gilbe-t @guiltbert@qoto.org

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mastodon,
is in fact, ActivityPub/Mastodon, or as I've recently taken to calling it, the Fediverse. Mastodon is not a social network unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning federated system made useful by the ActivityPub protocol, JSON-LD and Activity Streams.

Many computer users run an implementation of the ActivityPub protocol every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the implementation of ActivityPub which is widely used today is often called "Mastodon", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically using the ActivityPub protocol, standardised by the W3C.

There really is a Mastodon, and these people are using it, but it is just a
part of the network they use. Mastodon is one implementation: the program that relays posts and other activities between other users on the network.
Mastodon is an essential part of the fediverse, but less useful by itself; it functions best in the context of a complete federated network. Mastodon is
normally used in combination with the rest of the federated network: the whole system is basically ActivityPub with a few extensions added, or ActivityPub/Mastodon. All the so-called "Mastodon" users are really users of ActivityPub.

The science denial industry has deep roots - tobacco-cancer denial, lead paint/gas denial and other ancestral forms of commercial denial gave birth to modern forms of denial: anti-vax, anti-mask, "stop the steal" and, of course, climate denial.

https://doctorow.medium.com/i-quit-9ae7b6010c99

The denial industry has a well-developed and constantly evolving playbook.

1/

Since we’re bashing linguistics today:

The more I learn about linguistics the more baffled I become that "at least one sign language" isn't a mandatory subject for all linguists from, like, undergrad year 1, and all skill paths like phon/phon, morphology, prag etc. aren't studied from the start using both sign and voice as first-class objects of study for contrast and comparison.

I mean I maintain that
widespread acquisition of sign languages by children of the general population – the way Australian Aboriginal and other peoples did it – would have a ton of advantages not just for inclusion, which would already be worthy the effort ofc, but for everybody else too; but, come on, us linguists? There's 2 fundamental types of human language and we base all our models and conclusions on 1?

It's as if you're training chemists and on first semester somebody briefly flashes them a periodic table for a minute and says "yeah so there are 3 types of elements, metals, metalloids and nonmetals. From now on we're going to focus on metals." And most of them, for their whole career, never think about silicon or sulphur again. They try to learn everything about bonding and reactions and molecule structure etc. using metals as the sole subject 99% of the time. Sometimes somebody who took the 8th-semester optional subject "General Introduction to the Most Common Nonmetal In This Area I" (where they do a crash run over reactions, molecules etc. now with 1 single nonmetal added into the mix) will point out "oh, actually hydrogen does not behave like that", then everybody else gets annoyed at this arrogant interrupty person who keeps bringing these weird nonmetal complications into the stuff they're already finding it hard to follow with metals only.

Putting my effort where my mouth is and my hand will soon be: anybody wants to learn Deutsche Gebärdensprache with me please send a note, I'm serious o/ maybe we could start with fingerspelling over jitsi or s/t :)

@IngaLovinde sign and spoken native langs both don't leave persistent marks, so we know little about pre-colonial situation.

but children not only have the ability to effortlessly acquire any language just by being close to it, they also have the ability to intuitively create fully developed grammars, and will do that if no grammar is provided for them. we have watched this happen a number of times with spoken languages in the process called 'creolisation'. but for sign it's even more common, because Deaf child communities often find themselves in a situation where no language is provided (sometimes they're even actively denied language in an abusive attempt to make them 'less deaf' somehow). So there’s a large number of small, understudied, indigenous ('village', 'rural') sign languages around, undoubtedly many of them still unreported (non-exhaustive list: https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/vill1244 ).

One well-studied case that got big is Nicaragua Sign Language
https://www.britishdeafnews.co.uk/nicaraguan-sign-language/ , there’s lots of info online about it.

Children's instincts appear to prefer voice where available, but will seamlessly do sign when not. Many indigenous communities have periodic outbreaks of diseases that cause hearing loss, most commonly meningitis. This has resulted in many sign languages created as primary languages for the Deaf people among them (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Islands_Sign_Language ). Indigenous communities are tight-bound, and usually the non-Deaf people will learn to sign along with their mates, so that the sign language becomes a well-established 'alternate language' for the hearing, too; this is even more useful when the cycles of disease and immunity alternate generationally, or there are genetic predispositions, which gives incentive to keep the languages around. Australian Aboriginal alternate sign languages have been argued to have been especially widespread, bordering on universal, pre-colonisation.
https://www.cdu.edu.au/sites/default/files/the-northern-institute/cdu_ni_learning_communities_journal_2015_16_print.pdf#page=30

Behold the #Cloud

Hey, people tired of Google Photos, found a new alternative: https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos

Claims to have working AI facial classification. Need to try this one.

> The Web was Never Decentralized

Interesting history and deconstruction of the Web for a '99er.

https://medium.com/design-warp/the-web-was-never-decentralized-bb066138c88

#find

What is this Gemini thing anyway, and why am I excited about it?

https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.html

gemini://drewdevault.com/2020/11/01/What-is-Gemini-anyway.gmi

First Look: Cyberfeminism Index https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/oct/22/first-look-cyberfeminism-index/

"I reverse engineered McDonald's internal ordering API and I'm currently placing an order for a McSundae every minute at every McDonald's location in the US to figure out which ones have a broken ice cream machine."

https://mcbroken.com/

😂

this might be the most cursed web page I've ever scrolled thru