Curmudgeon @Curmudgeon@qoto.org

A partial list of our reporters you can follow on Masto:

•Caroline Chen @carolinechen

•Annie Waldman @AnnieWaldman

•Perla Trevizo @Perla_Trevizo

•Jeremy Schwartz @JeremySchwartz

•Emily Hopkins @emilyhopkins

•Ken Armstrong @bykenarmstrong

•Mariam Elba @mariamelba

•Jessica Lussenhop @lussenpop

•Ellis Simani @emsimani

•Justin Elliott @elliottjustin

•Max Blau @maxblau

•Andy Kroll @andykroll

•Kartikay Mehrotra @kartikay

•Jeremy Kohler @jeremykohler

•Neil Bedi @neilbedi

@UrcelaM No. I view Post as a microtransaction platform masquerading as a blogging platform. It's another venture capital play

Today is the day.

Goodbye, Twitter.

https://www.forensicnews.co/bye-twitter/

How it started, how it's going, etc. etc.

I've gotten a lot of responses to that Substack piece about leaving Twitter. Many are positive but some are negative. A few are saying "oh so you think free speech is nasty?"

What kind of stupid question is that? Of course I do. The Nazis marching at Skokie were nasty. All sorts of speech is nasty. Supporting free speech doesn't mean reserving judgment about it, you imbecile. It means not using the state to suppress it.

dear god it’s really rancid over there. the stuff I’m used to seeing on later banned accounts or on stormfront

We simply should not let people become so rich that their personal issues become society's problems

What's going on here is that unrelated libertarian principles are being recoded as issues of free speech. All of sudden preventing algorithmic harm becomes leftist censorship, and the culture war is used as a bulwark against government regulation of discriminatory technologies.

"Algorithmic decisions about parole, loan approvals, interest rates, program admissions, insurance premiums, security clearance, etc. that depend on race and ethnicity? That's not discrimination, it's *speech*."

The Turing Test poisoned the minds of generations of AI enthusiasts, because its criteria is producing text that persuades observers it was written by a human.

The result? Generative AI text products designed to "appear real" rather than produce accurate or ethical outputs.

It *should* be obvious why it's problematic to create a piece of software that excels at persuasion without concern for accuracy, honesty or ethics. But apparently it's not.

BOOST for our #Journalist colleagues.

It takes less than five-minutes to secure and verify your #Mastodon account.

Here is the quick step-by-step #Tutorial. (I also share #Follower #Tips.)

https://robbmontgomery.com/mastodon-a-quick-start-guide-for-journalists/

We all have to make decisions about who we are and who we want to be, and if we aren't mindful of how we treat others and why we do so, the decisions get made thoughtlessly and the environment becomes toxic. Mastodon is an opportunity for Twitter expats to reexamine and reframe our relationship with online life in hopes of leaving behind the parts of the old community that were harmful - but it's also a responsibility to do so. I truly don't want this place to become that place.

Getting one of the computers from Chernobyl working again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1EWsWxObjA

It feels like Mastodon is one really great third-party client away from being mainstream-ready, on the UX front at least.
The same thing happened with Twitter years ago: Third-party apps like DestroyTwitter, Tweetie (which became Twitter for iPhone), and Tweetbot helped redefine the mainstream UX of the service, in a hugely positive way. (Until Twitter shut a lot of them down, anyway, but that’s a different story…)