Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

Overall, moving your account to another server fails in both functionality and #UX.

WHY IS IT SO COMPLICATED? There should be no surprise dropped followers/followees. You shouldn't have to download & upload multiple files. You should only have to enter the new username, server, and password and click "Move".

Unless Mastodon streamlines and improves this process, I think it's misleading to claim to typical users that they can "just" move to a new server.

8/8

The Myth of Account Portability on Mastodon

I've heard countless times that if you don't like how your Mastodon server is run, you can just move to a new one. Well, I tested it, and that is simply not true!

While Twitter locks you in with a proprietary protocol, Mastodon locks you in with a messy UX, incomplete functionality, and the myth of "you can just move".

Here's a thread looking at why I moved, what I did, and how it went.

1/🧵

#mastodon #UX

Actually if I weren't working with software teams right now what I wouldn't give to do research on doctors' understanding of and evaluations about causality and the diagnostic and care access consequences of this, it would be fascinating

Honey, are you okay? You barely use your herring phone

@carnage4life Capitalist Stockholm Syndrome

“A SPECTER IS HAUNTING right-wing dissident Substackers—the specter of Renée DiResta.”

My book is reviewed in The Bulwark today — and it’s a very entertaining read! 😊

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/influencers-bullshitters-losing-shared-reality

@spoltier the guac went on the ham, the choc stayed on the bread, all worked out lol

I am extremely not sad about this breakfast

HOMOSEXUALS PLEASE DEPOSIT WITH US ALL OF YOUR PRECIOUS GAY SO WE MAY SEAL IT AWAY IN OUR VAULTS

@mcc *hurrying up to the ceo* sir- there's been a containment leak in the gay vault. at this rate of leakage... the whole midwest will be gay by tomorrow

@kellogh If we're being extremely pedantic, Free Software started as a movement because somebody had a printer but no printer drivers. They did not have a *per se* problem with the fact that a printer is capital nor with the capitalist system that produced the printer.

This suggests to me that we need some sort of further movement to tackle LLMs. I'm thinking about Open Access (share the docs and data), Open Hardware (share the low-level implementation details), and various open-dataset efforts.

Also, it's worth pondering whether the cost of training an LLM is innately expensive. It could be the case that only one pass is needed through the training data, and that the current system is set up as a data laundry to avoid paying license fees. The VCs funding this research are used to the idea of laundering resources through startups. Shalizi has an exploration of the implicated components: http://bactra.org/notebooks/nn-attention-and-transformers.html

But you know, as long as software journals don't even want to allow the reporting of participant demographics, we cannot possibly begin to scratch the surface on any of this. I think it is important to consider the selection effects of what we hear about, the long chains of pipe we've laid down that dictate who is heard in this moment, and what complexity is compressed into legible summaries that treat all "developers" like a neutral blank slate, interchangeable "personas."

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

Clock ticks (†Horoixodidae; A. A. Koch, 2144) are a now-extinct family of family of parasitic arachnids of the order Ixodida. Adult ticks are approximately 1 to 8 nanoseconds long, although their larvae may reach as much as 1 microseconds in duration. Since the widespread adoption of asynchronous logic in the Third Industrial Revolution, habitat destruction and loss of reproductive capability have caused the loss of this once-widespread group of animals.

All-terrain power wheelchairs are now available at state parks in Georgia, opening up hiking trails to wheelchair users. #ShareGoodNewsToo https://gastateparks.org/Accessibility/TrackChairs

Honestly I don't think "gaining adoption" is that important in a truly diverse ecosystem.

The reason concepts like adoption become useful is when it drives compatibility. We do want different servers to be able to participate in the larger society. But I think compatibility emerges because people *want* to participate. You have to add the value first. Then people will do the work to be compatible so they can get to the value.

And of course, the army wouldn't land the aircraft on the highway without paying for the highway tax sticker.
#vignette #AlphaUno

@gdupont @0x5DA @mozilla I would argue that providing free and on demand descriptions directly to a screen reader is a better use of time, energy, and utility than allowing writers' use. There is also absolutely no reliable way to determine if a description was AI generated.

@0x5DA @mozilla It can be useful for a person using a screen reader to have access to an AI description, but crucial there is that said user needs to know that that's the source of said description. There are repeated patterns of those who feel pressured to include descriptions but don't actually care about accessibility doing the absolute minimum, manifesting here as using the direct AI output without examination or editing.

So yes, a lack of inline alt text is better than AI gen inline.

Streisand effect in effect https://drive.google.com/file/d/16rbaGNH9J-brtmc4T4jZsnjjA9c_eItZ/view (see https://theintercept.com/2024/06/03/columbia-law-review-palestine-board-website/ )