Wednesday, December 21, 2022 →
Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This? — Mike Masnick at Techdirt @mmasnick@mastodon.social.
I’m asking myself the same question. I’m heavily active on Facebook but not looking to get involved in another proprietary social media service.
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
The web is the world’s town square.I t’s been right there along along, and Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., are all just layers on top of that web. Nobody owns the web. If somebody like Twitter or Facebook puts a fence around their part of the web, that fence is just two feet tall. You can easily climb over it. If you’re not doing that, it’s because you’re choosing not to.
Wednesday, December 21, 2022 →
I like that micro.blog doesn’t support likes or reblogs. On Facebook, Tumblr, and Mastodon, I’m trying to pay very little attention to my likes and reblogs without comment.
Likes and commentless reblogs are sometimes useful. Sometimes a friend I haven’t heard from in a while likes one of my posts, or somebody famous likes or reblogs something, both of which are good to know. But most days, likes and reblogs without comment are just noise.
I wish Facebook, and Mastodon would just give me a daily report on likes and reblogs that don’t have comments. I don’t need or want that information in realtime. Tumblr lets me set something like that up with filters, but it could be easier.
micro.blog’s intentional lack of support for likes and reblogs is just one way it’s different from Mastodon. Here’s a good article from @manton describing why micro.blog is not Mastodon, even though you can connect between micro.blog and Mastodon.
Wednesday, December 21, 2022 →
Hi, @manton! Feature request for micro.blog: Let me import my Mastodon follower list, which I can already do when switching Mastodon instances. Right now, I’m syndicating my micro.blog posts to my mastodon.social account. Importing my follower list would be even better.
Wednesday, December 21, 2022 →
Daring Fireball @gruber@mastodon.social: Quora is beta testing an AI chatbot.
Shouldn’t be that big a change for Quora, many of whose participants already fail the Voight-Kampff test.
Wednesday, December 21, 2022 →
Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How Apple could open its App Store without really opening its App Store.
Apple will be required to open the iPhone to competing app stores, according to reliable reports, which is a huge deal and runs completely counter to Apple’s iPhone strategy since 2007. But Apple could still pull a fast one, unless regulators are smart, says Cory.
Apple “fights for its users when doing so is good for its shareholders. But when something is good for Apple shareholders and bad for its customers, the shareholders win, every time.”
Wednesday, December 21, 2022 →
Hearing Wendell Pierce say “fuuuuuck” in an early scene of S3E1 of “Jack Ryan” makes me want to watch “The Wire” again.
While walking, the dog and I saw this mobile axe-throwing setup. Because is it really the holidays without axe-throwing?
While walking, the dog and I saw this dapper gentleman.
The right believes in absolute free speech for everyone they agree with.
Soon as I saw the headline cross Mastodon, I checked my twitter account. Still active. I feel snubbed.
Thursday Night Purge: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bans Tons Of High Profile Journalists — Mike Masnick at Techdirt.
“… it seems that whatever brakes or controls were in place at the new ‘free speech absolutist’ Twitter have really come off.”
How cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face – Cory Doctorow
“No matter how hard conservative culture-war cannon-fodder love big business, it will never love them back.”
While out walking the dog late this afternoon I saw a little four-year-old girl wearing a beautiful green Christmas dress with a red bow on it. She was getting out of the car with her Dad, coming home from daycare I guess.
This was the same little girl I’d seen one morning a week or two ago, getting into the same car with her Dad. That morning she was wearing an elf costume, and was delighted to show it off for me.
So today I said to her, “Don’t you look pretty!” The dog, meanwhile, wanted to say hello, so I took a step or two slowly toward the girl and her father, keeping an eye on the situation.
This time, the girl was not delighted. Her face slowly started to crumple, and she clutched for her Dad’s leg and started to wail. So I backed away.
I don’t think she was afraid. I think she had just had a busy day, with a lot of stimuli and was overwhelmed.
“Kid,” I wanted to say. “A lot of the time I feel just like that.”
Wednesday, December 14, 2022 →
Years ago, two friends of mine, one at the CIA, one at the Pentagon, advised me to delete the app. So I don’t want to position the concerns about TikTok as an extreme position. Having a Chinese-owned social media app embedding itself into our lives is not without risk. But it’s worth noting that the things we fear from Chinese software companies—privacy invasions, data selling, democracy disruptions—are things that American social media companies have been doing with our full cooperation. It’s also worth noting that American social media companies have a particular interest in reducing competition from global players, and they’ve never faced this kind of a domestic business threat from a China-based company. In other words, the pressure to ban this outside app could be coming from inside players.
— Dave Pell, NextDraft, Tok Bottom
Wednesday, December 14, 2022 →
… a conservative is someone who believes that some of us were born to rule, and the rest of us were born to be ruled over.
— Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.
Wednesday, December 14, 2022 →
The idea that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is utter nonsense. The factor that determines whether a company will treat you like the product is whether they can get away with treating you like the product. A company that is disciplined by neither competition nor regulation will extract value from you in every way it can get away with.
— Cory Doctorow, Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.
I have just disabled micro.blog’s cross-posting to my main mastodon account, and will instead use micro.blog’s native ActivityPub support. If you want to follow me on Mastodon, you can do so on @mitchw@micro.blog.
This situation is permanent. Until I change my mind. Which could be never. And could be in, like, an hour.
But if you follow me on mastodon, you should probably do it on @mitchw@micro.blog. One reason to do that is that the posts are formatted a little nicer that way.
micro.blog doesn’t show me who’s following me, who likes my posts, and who boosts them. I don’t even get numbers for those statistics. Doing without this information will be character-building for me.
I can’t make up my mind whether I want to cross-post from micro.blog to my primary mastodon account—as I am doing now—or simply use micro.blog’s built-in ActivityPub support. I go back and forth.
When I’m not cross-posting, I boost my micro.blog posts to my mastodon account manually, which maybe sounds like a hassle but it’s actually no big deal
I also can’t decide whether to redirect mitchw.blog to micro.blog.
This back-and-forth is pretty typical for me with regard to blogging and social media. I seem to like fiddling with my setup as much as I like posting.
Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors: The fall of FTX shocked everyone. Except this guy.
The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby.
He’s James Block, and he runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media.
Block, a vehement crypto skeptic, has spent the past 18 months doing forensic blockchain research. He uses open-source tools to follow flows of money between crypto companies, repeatedly demonstrating how shadow banks and nefarious scammers inflate the value of worthless assets in order to generate enormous wealth that exists only on paper.
Charlie Warzel interviewed Block for The Atlantic.
Block: The AMC-meme-stock thing is a good example of how this can happen. People buy the stock of a semi-worthless company because they have this idea about short squeezing, or whatever. They are not financial experts and have a loose or maybe even wrong understanding of how finance works, and want to try to move the market. Crypto takes this abstraction a step further, because there’s nothing linked to it at all. There’s no economic activity in this space. There’s nothing produced by these companies. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game because of the cost of running the blockchains alone—the computational cost is tremendous. The amount of time and money people put into just running these things is tremendous. And they produce nothing of value. There’s a reason these massive companies aren’t all using blockchain for their processes: It is incredibly inefficient. And realistically, who actually wants their financial information public and visible to everybody?
…
Warzel: Do you think most entities in the crypto space are insolvent and know it, and are just pretending right now, post-FTX?
Block: Absolutely. That’s because of what I said earlier about crypto. There’s no value created by any of these companies. It’s all just moving money from Person A to Person B.