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• Post #4486664

  The great Enshittocene is now spreading into in-person UX. A few hours ago I went to the local multiplex to see The Odyssey, and walked out with a refund. But I have no idea what the movie is like, I left within minutes of the start. I left because it was painfully loud for the tiny cinema, and the staff told me the volume was controlled by the distributor in the US. They have no projectionist who can customise the UX to the needs of the room. (1/?) #MovieIndustry #movies #enshittification

• Post #4393793

  What, you mean that not only does banning under-16s do nothing substantial to address any of the serious societal issues caused by overgrown social media platforms, it doesn't even keep people under 16 off them? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/3/australias-under-16-social-media-ban-failing-study-shows-what-it-means Who'da thunk it?!? 😱 But seriously, did anyone involved in the social web seriously expect this performative nonsense to work? #B416

• Post #4377049

  I'm reading a 2023 piece about a visit to the country by a professional troll. To avoid getting derailed into a discussion about the particular issue this troll uses as bait, I won't give details. But the piece argues - as did many at the time - that those who staged an aggressive counter-protest did a Good Thing(™️). My argument is that they were morally right - I think the underlying position they were protesting for is unassailable - but strategically wrong. Why? Let's unpack this...

• Post #4347186

  "AI is not an inevitable force that we need to react to, but these are highly political decisions that need to be made." #FrederikeKaltheuner, 2026 https://www.techpolicy.press/is-europe-getting-ai-wrong/ I want this on a t-shirt! It's a timely rebuttal to the almost religious mania gripping the political class, with deeply distributing consequences on the ground, as described by Nikhil Suresh; https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/ #E...

• Post #4326481

  "... China now restricting access to certain open source models." #MaximilianNegele, 2026 If all the points in the OSD (Open Source Definition) are being followed, access can't be restricted. So if it can be restricted, it's not Open Source, by definition. At least, that was the case, until Stefano Maffulli, as director of OSI, led the charge on drafting a new definition for "Open Source AI", by watering down the OSD until some MOLE training fit into it. *sigh* #O...

• Post #4301929

  "Within that broader launch, the one substantive new policy announcement was a proposed one-year moratorium on new AI data centre consents." #HenryOliver, 2026 https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-bulletin/27-07-2026/a-green-party-for-all-of-us The Greens like to present themselves as radicals, but this is incrementalism writ large. To those of us closely following the disasterclasses of the #MOLE Training industry, this policy is about as ambitious as a 1 year moratorium on fossil fuel exp...

• Post #4272892

  "Direct action, what is it? Does it work? Yes." #RobbieNicol, Citizen's Handbook, s02ep5, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1GW52tsgZg Although scholars from Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa at Otago University have collected copious evidence that it's *nonviolent* direct action that leads to the most lasting positive change. It's the combination of willful violation of unjust rules, and a commitment to protect living things - including people - that gives it potency. #DirectA...

• Post #4150295

  "However, some projects simply do not have an easy way to tack on the AI label, or the person advocating for them either does not want to lie or has not understood that lying has become necessary. In all cases, this either kills the request for funding outright, or adds a pervasive and intractable drag on all communications, as every request must be worked and re-worked until it is 'AI enough'." #NikhilSuresh, 2026 https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glob...

• Post #4137072

  "Being a software engineer, he got to spend a little bit of time backstage with the developers, whereupon they revealed that most of the demos were faked ... Didn't stop them spouting absolute gibberish to a breathless audience for an hour though! I blame not the engineers, who probably tried to actually get the damn thing to work, but the lying blowhards who insisted that they must make the presentation or presumably be terminated." #NikhilSuresh, 2024 https://ludic.mataroa.blog...

• Post #4128769

  I don't mean to take a crack at musicians for making strategic decisions within the constraints of the world as it is. But I do think it's ironic to search for subversive, localist bands, and find them only on one corporate hosting platform; https://traumaparty.bandcamp.com/album/ ... and not on any of the, non-corporate hosting services searched by Unstream https://unstream.stream/?q=trauma%2Bparty How can we make discovering and using these independent services easier for our musi...

• Post #3944438

  Anyone tried this Matrix<>ActivityPub bridge? "Turns your Matrix server into a fully functioning ActivityPub server. Matrix users can post, follow, reply, react, and DM across the fediverse using ordinary Matrix rooms and clients. No separate account or server needed." https://github.com/Haven-Organization/matrix-appservice-activitypub @evan@cosocial.ca #Matrix #ActivityPub

• Post #3925841

  "Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources - even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case." #DavidGraeber, #DavidWengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-the-dawn-of-everything (1/?) #eurocentrism

• Post #3921299

  Strap in for another mega-thread of quotes and reflections folks. I just started reading The Dawn of Everything, by the late David Graeber, and David Wengrow. My first reflection is that whether or not institutions support them, we need more anthropologists like Graeber. Researchers willing to question entrenched narratives and go where the evidence takes them. If you're that way inclined, I recommend Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology; https://theanarchistlibrary.org/lib...

• Post #3907449

  #TIL about #Harmony, a bleeding-edge project to build a decentralised replacement for Miscord using ActivityPub, E2EE using Vodozemac, a cryptography library used in Matrix software; https://joinharmony.app/ Source code is on GritHub, under AGPL; https://github.com/zcharef/harmony Anyone know anything about this? So far I haven't been able to find fediverse accounts for the project itself, or the creator. #fediverse #ActivityPub #Vodozemac #Matrix

• Post #3901084

  “You can dislike his politics, you can envy his money, you can be appalled at some of his misjudgments as a broadcaster, but he is so damned likeable.” #AudreyYoung, Senior Political Correspondent, NZ Herald, 2026 https://thespinoff.co.nz/media/17-07-2026/new-zealands-media-has-been-gripped-by-paul-henry-mania More evidence of the news media's manifest left-wing bias. If a journalist heaped praise on a new Green or TPM candidate like this - let alone a *senior* political correspondent - w...

• Post #3896548

  Fukkit. I think I have the 'rona. I've been in bed sick all week, coughing and sneezing up slimy liquids, and this morning I can't taste my cup of tea. Not much I can do except stay in bed, avoid my flatmates, and wait for it to burn out.

• Post #3844801

  And in today's edition of staring into the abyss in growing horror; "On Monday, Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children and a victim of Grok deepfakes, told the Guardian she felt 'horrified and violated' after Musk’s fans undressed pictures of her as a child. She felt she was being punished for speaking up against the billionaire, from whom she is estranged, describing the images as revenge porn." #AmeliaGentleman, #HelenaHorton, 2026 https://www.theguardia...

• Post #3806409

  I'm forever finding myself trying to free up space on a digital storage medium. If all files took up roughly the same amount of space, then as with piles of paper, there would be no alternative to just sorting through them looking for stuff I don't need. But digital files can be anything from a few KB to several GBs, and the upper size limit is increasing all the time. I'd love a simple-to-use tool that presented the files anywhere in a drive, from biggest to smallest, ignoring fol...

• Post #3615260

  After years of people raving about John Wick, I finally got around to watching it. I'm aware I'm very much in the minority here, but honestly, I don't see what the fuss is about. The story boils down to ex-hitman's wife dies, dumb gangster messes with him, ex-hitman takes revenge. That's pretty much it. Sure, the action scenes are nicely done. But the same is true of plenty of other movies before and since that have much more compelling stories to frame the action. #JohnWic...

• Post #2851172

  "... sacredness is a stance toward the world, not an inherent quality of some bits of it; ... adopting the stance that everything is sacred generally leads to better outcomes than the stance that nothing is sacred." #DavidChapman https://vividness.live/sutra-tantra-and-the-modern-worldview #sacredness

• Post #2467422

  Kia ora fedizens, a few months ago I was shoulder-tapped to take on stewardship of fediverse.party. One of a bunch of websites that aim to gather lots of useful info about the fediverse in one place. This is a project I've been a casual contributor to for years, and I really want to see it maintained. So I said yes. (1/2) #fediverse #FediverseParty

• Post #2346385

  I've never been a fan of Linkin Park. I tend to like music that has at least some social commentary (Rage, Tool, System), and as with Korn, I tended to find Linkin Park turgid and self-indulgent. But over the past week, I've been supporting a close friend through an intense life crisis, which has led me to completely reevaluate LP. One Step Closer and Falling could both have been written about my friend's situation, and they found listening to those songs very validating...

• Post #2346383

  #ShowerThoughts: What if moa were introduced to Aotearoa by early Pacific mariners? Maybe the chicken sized ones, long enough ago that they giant ones could evolve by the time the "moa hunters" arrived? Side note: these days, it's presumed the folk who unalived moa are ancestors of modern Māori. But we only have oral histories and dug up artifacts to go on, and those don't always line up. I've had Māori tell me their whakapapa goes back much further th...

• Post #2346382

  Why on god's green Earth have some email client stopped displaying the actual sending address of emails? It's like they *want* more people to fall for phishing scams. (1/2) #FairEmail #UXFails #phishing #UX #email

• Post #2346381

  The character assassination of TVNZ political journalist Maiki Sherman; https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/media-technology/594667/tvnz-political-editor-maiki-sherman-resigns ... reminds me of what happened to Metiria Turei, and to Benjamin Doyle. Old scuttlebutt dug up, and then a campaign if sustained harassment of the person, the institution they're part of, and in Metiria's case, her whānau. #CharacterAssassination #MaikiSherman #TVNZ #NewsMedia

• Post #2346380

  While I'm living in HamilTron, city of the future, I want to help create a cooperatively-run cafe and arts venue. I reckon we could crowdfund the costs of setting it up, by promising $23 worth of coffee and food for each $20 contributed. (1/2) #cooperatives #CoopCafe

• Post #2346379

  #Listening to Superhero by Drew Stephenson, feat. G. Stoner Hilcot. This track is righteous; "Chief. Executive. Officer. He so important he got 3 words all mean the same thing. He a 'wealth creator'. A 'wealth creator'. How he doing that? Exactly." I found it on a fundraising compilation of protest songs called The Weapon and The Shield (Vol. I); https://theweaponandtheshield.bandcamp.com/album/the-weapon-and-the-shield-vol-i (1/2) #DrewStep...

• Post #2346378

  #TIL about the company behind #Deflect.ca, an anti-DDoS service that non-corporate sites can use instead of ClownFlare: "... eQualitie – a Canadian company developing open and reusable systems with a focus on privacy, online security and freedom of association. Technology solutions and innovations are driven by our values that guide us to protect the rights and aspirations of everyone online." #eQualitie #DDoS

• Post #2319877

  Sighted out back of the Grey St Salami in HamilTron, Aotearoa, an electric organ. Presumably left for the op shop staff to deal with. No idea if it works, but .... #HamilTron #Aotearoa #NZ #MusicalInstruments

• Post #2074878

  What if we made it a law that like services must interoperate without interop fees to the consumer? Like all payment systems must connect, it's up to them how they do it, but they must. Same with voice calling systems. The penalty for non-compliance being a revenue tax on proprietary services (that don't interop). The goal would be to discourage Walled Gardens, and raise revenue to fund protocol research and proof of concept projects. What might be some of the unintended consequ...