Joe Terranova @joeterranova@leftist.network

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

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.

"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.

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.
Teach a man to be a fish biologist, and he’ll have an increasingly difficult relationship with eating fish, as he navigates the difficulties of a complex conservation landscape, attempting to avoid, not only starvation, but the over-exploitation of sensitive populations and the harmful health effects of the likes of PCB, PFAs, and mercury pollution.

Eventually you get tired of trying to amplify your signal or maximizing anonymous online adulation, and just get down to building the community you want to build in the place you want to build it.

UPDATE: Musk said he would abide by the results of a poll about whether he should step down as Twitter CEO

A large majority voted for Musk to step down.

Now Musk is suggesting the poll was rigged by "deep state bots."

How it started. How it’s going.

i think the thing that i'm going to be weirdly obsessed with is that nativity displays where everyone is white and the angels are blonde is white supremacy and your church shouldn't put it out even if it's like the beautiful ones you've had since the 1960s

One of my absolutely favorite phenomena online is when you're trying to learn something about how a framework works at a high level and the documentation is like, "Raxy is a distributed paradigm for computing at-scale utilizing elegant composite and flyweight patterns" and you're like "what the absolute hell" and go on YouTube and some random guy named Tom is like "Raxy is just a way to add numbers quickly if you have over 10 GB of data."

I keep seeing that “first they came for the journalists” sign, and it pisses me off so much, because when they came for muslims, immigrants, and trans people, mainstream journalists normalized it and reported it as “both sides”. Somehow it didn’t count for them until it was happening to them personally, which is *exactly* what the fucking poem was warning against in the first place.

Tired: Tech writers dumping on Mastodon without having ever used it

Wired: Political writers inventing a founder for Mastodon because they can’t read #JohnMastodon

"You don’t say, ‘I’ve done it!’ You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realise that this will do.”
– Anthony Burgess, on finishing books