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"If you shoot back a twelve-page rebuttal / With an indexed list of their lies / They'll laugh like demented hyenas / As engagement metrics rise / If you even admit their existence / Then you're falling for their trick / Let them rot in their lair as you starve them of air / It's bad on purpose to make you click."

astralcodexten.com/p/its-bad-o

Interesting thing I found out about : If you try to search the for an archived post on the bsky.app site, you'll get what looks like a blank page. However, the text and the author are still in the source code.

(Similarly, if you search for a more recent archive of one of their blog posts, the main content appears to be missing, but it's in the source code. But here for some reason the content shows up if you click somewhere on the page.)

Today, we filed our final brief in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library. For four years we've been fighting for library rights—what our founder, @brewsterkahle, calls “a battle for the soul of libraries in the digital age.” blog.archive.org/2024/04/19/in

This whole Twitter thread illustrates the problem with the common practice of copying things on the Internet. More people need to learn about licenses, so they can, if they so choose, give explicit permission for others to share and reuse their work, rather than rely on inconsistent and uncertain social norms.

twitter.com/MadeiraSpotting/st

SXSW’s claim that the Austin for Palestine Coalition infringed its trademark fails because the graphics at issue are constitutionally-protected, non-commercial political parody that won’t create consumer confusion, EFF’s Cara Gagliano said. The Austin Chronicle has the story:
austinchronicle.com/daily/news

"But morality and social norms are supposed to be a different thing from law. In some spheres, it's more important to have hard-and-fast rules enforced by the government in a supposedly unbiased way; in others, it's more important to let communities make judgments using their own vague social norms."

"How Should We Think About Race And 'Lived Experience'?" by Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten astralcodexten.com/p/how-shoul

It's worth considering the specific case being examined here, but I wanted to highlight this broader point. I think it's similar to something I wrote about a few years ago collectedoverspread.tumblr.com

I've started calling this sort of thing "legalistic thinking," where people apply the strict standards found in law to discussions about morality.

A big loophole and a lack of audits “makes it much harder for someone to challenge when a deployer is saying that the AI system is exempt from the law,” EFF’s Hayley Tsukayama told The Record of Workday’s model legislation. therecord.media/human-resource

I'm not sure how often checks this Mastodon account so I've sent them an e-mail about this.

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US politics, Oklahoma "furry bill" 

"...while elements of the bill, such as getting animal control involved, appear intentionally provocative, banning student expression in this manner is no joke and presents serious constitutional concerns."

"Fursona non grata: Oklahoma lawmaker moves to ban 'furryism' in public schools" by Greg Gonzalez for FIRE thefire.org/news/fursona-non-g

I appreciate FIRE's dedication to responding to threats to free speech, but at the same time I'm sorry they had to take time to write this. I guess it's good to know that the stupid litter-box myth is alive and well in some places (sigh).

(There just so happens to be a furry convention in Oklahoma City this weekend. Hope everyone has a good time; maybe make some memes about this.)

Meta-discussion on political discourse 

"Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on? I'm only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people's brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog?"

"The Psychopolitics of Trauma" by Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten astralcodexten.com/p/the-psych

I've held off on trying to get on because it's still centralized in practice, but given that it plans to open up federation this year ( blueskyweb.xyz/blog/11-15-2023 ) it might be worth thinking about.

I plan to make this a proper blog post, but I will highlight one thing I like, the domain-name handles, which solve a problem that I've had to deal with on the (identity based on an instance which can go down).

In the battleground of history, archival work is cultural defense. Luckily, digital media can be quickly and cheaply duplicated and shared. #copyrightweek #twitter eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/save

Apple is putting a seriously DISHONEST, butthurt spin on the EU finally breaking up their monopoly:

- "new risks the #DMA poses to #EU users. "

- "Even with these safeguards in place, many risks remain."

- "Inevitably, the new options for developers’ EU apps create new risks to #Apple users and their devices."

- "That includes threats like malware or malicious code, and risks of installing apps that misrepresent their functionality or the responsible developer."

apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/app

Re: "Punching Nazis" 

There actually is an argument to be made that the "Nazi" label rightfully applies, which is presented in an update to the Dogpatch Press article linked in the BAR post which directly responds to it. (It also mentions a previous furry-related hoax that the BAR writer created, which certainly deserves its own critique.)

Finally, there's this Twitter post worth highlighting:

"Possible alternative take: It's rarely (but sometimes) okay to enact physical violence against one's political enemies, but *celebrating* that violence is an act that should be looked down upon

"(The correct stance is a deep seriousness and anguish)"

twitter.com/niplav_site/status

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Re: "Punching Nazis" 

"That’s where my mind was when I first saw the video: the importance of unambiguously condemning violence against one's political enemies, and that’s the article I was prepared to write going into this... That assumed, though, that there were political enemies to fight in the first place. Almost as soon as I started digging into the story, it became clear there was something more complicated, and more tragic, at hand."

"When 'Punch a Nazi' Goes Wrong" by TracingWoodgrains in Blocked and Reported blockedandreported.org/p/when-

Even though I hadn't heard of this before, this hits closer to home than I'd like as someone who has long considered myself "furry-adjacent" and in recent years seemingly at odds with parts of the fandom. More broadly, it's an example of how online accusations can lose nuance and become exaggerated to extremes.

@creativecommons the "compatible license" provision in the legal code of the CC BY-SA 3.0 (Unported) legal code has been lost in the redesign.

Previous page from Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/2023092614
New page: web.archive.org/web/2023093013

Missing the definition of "Creative Commons Compatible License" previously in Section 1(c) as well as the provision for such compatible licenses in Section 4(b).

(Plain-text version is unchanged; these provisions are missing only from the Web page. Ports don't seem to be affected.)

@jpgaubier @FirefoxNightly @mozilla This was news to me given that PWAs are still supported in Firefox for Android. From what I can tell, a similar feature (SSB) was removed from the desktop version. I do agree that PWAs are a good thing and I do hope they remain supported on Android.

An organization posting a public statement as an image on social media is nothing new. But making the alt text an abridged version of the statement and not the actual text in the image, that's certainly different.

(And again, the organization has a perfectly functional website where it could post this statement as proper text!)

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