Steve Zissou @SteveZissou@qoto.org

As long as the topic of image description has your attention, I'd like to try & reproduce on Mastodon something I & several other volunteers organized on Twitter. It’s 2 hashtags to assist with image description.

The first is #ALT4me — blind & visually impaired individuals can reply to an image that lacks ALT text with this tag, so that sighted volunteers can then reply with a description. The strength of crowdsourcing this is that each person adds unique details from their own perspective, that when combined, form a detailed & meaningful conception of the image. It also allows one person to give a quick triage description, & then others can fill in details as they see fit.

The 2nd is #ALT4you — if you come across an image that is particularly striking, or one that you believe will quickly become iconic & part of a shared visual imagery/memory, please describe that image & tag it with this tag. This is particularly important during unfolding news stories that quickly break & change, leaving behind indelible visual impressions, that then shape most peoples memory & consciousness of the event. Obviously, for the blind/VI, without a description, search images, no matter how important, remain perceptual and informational black holes.

Thank you all again for the outstanding image description I have encountered so consistently in my limited experience on Mastodon.

Figured I should explain this here in case folk are wondering why my finger is often in my photos - I have scale bars tattooed on my index fingers, the lines and dots are 5mm apart and they’re super useful for quick field photos 😅 Demonstrated here with some gorgeous crinoidal limestone from Fife 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

tl;dr why all the crypto co's are long fucked, not just FTX:

all the crypto co's are broke because the dollars all left in May, and the co's now have to pretend these billions of dollars in illiquid cryptos are worth their book value, when they just aren't

I logged into mastodon just now & the first post I saw was someone advocating for content warning tags over all self-promotion of books or writing. And just like, hell no.

One, writing is my job, & telling me to hide it feels terribly wrong. 1/

There have been efforts to archive a lot of social media material from the 00s and early 10s, but it has not had the kind of state funding and institutional backing that could create the kind of archival structure historians have relied on for centuries. That needs to change.

Paper style pixelart world map, i made for an asset pack.
#pixelart #art #MastoArt #gamedev

Debt for climate swaps in Latin America: green new future or load of hot air?

Forgiving debt in exchange for action on climate change is an increasingly popular political proposal, but can it move beyond discourse?

"Leaders often point out that what they are doing is what many Global North countries did decades or centuries ago to achieve their current prosperity."

https://piratewireservices.substack.com/p/debt-for-climate-swaps-in-latin-america

From another sense, this is false. The old organizations can't recognize who truly understands the issues, who has the skills to architect the next one. It devolves into internal political debates among genius engineers who want to build 2.0 "free of technical-debt".

From one sense, this is true. You can't design a perfect v1.0 from scratch. You truly don't understand the issues until you've built it the first time. Only after building the first one will you understand how you should've built it.

This is actually the unspoken engine that drives Silicon Valley. Big companies are always trying to build "next generation" products, but they usually end up building a next generation product from smaller companies.

Seaglass is such an accidental obsession, some years I’m more into it than others so kind of tide like with the passion. And out of that obsession a better understanding of the coastline, sea & history has emerged, accidental learning if you will. The glass in the images is locally found, admittedly the top end of seaglass free from chips and breaks. Anywhere from 30/40-200 years in age and maybe longer for the deep black glass.
#seaglass #cornwall

Mornin' everypeople...

Mike Pence is an example of toxic Christianity. We should have freedom of religion, yes, but we must also ensure freedom *from* religion. Your religious freedoms don’t give you the right to deny freedoms or civic participation to others. Period.

#30DaysMapChallenge
Day 15- late post of food and drink
Bay Area Restaurants rated 4.5 and more with the most popular top rated cuisine in each county highlighted on the map. Data from Yelp Fusion API.
Made using #RStats
#DataViz #DataVisualization #maps #GIS

Perceptive post by Sarah O’Connor in the FT, with quotes from labour lawyer @valeriodestefano

Tech workers were sold a dream where unionisation would not be needed because they already had a meaningful and well paid job, but the recent lay offs at Meta, Twitter and Amazon expose a different reality - showing how ‘benevolent dictatorships seem fine until they’re not so benevolent anymore’

https://www.ft.com/content/b6fdff1c-94a1-41d6-ae52-5dcbffa5dcea

A rare photo of Schrödinger's Cat...

In science news:
Researchers in Israel have found what they say is the earliest evidence of #fire being used to cook - a key point in human #history. The study suggests our early human ancestors were cooking well-done fish nearly 800 000 years ago (prev research ind. less than 200 000). A 16 year study at a prehistoric lake site in N Israel found that changes to the enamel of fish teeth suggested they had been subjected to temperatures of between 200-500 C - the right range for well-cooked fish.

We gave rocks anxiety, and they gave us depression: a programmer's memoir.