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The only #socialmedia I am now left on is Mastodon, Pixelfed and LinkedIn.
After being cyber-flashed on #BlueSky - bombarded by abuse on Twitter where I had blocked 4,500+ accounts - Russian "ladies of the night" trying to follow me on Instagram - bombarded with ads and animal abuse on Facebook, I now feel I'm in a better place.
Maybe my blog article is a bit of a rant but it felt better to clear my head.
stevendrowe.com/state-of-socia…
State of Social Media January 2025 - Steven D Rowe
The state of my social media accounts in relation to the Meta CEOs unhinged statement about taking away fact-checking to kowtow to Trump.Steven (SDR Web Design)
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hello new people
fleeing all things Meta
welcome to web 4.0, where we cultivate our own resilient social media graphs organically
free of ads
free of rage bait algorithms
free of murky VCs seeking ROI
... and... free.. as in beer 🍻
remember it is acceptable to point & laugh at the web 3.0 griftclowns and their enshittification schemes
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I read that Zuckerberg is calling people who leave his platforms, "virtue signalers." Yup. Indeed. I'd also add, "ethics and morality signalers and patriots." We should all signal that we don't support this kind of behavior. With action.
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‘As If She’d Have a Crystal Ball’: Supporters Race to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ Defense As MAGA ...
As wildfires raged uncontrollably across the Los Angeles area, forcing tens of thousands to evacuate and leaving at least five dead, conservatives within the MAGAA.L. Lee (atlantablackstar)
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i will die on the hill of closure isn't a group axiom
closure is a requirement of a binary operation
and a group is definitionally a set under a binary operation
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Today I'm going to start building a new website from scratch using Guile Scheme!
The goal is to create a production website that could get a fair amount of traffic. This ongoing project should be a good example of real-world Scheme hacking!
Join us here at 07:30 UTC (in around an hour):
- youtube.com/live/jpYROJ9_W2E
- twitch.tv/SystemCrafters
#gnu #guile #scheme #webdev #programming
Kicking Off a New Guile Website Project! - Crafter Hours
Welcome to Crafter Hours where we try to build something new every stream! Stream recordings will eventually be turned into shorter channel videos.#gnu #gui...YouTube
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If Merrick Garland can release the Robert Hur Special Consel report which was a political hit job on President Biden, then he can release the Jack Smith Special Counsel report.
If he doesn’t release the report, then he’s not just a coward, he’s complicit.
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A while back I read that the best way to teach a puppy how to behave is to do so in the presence of an adult dog who has already been trained to behave the way you need to. The adult dog will teach the puppy.
As I read this, I was amazed!! Dogs teach their young human behavioural expectations!!!
Then I realized: everything I know about how to behave around dogs I learned as a child, from an adult human.
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this is also the big problem with animals in captivity. The issue isn't the breeding every time, sometimes it's that the captive population fundamentally can't survive the wild because they don't have an adult to teach them "street smarts".
And unfortunately to bring the tone down a bit, the reverse: destruction of context without destroying life happens with slavery or with (in Australia's case) with the stolen generation.
Elon Musk’s European political meddling is ‘worrying,’ says Norway’s PM
European backlash grows against billionaire ally of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
After buying the US President and a place in the Oval Office, Musk looks for world power and influence for his right-wing whack-a-doodles.
#AureFreePress #News #press #headline #GOP #Politics #uspolitics #uspol #Breaking #BreakingNews #Musk #Twitter #x #Fediverse #socialmedia #Mastodon
politico.eu/article/norwegian-…
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Giorgia Meloni vuole regalare i dati sensibili di milioni di italiani al suo Elon Musk
Il problema non solo solamente gli 1,5 miliardi dei contribuenti italiani Giorgia Meloni ha deciso di regalare a Musk...Gayburg
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Most of the accounts that I read at Bluesky are trans people's accounts and I read them from outside the system without an account.
I don't feel particularly motivated to delve into that platform any deeper than that, given its safety issues and general corporate fuckery. I'd rather not.
I just saw someone say, "I'm putting a lot of interesting stuff on my Bluesky account but not here. Read my stuff over there, too! I might bridge it if the mood strikes me." (not a direct quote)
Eh, no.
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Dell is making a bad decision.
Killing XPS is like Lenovo killing off ThinkPad: if you want a quality Dell, that’s what you get.
Without XPS, I don’t know if I would ever consider a Dell.
theverge.com/2025/1/6/24325799…
Dell kills the XPS brand
Dell’s changing up its product names for laptops, desktops, and monitors for CES 2025 — opting for branding like Premium, Pro, and Max over XPS, Latitude, and Precision.Antonio G. Di Benedetto (The Verge)
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Me: [tap-taps Command key to invoke Apple Intelligence prompt]
Me: Which countries have banned Minecraft?
Apple Intelligence: Five countries have reportedly banned Minecraft: Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
Me: Why did Mexico ban Minecraft?
Apple Intelligence: Do you want me to use ChatGPT to answer that?
Me: [clicks Use ChatGPT button]
ChatGPT: As of January 6, 2025, there is no credible information indicating that Mexico has banned Minecraft. If you have heard otherwise, it might be due to misinformation or rumors.
just... fuck.
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Donald Trump’s attempted coup of 2020 was so successful that four years later a majority of the American electorate either voted for it or were indifferent to it.
‘Justice delayed’ wasn’t merely ‘justice denied’. It was the triumph of injustice.
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Some folk infer from the fact that Earth had single-celled organisms for three billion years before multicellular life finally arrived, that the leap from single- to multi-cell is the “Hard Step” that explains why we do not see a universe teeming with intelligent life.
Those people were about half correct. The hard step is having all the supervisor drones installed on a farm planet to keep the biosphere generating fossil fuels (and not, say, evolving any life that would consume those fuels) break down.
We worked this out after we dug up a broken supervisor. But not, alas, before we repaired it.
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That sentence is not great as it stands (hence my tripping up on the "break down" which I DM'd you about) and this toot is, imvho, otherwise your best tootfic, period. The challenge of keeping the twist working as well as it does, retaining the callback, meeting the character limit, and making parsing it easier on the reader... is unenviable.
Can I suggest having that also in past tense - " The hard step was ..." Jumping between tenses makes it harder to follow the narrative.
You might also consider capitalizing Hard Step, to link it to the previous paragraph.
Version 2 of this #Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot with thanks to the RetroProofing gang!
Some folk inferred---from the fact that Earth had hosted single-celled organisms for over three billion years before multicellular life finally arrived on the scene---that the leap from single- to multi-cell is the “Hard Step” that explains why we do not see a universe teeming with intelligent life.
Those people were about half correct.
On a farm planet, the Hard Step is avoiding the notice of the strikebreaker drones; machines tasked with ensuring that the planetwide bacterial soup produces petrochemicals and feedstocks and
not, say, us (or anything else multicellular).
Any phenotypes that show signs of unionising - forming cellular collectives that benefit themselves rather than the Bosses - get stomped down HARD by the Strikebreakers. Complex life only got going hereabouts when an unlikely catastrophe broke the breakers.
We worked all this out only after we dug up a broken drone. But not, alas, before we repaired it.
"MD Anderson is one of the best cancer centers in the nation, offering cutting-edge treatments that attract patients from around the world. But that treatment is likely out of reach for millions of people covered by health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act.
MD Anderson for years has not accepted any individual health plans offered through the Affordable Care Act marketplace..."
It's not just insurance companies.
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Look who are having a chitchat together in two days!
(Now completed)
youtube.com/watch?v=I0kvjNh7cz…
Elon Musk’s Move Into Politics: Yanis Varoufakis and Cory Doctorow on Fighting Billionaire Control
Elon Musk’s growing role in politics represents a troubling evolution in how wealthy elites shape public discourse and policy. From his control of X (formerl...YouTube
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@game @pluralistic
Yeah, I hadn’t looked at that but bad dog no biscuit to the both of them?
I’m scandalized personally. 😅
Public service announcement:
There is no N in the word ‘restaurateur’.
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I HATE "customer service" chats on websites.
You know you're talking to an AI when you start. And there's a good chance you're still talking to an LLM when they "connect you to a live representative".
Even if it IS a human, they are clearly not paying attention.
And all this because of bad UI design in the first place. All I needed was a stupid "I didn't receive this shipment" check-box.
But NO-Ooo-OOO, that would make too much sense. Instead we have to do an overcomplicated hour-long chat.
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uh unfortunately apparently people need to hear this but if a trans person hasn't referred to a body part of theirs in a specific way you referring to that body part in that way especially body parts related to secondary sex characteristics is a big no
mirror their language
don't be a creep
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Ban on Firing Employee Because of Reproductive Health Decision May Violate Religious Employer's Expressive Association Rights
So employers may be able to fire you because you had an abortion
Once again, Christians attacking an anti-discrimination law
Awful
#Law #FediLaw #Religion #abortion #discrimination
Ban on Firing Employee Because of Reproductive Health Decision May Violate Religious Employer's Expressive Association Rights
In CompassCare v. Hochul , (2nd Cir., Jan. 2, 2025), anti-abortion pregnancy centers and a Baptist Church challenge a New York statute whic...buff.ly
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I suspect a lot of US trans folks who started transitioning in the last decade don't realize how big the Affordable Care Act has been in our access to care.
Almost no insurance companies were covering HRT or other care before the ACA - it was out of pocket or treated as a pre-existing condition, potentially blocking us from all medical care. I don't know that we would have the lively and open trans community today if it wasn't for that. It's also the reason people can access it for cheaper in other settings and why Medicare/Medicaid covers it.
I know it seems stupid, but we might need to do what we can to muster a defense of the ACA (which I hated when it passed because I was advocating for single payer, universal healthcare). It might be one of the most important levers and wedges against efforts to destroy our ability to embody ourselves in the next 4 years.
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Feeling 'hoodwinked' erodes trust in employee relations, observational study reveals
phys.org/news/2025-01-hoodwink…
"Otherwise, it basically winds up eroding trust and they feel like you don't have their best interests at heart."
TBH, I've never expected an employer to have my best interests at heart.
I'd be astonished if they did. A corporation doesn't have a heart.
Remember, "employ" means "use".
An employer uses employees.
Feeling 'hoodwinked' erodes trust in employee relations, observational study reveals
Even when an agreement meets the legal criteria for consent, individuals may not feel as though they have truly given consent, which can have serious consequences for the employees' relationship with their organization, according to new Cornell resea…Julie Greco (Phys.org)
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But... At my work that's exactly like everyone else's work we're a _family_.
(Which has _never_ been the positive management thinks it is.)
I have definitely had employers who had my best interests at heart - but these were small businesses where we worked side by side every day, not corporations. Also, I choose my employers with great care, though that isn't always an option.
Either way, It's not like it's impossible to use (!) someone's skills & pay them for it without exploitation or disrespect - those things are a choice, which in my view makes it even worse.
myrmepropagandist
Unknown parent • • •@justafrog
Seeing how bad it's become, I can see why they find it so offensive. I can look at termite photos and not have any random AI gumbo thrown in for no reason. That violates their rights somehow I suppose.
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JustAFrog
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •They want the same flood of garbage which exists in russian media.
To destroy any hope of people knowing what's really going on, and organising against it.
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myrmepropagandist
in reply to JustAFrog • • •@justafrog
I think we need to get the word out that doing an "image search" for reference images isn't good practice anymore if you care about anything being based on real creatures, plants or anything.
And it may be very limiting for even fantasy subjects as you are getting normalized and reprocessed image pudding.
JustAFrog
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Much to my sorrow, image searches now contain an extra workload for me, in that I need to analyze each one for "is this slop?" and I hate that so much.
Often, the slop appeals more to people, so you get things based on it, which were made by a human.
It seems very hard to stem the tide, if it's possible at all.
Even after LLMs get dropped and nvidia dies, the garbage will stay with us for decades.
Bruce Mirken
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •JustAFrog
in reply to Bruce Mirken • • •@BruceMirken More precisely, people's inability to separate out fact from pleasing misinformation is ruining things.
If rejecting that slop were universal, it wouldn't cause a lot of difficulty.
Instead we've got millions of people who think they can finally outsource all their work.
myrmepropagandist
in reply to JustAFrog • • •@justafrog @BruceMirken
Not everyone has the same experience. There are areas where the slop works on each of us since we don't know enough to see what's wrong with it.
For example AI slop cars? That would work on me. I don't care enough about cars to know a Toyota from an Audi.
Bruce Mirken
in reply to JustAFrog • • •JustAFrog
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •@BruceMirken The best example I know of is with young peacocks.
The fake ones have tiny adult plumage, the real ones have brown.
And really short tail feathers which the young males will display anyway, because it's what dad does.
Plenty adorbs without fakes, but the fake version is much prettier to look at.
The fake one is in stock image collections, which makes it worse.
Lorin Sherman
in reply to JustAFrog • • •Leefeller Guy
in reply to JustAFrog • • •JustAFrog
in reply to Leefeller Guy • • •Nazo
in reply to JustAFrog • • •