Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@llewelly @internetarchive Yes. And we expect to have to use the IA for transitory sites — for random things posted by regular people on mayfly websites.

But this is the freakin' American Museum of actual Natural History. One of the biggest, best and most well funded museums in the world.

How is it possible that they can't do this simple thing right? I mean https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html is a quarter of a century old.

On 5th May 1945, the SS launched an assault on Itter Castle in Austria.

Defending the castle were a mix of US Army and Wehrmacht soldiers, and French politicians, celebrities who had been prisoners of war.

It remains one of the most unique battles of WW2, and the only major documented instance of the US Army and Wehrmacht fighting side-by-side.

Here's how this remarkable series of events unfolded /1 🧵 #history #histodons

I really want Mastodon to be the next big thing, but it frankly has a culture problem that is going to kill its broader adoption. After quite a long time here, and a few days at Bluesky, the comparative experience looks like this:

Bluesky: "Everyone's posting about the latest weird inside joke, and I'm excited to post my weird twist on it!"

Mastodon: "Jokes offend me because I was born without a sense of humor. I demand that you wrap all levity in a content warning or I will FediBlock you."

NitroKey disappoints me...

https://blog.brixit.nl/nitrokey-dissapoints-me/

This made me chuckle 😂😂

day 6

A Little Wordy #6 🎨✅ 97% https://theoatmeal.com/wordy?date=04-22-23

thanks a lot for not making me type the whole thing, @oatmeal !

Follow-up: Dean Martinez writes an excellent letter in response to the Judge Duncan fiasco https://popehat.substack.com/p/stanford-law-responds-appropriately

I kinda wish mastadon wasnt anti-algorithm when it comes to your feed... The ideal, IMO, is that the user can pick whatever algorithm they want to effectively empower their feed and make discovery of new content better.

Filling out US taxes and it strikes me that TurboTax is increasingly becoming an example of @pluralistic concept of enshittification. The process now periodically throws up a window into the underlying tax form without context with the message "we just want to check that this is correct". It looks scary and you don't have the context to answer the question because the machine has been filling this form out and this is the first time you are reading it. All the while there is a big green button in the top right corner that says "talk to a tax expert" that encourages you to sign up for a premium plan. Intuit has already captured the market for this fucked up cottage industry of tax preparation. At this stage, the only way to increase their profits is by shaking down customers for premium subscriptions. The whole business shouldn't even be there. There is no reason why uncle sam can't just send me a bill at the end of the year and be done with it.

@vyr This is a crude, bad faith mischaracterization of events, with a screenshot deliberately disconnecting the message from what it was replying to, in the context of a longer conversation, and then doubly mischaracterizing what said message actually says.

OTC cold meds are nearly useless and can be harmful. Same old ingredients with a new advertising twist every few years.
@https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-cold-drugs-dont-work/

#FourColor problem

https://www.quantamagazine.org/only-computers-can-solve-this-map-coloring-problem-from-the-1800s-20230329/

These are such good questions:

* Are you capable of entertaining real doubt about your beliefs? Or are you operating from a position of certainty?

* Can you articulate the evidence you would need to see in order to change your position? Or is your perspective unfalsifiable?

* Can you articulate your opponents perspective in a way that they recognize? Or are you straw-manning?

* Are you attacking ideas or attacking the people who hold them?

* Are you willing to cut off close relationships with people who disagree with you, particularly over small points of contention?

* Are you willing to use extraordinary means against people who disagree with you?

(These are the “discernment questions” Megan Phelps-Roper poses in “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling”. The podcast much recommended in entirety.)

What a weird headline and story frame.

It makes it sound like stripping the right to vote is just a little bump in the road for a party that wants to take its ball home now that no one wants to play with them anymore.

Our national media (which is our only media these days. See: Gatehouse) continues to fail us.

It is no exaggeration, as @mmasnick writes here, that Big Publishing is one huge step closer today to killing libraries it doesn't control -- a longtime goal of a cartel that would never permit public libraries to exist if they were being proposed today.

That's how awful a judge's ruling was in the Internet Archive case.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/27/publishers-get-one-step-closer-to-killing-libraries/

Note: The ruling could also open the floodgates to the Copyright Cartel-led banning of all kinds of things we take for granted today.

So look—I've never been quite as big of a Steven Wolfram fan as Steven Wolfram is.

But to if you can get past the idiosyncrasies, in this piece he does a better job than I could of trying to explain from the ground up what it is that ChatGPT is doing.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/

I was promised a sci-fi future where robots would do all the menial tasks so that humans could focus on creating art and instead you assholes built robots to do the art so we all have to fight over the jobs doing menial tasks, good job.

Another day, another classic author's works get rewritten "to preserve their relevance to modern readers". This time it's Agatha Christie.

This process is so condescending. Can they really think so little of readers?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/26/agatha-christie-novels-reworked-to-remove-potentially-offensive-language