Notices by tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org)

@afelia Gerade heute kam dieses Video heraus, das genau deienen Punkt auch macht. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoquS5uXOKs

Auch in Deutschland will sich die Cryptobranche nun in die Politik einkaufen.

(Original title: Bundestagswahl 2025: Krypto-Broker Bitpanda spendet Millionen an Parteien)

https://www.golem.de/news/bundestagswahl-2025-krypto-broker-bitpanda-spendet-millionen-an-parteien-2501-192481.html

Cool project: "Nepenthes" is a tarpit to catch (AI) web crawlers.

"It works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into a the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse."

https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

@gabrielberlin
a) 80% (Zahl erfunden und gerundet) aller Organisationen in Deutschland nutzen als zentrale Kommunikationstechnologie WhatsApp. All die Kitas und Vereine und Kleinbetriebe laufen auf WhatsApp
b) Wenn du nicht mehr auf WhatsApp bist, gibts dich nicht mehr. WhatsApp ist, was die Leute öffnen um zu kommunizieren. Wenn du da nicht bist, wirst du einfach weniger angesprochen. Du kannst alle erreichen, aber das wird zunehmend one-way

Given how little support "FreeOurFeeds" is getting (45976 USD raised from 751 people) even with all the support by famous talking heads and media it makes sense that the project now tries to shame people into donating using the term "ideological purity" (which is very close to the right-wing "virtue signaling").

Dunno, something about the "FreeOurFeeds" campaign is off. (https://freeourfeeds.com/)

It's basically trying to raise money for AT Proto so "the community" can standardize the thing and "build stuff" and they wanna run a second "relay" (which is the chokepoint that centralizes Bluesky ATM). I mean okay, but it feels a bit ... isn't that what the Bluesky Corporation wanted to enable/do? They already got millions in funding. Now some external entity collects more from people who for their investment get no stake in the corporation actually owning the whole thing...

The 9 custodians consist of a whole bunch of AI people, some Mozilla folks (same thing) and the director of the Social Web foundation. But the already existing standard ActivityPub is just an entry in the FAQ:
"ActivityPub is a W3C standard that enables interoperability between platforms like Mastodon, Flipboard, Ghost, Threads and others. AT and ActivityPub should not be either/or options. Our vision is that interoperability between open social media platforms is achieved through collaboration. This campaign can organize developer communities, fund product development, support testing that improves bridging and native protocol interoperability."

It can, but will it? Who knows?

It's just presented in a weird way with a whole lot of "give us a lot of money and we'll make amazing stuff happen" and in the end a bunch of AI grifters get some startups "that build upon AT proto" funded.

Like they could have made this a "let's get the decentralized social web funded" thing and actually put money and resources towards making ATproto and ActivityPub interoperable. Could have funded Mastodon development (or the development of a new ActivityPub platform). But they just wanna funnel money into one protocol claiming that that will somehow "save" things.
https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/113822909756877628

@mspro du könntest versuchen

`define( 'ACTIVITYPUB_DISABLE_REACTIONS', true );`

in deine wp-config.php zu packen

@isotopp @mspro Mullenweg's Midlife Crisis führte dazu, dass ich mir diverse CMSe angeschaut habe um zu evaluieren, ob ich wechseln kann. Leider fand ich alle Optionen eher ungeeignet (weil Funktionen fehlen oder so). Ich behalte gerade die Community im Auge und hoffe, dass AspirePress oder ein anderes Team es schafft, einen sinnvollen Fork zu erzeugen, der es erlaubt, sich von Automattic zu lösen ohne dabei gleich alle Plugins zu verlieren; zum Glück bewegt sich da im Moment ja einiges und viele Unternehmen, die mit WP ihr Geld verdienen sind bereit da finanziell zu unterstützen.

Es hat allerdings dazu geführt, dass ich ein anderes Projekt im Moment auf Eis gelegt habe, bis klar ist, wie man weiter vorgehen kann.

@isotopp @mspro es "zwingt" nix. Aber es gibt halt viele Plugins/Features, die Dinge angenehmer machen (und die ich mit SSG so einfach nicht hinbekomme bzw. dann mit anderen Schmerzen kommen)

The Vulture article on Neil Gaiman's decades of rape and abuse is chilling. What a fucking monster. Given his influence the bravery of the women he attacked cannot be overstated. https://www.vulture.com/article/neil-gaiman-allegations-controversy-amanda-palmer-sandman-madoc.html

It's super revealing that Zuckerberg basically equates "lack of masculine energy" and "female energy" which then he calls "neutered".

Not great to kinda imply women are neutered men. His world view is basically at pickup-artist/incel levels.

Ist ja gerade Wahlkampf, daher kurze Frage. Hat die SPD gar keinen Kanzlerkandidaten aufgestellt?

Mark Zuckerberg means it when he says that LGBTQ* people are fair game on Meta platforms now. Wouldn't be surprised if this pride month many tech firms will skip the "lets pretend we care about LGBTQ* issues by coloring our social media avatars in the rainbow flag" charade. The mask is really off. https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/113805164817030243

@anna No, never had the brazillian version

Carrot cake is no cake. Cake is about doing something a bit indulgent, a treat, don't try to cheapen that by pretending it's better by being worse. It's okay, you can just enjoy a thing that's slightly bad for you. And then eat a salat and some hummus for dinner.

The whole post is written in such a juvenile, passive aggressive tone. Like a teenager rebelling against their parents. But it's a middle aged man who'd rather burn the project down than going to therapy.

Matt Mullenweg is still in his midlife crisis, 2025 edition:

Automattic publicly announces it will massively reduce its contributions to the WordPress open source project and focus on their proprietary offerings.

https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-sponsored-contributions-to-wordpress/

"That’s the existential threat these pundits are referring to. It’s a vibe. Democrats stopped treating tech billionaires like the world’s most special boys. They started insisting that the most powerful individuals in the world should bear some responsibility for the state of the world.

And the tech billionaires could not handle it."

(Original title: Mark Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech is as deep as Exxon's commitment to clean energy)

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/mark-zuckerbergs-commitment-to-free

Paper shows how easy it is to inject medical misinfomation into LLMs.

But the same applies to anything (think attacks on software supply chains for example)

(Original title: It’s remarkably easy to inject new medical misinformation into LLMs)

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/its-remarkably-easy-to-inject-new-medical-misinformation-into-llms/