Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org

So apparently the European Honeybee has recently been named Virginia's official state pollinator. This steams me so bad. Honeybees are NOT native to Virginia, and the fact that so many people import them to grow colonies and have their own honey actually crowds out native bees that mostly feed on native plants. I'm still not sure how this happened, as the European Honeybee is widely considered an invasive species.

We need a word for real-life enshittification caused by online culture. Like being unable to find an organisation’s info because they’ve Instagram but no website. Or panicked people being sent a videolink to download to their phone when they ring for an ambulance. Or being excluded from residents' association news if you're not on Facebook. Or having cash payment refused. Or staff in the business you’re physically standing in telling you to find the answer to your question on their website.

You can't solve problems you don't understand with software you don't understand.

It feels weird needing to repeat that.

LB: if OpenAI violating copyright becomes legally ok but Internet Archive still isn't, I might actually scream

"We can make a digital AI clone of you that will do your video conferences for you and respond like you."

This mentality shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the purpose of nearly every type of meeting. Let me put it a different way:

"We can make a digital clone of you to go to class for you and take your courses. It will respond just like you in class."

1/

"Some hope that Nike will open-source the app so that customers can maintain their shoes' original and full functionality."

What an amazing sentence.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/immensely-disappointing-nike-killing-app-for-350-self-tying-sneakers/

So, the #InternetArchive is down. With it, the Wayback Machine. And Open Library.

I am here chasing an obscure Philippine epic with a female protagonist published as an MA thesis in the 1970s and referenced in a book from the 1980s not available anywhere.

I know this is a very niche problem to have.

But it hurts.

#storytelling #research #folklore

Friends, it is important to know that millions of rank and file Democrats are concerned about Biden’s health and/or his ability to beat Trump. Accusing them of wanting a Trump victory is neither accurate nor honest. We have to be the party where people can freely express concerns about Biden — otherwise, we risk degenerating into the current Republican situation, where all dissent has been quashed. 1/

Timothy Snyder: We have been trained by digital media to believe that only what happens right now matters. But the people who intend to destroy the American constitutional republic have learned from the past. One of the basic elements of Project 2025, for example, is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung: transforming the civil service into a fascist nest.
#fascism
https://snyder.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-fascism

Related
‘Weird interaction with a student. They keep coming up with weird “facts” (“Greek is a combination of four other languages”) that left me baffled. I said let’s look this stuff up together, and they said OK, I open a search bar, and they opened … Ch*tGPT. And I was like “this is not a search bar” and they were like “yes it is, you can search for anything in here”.
…
Each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine.’
- https://mastodon.social/@Miniver/112742679202304903

Despite what some politicians say, crime rates are decreasing

Violent crime in the United States dropped significantly in the first quarter of 2024 compared with the same period last year, according to the FBI’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report released earlier this month.

The FBI’s data, collected from nearly 12,000 law enforcement agencies representing about 77% of the country’s population, suggests violent crime dropped by 15% compared with the first quarter of 2023.

The data, which covers reported crimes from January to March, shows a 26.4% decrease in murders, a 25.7% decrease in rapes, a 17.8% decrease in robberies, and a 12.5% decrease in aggravated assaults. Reported property crime also fell by 15.1%.

Nevertheless, the widespread public perception that crime is rising — a perception reinforced by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and many other GOP candidates — could figure prominently in November’s election. And state legislative and gubernatorial candidates from both parties likely also will cite crime statistics on the stump.

In a Gallup poll conducted late last year, 63% of respondents described the crime problem in the U.S. as either extremely or very serious. This is the highest percentage since Gallup began asking the question in 2000.

#USPol #Politics #News #Crime #CrimeRate #FBI

https://michiganadvance.com/2024/07/05/despite-what-some-politicians-say-crime-rates-are-decreasing/

@tusk81 This is what people don't get, government work isn't supposed to be flashy, when it's working well, you should barely notice it. It should just be making your life easier and better.

Fact: it's cool to wear a mask

TELLING YOU they will have REVENGE, CAMPS and FIRING SQUADS should be enough, ffs.

AI deepfakes are here. I've filed legislation to ban deceptive deepfakes and require disclaimers on AI-generated campaign content.

Voters deserve to know what's real and what's fake.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4744171-ohio-democrat-ai-generated-election-misinformation/

Maryland Govenor Wes Moore dancing in the street with residents of Catonsville, MD in Baltimore County on July 4, 2024. Ayeeeeee... That's how we do.
#blackmastodon

My own commentary:

1) mass transit should simply be free

2) public services should be publicly financed and run. Hiring private firms or consultants to implement parts makes sense (@agaric is that, after all) where there's a competitive market for services that both public and private entities need, but turning management, control, and financing over to private equity ensures perverse incentives that make the public pay and suffer on both ends.

Numeronyms are fun, but they have one major problem: namespace collision.

What is a11y? Is it accessibility? Associatively? Axiomatically? Autobiography?

This is obviously a problem that needs solving.

My solution? SHAsum hashing. We can avoid the ambiguity of "a11y" with this unique, cryptographically sound alternative:

Accessibility? a884a5f3609f2cca635fed56d4ec5795da56fb970y

Axiomatically? a20c4bcee8f977a3f5a3b6b499d52d7dd32584771y

SImple, easy to visually distinguish, everyone wins.

"What I'm most worried about is that we're building an enormous infrastructure for artificial intelligence that is extremely energy- and water-intensive, without looking at the very real downsides in terms of the climate impacts. These large-scale data centers, they use GPUs that are enormously heat-producing. And the water to cool these GPU chips is freshwater. So it's often coming from exactly the same reserves that are used for drinking water."
Kate Crawford

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/ai-and-the-energy-required-to-power-it-fuel-new-climate-concerns