# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 860
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/thecanine/twtxt.txt&offset=759
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/thecanine/twtxt.txt&offset=859
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/thecanine/twtxt.txt&offset=659
@abucci I think it recording the outside of the car, was known for a long time. Likely since they came up with that not so great self-driving project, that led to the need for a lot more data to improve it.
Sadly, people in tech, talking shit about their customers, doesn't surprise me either. Not saying it's excusable, I've just seen it happen, at many places, in the past.
The one thing, that surprises me, is it recording the inside. Even I, with all me skepticism, would still expect some bare minimum of privacy, when it comes to the things I'm doing and conversations I'm having, inside my own car.
Can we get a folder, for all the new android Yarn App builds, or something like that, so most users don't have to be stuck, on this ancient version please?
I still have great memories, of playing Club Penguin as a child, or even playing it on a few private servers, at times, as a nostalgia-filled adult, after Disney destroyed and took down the original. Sadly most of those servers were either too obscure, broken, or not obscure enough, to avoid Disneys lawyers.
I was mildly excited, when I heard about a 3D sequel, made by some of the people, behind the original game (before Disney bought it), but this is suspicious at best.
Even if you made the funny penguin game from my childhood, I will not give you my social security number, nor my credit card info, to play the new one and I hope not many others will either.
*The sequel is called "Party Parrot World" and requires a "verified Hideaway account", if you want to play it, or try some other two game things, that they are currently working on.
I said, I don't want to hear any more Trump news, but seeing he's still seething in all caps and some invalid characters, on his isolated bootleg site, made me chuckle.
The only way, this could get more pathetic, is if he starts spamming 5 emojis, after every word. 😂
To my surprise, some AI companies, might have to face the consequences of their art theft afterall. While the legal and corporate world, still couldn't give less of a shit about the small artists, stability ai made the critical mistake, of using the ever so precious bland and generic stock images. Those are owned by companies, who for obvious reasons, hate AI, have extremely deep pockets and access to the right kind of lawyers.
They also have one other key advantage, that could win them the case. By slapping their watermark on millions of images, in the exact same place, the AI will start putting distorted versions of it, onto some images. Therefore, they can argue damage to their reputation, with evidence, to back it up.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66788385/getty-images-us-inc-v-stability-ai-inc/
@prologic Thank you, this is it's april fools version - still it's really nice to hear this, since the regular version, is now somewhat in danger, thanks to the unwillingness of Czech ISPs, to provide IPv6 addresses, to their clients.
If you mean the illustration here, I have to disappoint you and admit, that the bottle was generated by AI, before being edited by me.
I have some exciting news to share! Celebrate the 3000 days of Canine anniversary, with this limited time offer. The ore-orders will launch soon, so get your wallets ready everyone!
While waiting, you can also check the post-modern redesign of the Flist site, currently being tested on: https://flist.glitch.me
@prologic Thank you. It's the not so great game, the last pixelart was also referencing.
Another month, another pixelart! This time it's actually not a canine, but a strange scenery, made using the PICO 8 color palette.
The only thing shared between this and the last art, is both being "slightly YIIK inspired".
Microsoft really couldn't stand their browser for the first time, being ever so slightly better than Google Chrome, so they're already heard at work, finding ways to ruin it.
Microsoft really couldn't stand their browser, for the first time ever, being ever so slightly better than Chrome, so they're already working hard, to find new ways to ruin it.
@off_grid_living Your reflective glass door, has turned your dog into a yoteyote.
This illustrations is by TheRoguez
My hot take, adding to the banks vs crypto debate, happening here:
While banks in most countries, can be trusted, what I find more alarming, is there being only two companies (MaserCard a Visa), who handle international money transfers - both having ToS, that allow them to blacklist you, without even giving you the reason, why that decision was made. They are also both ran out of the same country.
I'm not saying crypto is the solution, competition is! Anything even close to a monopoly, in any field, should make people worried. There should also be no second chances, for the companies, institutions, or governments, cough mishandling peoples money.
PayPal withheld funds for unreasonably long and charged illegal and unjustifiable random fines, that earned them a class action lawsuit. No-one should do business, with a company this scummy and I immediately demanded, that they delete my account, when I found out this was happening.
Lastly, say what you will, about the protests of Canadian truckers. I don't fully endorse, what they did (both sides made mistakes, in this conflict), but if my government withheld money, from anyone, over protests, I'd definitely not feel safe, knowing people like that, can touch all my money.
Just days after @prologic integrates ActivityPub into Yarn, Facebook comes out with plans to do the same (at least according to Twitter jurnos): https://www.platformer.news/p/meta-is-building-a-decentralized
There's no escape Prologic, Facebook will find you in the end...
Don't be sad, I know you will
But don't give up until
Facebook will find you in the end
*Help, I can't stop with the stupid lyrics gimmick, while posting here. 😅
@bender Yeah, I fully understand Mastercards and Visas decision on this. I'm just saying, that the people invested in crypto, who want it to become mainstream, shouldn't forget, that the main reason it got popular, was people wanting a financial system, that governments and big companies wouldn't be able to monitor, rule over, manipulate or ban anyone from. So why do some of them cry, over these big companies like Visa or Mastercard, not wanting to be involved now?
There were even those, who tried pushing crypto, as one of the main currencies in their countries - and that just ain't it either. Just look at what happen to El Salvador, after they tried doing this, with Bitcoin.
These things might sound nice on paper, to cryptobros and holders, but I think they go against, what crypto was meant to be.
@prologic The people who wanted to rely on Visa, Mastercard or any other giant company with already too much control over peoples finances and ability to do business, completely missed the whole point of crypto, to begin with.
Or at least the point, that sadly became secondary, to "extracting money from gullible idiots, to overall benefit the already wealthy".
@movq I kinda like the glass look it adds to the site. I also still have no idea, how CPU demanding such a thing is, so now you're making me wonder, if it's worth it. 🤔
@prologic Thank you. The reference is really obscure, to the point that no-one, in any of the places I posted it to, guessed it. Excluding the place, where I found about the thing from myself - but one can hardly count that as a guess. 😂
So I guess, I might as well say it. It's Alex Eagleston, one of the most unlikable video-game protagonists, from the game "YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG". A game, that most would agree, isn't very good either.
Good news, for those who miss the cursed canine sticker collection - here's a bonus one. As always, there's a reference there, to be guessed. :)
@prologic New app? What? Where? When??!
Give me!!!
@prologic Yeah, this is probably the best option, especially if the e-mail isn't kept anywhere, after the verification.
@prologic I'm pretty sure it's still possible to mass-register accounts, through some tempmail services. - It just makes doing so harder.
In this case, despite hating captchas, they still seem like a best solution to this. Especially if there's still ones, that'd work, while being well made, not too annoying and made with accessibility in mind. 🤔
The social media of old, are so desperate for money, they're now copying Twitters widely mocked decision, to charge monthly, for a verification badge.
https://youtu.be/6t3eiNHL2Zo
In the days of old, jannies were widely mocked for moderating (often very profitable) sites, for free, just to feel some kind of power.
Now even more pathetic creatures emerge, willing to cough up a monthly payment, as well as a copy of their government ID, for this feeling.
@prologic I got an ad, for this strange site, that claims to be the only way, to invest in parts of some famous paintings.
I decided, to check it out, because it presents more questions, than it does answers, like if and how do they even own them. It's also been advertised for quite some time, yet it tries to look, like some hot new thing, you have to be invited to join.
Can't really say, how much of a scam it is, but the fact some of the paintings listed have their image links broken now, doesn't add much credibility - not like the site itself had any, to begin with.
@prologic I got an ad, for this strange site, that claims to be the only way, to invest in parts of some famous paintings.
I decided, to check it out, because it presents more questions, than it does answers, like if and how do they even own them. It's also been advertised for quite some time, yet it tries to look, like some hot new thing, you have to be invited to join.
Can't really say, how much of a scam it is, but the fact some of the paintings listed have their image links broken now, doesn't add much credibility - not like the site has any, to begin with.
@prologic I got an ad, for this strange site, that claims to be the only way, to invest in parts of some famous paintings.
I decided, to check it out, because it presents more questions, than it does answers, like if and how do they even own them. It's also been advertised for quite some time, yet it tries to look, like some hot new thing, you have to be invited to join.
Can't really say, how much of a scam it is, but the fact some of the paintings listed have missing their images broken now, doesn't add much credibility - not like the site has any, to begin with.
I'm not an art investor myself, know a fair bit about it, but had no idea missing JPEGs, is where the money at. 
@off_grid_living Opera is on almost everything, I'm using it on Windows. There are probably way better options on Linux, Mac, phones and the rest of things.
Hmm... my background, now I'm obligated to make that joke - hope it's not too far. Oh no, here comes the Big Bang Theory music.
♫ Our whole universe was just some shitty meme groups on Facebook, Then nearly ten whole years ago, expansion started, when Z** ***n slept with 5 game jurnos... Wait.
Discord, "chat for games" started,
A tone of stupid drama happened,
Then a server called Wolf Den was formed,
Went from a chipmunk, to wolf, to canine,
Drama and constant infighting, let to changes in many things,
But it all started with Gamergate! ♫
*Censored the name, not to spread stupid rumors, nor did I have anything to do with the mentioned movement, other than it changing a lot of things on the internet - most of them for worse, just by it happening simultaneously.
@bender @abucci I'm not trying to be hostile, or spread misinformation. I was there, on the Fediverse, back when it happened. If anyone wants more information about this part of Fediverse history, they can watch this short video about it: https://youtu.be/yZoASOyfvGQ
Even this video is in favor of this kind of instance-based moderation and so am I - to some, but much lesser extent. There are instances, that unfortunately became the home of mostly pedophiles or animal abusers and I'm sure no-one else, wants to see that, unless "that" means seeing these kinds of people in jail.
What I have a problem with, is circulating blocklists, including many instances, because of some political ideology or offensive/dark sense of humor - or worst case scenario, the actions of only few of its members.
An ideal implementation of the Fediverse, would in my opinion, warn users, when they're about to interact with one of these instances, but still give them the options, to accept the risks and go forward with it.
I think this decision being left purely to instance administrators, can in some cases further the divide, between groups and opinions and lead to more extreme versions of those opinions eventually.
We can argue about the other topics too, but that's probably less important, as I'll always be of the opinion, that when it comes to humor, anything (me included) can be a target - to the point where I even think it's ok, to make fun of tragedies, as soon as they happened, even if I usually don't do that myself.
The sanitization only applies to some sites, like YouTube - removing the dislike button and making their rules way stricter, when it comes to some topics. There are other examples, but I don't want to make this textwall infinite, so I'll let go of this, for now.
Lastly and probably most importantly, it was pretty stupid of me, to add these other frustrations of mine, onto this thread about transphobia. Even if we disagree about what is, or isn't too far, when it comes to humor, I'm obviously in favor, of keeping this place free of any kind of discrimination.
It's absolutely laughable, how some people see Russia as a free-speech utopia. I'm sure those thrown in jail, for as little as suggesting, that what Russia is doing to Ukraine, might be a war, are really glad, to live in such a free country.
Even when it comes to hosting, you get more restrictions, than you do in the US (or the before mentioned Ukraine), unless your controversial thing, is either convenient for their government, or you're willing to play ball.
@off_grid_living I use Opera. It comes with some basic ad blocker, built in. It's far from a good browser, it's just what I've always used and I'm too lazy to switch.
It's probably the same with most browsers on Windows, unless you harden them through settings and extensions.
The Nostr protocol really is a cryptobros wet dream. On Amethyst (the Android client), every account automatically gets a pointless blue checkmark - before it even has a name. You get the promise of free speech, I'm the marketing, but in reality, that predictably translates to bots, spamming vague porn ads and other suspicious links, new users begging for followers for a follow in return and most prominent of all, the people utilizing the great feature, to beg for cryptocoin change, without doing anything else and not getting any.
The Nostr protocol really is a cryptobros wet dream. On Amethyst (the Android client), every account automatically gets a pointless blue checkmark - before it even has a name. You get the promise of free speech, in the marketing, but in reality, that predictably translates to bots, spamming vague porn ads and other suspicious links, new users begging for followers for a follow in return and most prominent of all, the people utilizing the great feature, to beg for cryptocoin change, without doing anything else and not getting any.
@abucci @moveq I for ones was just silently confused, I'm not in the IRC, so whatever it was - therefore I didn't see it. I also think it's important to add, that no group, event or action, should be considered "protected from humor".
It's a feeling, hard to describe, but the Internet went for mostly toxic, with only a few sanitized places, to now almost fully sanitized. It ruined the fun.
The Fediverse fractured, mostly because some percentage of users, had to find a way to silence those offensive to them, for the entirety of their instance. I really don't want this place, taking the same path.
@abucci @movq I for ones was just silently confused, I'm not in the IRC, so whatever it was - therefore I didn't see it. I also think it's important to add, that no group, event or action, should be considered "protected from humor".
It's a feeling, hard to describe, but the Internet went for mostly toxic, with only a few sanitized places, to now almost fully sanitized. It ruined the fun.
The Fediverse fractured, mostly because some percentage of users, had to find a way to silence those offensive to them, for the entirety of their instance. I really don't want this place, taking the same path.
@off_grid_living By more extreme measures, I meant the things, that Tor browser does. For all that is holy, or unholy, please don't ever return to Internet Explorer - it has destroyed the sanity of enough web developers as is, we can't risk it's user numbers ever increasing - never!
@abucci Even back when I still somewhat cared about the site, the API was lacking (and that's putting it extremely nicely). In addition to lacking the support for many, if not all, new features, the alternative clients, relying on this not so great API, also had a very strict, hard limit of accounts, allowed to use them. That's why these clients usually didn't last long, or had a million different versions and charged their users to make those few user slots last.
Some might have had a better contract (don't know if that was just a rumor, or not), but now with Elon taking over, none of it matters - they'll all go away now. Sure, it might force people to use the ugly default app and see the ads, that it is full of, but I hope the users aren't this brain-dead and that it'll have a negative effect on the company, in the long-run.
Surely, there must have been a better solution, than shutting it all down. If the API was updated and ads included, in the alternative clients, or it had some other from of monetization, Elon could have removed the hard user limits instead and be seen as the good guy, like he was often in the past.
@prologic "outsourcing" and "restructuring" are the hot new corpo buzzwords these days. The shirt economy and endless inflation we find ourselves in, probably isn't helping it either.
@off_grid_living There is a difference, between scraped data, used for AI training and the advertising companies, who track your behavior online, across sites, to better target you, with more relevant advertisements. These tools also give companies that use this technology, statistics about how people use their sites, so they can deduce, what needs to be changed, to increase their profits - but no AI is involved in any of that yet.
There might not be much one can do, to prevent what they publish online, from being scraped, to make some AI, but you can fight against targeted advertising and corporate analytic, by hardening your browser.
I think it's best to combine things like: Using adblockers, scriptblockers/filters, incognito modes, settings that delete everything, when the browser is closed, not allowing unnecessary cookies, logging out of services, right after you're done using them (unless you are sure, they don't track you).
There are more extreme measures too, but those are a bit of an overkill, for normal web browsing, in my opinion.
@prologic Google scanned all kind of books, to improve their search results - letting people find books and studies, based on any of the text in them, while not having the content of the books freely available, for obvious legal reasons.
Despite only doing that, it still resulted in a big lawsuit, that dragged on forever, then settled, only to be brought back to court again. Eventually Google won, more or less because their service did more good, than harm, for both book sales and people looking for books to do book things with.
This case was also recently brought up by many, when some artists filed a class-action lawsuit against Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, for their AI, trained, using copyrighted images.
This is just a "brief" and maybe not entirely accurate summary, mostly based on this stream, by Uncivil Law, who is a real lawyer and surely more qualified to talk about this, than I am: https://www.youtube.com/live/CwTWwvLRdeo
@lyse I guess unusual garbage in places, where one wouldn't expect it, is a problem everywhere. Still find it hard to understand, as even if you don't care about nature and animals living there, in any way, it still takes a lot of effort, to bring the furniture, car parts and heaps of other junk there.
I also doubt the average perso doing this, is carrying washing machines into forests by hand and when you're already driving around with it, it's probably simpler, to just dispose of it legally. In many cases it might also be closer, or get you a bit of money, for the scrap metal.
@off_grid_living No problem. The dataset the site searches, is only comprised of images, with very detailed text descriptions attached to them, as that's something all images used for AI training need. Therefore I think this site works more based on those descriptions, than it does recognizing the text on the images themselves. 🤔
@off_grid_living There is not much one can do, other than avoid putting any of it on places, that get scraped frequently or engage in data harvesting, for some other purposes.
You can also check the site https://haveibeentrained.com . There you can see, if any of your images are already in the scraped datasets, used to train AI. If they are, you can request them, to be removed.
@jlj Just wait until you make it into one of those cursed forest-ish areas, that's where the old furniture, electronics and car parts begin.
Or maybe that only happens here. 🤔
@prologic I don't think banning it, is the right solution, as it can be quite helpful, when used the right way. I just think the works produced, should never be able to get copyrighted or monetized in similar ways. The double standard between music and images should also be addressed and either every artist gets fair compensation, or none of them do.
Sites should also decide, if they want to be an image board, or a portfolio site for artists and approach the situation accordingly, rather than trying to play both sides and failing.
Lastly, the situation should be used, to bring awareness to user agreements and the things companies put in there. Many of them already include, giving the company the right to use your work (be it code or art) to train some proprietary AI (GitHub, everything Adobe, DeviantArt...).
This is where it comes full circle, back to the subscription based apps. They change their agreements all the time and always add these things, that let them monetize your data, so they get you to be the product, like the "free" ones, but they get to charge you for it too.
@prologic I understand people falling for "free" software, especially if it's something you're almost never using, but subscription services still confuse me.
How can someone be unwilling, to pay for a thing once, but happy to lower their monthly income for the foreseeable future, for it?
@prologic Yeah, I don't think there even is an equivalent for other artists, you'd have to get your own team of lawyers with powerful connections. Good luck doing that with (in comparison) next to no income.
What I also find funny, is how music streaming services are a normal thing, most people use theses days. You couldn't sell people a subscription, to look at all the images. In some cases, you're even expected to pay, for the privilege of people seeing your art. _cough cough_ Facebook pages _cough cough_
This interesting video about AI art, just came out: https://youtu.be/nIRbN52PA0o
I already knew, most of what it was talking about, but found it interesting, that no company, developing music generating AI, was ever brave enough to use copyrighted music, for training. They all seen to have no problem, doing it with images.
It's not surprising, I've already expected it to be the case. It just amazes me, how they find a way to incorporate the "music is worth money, images are not" bias into everything.
It's more so a battle of lawyers, than artists at this point - or perhaps it always has been. With the corporations, using the garbage flat art and "nothing music*" for their interests and letting stupid and underpaid artists, eat the (usually deserved) backlash for it.
*nothing music/corporate music is a whole other chapter itself, if anyone wants to find out more about that, this is a good start: https://youtu.be/AIxY_Y9TGWI
@prologic Are you doing all your work, on this tiny keyboard? 🥴
I'm starting to notice replies to Tweets, after Elon took over, are now sorted in this way:
1)checkmarks
2)non-checkmark other checkmarks replied to mixed with checkmarks
3)non-checkmarks
We just unlocked the segregation ending, for "our online public square".
@prologic At least when it comes to personal use, it also depends on how much data you're storing, how important it is and how much you're fine with using dirty tactics.
For a lot of people the free options are enough, or the combination of them, at least. Neither is there anything, preventing you, from using alts on those services (other than the impracticality, of having everything on a different account).
For data you want to share, but don't mind loosing, there's also sites, that let you forcefully connect your account to some companys paid Google storage, that you can then use, until they find and kick you, or cancel their subscription - but they can never get your OG Google account banned for doing this.
Lastly there's also Chinese companies, that let you save upto 1 or 2 TB, in return for most likely mining that data, having it linked to some adware and wanting money for faster download speeds. These services can also be exploited to get those paid speeds and features for free and the ability to use it without the adware, making it usable, if you don't care if the data is private.
So you can have all the cloud you want, for free. What you pay for is privacy (or the illusion of it), convenience and the peace in mind, that you're not a "cloud pirate".
@eaplmx @prologic I'm still using the relatively old version of the Go/Flutter app and other than the two spaces at the start of a new reply, it being impossible to select text properly (while writing it) and the looping timelines, I don't see any serious problems with it.
I don't think it needs all the new features, fixing what's broken, finishing the rebrand to Yarn and making it easier to download, would be more than enough.
There's also the fact that while sending this reply, for the first time, the app got stuck in an infinite loading loop. Because text editing is broken, the best I could do was screenshot what I wrote - then OCR it back into text.
@prologic It's not an unpopular opinion, it's one shared by most people with a brain, most likely including the majority of the Apache people - if anyone actually asked them.
The problem is that the minority, interested in censoring the history, speech and opinions allowed always complains louder and is backed by the media, owned by those, that this benefits in some way.
@prologic DownLoadable Content - usually of the paid kind and sometimes already in the game, but requiring extra money to unlock.
@prologic Oh god, the Pocket Edition of Minecraft is pretty dreadful these days.
The controls are annoying to get used to at best and useless at worse, also literally everything in that game is monetized now. The last time I tried it, you needed a paid DLC, just to play sky block or similar mods. I know everything has paid DLCs these days, but this is literally paying, for the opportunity to have less blocks in your world, so you might even say, paying for more nothing.
@prologic I don't think Minecraft itself was ever open-source. Also when it comes to burner emails (that I assume can't be temporary in this case), is there any reason why go through all this, when you can just have an account on something like riseup.net, with a few strange aliases not linked to you?
@lyse Same. I enjoy the visuals and not the sound, so I too dislike the kind of people, who use things, that just make a pointlessly loud explosion, without anything nice to look at.
At that point you're just buying ear drum pain and the opportunity to annoy your neighbors and all the animals around.
@prologic Idk, when it comes to art, I don't really hate it tbh. Mostly out of spite, because I think most of art has been on a downward spiral for quite some time. There's also the fact, that it can provide some inspiration or concept art, when needed.
Then again, I'm not effected by it much, as machine learning algorithms are having problems with pixel art. Combining a lot of pixelart images produces strange results, as it uses pixels of inconsistent sizes and distorts them further by blending.
When it comes to code, the arguments are a bit similar. The code optimalization on most projects these days, leaves a lot to be desired. I'm not saying I'm the one to talk, I'm definitely responsible for some spaghetti coed myself, but maybe that's something the AI could help us with, in the future.
Sadly I can also see there being companies, who might try to use it to replace their developers, as soon as they think they can get away with it and that code will probably be way more of a mess, than the code the worst of us can turn out today.
@prologic Me neither, that's one of the reasons, why I don't post pixelart more oftern.
Even when I somehow convince myself not to be lazy and find time to start trying, sometimes I just place a few pixels and realize that "today's not the day", or end up with something I don't like the look of and decide to delete.
The art AI also further encourages my laziness, as I'm more so a shitposter, than I am an artist. Before the days of AI, I'd have to draw meme posts in MS Paint or somehow convert them to pixels, but now I can get almost all of that painted a hundred different ways by a few different programs and choose what works the best, for what I'm trying to accomplish.
@justamoment I also have ears sensitive to earplugs and some headphones, but getting a big pack of cotton wool and shaping a bit of it to fit in there always works for me.
I'm somewhat of a fireworks fan, especially if they're bought and launched by others, more willing to waste their money, but I get it being annoying, if it's still going on a second night and preventing you form sleeping.
@justamoment Thanks. The face readability is a fair critique. I was trying to keep the ears and "hair" similar, to the previous one, just down-scaled.
That limited me, on how to do the rest, working with a canvass of this size. The result somewhat reminds me of some animals from the animated shows of previous two decades, or the artstyle they inspired, just in a very pixelated form.
@lyse 11 pixels in both length and height, but over 70 pixels in total - a lot more than the other tiny ones.
New pixelart. Hope it works well as a profile picture.
@eaplmx depends on what what side I happen to start peeling it and how close to a trash can I'm standing, while doing so.
I thought, he'd use the poll to determine, if he should find some puppet to put "in charge" of the company, or stay the public face himself. 🤔
@prologic it's obvious, he bought a very shitty website, only valuable, because it has a lot of users, for like ten times what it was worth and many of those users hate him and/or are actively trying to flee into any other community, willing to accept them.
This policy doesn't have any higher goal in mind, it's just the "let's tie everyone to this sinking ship, that might make it sink slower somehow" kind of policy.
@bender but he said the dreaded m-word and that people can find him there. That's what broke that stupid rule, not the fact it was linked on the site.
To 100% comply, with how that rule is written, you'd have to just link the site, without directly saying what is on it.
It's pretty clear and somewhat funny, these people were never before on the dark side and have no idea, how to ban-evade.
Glad I left Twitter years ago, so I don't have to find ways around this garbage. If I had to, I'd probably end up making some indirect redirect site (with other things on it, as well) and put it on some really offensive, but technically still within the ToS sub domain - something along the lines of "elon-sucks-off-aids-infested-crackheads.coolsite.co".
@marado This is pretty pathetic, but it might at least force the more "follow-worthy" people, to create a simple unique website, with links to all their socials, for them to link on their Twitter instead.
@prologic Sad to hear that, hope you get better soon.
@prologic Google support? There exists an alternative to finding the e-mail address of the most important Google employee you can find and spamming them until moral improves?
Well if the new option is awful, you can always return to the original one I just described - no need to thank me.
Might as well also tell them, to shove their whole browser authentication/OAUTH2/secure browser detection team far up someones ass. They've just had it set to check user agents for years, while pretending they're actively working on actually making that thing be of any use.
@xuu Now you just have to find seven more and a sled. 🙃
@prologic Sure, go for it and get him here. I'm still waiting for him to apologize for crippling the original Twitter API or letting it happen.
That an a very detailed explanation, of what happened to project Bluesky. I'm not blaming him for that not being finished, it not going well, was one of the reasons he "left".
There were other things, that I hated him for in the past, but most of that is forgiven. I'd still make fun of him, for being the kind of basic bitch, who puts "#bitcoin" and nothing else, in his bio and a profile picture, looking to the side, focused on his ear hole.
@eaplmx I assume we're using the dictionary definition:
an environment in which the same opinions are repeatedly voiced and promoted, so that people are not exposed to opposing views:
an online echo chamber;
_We need to move beyond the echo chamber of our network to understand diverse perspectives_
Even then it's not obvious, at what point something becomes an echo chamber, or rather, it's left subjective. Still I find it bizarre, arguing that it's not a thing at all.
@abucci You can't say that it's been deboooonked, but follow it with evidence, finding that it doesn't happen as often, as people assume.
We can argue about the details, but the fact is, that on most social media recomendaitions are based on what you like, rather than providing you all opinions on what you're frequently looking at.
Most sites also show some bias in their moderation, on top of that, so people often end up on the sites, where finding opposing opinions is harder, than those they agree with.
This isn't enough to create an echo chamber in most cases, but just look around social media and see how many people are subscribed to blocklists, designed to filter out the rest, or just block those, who try to have a discussion, about specific topics.
@prologic Despite not liking Elon all that much, as well as hating Twitter in almost every way, I'd still give Elon some credit for at least tying to fix that excuse of a site, even if so far it's mostly just the CEO equivalent, of throwing shit at the wall and seeing if any of it sticks and slows the collapse of the house.
It's still better than the previous strategy, of looking away and pretending they don't see the holes in the walls and pedophiles inside of the falling house.
Obviously the best solution in my opinion, would be to bulldoze this poor excuse of a house/site completely and build a better one from scratch, but I can see how that's hard to do, when it cost you 40 billion dollars.
@eaplmx I'm all for less restrictions. The land ownership is a good example. When people in this country buy a piece of forest land, they don't put fences around it and let people and animals use it freely. In contrast, this obviously wouldn't work for all land. You wouldn't want strangers and wildlife randomly walking through your house - or at least i wouldn't.
Back to the ownership of art. I value my pixelart somewhat and part of why I started making it, was to stand out of the crowd, that is social media and have something unique and memorable, that people can recognize me by. I'm not crazy, so if someone randomly finds it somewhere and starts using it as their profile picture, I'll politely ask them not to, rather than throwing a law book at them and claiming non-existent damages.
With NFTs, the situation is different. People usually know it's wrong, but still felt entitled to just steal art and keep all of the profits for themselves, while the artist who did all the work gets nothing at best and a damaged reputation at worse. Even if the license the art is under allows it, I still see it as misuse of the art and the license, that was most likely intended for the art being used for some nice website illustrations or to help people express themselves online, rather than for someones pyramid scheme.
@prologic The rights to perform the play, would be what's most valuable. A printed copy would probably be worth more, than the digital one, because of the price of paper and printing ink.
But on the other hand, sometimes the digital copy has more value to people, because it's easier to share (both digitally or in making additional prints).
@marado It's still a convenient term to use for that category of laws, even if it is more misleading.
In case of art you're mostly dealing with copyright, or the license to use the art in some way. Patents and some other laws, one might find under the "intellectual property" umbrella are all good example of things that have value, despite not being physical.
Even if somebody wanted to argue against this, it's weird to draw the line between physical art and the rest of it.
Would printing out the image or script to a theater play, suddenly give it value, that it didn't have before?
@prologic Wait, you put the presents under the tree this early, but don't open them until 24th or 25th?
You're supposed to wait for Santa, or whoever brings them in Australia, to put them under the tree on the Christmas day.
@prologic There are things that are valuable, even if you can't physically own them - for example intellectual property.
The problem with NFTs, is that by buying one, you don't own the art physically, legally or even digitally - you don't really own it at all, you just bought some vague digital receipt with a link attached.
So by right clicking and saving the file attached to the NFT, you actually own a copy, unlike the person who bought it.
@prologic Don't have one yet. Don't even know if I will, as I was never that much into Christmas profile pictures.
Advent of code (impossible edition) 6/12/22:
Task of the day:
Fix the Yarn.Socail app, so the timeline doesn't loop.
@mckinley Giving Discord*, Slack and Reddit a check for "user-ran instances" is a massive stretch, as those "instances" still run on their server and rely on the mercy of global moderators, to be allowed to exist.
Discord can also be ran on ones hardware, using Fosscord, but than it's not very connected to the rest. This option is also used by only a handful of people, mostly those directly involved in the development of Fosscord.
@abucci To be fair, the DMs on these sites are never private, now it's just easier to guess who might be going through them and for what purposes.
This should ironically enough be considered an improvement, as before you couldn't even guess that, but sometimes knowing more makes these things less comfortable.
@eaplmx @prologic I just downloaded it from the first link, installed it and it works perfectly!
I had to uninstall the old version, but that's because of the signatures, but other than that the app seems to work even better than the previous version did.
Looks like the ancient Android app for this thing broke at last. I can still see the feeds (albeit without any profile pictures), but no user profiles can be loaded, not even my own.
I'm starting to think that neither Twitter being bought by Elon nor it being left alone is the good ending.
I really hope it gets stuck in endless legal hell and bleed money, users and investors, for as long as possible - preferably until becoming MySpace 2.
I hate what that site is now, but I'd hate it even more if it became the "everything app" and the idiots involved in running it now ran our banking and infrastructure. Also WeChat, the app this idea takes inspiration from, is run by the Chinese government to monitor everything about heir citizens and outcast those not enthusiastic enough about it.
With Twitter already taking orders from politicians, I'm sure giving it even more control, would go just fine and definitely not turn into "man-made horrors beyond our comprehension".
@movq Well a lot of the things in IT suck sadly, but it is probably better to also focus on the improving parts from time to time. For example people finally starting to worry about their privacy, or leaving big tech, to try out some alternative community hosted platforms.
Also things sucking is not exclusive to IT, as most things look nice on the outside, but when you get deeper, you find out the much darker reality of that field and in things like art the reality is much darker, than it is in IT.
@lyse Luckily for me it was only in the main building, where I only had to stay for one and a half hour today, so hopefully not long enough to catch a cold from it. 🤞
@lyse Manual testing of internal systems and websites along with the bugs reported.
I use XMPP and Matrix myself and was also very skeptical, when it came to the push to add crypto to Signal. Especially as someone who had to jump the Keybase ship years ago, for similar crypto and ties to a dictatorship (in Keybases case China) reasons. 🤔
Russia has some ties to Telegram, but I don't think they have ways to control Signal.
I don't use it, so it doesn't effect me either way, other than peeking my curiousity. Also even if that was somehow the case, there are still Signal forks, with their own servers.
@prologic Thanks and good luck with the new job to you as well!
