Joe Terranova @joeterranova@leftist.network

I had a disturbing encounter in a #Toronto retail store yesterday. A masked sales associate approached me with friendly greeting & then dissolved into tears.

Me: Are you OK?
SA: Just tears of relief; I approached you because you were wearing a #mask, so I knew you wouldn't say anything nasty to me about wearing mine. I can't afford to get #Covid, I just finished my cancer treatment.

Everyday she receives jaw-dropping, stomach-turning anti-mask comments. 🥺​

#WeAreLost
#HumanityIsDoomed

My tech philosophy:

Use #FOSS for any situation in which viable FOSS exists. Only use proprietary if no viable FOSS exists.

Local (in country) is better than off-shore, though this is somewhat price-sensitive.

Social media:

Open and decentralised (#Fediverse) first. Closed and centralised second, if at all.

I think governments around the world (especially in my corner of it) should adopt this philosophy with extreme prejudice.

@StillIRise1963 When I was 9, my father explained it this way: “You know those bullies at school who beat you up? When they grow up, they become one of two things: muggers or cops. It’s the same people with the same desire to use physical power to control others.”
This was the man who carried me on his shoulders in 1960s protests for racial justice and in marches against the war, and said as white guys, we had the responsibility to fight oppression. He was far from perfect, but he did his best.

Sometimes when I'm playtesting (running) a brand new rpg system I've designed, a player will make a mistake and then say, "Sorry, I'm still wrapping my head around the new mechanics." My reply is pretty much always, "No worries. It's brand new to me too."

The point being, it's valuable to not be a definitive authority on a developing set of rules because you might accidentally make yourself believe that something is suddenly set in stone that isn't actually ready to be.

Say person A pointed a gun at person B and pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. Person A then gave a half-hearted apology.

Should person B accept the apology? Should they trust person A ever again?

What if person A starts visibly trying to clear the jam but assures person B that it's all fine?

Asking for a friend.

@jeffjarvis

Republican John Boehner described the modern GOP in his memoir:

"What they're really interested in is chaos… They want to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they've finally proved that it's beyond saving.”

What many GOP pols (the sand-throwers) want to accomplish is obstructionism, NOT governance.

The GOP has built its brand on being obstructive, using chaos to block governance.

See thread 👀🧵: https://newsie.social/@ZhiZhu/109635671807761846

#USPolitics #GOP

Been seeing a lot about #ChatGPT lately and got my first question at the library this week from someone who was looking for a book that the bot had recommended. They couldn't find it in our catalog. Turns out that ALL the books that ChatGPT had recommended for their topic were non-existent. Just real authors and fake titles cobbled together. And apparently this is known behavior. 😮

This just in: Dystopian science fiction will no longer be sold or streamed in the San Francisco Bay Area or Silicon Valley due to the high risk of it inspiring new tech startups. #tech #scifi

Going to a car dealership with a USB drive

Taking all the cars for a test drive

Replacing the car's OS with Linux

Now you can brake by simply typing:

$ sudo braked initialize --no-prompt -s 0

This is what freedom looks like

i know that the alps being snow free is an ecological disaster, one which will get worse when rivers don't get meltwater in spring, but

its also kinda hilarious hearing hoity-toity tourists complaining about having flown all the way from St. Bart's and finding no snow, and poor Tarquin and Ophelia are so disappointed, as this was their first winter week from their new boarding schools.

When I Bookmark something, it's just for me.

When I Like something, it's just for me and the person who made the post.

When I boost something, it's because I want to share it with others.

There's no software in the background recording and evaluating my behavior so it can decide the best ads to show me, and what I should see or not see in my feed to increase my engagement.

It's pretty nice not being the product anymore and just enjoying the web again.

#Mastodon & #TwitterMigratin FTW

A plea to journalists covering the Fediverse:

If you want to pitch a story and the only people you can think of to talk to are Gargron and the Journa Host admin, please don't.

Instead, use the time you saved to learn more about how this network functions, who the people behind ActivityPub are (and what that even is), who the people keeping instances running are, who the people moderating instances are; you can even get your hands dirty by digging through the Mastodon GitHub issue queue and learn why exactly some design decisions ended up the way they did, it's all right there!

Mastodon is not off-brand Twitter. You do this entire community a massive disservice by painting it as such, and you do our profession a disservice by expressing a complete lack of curiosity about this community before you report on it.

Thank you.

Someone has made, and uploaded, a feature comparison of over twenty Mastodon apps.

#mastodon

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1De5KRwqMIdwEryfoeBLARgxF7QgKkeOQBCilKuIdAXE/edit#gid=0

"Google will do to the #fediverse what they did to email".

But this is not email. There's nascent community here, an inchoate shared culture, saplings of governance.

Community creates resilience. That's why Google has not been able to kill #Wikipedia. They tried their hand at building community repeatedly & failed.

Yes, every server is different. But there are clusters of commonalities, shared values & transferable practices. These are foundations we can build on to prevent a GMail scenario.