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• Post #4422101

  After experimenting with local LLMs for a couple years now, I'm excited to release my newest project: The Ethical Assistant! It provides all the benefits of an LLM assistant but with low energy usage, completely private, and no cost to use. https://tinysubversions.com/ethical-assistant/

• Post #4188798

  You're telling me an n ed this Flanders?

• Post #3993062

  Discovered today that one of the most formative books of my childhood, Math For Smarty Pants (1983), is available as a full PDF online: https://arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/mathpants.pdf It's not a super well known book, though I bet there are plenty of Fediverse nerds who loved it as much as I did. The book was full of cool math stuff, but also wonderful cartoons and stories. Reading the sentence "The mathematician believed that every rule probably has exceptions" at age 7 b...

• Post #3349079

  The ActivityPub Trust & Safety Task Force is looking for a new Co-Lead (I'm stepping down because I'm leading the Social Web Working Group now). Specifically we'd like someone with trust and safety experience! Doesn't have to be paid/professional experience (volunteer moderation workers welcome). If you're interested, please leave a comment on the Github issue here: https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-trust-and-safety/issues/135 For more on what the TF does, check out...

• Post #3347511

  There are a lot of reasons I've been in a creative funk recently but one of them is the chilling effect where I think about the inevitable LLM plagiarism that will occur and I think, huh, do I really want to release anything publicly? I feel myself more drawn to making stuff that never goes on the internet at all. Like, the idea of playing in a bar band around town feels more inviting than the idea of creating a cool web-based toy like I used to.

• Post #2859401

  Looking for recommendations on either books or websites that have quite serious, para-professional baking recipes. I generally like stuff from Serious Eats (Stella Parks et al), and generally speaking I like recipes that pay attention to weight and hydration percentage and so on. Usually I find stuff in the genre of shortcut recipes for busy parents -- which to be clear are perfectly fine but not what I'm looking for! EDIT: Seems like King Arthur is the consensus, thank you!

• Post #2859400

  ...you're telling me a gott fried this leibniz??

• Post #2557076

  Lol. Lmao. From @fediversereport https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr162-eu-regulation-wont-save-open-social-networks/

• Post #2464313

  Okay, #Hometown v1.1.0 is coming out tomorrow! There are so many changes (and I will explain them all in the release notes) but I think I am most happy with the tweaks to the Mastodon v4 mobile layout. * Removed giant header * Retractable right hand menu (click the top right hamburger icon) * Reduced margins overall for a more compact layout Attached pics: before, after, and after with retracted menu. Note you see a whole extra post in the 'after' screenshot due to all the remo...

• Post #2464312

  Okay, #Hometown v1.1.1 is now released! Massive release notes here: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v4.0.2%2Bhometown-1.1.1 Admins, please let me know if you run into trouble on the upgrade. This is a tricky one, mostly due to Mastodon v3 -> v4 stuff. You'll get a lot of mileage searching the Mastodon issues repo for production errors you run into on the upgrade. I'll repeat what I said on the release notes: if your installation is customized in...

• Post #2451218

  US House Rep Nancy Mace, a noted anti trans legislator, was speaking on a panel at the Project Liberty Summit. She was disrupted by @evangreer . I was walking out of the room when it happened. It was awesome. Evan is doing okay. https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-11-21-transgender-digital-rights-activist-confronts-hate-monger-rep-nancy-mace-at-internet-summit/ Edited to add: non TikTok version of video in my reply to this post

• Post #2418992

  Extremely pleased to announce the release of the ActivityPub Fuzzer! This is a tool that runs in a local development environment and (partially) emulates known ActivityPub software. It can even create a fake local "public fire hose" shaped like what you might see if you hooked your in-development software up to the real Fediverse. I built this because I wanted ways to test in-progress fedi software for compatibility without actually making it live and breaking things. https:/...

• Post #2416605

  I'm at a loss for words but here are some from Mayor Mamdani that will suffice for now: "Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change. They want relief from the affordability crisis. They want peace." https://nitter.net/...

• Post #2313404

  Great article from @dajb about governance on Mastodon servers. Like social.coop, Friend Camp has started using Loomio to make group consensus decisions around things like non-obvious defederation, and it's working out really well. https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2022/11/25/defederation-and-governance-processes/ I recommend instance admins look into Loomio. Once we have used it a bit more on Friend Camp I am going to post a how-to and best practices for small servers.

• Post #2279630

  "Don Quijote (Pierre's Version)"

• Post #2233403

  Wow, this is very interesting. Smalltown is a new fork of Mastodon specifically for civic communities looking to host their own social media. It is being developed at Ethan Zuckerman's lab at UMass Amherst. https://publicinfrastructure.org/2022/09/28/welcome-to-smalltown/ (It's explicitly inspired by Hometown and very nicely links to my Patreon on their github, too.)

• Post #1871529

  I've been talking with an academic researcher who is interested in speaking with people who have shut down their fediverse servers, for any reason. I know it's a touchy subject so I didn't want to just refer her directly to people, but if you are seeing this message and you're interested, please DM me and I will give you her email. I did a 1-hour interview with her on more general topics and really enjoyed the experience. (Boosts appreciated!)

• Post #1791456

  I finished my stint as a Mozilla Fellow and now I'm relaunching my Patreon with a focus on, well, fixing social media. This means I'm going to continue my concerted work trying to make the fediverse a better place, in the form of best practice guides for running instances, external advocacy, and technical tutorials and training so that more people can contribute software to the fediverse at large. You can read a partial summary of my work so far at my new Patreon page! https:/...

• Post #1771053

  Sometimes I remember that I can just poach eggs for breakfast. And then I do. And it's good.

• Post #1748803

  Can't attend #FediForum today but looking forward to tomorrow and Thursday...

• Post #1689701

  From a Black revolutionary friend of mine, quoted anonymously with permission. This sums up how I've felt about the whole supreme court mess

• Post #1619403

  the sickening thud of a thickening sud

• Post #1601746

  Someone get the CEO of antifa on the line. I've composed the official antifa jingle. It goes: do re mi so la ti do

• Post #1307451

  Saw an AI influencer-type on another social network say > It’s been shocking to see Claude go from an AI model that seemed one upgrade away from taking over most of the routine tasks in my day job to not even being able to reliably download a webpage without lots of prompting. I'm excited for people who claimed "the models are 90% there but if line keeps going up we'll be at 110% soon" to hit a wall at approximately 130mph

• Post #1298747

  Fuck, they really are automating all the factory jobs aren't they

• Post #1245267

  I'm pleased to note that even https://dolphin.town, my Mastodon server where the only letter you are allowed to post is "e", has seen increased activity in the last few days. Thanks Eeeeelon!

• Post #1201656

  > Scams are usually imagined as a game with two players: con artist and mark. But today’s scams are more like massively multiplayer online games. They are, as I have put it, “network scams.” In this economy, everyone is reminded to respect the hustle of the next person, to always try to out-hustle them, but to accept when they themselves have been out-hustled. "Social Media in the Scam Age", a new essay from fintech scholar Lana Swartz https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/...

• Post #1168574

  The Polish language edition of my 2014 book on how the game Jagged Alliance 2 (1999) was created is now available! Honestly I'm really pleased with this given how much more popular that game was in central Europe than in the US https://wydawnictwoopenbeta.pl/p/game-story-jagged-alliance-2-ksiazka/

• Post #1074387

  If you are on Twitter and want to find people who have opened accounts over here, someone made a little tool that scrapes Fediverse handles (and email addresses, since a lot of people drop the leading @) from the Twitter bios and display names of people you follow over there https://fedifinder.glitch.me

• Post #1044896

  I just walked past two security guards for an armored truck and overheard one saying to the other, "...two days after my daughter was born..." My dude, a videogame protagonist is about to you knock you out or worse