Everyone's always had the option of following a mastodon user because every mastodon account exposes an RSS feed. So if unidirectional follows were the desired feature, that already exists, right?
ActivityPub the protocol allows for two-way communication. There's an impedance mismatch between how yarn works and how ActivityPub works, but it's always been possible to bridge the two, following what the IndieWeb <-> ActivityPub bridges already do.
So, like, what exactly is the purpose of the ActivityPub work being done on yarn? What's it supposed to support? If it's just for unidirectional following, why not use feeds/RSS and call it done? If it's meant to be bidirectional, why not pursue building a bridge and borrowing from what the IndieWeb folks have already done?
Everyone's always had the option of following a mastodon user because every mastodon account exposes an RSS feed. So if unidirectional follows were the desired feature, that already exists, right?
ActivityPub the protocol allows for two-way communication. There's an impedance mismatch between how yarn works and how ActivityPub works, but it's always been possible to bridge the two, following what the IndieWeb <-> ActivityPub bridges already do.
So, like, what exactly is the purpose of the ActivityPub work being done on yarn? What's it supposed to support? If it's just for unidirectional following, why not use feeds/RSS and call it done? If it's meant to be bidirectional, why not pursue build a bridge and borrowing from what the IndieWeb folks have already done?
> Regarding the "AI Letter" calling for a pause to large-scale AI:
> 1. The Future Of Life Institute, which put out this letter, is more aptly called "The Future Of Life At The Expense Of Present Life". They are a dangerous longertermist organization, and by definition their espoused values are sociopathic. Do not take this letter at face value
> 2. This industry is literally *begging* for outside regulation. All the harms, real or imagined, that AI can cause are being pushed on society by many of the signatories of this letter. They are telling us that they cannot control themselves, that they cannot help but push harmful technology on society. They are asking us to rein them in, and we should.
>
> [1] Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo
> [2] The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”
A lot of people in the US don't seem to know that cars were crammed down our collective throats in much the same way, over enormous protests. Cars killed tons of people, and building roads destroyed communities on a massive scale. Huge numbers of people protested all of this and more, but cars were rammed through as something we just had to bear anyway.
Many people, including me, have raised alarm bells about this AI technology, and yet here we are having it rammed through in much the same way. It's a pattern in the United States for sure, if not in the Western world generally. The powers that be don't seem inclined to slow this process down or regulate it in anyway. I suspect they won't start until the harms it can cause and are already causing become so great they can't be ignored anymore.
> ACM, Association for Computing Machinery recently circulated a survey about their authorship policies. I strongly agree with their stance that AI text generators should not be listed as authors. I strongly disagree with their stance that research articles could contain generated text if it is disclosed and meets some other reasonable critiera. I believe the inclusion of such text in research articles fundamentally reduces their quality relative to texts authored entirely by human beings. I also believe, given how AI text generators are trained, that their use is a form of plagiarism. I very much hope the ACM reverses course on that particular aspect of their policy.
It's good to see at least one US agency taking this stuff seriously.
Nice. An artist can run their visual art image through this tool. The tool produces a new version of the image that is almost identical to the human eye, but will prevent unethical, extractive AI like Stable Diffusion or Midjourney from learning the artist's style, so that their style can't be stolen and copied. The artist can thus freely post images online without having to worry that some asshole company will co-opt their art style.
They do warn that AI advances quickly and this particular tool will most likely not always be effective. However, I think the effort is commendable, and this tool or some future variant could put enough of a barrier in place that it is no longer cost-effective for lousy AI companies to steal from artists.
Nice. An artist can run their visual art image through this tool. The tool produces a new version of the image that is almost identical to the human eye, but will prevent unethical, extractive AI like Stable Diffusion or Midjourney from learning the artist's style, so that their style can't be stolen and copied. Then they can freely post images online without having to worry that some asshole company will co-opt their art style.
They do warn that AI advances quickly and this particular tool will most likely not always be effective. However, I think the effort is commendable, and this tool or some future variant could put enough of a barrier in place that it is no longer cost-effective for lousy AI companies to steal from artists.
Nice. Self-hostable even!
The only conclusion is that this feed is cursed.
The only conclusion is that this feed is cursed.
I've noticed this behavior before with other feeds.
Peter Thiel, of Facebook and PayPal fame, besides being a horrible Trump-supporting human being generally, literally wants to have injections of teenager's blood under the bizarre belief that this will slow the aging process. That kind of "treatment" uses much the same rationale as this guy provides in the first few minutes of the video you posted.
A literal fucking vampire:
* Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People's Blood
* PETER THIEL WANTS TO INJECT HIMSELF WITH YOUNG PEOPLE’S BLOOD
* Peter Thiel Isn't the First to Think Young People's Blood Will Make Him Immortal*
Silicon Valley Bank crashed, now this. Buckle up folks, we could be in for a wild ride.
https://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2015ams/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/D2T2-Filippo-Valsorda-and-George-Tankersly-Non-Hidden-Hidden-Services-Considered-Harmful.pdf
> Hidden service users face a greater risk of targeted deanonymization than normal Tor users
> over 25% of the Tor network’s exit capacity has been attacking Tor users
[NSA targets the privacy-conscious (Seite 1)| Das Erste - Panorama - Meldungen](https://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/nsa230_page-1.html)
> Among the NSA's targets is the Tor network
etc etc etc etc etc.....
> >25% of the Tor network’s exit capacity has been attacking Tor users
[NSA targets the privacy-conscious (Seite 1)| Das Erste - Panorama - Meldungen](https://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/nsa230_page-1.html)
> Among the NSA's targets is the Tor network
etc etc etc etc etc.....
> No institution can give an order to block your transactions! Even if you’re bank account is blocked, you can still trade with crypto! That’s at least one of the reasons it has value!
You're literally trying to say that if your community has decided that you should not have access to certain funds, you should be empowered to thwart that decision. A profoundly anti-social stance to take.
Because that's the notion here. Banks can't legally decide that you no longer have access to your funds. You have a right to those funds that is protected by law. Legal authorities in some cases can restrict your access to your funds, but there is a reason and purpose to that, and in theory that reason and purpose is protection of the community. Yes I know I'm being simplistic, but the alternative is to take the extreme libertarian view that these institutions are all broken and hostile beyond hope, we should resist them at all costs, everyone else be damned. To me that's far more simplistic, naive, and dangerous than believing that these institutions approximate the ideals we have for them and can be improved through time.
And honestly, if that's your worry--that a bank would restrict your access to your money--why in the actual FUCK would you think that cryptocurrency gives you better access? Get a bunch of cash, bonds, and prepaid debit cards and bury it all in your backyard. That's far better.
I've talked to many people who are enthusiastic about cryptocurrency, and almost to a one I find that they have a limited understanding of how actual currencies work. I'd urge you to read up on how banks work, how fiat currencies work, etc., before saying stuff like this.
> Crypto increases or decreases in value just as any other good (or currency), based on demand, you can do Ponzi schemes with potatoes, you can’t say potates at their core are Ponzi scheme.
This is not true, because cryptocurrency is unique: it has no inherent value whatsoever. Potatoes have value as food, and so yes while they can be used as the underpinning of a Ponzi scheme, the presence of potatoes as a kind of currency does not immediately imply that you're looking at a Ponzi scheme. You might be looking at a perfectly viable economy grounded, ultimately, in the value of a potato as a food.
There is no grounding for cryptocurrency. You can't eat it, wear it, or live in it. You can't use it to pay taxes, fees, or fines from a nation-state without first converting it into the fiat currency of that nation-state.
You might argue "well, you can exchange the crypto for those other things!" and the answer to that is: no you can't, unless you have enough people participating in the Ponzi scheme. That's how these schemes work. It's a con game where the token only has a value if enough people *believe* it has a value. That's a Ponzi scheme.
> And cypto’s value is that it’s a currency outside the (at least the digital) reach of a countries institutions.
That is not a value. I have absolutely no need or desire for that, nor do the vast majority of people. People avoiding accountability from their community might view it as such.
What I find objectionable is that Google and IBM (and others!) pretend that these training courses about their products are actually *educational* the way a university education is. That is blatant misrepresentation.
tl;dr version: Large tech companies pretend to offer educational material about machine learning, but what they're really doing is trying to train you in how to use *their very specific technology* so that they can lock as many people as possible into that way of thinking and doing things, and therefore control the market. A quote:
> We demonstrate how the online courses further support Google and IBM to consolidate and even expand their position of power by recruiting new AI talent and by securing their infrastructures and models to become the dominant ones.
Which is fine--all tech companies do some variation of this, and depending on what you're doing you may need it--but don't confuse this vocational training for education, because it's not that.
Love it or hate it, institutionalized fiat currency has value because the issuing country has people with guns who will drag you off to a metal box if you don't use the currency in the intended ways (unless you're super rich I guess). That aside, cryptocurrency stupidly throws away many thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge about how currencies work and don't work. For that reason alone it's stupid and untrustworthy.
So in that case why wouldn't it be possible to have an ActivityPub bridge that forced yarn semantics (so to speak)? If someone sent you a reply via ActivityPub you wouldn't see it on yarn unless you followed their feed?
I'd argue that mastodon gives you as an end user significantly better control over what you see than yarn does. You can mute by keyword, for instance--if you don't want to see posts about "ChatGPT" anymore, you mute that word and poof! those posts are gone. You can block individuals, or entire instances. You can mute hashtags. You can set timed mutes/blocks, for instance muting a person for 1 hour or 1 day and then having that mute or block automatically reversed. Once you learn how to use those tools, the chance you'll ever see a post you don't want to see is pretty low unless you're being actively harassed or you wade into the "federated timeline". I can't speak to the administrator tools since I've never set up an instance and played with them. Anyway, my mastodon account feels pretty slow to me, and I feel like I'm in full control of what I see--nothing at all like being shouted at.
yarn, as it is, seems ripe for abuse if there's ever a large influx of potentially malicious users, because it does not have fine-grained end-user tools like these. What would you, as an end user, do if someone stood up a yarn pod full of assholes who all collectively decided to twt at you all day every day? What would your options be to stop that, which would very much feel like being shouted at? At the administrator level, I had to drop the OS and block a range of IP addresses to keep spam users from continually registering on my pod, for instance; yarn only gave me the option to manually delete them one-by-one as they popped up.
I'd argue that mastodon gives you as an end user significantly better control over what you see than yarn does. You can mute by keyword, for instance--if you don't want to see posts about "ChatGPT" anymore, you mute that word and poof! those posts are gone. You can block individuals, or entire instances. You can mute hashtags. You can set timed mutes/blocks, for instance muting a person for 1 hour or 1 day and then having that mute or block automatically reversed. Once you learn how to use those tools, the chance you'll ever see a post you don't want to see is pretty low unless you're being actively harassed or you wade into the "federated timeline". I can't speak to the administrator tools since I've never set up an instance and played with them. Anyway, my mastodon accounts feels pretty slow to me, and I feel like I'm in full control of what I see--nothing at all like being shouted at.
yarn, as it is, seems ripe for abuse if there's ever a large influx of potentially malicious users, because it does not have fine-grained end-user tools like these. What would you, as an end user, do if someone stood up a yarn pod full of assholes who all collectively decided to twt at you all day every day? What would your options be to stop that flood, which would very much feel like being shouted at? At the administrator level, I had to drop the OS and block a range of IP addresses to keep spam users from continually registering on my pod, for instance; yarn only gave me the option to manually delete them one-by-one as they popped up.
A good read in my opinion.