ceoln @ceoln@qoto.org

There's a narrative that Mastodon is "losing users". Okay, what do the actual numbers say?

According to this MAU chart, active users has been consistent -- albeit volatile.

Activity is based on how foolish Elon Musk is being at any given moment.

Mastodon usage spikes whenever people perceive Twitter as dying.

Prior to November, there's been spikes. You can actually see this in April/May.

What's different this time is that people are staying.

https://the-federation.info/platform/21

"But the allegations were always hollow, for instance in Alabama, where Republican-appointed U.S. Attorneys chased every accusation that was made for the eight years of the George W. Bush administration without finding anything of significance.

The Big Lie put the old trope on steroids, a Trump-sized version of the voter fraud complaints Republicans trotted out every election cycle. But none of it is true."

#VoterFraud #VoteSuppression #Republicans #racism

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Hey did an AI steal your art

Did an AI steal your buddy's art

Saddle up, first class-action suit i've seen

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/class-action-filed-against-stability-ai-midjourney-and-deviantart-for-dmca-violations-right-of-publicity-violations-unlawful-competition-breach-of-tos-301721869.html

The Jan. 6 committee spent more than a year using subpoenas and interviews to find out where exactly each social media company fell down before, during and after the insurrection. And then printed almost nothing. My colleagues got the report they buried. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/01/17/jan6-committee-report-social-media/

There's no other way to say this: OpenAI is extractive-resource colonialism, and the resource being extracted is human's mental health. That fancy new tool you think is so shiny, that's a blood diamond.

https://twitter.com/dlberes/status/1615692829082193920

"OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya... Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest. Some workers made just $1.32/hour."

#introduction toot!

I'm Iain (he/him). I mostly work in acrylics and inks, with occasional forays into pencils and oils.

I've been doing art for the Dublin and Glasgow Worldcons, for which I've somehow won a couple of BSFA Best Artwork awards.

I do a lot of fan art for various geeky things, notably #DoctorWho, but also #StarWars, #StarTrek, #TheSandman, #TheExpanse and others.

Twitter flotsam. Currently struggling to keep up with far too many social media platforms.

Every Ronald Reagan airport, library and public building should be renamed and his statues melted down for scrap, that'd be great.
And his supercarrier should be renamed the USS George Floyd.

Judd Legum looks at the global elite meeting at Davos, Switzerland, now — Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Mancin are featured there — and asks what are the priorities of the elite.

He concludes that with only 81 billionaires holding more wealth than 50% of the world combined, extreme wealth inequality is a policy choice "pushed for by corporations and the wealthy and enacted by government officials."

#EconomicElites #KyrstenSinema #JoeManchin

https://popular.info/p/the-true-priorities-of-the-global

Another 🔥 example of how behind 'automation' there are always HUMANS involved maintaining and sustaining it. This is what @ubiquity75 calls brand safety in her work on content moderators. As I talk in my work these low paid workers are an integral part of the service/channel!

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

I can't find anything about this from googling - but, does anyone know/have any good sources on how the TikTok text-to-speech narration was developed, specifically the voice inputs* that were used to develop it?

*Prob not the right term - I mean, I think, the training data that informs the sound of the synthetic voice output

Marjorie Tayor Greene claimed 9/11 did not happen --now the GOP has put her on the Homeland Security Committee. Today's GOP is a threat to our nation's safety! https://www.mediamatters.org/congress/qanon-candidate-marjorie-taylor-greene-911-conspiracy-theorist-who-claimed-theres-no

Okay. Migrated from masthead.social to mastodon.social. Meanwhile, here's the Substack on my decision to leave Twitter.

https://popehat.substack.com/p/goodbye-twitter

Let's put it bluntly: the Democratic Governor of New York can't team up with MAGA to push her conservative nominee through the Senate by suing her own party and attacking her own base. It simply can't happen. #LaSalle

"What is the city today, for us? I believe that I have written something like a last love poem addressed to the city, at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to live there. It looks, in-deed, as if we are approaching a period of crisis in urban life; and Invisible Cities is like a dream born out of the heart of the unlivable cities we know."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41806854

My contribution to #thicktrunktuesday #midjourney #aiart

#waterfallwednesday #aiart #midjourney