Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

really appreciate everyone who buys corporate licenses for the zines! I always love hearing about how people are using zines to share knowledge about SQL or debugging or git with their coworkers ❤

if you're disabled, consider getting an air fryer.

i've struggled with meal prep for as long as i remember. it's not _completely_ infeasible for me, but it's a lot of effort on the best days, and completely and utterly draining on the worst ones, where every time i stand up pushes me closer to just staring at the wall forever

an air fryer and a pack of single use inserts mean that meal preparation is now a two-step process
1. put stuff in and click start
2. get stuff out
and it tastes nice too

The https://phanpy.social/ timeline browsing experience is genuinely the first time I've actively enjoyed scrolling through my Mastodon timeline, it feels really fresh and the way it groups boosts together is a huge improvement on the default chronological lists from other tools

Things I will really miss:
- plain yogurt that isn’t sour
- beaches! Everywhere!
- zumo
- walking all the places because they are near, and mopeds for the rest
- wild parrots!
- having my CET folks be in my time zone (or me in theirs hehe) for once
- thinking to myself “what is that plant?” And when I look it up 9 of 10 times it’s a cooking herb!
- being asked if I want coffee at 10pm with my dessert, because folks of the Mediterranean are apparently my mom’s flavor of adhd and can drink all the caffeine 🥲

Things I will not miss:
- not being able to say even good morning sometimes because I am having a database error and instead of buen día what comes up is eg bon morning sō desu ne 😳
- apparently being an honorary German
- an hilarious plumbing job I would be obliged to fix if it was in my house (the sink in my hotel room has? No? p-trap? And it would take me like an hour to put one in)
- the apparent expectation you will carry all your bags up AND down allllllll the stairs unless you have a baby carriage in which case the husband carries the carriage, Poseidon help you if you set foot in the elevator under the age of 75 seemingly

Wir suchen eine*n Kommunikations-Manager*in, um unsere (deutschsprachige) Kommunikationsstrategie, Content-Produktion & Markenaufbau zu stärken. Wenn du dich für #OpenSource und Themen wie digitale Daseinsvorsorge interessierst, komm zu uns! Wir haben viel vor 💪 z. B. digitale Infrastruktur sichtbarer und resilienter machen.

Die Bewerbungsfrist endet Sonntag, den 30. Juni 2024.

Wir freuen uns sehr auf deine Bewerbung bzw. wenn du die Ausschreibung weiterleitest!
https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/de/stellenangebote/kommunikations-manager-in

i will try one more time

SEND ME YOUR FUCKING WEBSITE AND OR BLOG I WANNA LOOK AT YOUR COOL FUCKING WEBSITE AND OR BLOG

FEEL FREE TO BOOST THIS REQUEST

Qu’est-ce qui se passe à l’#UNIL ce soir? Tout le secteur Château, Ferme, Grange est bouclé. J’étais tellement perplexe, j’ai oublié de poser la question à l’agent de sécurité.

#Lausanne

if you use git submodules, do you use them in a read-only way (where you never edit the code in the submodule, only pull changes sometimes) or read-write?

You may not know me as such, but I have spent a lot of time moderating a lot of platforms; I spent two years as a moderator for one of the biggest chats on twitch. Megasites like Twitter try as hard as they can to hide moderation and make it seem as fully automatic and neutral as possible, but the reality is that anything more complicated than automatically blocking slurs is emotional labor by a specific human being. If you click "report" on a post, you are saying it is so dire, so urgent, that you need to put up the Bat Signal so Civility Batman (who, on mastodon and many other places, is likely an unpaid volunteer) knows to take the time and energy to swoop in and resolve the situation.

And that button exists for a reason! You can and should click it if there's a good cause. But moderators often find themselves drained by a barrage of "posts/users that I didn't like" rather than "posts/users that are active hazards." They have to take the time to look around and make a judgment call on whether there's something they're missing and it really is a dire post, or just someone being annoyed by a personal pet peeve. I encourage you to keep the human element on the other end in mind when deciding what your personal threshold is for reporting posts. And note, a post can be bad in the sense of "this is not the sort of post we as a community Love To See" without it being "summon the gods of justice" dire.

I will conclude with a funny story: twitch uses (or perhaps used, past tense) ML to detect when specific uncommon words in messages get manually moderated a lot, and assumes that's the hot new slur and begins moderating it automatically. Somehow, I don't know what happened, the word "Sega" got onto this list. I had to manually fish dozens of people out of automated ten-minute mutes for committing the crime of Sega on a video game discussion site.

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