Notices by Angus McIntyre (angusm@mastodon.social), page 2

It's fashionable to criticize #LLMs, but can you think of another human invention that allows us to spend the energy budget of Tanzania to lift shitposts out of context and present them as if they were authoritative knowledge?

#AI

As businesses and interest groups increasingly move to Discord, it starts to feel incredibly ripe for #enshittification.

Discord is a natural “point of capture": if you build a community there (as a user or a server owner), it's very unclear to me if you could easily migrate away to something else if it turns nasty.

And there are probably commercial incentives for Discord to change in ways that will hurt users: monetizing user data, intrusive ads, etc.

I would be wary of committing too much.

@cstross @english And don't even get me started about the muslins.

@cstross I'm of the opinion that pretty much any question related to Donald Trump can be answered with “It's a form of money laundering, in other words.”

Golf courses? Truth Social? Money-losing casinos? $60 Bibles? PACs? You'll be amazed to learn what all these things have in common …

I would be remiss if I did not post at least one #SuperbOwl today, and this is the most recent superb owl photo I have.

Taken in El Atteuf, Algeria. I suspect it may be a Pharaoh (or Egyptian) eagle owl, possibly a young one.

#birds #BirdsOfMastodon

@troublewithwords Amazon putting ads on Prime Video is a textbook case of what @pluralistic calls #enshittification: “OK, we've got you where we want you, so now we'll start making the product worse & sucking more money out of it.”

AMZN seems to be doubling-down hard on the whole enshittification strategy: from turning their storefront into a pay-to-play search engine for cheap crap, to amped-up Kindle DRM lock-in, to ads on Prime Video, it's an across-the-board effort.

Expect #AWS to be next.

Adobe has just added AltText & Extended Description to the IPTC fields supported by Lightroom Classic (I requested this feature in March 2022 & just got word that they've added it). This is potentially huge for anyone who uses LR to prep images for social media, e.g. Mastodon, or the Web.

@paul Could Ivory automatically read these fields & use them to populate the alt-text on image posts? (Read Ext. Desc. first, fallback to AltText?)

https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata

#a11y #accessibility #photography

A striking image of the rare 'furry land turtle’. This specimen is named Cocoa.

#caturday #cats #CatsOfMastodon

@cstross @slowtiger @jannem @adriano I'm pretty sure there are fake Irish pubs in Lhasa and Ulanbaatar by now. When Elon Musk's first landing party of hand-picked 8chan edgelords finally lands on Mars, they'll probably find a fake Irish pub in the Valle Marineris.

@cstross Is that another of those quaint English placenames?

"As the sun rose over the little village of Muppet Yiffing, Doris Goatfelch, the sub-postmistress’s substitute sub, had no idea of the horror that lay in wait for her in Colonel Plunkinstead’s game cellar …”
— "Murder Comes to Muppet Yiffing: A Cozy Mystery” by Eleanor Bagshaw

I have been trying to post a different cat each week for #caturday … but I have just learned that yesterday was #NationalBlackCatDay, so I am posting yet another picture of my late & still much-missed cat Sin.

Note: National Black Cat Day (Oct 27) is not the same as National Black Cat Appreciation Day (Aug 17). It's absurd that we have two days celebrating black cats, but I guess it will have to do until we can organize Black Cat Appreciation Month.

#BlackCats #cats #CatsOfMastodon

"Ohai, this is Windows. You may have noticed that I killed all the long-running jobs that you left going overnight and restarted your computer so that I could inject some AI-flavored bullshit you never asked for into your (*) operating system. You're welcome!!!”

(*) “It's not actually yours, of course. The OS now works for our Marketing Department rather than you. kthxbai.”

#Windows #enshittification

@detritus I use the term loosely, of course, but to me the essence of #enshittification is "lock-in + degradation”. No matter how bad something is to begin with, if it is deliberately made worse in order to extract a profit from a more or less captive audience, that's enshittification.

That, at least, is my understanding, but I'll let @pluralistic be the final arbiter. And if you want to propose a more specialized term like, say, “pessimization”, I'll go along with that too.

@CptSuperlative @pluralistic I've started to mentally replace the phrase “job creators" with "rent extractors" and everything makes a lot more sense now.

Politicians never tire of creating truly horrible Internet legislation. #KOSA is just the latest in a long line of legendarily Bad Ideas, this time justified by the old standby "we must protect the children” instead of the equally hoary “terrorists are going to get us.”

Unfortunately, the bill has a lot of support from people who should know better.

Folks in the US, if you haven't already contacted your representatives, the EFF makes it easy for you. Do it now:

https://act.eff.org/

@andrewt A company I worked for hired consultants to send us periodic phishing emails. The emails were sent from assorted domains that were all registered to the consulting company.

Back in the day, WHOIS data was public, so after the first email, I simply looked up all their domains and configured my mail client to flag any mail from those domains with a special label.

This was probably contrary to the spirit of the security awareness program, but I like to think it demonstrated initiative.

@cstross As a bonus, if you search for “locksmith near me” on Google StarCharts, all the entries are fakes created by Rigelian SEO outfits and there's a better than 50% chance that whatever eventually shows up will eat you instead of fixing your lock.

@cstross What you say might be true, but I can’t hear you over the sound of me raising venture capital for my new startup that uses AI to put room-temperature superconductor-powered carbon credit fusion futures on the blockchain. La la la la!

Hi, Big Corporation

Just wanted to let you know about a minor issue in your software. I think the option screen that offers me the choices:

[Set Up Now] [Remind Me Again in 3 Days]

is missing the third choice:

[Fuck Off Forever]

No biggie. There’s lots of space on the dialog to accommodate that third option, and it should be an easy fix. Thanks!

All those people who dismissed #Twitter as a “Nazi bar" have it wrong.

It's not JUST a Nazi bar, it's a Nazi bar with paid guest performers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/13/twitter-creators-payments-right-wing/