that given the regular pendulum of dictatorship <-> democracy in the region, it's likely that the topic simply isn't well-developed (either judicially or academically) in the way Americans expect.

Which might be reason for American civil libertarians, resting comfortably on 250 years of history, to be humble in their assertions of what is Best in places where democracy is more precarious. But uh... that's not what I'm seeing.

Essay I want someone to write: if you weren’t there, it’s hard to explain how much 1990s FOSS was driven by how *low-quality* proprietary software was. Is enshittification opening a similar window? If not, why not? (My gut is “not” but elucidating why/why not might point the way towards areas of opportunity, either for open or something open-like.)

My post on "how to pay maintainers" (which maybe I should have subtitled: "step 0: you pay in cash, not lip service") has been graciously republished by @allthingsopen. I won't make it to the conference this year but my delightful co-worker (and NC native) Lauren Hanford will be there, talking about open and maintainers!

https://allthingsopen.org/articles/a-how-to-guide-for-paying-open-source-maintainers

@ntnsndr @laurenshof thanks! It always staggers me how a platform that is economically and technologically dependent on communities can be so bad at so many basic pro-community UI choices.

There’s more advanced stuff too, of course: what’s the equivalent of Bluesky’s starter packs so newcomers to a community can get “best of” the community, or input from community-adjacent people on other servers?

@ntnsndr as @laurenshof says, a lot of low-hanging fruit. I'd suggest one start would be an audit of the Mastodon UX to make it more community-forward.

Examples from the 🐘 UI:
* "🌎 Live feeds" is where your local, chosen community is—how is any first-time user supposed to figure that out?
* I thought I signed up for the "social.coop community"—why is the logo at the top "Mastodon" and "social.coop" greyed out?
* For me 📣 means protest (or noise). Here: it is the most important community news?

I would read the hell out of a New Yorker article or Wired oral history on the origin and history of the Hype Cycle graph. Because it’s both awful and also deeply, deeply true.
https://mastodon.social/@bruces/113029738165795364

I'm not necessarily in camp "every billionaire is a policy failure" but I'm definitely in camp "billionaires (and aspiring billionaires) believing they can behave with complete impunity is not just _a_ policy failure, it is one of _the most important_ policy failures of our time"
https://mastodon.social/@jwz/113024201775570924

the past is not even past, things I learned in the past 36hrs edition.

When VP Harris was born:
- Berkeley schools were still segregated
- multi-family housing was still legal in Berkeley
- the As were still in Philadelphia

Shut LinkedIn down until we know what’s going on.
https://mas.to/@carnage4life/113007690957113034

@lizzard reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RGrd9cLsW0

@ntnsndr customer-owned coops exist to provide their customers with cheap goods. So… afaict they were acting like a customer-owned coops the whole time?

@kingrat didn’t notice anything here?

I continue to think that AI+law scholars should write less about regulating hypothetical future AI killer robots and more about regulating (or failing to regulate) the killer pattern-recognition death machines we already have.

https://apnews.com/article/tesla-full-self-driving-motorcyclist-killed-d3393396521c373fe5df5a44d2d9637f

Illness and travel meant not nearly as much #olympics posting as I’d expected but just coming on here to say THE WOMENS MARATHON PARTIALLY FOLLOWED THE ROUTE OF THE WOMENS MARCH IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION WHAT. Deep history nerd cut. The French commitment to being very French in this Olympics has been pretty amazing; LA will be fun but can’t possibly match this sort of thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_March_on_Versailles

Weirdest, possibly greatest, Tim Walz fact.
https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/112915624921601732

Here's a deeper-length article about his interest and long-term usage of maps. I'm genuinely impressed. https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/08/06/former-geography-teacher-tim-walz-is-really-into-maps/

(via @anildash )

I can’t believe it’s been a decade since I wrote this, for @Smalljones ’s class. Maybe I’ll revisit while I’m at #wikimania2024.
https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/112899055747274221

I assume/hope that @osi has a canned statement ready to go on this abuse of “open source”. You don’t need a new definition of open AI to know this is just wrong.
https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/C9xPBHGv_3V