werner58 @werner58@qoto.org

I just got access to Google’s new MusicLM and…

Wow.

No exaggeration when I say this will change the music industry. Thanks https://twitter.com/zackhargett/status/1656812761324875776 for the HT.

The constant-threats-to-defederate thing is going to kill this place, seriously.

Defederating an instance is an extreme measure and it should only be taken in extreme circumstances.

Finding out I might stop getting posts from people I explicitly follow because they happen to be on an instance being defederated by mine all because a bunch of admins I don't know got in a spat over a user I don't follow is just about the most annoying value proposition imaginable.

https://federate.social/@mattblaze/110317006852580015

I remember when Aaron Swartz was criminally prosecuted for downloading too many academic journal articles, but, sure, it's totally cool to scrape everyone's personal photographs as part of a commercial effort to market discriminatory surveillance tech to police departments.

https://www.businessinsider.com/clearview-scraped-30-billion-images-facebook-police-facial-recogntion-database-2023-4

The new stuff in the Twitter algorithm is wild.

"author is elon", "author_is_republican", "author_is_democrat", etc., are explicitly included in there.

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b928b479b512ec51ac2c3821f5922/home-mixer/server/src/main/scala/com/twitter/home_mixer/functional_component/decorator/HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala

Banning TikTok for national security purposes makes complete sense if you look at TikTok on its own. But as soon as you take into account the fact that US media is so toxic that the country is basically a global leader in self-destabilization, the whole thing is just lol lmao.

🚨BREAKING NEWS!🚨

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is now co-authoring the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress.

The intent is to make WordPress a "first party Fediverse member", on par with Mastodon, Pleroma, and Pixelfed.

WordPress already powers 43% of all websites—and every one is a potential Fediverse server.

Automattic employee @kraft just confirmed this.

https://religious.social/@kraft/110003134398099446

@fediversenews

My view on T2FA: EM has been maniacally focused on cutting costs on twitter since he took over - we can agree that it’s reckless, shortsighted, etc, but I suspect the SMS 2FA flap is narrowly about costs - I have to believe they get a big bill from Twillio (or whomever they use now) each month for SMS services, and since there (probably) aren’t more servers to shut off, kitchens to close, leases to default on, or moderators to fire, this is next in the pile of expenses to manage.

Cloudflare has announced Wildebeest, an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server that can be easily deployed on Cloudflare's servers.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/welcome-to-wildebeest-the-fediverse-on-cloudflare/

https://github.com/cloudflare/wildebeest

About ten years ago a flying squirrel snuck into my house and spent a few hours playing hide-and-seek with my cat. Anyways. Here's the best photo you're likely to ever see of a flying squirrel hiding inside a #sunmicrosystems E4000 server chassis. #retrocomputing #mammals

Forbes 30 Under 30 To Life

Your parenthetical of the week, from a Philly Inquirer story about a lawsuit against the police over an officer’s tendency to take off his pants in the precinct office:
https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-police-pants-disrobing-office-lawsuit-20230106.html

Not a caterpillar - On a frosty May morning, a group of European Bee-eaters perched on a branch gave the impression of a caterpillar at first glance. The vibrant colours of their feathers, with shades of green, blue, and yellow, seemed to blend together and create a fluffy, caterpillar-like appearance. It's also a winning image in Adult Category of European Wild Wonders photo competition, November 2011. José Luis Rodríguez

Your periodic reminder that just because a URL is saved at archive.org doesn't mean it's going to stay there.

Last year, I wrote a series about proxy services marketed to cybercriminals, and that relied heavily on Archive.org links to document various connections. After my story ran, the person that those links concerned asked Archive to remove those links from their database, which they did. The person in question came back and said hey, what you said in your story is wrong because there's no supporting evidence and you must remove this. Archive.org confirmed they removed all of the pages at the request of the domain holder, and that was that.

If you stumble upon a page that is in archive.org and you want to make sure there is a record that won't be deleted at some point, consider saving the page to archive.today/archive.ph

I didn't know the PC market deteriorated this bad.

If I will sell my two-year-old laptop today, I will end up making a profit on it. LOL

The natural gas situation in Europe: currently actually filling up the storage sites. Demand for natural gas often craters after Christmas, but that we're increasing our buffers in the midst of winter is rather special. Live graph on https://berthub.eu/gazmon/

So, as @mmasnick basically predicted, it's not surprising to see Elon moving away from his naive #freespeech position towards balancing speech and safety.

It's just that it sucks that he's being so selfish about it.

The thing about having a lot of high flying, overachiever friends and coworkers is that sometimes you don’t think you’re doing enough until you run into someone who’s just like, “at night I’m going to eat some pizza and sit on the couch”, and you’re like - “wait, no language lessons? No flight school? No excessive gym time? Not traveling to an event somewhere? People DO THAT, regularly? Wow, I guess I could take a night off someday.”

It’s like, I tear myself to pieces when I’m not in the top nn% of the race on my exercise bike workout, and then I realize I’m actually more physically fit than nn% of the people who own and use a Peloton regularly. Be careful who you’re setting your standard of “normal” against. Either too low, or too high for you.

Easy (and justified!) to rail against giveaways to undeserving corps. But sometimes leakage is the price of achieving crucial advantages 3/

I keep saving memes to my camera roll, secure in the belief that there will come a time when I need each and every one.