Martin Ruskov @mapto@qoto.org

This is what Stable Diffusion thinks the Dark Avenger looks like 🙂

Important PSA:

NEW: LAION, the gigantic dataset powering Stable Diffusion, several Google products, and other prominent AI tools has been taken down from the internet because it contains thousands of images of child sexual abuse material

https://www.404media.co/laion-datasets-removed-stanford-csam-child-abuse/

A year ago, Motherboard published a story about nonconsensual porn and terrorist beheadings sitting in this dataset. The issue was being openly talked about in the development team's Discord. We asked about the issue and the team started deleting messages and said this:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ad75/isis-executions-and-non-consensual-porn-are-powering-ai-art

We've got a Thunderbird for Android "Two for Tuesday!" Play two songs from your favorite band while you read our latest progress report (https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/12/thunderbird-for-android-k-9-mail-november-december-2023-progress-report/). There's lots of news, updates, and community contributions to end 2023!

While we hoped to release Thunderbird for Android by now, we realized you deserve the best mobile e-mail we can give you. Read about our decision to let the newest Thunderbird take its time to hatch:
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/12/when-will-thunderbird-for-android-be-released/

#Thunderbird #OpenSource #Android

We're testing a couple new follow recommendation algorithms on mastodon.online, so if you have an account there, please check Explore → People and let me know if the quality of the results has improved for you.

Sometimes, the best way to protect a replanted forest is to log some of it.

New research from Smithsonian Institution scientists shows that paying people who replant tropical forests with some of the timber has benefits for both #ClimateJustice and the ecosystem, as it can lead to longer-term sustainability as participants feel a sense of pride and responsibility for the project’s success.
https://theconversation.com/paying-people-to-replant-tropical-forests-and-letting-them-harvest-the-timber-can-pay-off-for-climate-justice-and-environment-219894
#trees

This strategy of silencing criticism has extended into the digital realm, with X CEO #ElonMusk’s platform playing a pivotal role in the Indian gov’s transnational repression. At the Indian government’s behest, Musk’s platform deleted hundreds of posts sharing a #BBC documentary exposing Modi’s role in a 2002 anti-Muslim massacre that unofficial estimates indicate as many as 2,000 lives.
https://truthout.org/articles/free-speech-absolutist-musk-is-abetting-modis-suppression-of-voices-in-india/

Camera, Action!

https://crimethinc.com/CameraAction

On January 26 and 27, during the first International Gathering of Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Practices against Borders in Tijuana, Mexico, the Ex-Worker Podcast will present a curated series of anarchist films from around the world. In addition to showing our own published shorts and debuting some new material, we will curate a series of anarchist features, dramas, video propaganda, oddities, and experiments.

You're invited to submit your work!

Here, we present our submission parameters and review some of the precedents for anti-border gatherings like this one.

@glennf You may appreciate this history I made, which combined YahooPipes with Delicious for doing monitoring work:
https://bureaucracksy.constantvzw.org/delicious-user-guide/

Did you love Yahoo! Pipes and miss it? I sure did. I wrote this history of the graphical web-based processing tool that sure seemed like the future when it was introduced! https://retool.com/pipes I interviewed the core team and several other folks so we could finally have a definitive history. (And forget my words, even—the illustrations are amazing!)

This is part of a series at Retool, a visual programming tools company, that decided to make sure the past wasn’t forgotten.

We are on the cusp of creating a world where it will be normalized for Mastodon users to follow Threads users and where it will feel strange that a Threads user can’t follow a Twitter user. This is the a vision that many of us have been pushing Meta on for at least 15 years (remember OpenSocial?)

It’s ironic then that the biggest opponents of this future are Mastodon admins who have blocked Threads integration with their slice of the Fediverse.

Who would have expected this outcome?

I’m in the process of moving all of a parent’s credit, banking, online ordering, and medical accounts over to my phone number bc they (my parent) can no longer deal with five-step logins and mandatory SMS codes across wildly inconsistent patterns and hoooooo boy are the tech companies and systems unprepared for what is about to hit them, generationally.

It took five phone calls, three codes, and two emails to change just one account over.

@jlroberson @Npars01 @scalzi

It's very reductive to think of the decent people still on Twitter as shallow idiots.

As was said earlier a oot of networks and communities are vanishing from the platform. Guess what's happening to the remaining members who don't know how to find safe alternatives elsewhere? Or whose friends a support networks are only easily accessible via Xitter?

Many of them are victims of that takeover, I think they deserve a bit more kindness...

This is unprecedented as far as I know. It is, in fact, historic. Biden staffers organized a vigil outside the #WhiteHouse calling on their boss to call for a ceasefire.
Wow!
And to the staffers, thank you so much!

#CHR2023 has been a very rich experience! Already looking forward to CHR2024 in Aarhus where we'll have some first results from the GOLEM project golemlab.eu

Btw, we're also hiring a PhD to work on the computational analysis of narrative in argumentative text

https://www.rug.nl/about-ug/work-with-us/job-opportunities/?details=00347-02S000AI7P

#nlproc