Alan Johnson @acjay@qoto.org
Data, software & management. Husband of Jen. 👶*4. Former teacher. Jeopardy champ*1. Uplift good ideas, support folks, and speak up against harm.
Joined Oct 2022
Alan Johnson
boosted
I feel like this is true for lots of kinds of conversations and not just tech interviews.
People are correctly pointing out that, if you dig into the logic of basically anything, it falls apart, but that's also generally true of actual humans, even experts.
Sure, https://twitter.com/YossiKreinin/status/1599114477022064640 is ridiculous, but have you tried asking an expert coach on almost any topic why you should do X? I think the level of reasoning is fairly similar to what Yossi observes ChatGPT doing.
Alan Johnson
boosted
US: 62% of adults accept at least one of the following New Age beliefs: reincarnation, astrology, psychics, and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects like mountains or trees
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/01/new-age-beliefs-common-among-both-religious-and-nonreligious-americans/ #PewResearch
Alan Johnson
boosted
Check out this cool elevation map of the contiguous US
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/jslbn9/us_elevation_tiles_oc/
Qoto new weekly signups appears to have peaked on Nov 11 at 4838 for that days trailing 7 days: https://qoto.org/web/statuses/109325078038092501
Today, it was only 129: https://qoto.org/web/statuses/109448233595238192
That's the lowest since Oct 29, when daily signups started increasing: https://qoto.org/web/statuses/109448233595238192
Not sure how this compares to the trend in other instances. I blindly speculate that other servers haven't seen the same decline and the conflict between instance operators is impacting Qoto. Which is unfortunate, because from my tiny vantage point, Qoto seems well run, and I don't see its policy of very limited blocking of other instances having negative consequences.
Nonetheless, I want to have one Fediverse presence and want to be able to interact with people on Qoto and on other instances that suspend Qoto, so I may have to migrate.
Alan Johnson
boosted
There is an effort underway to reframe work that attempts to address harmful disinformation — even work specifically aimed at mitigating malign foreign disinformation — as "censorship". If we accept that frame, we will enable the dismantling of the very nascent defenses that we've built over the past ~6 years, as our society has begun to realize the vulnerabilities that emerge from the intersection of technology, human behavior, and influence operations.
Alan Johnson
boosted
With #Twitter going to hell, I've seen many posts suggesting it's immoral to continue to visit. That doesn't sit right with me.
A lot of the very people who are made most vulnerable by the changes are the ones who needed that community the most, and may not have built the same supports elsewhere in such a short period of time.
I'm all for fighting back strong against the negative forces in the world, but we should hold on to the compassion and understanding that makes us better than that.
"Smartphones wipe out 97% of market"
It blows my mind that camera makers failed to capitalize on the smartphone. If I take a picture on my nice camera, it should automatically appear in my phone's gallery--zero gap in UX from the phone's camera. They should have stopped at nothing to achieve this.
After all these years, it's still so difficult to figure out "what specific thing is making my computer run slow right now".
DotCom boom -> network infra investment -> bust -> dark fiber : Google :: crypto boom -> miner hardware investment -> bust -> dark GPUs : ???
Skynet?
Alan Johnson
boosted
I've been blogging since bouncing off Twitter… almost every day? Little stuff, mostly links. Feels good. https://justin.searls.co
Alan Johnson
boosted
so today i learned that i can follow a hashtag and get those posts in my feed.
yay!
Alan Johnson
boosted
I'm not taking a side on the Eightpoint–Kolektiva confrontation because whichever side I take I'm going to have to say goodbye to half my friends because they were on the wrong instance
I turned off notifications of likes and boosts. I suspect it's healthier that way. I like that this product isn't optimized to capture my attention, provide the dopamine rush, or try to make me care about making my numbers go up.
I can imagine someone developing a network of peraonalized bots that exist to boost posts an account would like. Networked because some central store would catalog a much broader set of posts than any one account would normally see through its follows. I'm imagine an instance that only hosts these bots. Does this make technical sense?
I feel like I'm starting to understand this whole Fediverse thing. And I quite like it. There are some gnarly issues that I can see, and I do also have concerns about how it scales (maybe this isn't a problem, don't know), but I think that we don't need a centralized microblog service like Twitter.
The core Twitter value proposition is very stable. Stable enough to be a protocol, instead of a product. The innovation can happen at the product layer on top.
It occurs to me that boosting is probably much more crucial in the Fediverse than on Twitter, because there's no algorithm to surface things you might like.
Alan Johnson
boosted
Every "just asking questions" anti-trans article quibbling over bone density or some other largely nonexistent or made up problem persistently ignores the fact that trans kids DIE without access to treatment.
Because these people don't care.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/recent-anti-trans-articles-miss-the-point-of-gender-affirming-care
The physical airplanes are safer, I guess. It would be cool if we could be honest about the reasons for expending so much of everyone's time.
I'm packed tightly with hundreds of people to go through airport "security". What am I being secured from? If people actually wanted to kill a whole bunch of strangers, we're sitting ducks.
Data, software & management. Husband of Jen. 👶*4. Former teacher. Jeopardy champ*1. Uplift good ideas, support folks, and speak up against harm.
Joined Oct 2022
