Gwen Snyder is on Mastodon

2023-03-28 18:32:11

So that leaves...

Tumblr and Mastodon?

Incredible.

Gwen Snyder is on Mastodon

2023-03-28 18:31:33

All the Twitter clones failed to materialize into anything meaningful afaik (when was the last time you saw anyone mention Post or Spoutible?).

Gwen Snyder is on Mastodon

2023-03-28 18:28:51

So if I have this right:

-Facebook is dead except for the 2023 equivalent of email chain letter content

-Insta is an ad-littered wasteland

-Tik Tok is facing a likely federal ban

-in April Elon will finish his slow murder of Twitter

Laine Nooney @ 🔥🗑️🔥

2023-03-28 18:33:29

not an original observation, but its incredible how much internet infrastructure was built by chill dudes with tempered goals and how much this space has been ruined by pissy edgelords and boss babies trying to create inescapable capitalist finger traps

Grady Booch

2023-03-28 19:30:18

Let's be clear:

An LLM does not create any new truths; they are architecturally incapable of abductive reasoning.

LLMs only generate statistically interesting strings of words that are surprisingly coherent yet untethered to any metric for truth.

red

2023-03-28 20:05:07

The conversation around the retirement age being raised is missing a main premise - just because we’re living longer (most of us now aren’t btw) why would that automatically mean we need to expand our working years? Have we made zero economic progress whatsoever?

Alex Blechman

2022-11-25 01:28:13

Programming is chaotic magic. There are no rules. You ask a game dev “Can the player summon a giant demon that bursts from the ground in an explosion of lava?” and they’ll say “sure, that’s easy” and then you’ll ask “can the player wear a scarf?” and they’ll go “oof”

Alex Blechman

2023-03-26 18:56:24

Preventing online disinfo is hard. Sometimes there’s no best solution, just tradeoffs

But turning verification into “I have a credit card” (or stole a credit card) is impressively wrong. It’s like playing darts, missing the target, and somehow hitting the back of your own head

Alex Blechman

2023-03-26 18:42:51

Had I bothered I’d still be verified now. Would it matter? Do my posts need an imprimatur of officiality?

Am I deserving of a blue check as someone that previously wrote for a specific website? Maybe? Maybe not? These are questions that twitter never got around to answering

Alex Blechman

2023-03-26 18:42:50

Example of how arbitrary verification is: I could have been verified

While I was at The Onion our social media manager had a connection at Twitter. He asked for our handles to get verified. All I had to do was send an email. I didn’t bother because I wasn’t using my account then

Alex Blechman

2023-03-26 18:31:11

Appreciate how overworked the blue check was

“This person is actually William Shatner” is hugely different from “You can trust this journalist” but it was forced to do both, along with a dozen other things

Alex Blechman

2023-03-26 18:09:11

Was verification perfect? No, of course not. It was deeply flawed - an obvious result from using one badge for everyone from mega celebrities to to obscure bloggers - and handing them out arbitrarily with shifting rules over the years

But selling badges is the worst non-solution

Alex Blechman

2023-03-26 17:52:42

Verification is actually for the benefit of everyone else, not the blue check holder

If verified Harry Styles posts a link to his tour website, fans know it’s really Harry Styles, not a scammer’s link to a virus download

Alex Blechman

2023-03-26 17:41:58

The fact that most people couldn’t get a blue check is what gave them value

Like, medical degrees prove your doctor went to med school. If we let people just print them out at kinkos for $8 it’s hard to tell who should be performing open heart surgery on you

Alex Blechman

2023-03-26 17:37:23

The real function of verification was that people like Shatner, LeBron, Taylor Swift, the Pope could post on here without being impersonated - free content for twitter worth billions

Now that’s gone because the owner wanted to stick it to lowly-paid blue check journalists

https://twitter.com/WilliamShatner/status/1639811930243334145

Alex Blechman

2023-03-28 14:11:14

For You tab about to become the go-to spot for weird accounts complaining we don’t make marble statues anymore and investfluencers writing 10,000 word posts shilling Harambe Coin

https://twitter.com/MNateShyamalan/status/1640525489579216897

Sam Winkler

2023-03-28 01:05:46

What’s everyone complaining about this place looks great

Laura Crossett | @newrambler@glammr.us

2023-03-28 19:34:52

"Publishers are not archivists, they’re not librarians, and they shouldn’t be in control of cultural posterity." @mariabustillos kicking ass as usual.
popula.com/2023/03/28/wri…

Marco Rogers

2023-03-29 01:23:09

Engineers and scientists live in this world all the time. The reason the current incarnation of these models is so concerning to me is that the vast majority of users won't know or care about these very important distinctions. They are ready to implicitly trust these things.

Marco Rogers

2023-03-29 01:21:07

It's tough to even talk about this stuff. We have to walk the line in discussing what it looks like it's doing vs what it's actually doing. Then we have to clarify when we're talking about practical capabilities vs theoretically possible but not real yet. twitter.com/simonw/status/…

https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1640885931627651073

Mekka 💉x4 @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io

2023-03-28 19:36:44

Twitter replaced the Black folk, women, Latinx folk, trans folk, Asian folk, and Middle Eastern folk that were running it, with a warroom full of anti-woke dudes.

How's that working out?

The man's tuition bill is $44B, and he's still not learning anything.

Must be a legacy. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Mekka 💉x4 @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io

2023-03-28 19:29:08

If you're feeling sad because there aren't more boy doctors, maybe walk over to the computer science, physics, astronomy, and engineering departments, and tell them to stop driving all the women away.

That'll create some room for some mediocre med students! At least for a while.

Mekka 💉x4 @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io

2023-03-28 19:26:26

And women are just as good as men at all sciences. All of them.

But... women avoid the most sexist sciences. Which means that they will be over-represented in the least sexist science based careers.

Some of the smartest "women physicists and engineers" smoked you in pre-med.🤷🏿‍♂️

Mekka 💉x4 @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io

2023-03-28 19:17:29

Racism and sexism in academia exist, in large part because lots of dudes in the classroom don't want to compete against motivated Black and brown women on a level playing field. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Because when you do compete on a level playing field, sometimes this happens.

https://twitter.com/Frediculous/status/1640736395420659715

@delan@kolektiva.social + cohost.org/delan

2023-03-29 02:42:55

🎉 @ServoDev now supports named access on the window object, upping the number of web platform tests we pass by over 130!

those tests (and countless more) rely on this “legacy” feature, because it makes them more ergonomic to read and write.

github.com/servo/servo/pu… for @igalia

Servo

2023-03-16 12:24:36

New blog post about recent improvements to how we run tests, yielding faster builds and fewer failures due to flaky tests: servo.org/blog/2023/03/1…

Jiikae

2023-03-29 08:07:57

And I do think humanities is overpopulated these days. We need more people in hard sciences.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have critiques of STEM. A lot of the people in these fields are soulless. And the curriculum isn’t helping.

Jiikae

2023-03-29 07:59:05

Amazing thread

https://twitter.com/Manigarm/status/1640397429169111041

Ars Technica

2023-03-28 20:53:57

Adobe says its Firefly engine, which can generate new images from text descriptions, has been trained solely on legal and ethical sources, making its output clear for use by commercial artists.
trib.al/DuE8aYE

Jiikae

2023-03-29 08:42:32

WOW

https://twitter.com/Praetor_Zen0/status/1637992840491044864

D a z e e l

2023-03-20 21:24:34

My knowledge of Metroid and the lore is extremely basic, so forgive me if this is common knowledge but today I learnt the weapon symbols are the hand gestures Samus has to make inside the arm cannon to switch beam modes.