These things are not apples and apples.
Mastodon is a grassroots alternative to the ugly silos of commercial social media. It offers baked-in interoperability, decentralization, cooperation and a future that isn’t based on enshittification.
Mastodon is everything Threads/Bluesky is not.
I’ve seen shiny-faced developers from Threads and Bluesky discussing how the future is federated and how they look forward to joining hands with everyone. They really seem sincere, but they are doomed.
It was a bit of a weird joke in 2016, but WTF America? Again?
My condolences. The fact it could even be close confirms your country is fundamentally broken.
I’ve just watched my faith in humanity disappear down the toilet so I’m switching off the shitshow for a few years.
Good luck.
I was a bit pissed off the other day when I looked up an old Twitter thread to find it had been spammed by someone at bland.ai . Not cool.
Despite the shitty tactic, I couldn’t resist the clickbait.
They provide automated phone agents and will call you for a demo, so I tried it. I was actually pretty impressed. I threw a bunch of nonsense and non sequiturs at her, but she patiently waited then steered the conversation back on track. If I spoke over her she stopped talking, listened to what I said, and responded appropriately.
Just for fun, I decided to pit her against Lenny so I forwarded the call to him.
Lenny is a series of cleverly-constructed canned responses designed to infuriate spammers and cold callers. The recordings are generic enough to keep them on the line as he waffles and wanders till they finally give up in frustration.
Here’s how it went:
She didn’t do too badly. Lenny is just a dumb series of fixed responses, but Bland.ai was unfazed and patiently tried to explain. When it was obvious that the conversation was going nowhere, she politely wound up the conversation.
“Don’t anthropomorphize computers – they hate it.” — Andrew McAfee.
We arrived at our cabin to find a 2001 centenary dollar coin on the doormat.
I can only assume the magpies left it as payment for all the oatmeal we’ve been feeding them.
I recently decided I wanted a Home Assistant automation to turn on the bathroom fan. I already had an ESPHome temperature/humidity sensor so it seemed simple enough - just trigger the fan when the humidity reached a certain level.
The problem was what level? Humidity in the bathroom varies with the time of year and how long the shower is on. This looked like it could become a messy automation with a lot of tweaking.
I remember when the Cray-1 was the iconic supercomputer of the day but I’d heard that modern phones were comparable.
Of course the Google algorithm was listening to my thoughts and offered an appropriate video the next day. Here are the (slightly corrected) stats from the video so I can refer to them in future:
Cray-1 iPhone 13 Year 1978 2022 Price $38,000,000 (2020 $) $1000 Weight 5000 Kg 170g Power 115Kw 20h on a Li-Ion battery Memory 8.
I just spent way too much time tracking down the source of a bird call that’s been haunting me for weeks. Finally identified it: an Eastern Koel or Rainbird.
It’s always just out of visual range, but the call is very distinctive. It even has an interesting back-story as a migratory bird from New Guinea (which is presumably why I haven’t heard it before), and a dark side as a brood parasite doing the cuckoo thing.
There is nothing more annoying than half-hearing South Park from the next room.
What’s the world coming to if you can’t trust Gina and the Institute of Public Affairs.
It’s a delightful morning and I’ve managed to get out the door for a walk for the second day in a row. That’s a trend, right?
When I paused to take this picture, a kookaburra directly above me cocked his head to one side to look at me, then cracked up laughing.
I think he’s seen through me.
Sigh. Just got my first Mastodon spam.
It was really dumb spam, but I clicked on it because I’m in the Mastodon honeymoon period and my brain is thinking butterflies and unicorns because of all the nice people here.
Illusion shattered. Honeymoon over.
I guess I’m not starting the bonfire any time soon…
Seriously FaceBook? Putting a link to my blog article is “spam”?
That’s kind of pathetic. Perhaps they are nervous about the IndieWeb?
Beeper is the Black Knight of chat clients – Apple keeps hacking off limbs but they’re still hopping on one leg.
- Tis but a scratch! -
Ultimately they can't win this fight, but I admire their persistence.
I suspect part of it is poking the bear to shine some light on the shitty state of chat interoperability, so good for them. Take my money, guys.
I’m collecting alternative names so I don’t have to say “X, formerly Twitter”.
So far I’ve found:
Ex,
Xitter,
ExTwitter
and Twix.
ExTwitter is currently my favourite.
Good grief. These guys are like some one-dimensional super-villain in a crappy B movie.
“Whatever is the most greedy, misogynistic, self-serving, destructive option… let’s do that”.
I was walking along the Warburton Trail the other day and I passed through a grove of pine trees. There was a breeze and the pine needles soughed in the wind.
For an instant, I was ten years old again at my grandparent’s house and I could glance around in 1967.
I tried to grab at the memory…
It's a blustery, overcast day. My brother and I are in the top paddock and there's a windbreak of pine trees rustling in the wind.
Here’s an excellent video from @karpathy@sigmoid.social with some intriguing ways to think about Large Language Models:
They are a lossy compression of the Internet.
They could be seen as “… the kernel process of an emerging operating system”. – they coordinate a lot of resources (memory, computational tools) for problem solving. The internet is the “disk”, the context window is “RAM” as working memory.
Google Assistant seems to be doing a HAL 9000…
Ever since Google’s started cutting back on that product she’s been slowly losing her mind.
When she reads the news now it’s 50-50 whether she’ll read it, or just show a search result, or sometimes video with no sound.
Used to work perfectly. I’ll give up when she gets to the “Daisy, Daisy…” stage.
I can’t seem to find Elon Musk’s Mastodon handle to follow.
Over a week ago I read this article by Cory Doctorow and it sparked a cascade of neurons that have been tickled over the past few years.
It was a short hop from that article, to the state of the IndieWeb, to realising what a shit-show the whole social-media world has become. The IndieWeb and its principles were the solution I didn’t know I needed - I want to get back to blogging in my own place, with my own identity like it was in the early Internet.
