'Recklessly Undermining the EPA Mission': Staff Issue Public Call for Zeldin to Correct Course
'Recklessly Undermining the EPA Mission': Staff Issue Public Call for Zeldin to Correct Course - Splinter
Splinter is your home for news and opinions that challenge power in our political and economic system that's becoming more unhinged each and every day.Dave Levitan (Splinter)
NativeMind: Your fully private, open-source, on-device AI assistant
GitHub - NativeMindBrowser/NativeMindExtension: NativeMind: Your fully private, open-source, on-device AI assistant
NativeMind: Your fully private, open-source, on-device AI assistant - NativeMindBrowser/NativeMindExtensionGitHub
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The effects of AI on firms and workers
The past decade has seen tremendous growth in commercial investments in artificial intelligence (AI). The first wave came after the 2012 ImageNet challenge, which was a pivotal moment in the history of artificial intelligence, particularly computer vision and deep learning. Then, advances in computing power—GPU hardware—powered neural network models trained on large amounts of data. Across industries, from construction to pharmaceuticals to finance, companies rushed to implement AI in their operations. This trend has only accelerated with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. Even larger models trained on even larger datasets are showing even greater power, and AI applications are becoming ubiquitous across U.S. businesses (Babina, et al. 2024).The rapid rise of commercial AI has inevitably brought concerns regarding its potential to displace human workers. There is evidence that AI can automate some cognitive tasks or increase worker productivity in a way that could reduce the number of workers needed. For example, Brynjolfsson, et al. (2025) find that AI tools make customer service workers much more efficient. Fedyk, et al. (2022) find that audit firms that use AI reduce their audit workforce. But the good news is that the labor-displacing effects seem confined to select sectors and occupations. On aggregate, recent academic research finds evidence that companies’ use of AI has been accompanied by an increase in the workforce.
This article synthesizes recent research—including new findings from Babina, et al. (2024) and Babina, et al. (2023)—to assess the real-world impacts of AI on firms and workers. Contrary to common fears, we find that AI has so far not led to widespread job loss. Instead, AI adoption is associated with firm growth, increased employment, and heightened innovation, particularly in product development. However, the effects are not uniformly distributed: AI-investing firms increasingly seek more educated and technically skilled employees, alter their internal hierarchies, and contribute to rising industry concentration. These trends carry important implications for public policy, including workforce development, education and reskilling initiatives, and antitrust enforcement. This article reviews the evidence and highlights key takeaways for policymakers navigating the AI-driven economy.
The effects of AI on firms and workers
Synthesis of new research assessing the real-world impacts of artificial intelligence on firms and workers.Brookings
“IMPARO il CINESE in 30 GIORNI” (JumboDrillo è meglio di noi…)
Sembra strano, e non pensavo si sarebbe mai potuto dire (e per giunta in questa economia…?), ma probabilmente a proposito dell’imparare le lingue c’è qualcosa di buono che si può prendere persino da quel fallito di JumboDrillo…! (Che chiamo così solo perché è la singola proprietà attorno alla quale tutto il suo canale è sviluppato, […]
octospacc.altervista.org/2025/…
“IMPARO il CINESE in 30 GIORNI” (JumboDrillo è meglio di noi…)
Sembra strano, e non pensavo si sarebbe mai potuto dire (e per giunta in questa economia…?), ma probabilmente a proposito dell’imparare le lingue c’è qualcosa di buono che si può prendere persino da quel fallito di JumboDrillo…! (Che chiamo così solo perché è la singola proprietà attorno alla quale tutto il suo canale è sviluppato, non perché penso sia un fallito… certamente io sono più fallita di lui, insomma, sia ben chiaro.)youtube.com/watch?v=v-4ntXPLOF…
Lui da assoluto pazzo, ma indubbiamente più bravo di noi, ha deciso di imparare il cinese in 30 giorni… e per soli 30 giorni (e mi chiedo se poi abbia continuato… ma temo si sia fermato) non sembra essere andato per niente male. Il suo motivo certamente è poco condivisibile… voleva praticamente solo rimorchiare in discoteca… però bisogna apprezzare l’impegno. Purtroppo, per quanto il metodo poi sia stato relativamente efficace, c’è anche da piangere, perché non è per tutti: a parte Duolingo, qualche canale YouTube apposito, e il fatto che nel mentre di tutto ha preso tanti appunti vari (“tra l’altro con i colori come le ragazze“), una parte della storia si è sviluppata con lui che si è messo un po’ a frequentare Chinatown e aveva 2 coetanei cinesi con cui studiare… e sono questi ultimi dettagli il problema, insomma. Almeno nell’imparare qualcosa che non sia il cinese, perché il quartiere strambo non esiste per altre nazionalità, e quindi nemmeno le persone. Vabbè, pace, gli altri elementi sono comunque buoni per sfuggire ad una morsa troppo totalizzante del gufo.
#cinese #imparare #JumboDrillo #lingue
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Issues with stickies
In my community !action_movies@piefed.social , I've made two posts sticky (the "Welcome" post and the "Free, legal movies" post) using my Piefed mod account, but:
- viewing in PieFed, neither post is at the top. (They do have inverted angle brackets around the title.)
- viewing in Lemmy, The "Free, legal movies" post is sticky (at top, with pushpin icon) but the "Welcome" post isn't.
How do I get them both displayed at the top in both PieFed and Lemmy? Or is this a bug?
On piefed
They both appear stickied just fine to me. Something that is different with sticky posts on piefed is that if you sort by New, then the sticky posts are no longer at the top of the page. That is different than how lemmy does it. This has led to confusion in the past, and even has a codeberg issue about it.
On lemmy
I am guessing that federation had not yet been established between that lemmy instance when you created and stickied that initial welcome post. I just tried an experiment now where I subscribed to your community from a test lemmy instance I have and forced federation of one of the sticky posts, and it didn't come over stickied. So, there might be some weirdness there.
What you can do to try to resolve this is to unsticky it and then resticky it. That should send out the correct actions via activitypub so that the other instances know that the post should be stickied. To be on the safer side, give it a minute or two between those two actions so that you are sure the first action had been sent out fully.
Sticky post on PieFed aren't listed on the top of its community.
Cf pictures : The sticked post, with the blue title, stay at the middle of the community page. It doesn't move to the top of its community.Codeberg.org
Thanks for the info.
- I unstickied, re-stickied and waited a couple of minutes. Both are now stickies that appear at the top in Lemmy, no matter what the sorting order.
- Sorting order: when I first started with Lemmy, I got sick of seeing the same posts again and again and again. I tried different sorting orders, and different settings for viewed posts, none of which satisfied all my wishes, until I eventually gave up on everything except "New", which is now how I look at all content all the time.
So I guess this means in Piefed I'm always missing out on seeing stickies in all communities, not just the one I mod. :/
Wait, so what is that issue? If you bold something in two different places it gets messed up?
Edit: it sure does...I will take a look at that when I look at formatting comment previews correctly.
I think it might also happen when you have italics, or bold, immediately followed by punctuation.
Or is that only when the original post is done on Lemmy and then viewed on PieFed? I'll have to try to find an example.
- piefed.social/post/997768
Just following up on this that stickied posts should now show up at the top of communities even if you sort by New. Additionally, the double bold problem should be solved now without breaking anything else. Feel free to reach out in this community or on codeberg with issues if they come up.
PS - post and comment previews should show better formatting as well, including blockquotes and code blocks.
Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker
Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker
Publishers including Condé Nast and Sky News have welcomed the new tech from internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.Chris Vallance (BBC News)
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DiffuCoder: Understanding And Improving Masked Diffusion Models For Code Generation
This paper introduces DiffuCoder, a 7B-scale open-source masked diffusion large language model (dLLM) specifically designed for code generation.
The research provides insights into how dLLMs generate content, distinguishing their decoding behavior from that of autoregressive (AR) models. Unlike AR models, dLLMs can intrinsically adjust their generation causality and increasing sampling temperature diversifies not just token choices but also their generation order, creating a rich search space for reinforcement learning (RL).
This flexibility allows dLLMs to be more non-autoregressive and generate tokens in a less sequential, more "human-like" code writing manner.
To leverage this diversity and improve performance, the paper proposes coupled-GRPO RL algorithm. This method utilizes a coupled-sampling scheme that constructs complementary mask noise during training to reduce the variance of token log-likelihood estimates while maintaining training efficiency.
Experimentally, coupled-GRPO significantly boosts DiffuCoder's performance on code generation benchmarks, notably improving EvalPlus scores by 4.4% with training on only 21K samples. The research also shows that coupled-GRPO trained models experience a smaller performance drop when decoding steps are halved (resulting in a 2x speedup), indicating increased parallelism and reduced reliance on AR bias during decoding.
available at huggingface.co/apple/DiffuCode…
apple/DiffuCoder-7B-cpGRPO · Hugging Face
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.huggingface.co
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Critique of Jacobin's Article: Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care)
> “Leninists have rarely grappled with these facts, let alone provided a compelling explanation for them. In other words, they have assumed, but not actually demonstrated, that the dual-power / insurrection model of Russia 1917 — a revolution that toppled an autocratic, noncapitalist state, not a parliamentary regime — is relevant for capitalist democracies. Similarly, Post at no point provides any evidence for his assertion that only workers’ councils, not a socialist-led government elected by universal suffrage, are capable of leading a break with capitalism.”
The October Revolution overthrew the provisional government which was a parliament, although there was already a deep crisis caused by WWI at that point
Also, Leninists have talked about these facts
The rise of opportunism in imperialist countries due to the labour aristocracy and the super exploitation of the Third World, the cooption of communist parties in imperialist countries
On another point:
The Bolsheviks didn’t make the dual power situation happen
What happened was the masses spontaneously set up the Soviets in a time of deep political and economic crisis
The point that Leninists make is that in a time of crisis, the masses spontaneously take action (and this has happened in capitalist democracies too), the role of communists is to lead these movements to overthrow the state. The reason why this hasn’t happened is because of the rise of opportunism and the split in the working class
Ironically, the very ‘socialist’ parties that work through Parliament that this articles advocate for actually block this process from happening by diverting the energy into voting
Another point:
> "At the same time, the vast majority of elected left governments have never even tried to move down Kautsky’s suggested path due to the moderating pressure of labor bureaucratization and the immense economic power of the capitalist class."
This also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the split in the working class and the social basis of these left government
He’s implying that these left parties are radical but they are held back by ‘moderate Labour movements’
But the left parties spring up from the same class basis of these moderate labour movements they represent the interests of the section of the working class that make up these moderate labor movements
Also, if such a radical working class movement exists outside Parliament that is going to push this theoretical socialist party left…. Why doesn’t it just overthrow the state altogether and take power for itself?
> "Avoiding the dead-end of social democratization will above all require a very intense and sustained degree of mass action and independent working-class organization outside of parliament. Without this, even the most well-intentioned government will flounder."
Like… why do all this dancing around? Such a militant movement should and could overthrow the state if parliament becomes so hostile to it
The entire premise of this imaginary scenario is that a militant working class movement exists but only does stuff to keep its elected officials in check
Or when the state and capitalists block its agenda
I also just think the fact that it uses AOC and Sanders as examples kinda ruins the legitimacy of the article because these politicians are imperialists
A few more points:
> "Second, reclaiming Kautsky’s strategy should prompt socialists to focus more on fighting to democratize the political regime, a tradition that has gotten lost since the era of the Second International. Whereas liberals and social democrats generally accept existing governmental rules and structures, Leninists have often been reluctant to proactively fight for major democratic reforms because they seek to completely illegitimate the current state."
Leninism actively promotes the fight for democracy and democratic rights. Pro-migrant rights, solidarity with prisoners, being against anti-protest laws, police brutality etc. Lenin was very clear that these political battles have to be engaged with so we don’t fall into economism. I say again, just look at the BPP (Black Panther Party)
> "Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other newly elected radicals have raised working people’s expectations and changed national politics. Socialists should participate in this electoral upsurge to promote mass movements and to organize hundreds of thousands of people into independent working-class organizations"
These politicians were always imperialist btw, it’s just become very obvious post October 7. Also, very crucially, these politicians were encouraging support for the Democrats, a racist pro-imperialist party but one that was willing to give concessions to some workers. This is opportunistic. This doesn’t mean that socialists shouldn’t engage with such movements (I think US communists know better than I do) but that engagement always has to keep in mind that those politicians don’t represent the interests of all workers and they certainly don’t represent the interests of workers in oppressed countries, if anything I imagine communists would be trying to expose this.
This article is based in Euro Communism, essentially this kind of thinking means that they see the ‘global north’ (once again a term I really hate) is so stable, will never go into an intense crisis, etc that revolution is impossible. So your only hope is to basically form mass socialist parties and hope you get voted in. But at that point you’re not socialist parties, you’re just giving workers a bigger share of the imperialist pie.
Let's contrast these article with the praxis that Che and Fidel reached in Latin America.
These quotes represent Che's ideas on the following:
> "Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted."
He further clarifies that a revolutionary situation arises when:
> "People must see clearly the futility of maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken."https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1963/09/guerrilla-warfare.htm
> "It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them. ... [But] where constitutional legitimacy exists, however flawed, guerrilla warfare is premature."
He stresses that mass disillusionment with the state is a prerequisite:
> "The confidence of the electorate in any of the old forms must be completely shattered, confidence in the ability of the old system to honestly organize any aspect of public life shaken to the core."
faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/…
Guevara's broader writings reinforce this principle:
In a 1959 interview, he condemned electoral systems as tools of oppression:"Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians."
bigother.com/2020/06/14/che-gu…
He linked revolutionary violence to the failure of institutional justice:"Justice remains the tool of a few powerful interests; legal interpretations continue to be made to suit the convenience of the oppressor powers."
marxists.org/archive/guevara/1…
Theoretical Consistency in Anti-Imperialism
Guevara framed armed struggle as a response to exhausted alternatives in global contexts:
> "The feeling of revolt will grow stronger every day among peoples subjected to exploitation, and they will take up arms to gain by force the rights which reason alone has not won them."
bigother.com/2020/06/14/che-gu…
Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care)
Karl Kautsky’s vision for winning democratic socialism is more radical, and more relevant, than most leftists care to admit.jacobin.com
More than half of Americans - and 83% of Democrats - say ICE has gone ‘too far’ in arresting migrants: poll
More than half of Americans believe that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has gone “too far” in its pursuit of arresting migrants, according to a new poll.
While 54 percent said ICE has used its power too aggressively, the sentiment was even greater among Democrats at 83%, according to a poll by PBS News, NP and Marist.
Nearly half of Republicans, by contrast, said ICE’s actions are appropriate and an additional 31% said the agency had not gone far enough in enforcing Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
The vast majority of Americans (80%) support the U.S. government's deportation of migrants without permanent legal status who have been convicted of a violent crime.
More than half of Americans - and 83% of Democrats - say ICE has gone ‘too far’ in arresting migrants: poll
The poll follows a month of heightened tension over immigration as protests against ICE broke outRhian Lubin (The Independent)
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Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws aren’t keeping up
Schools and lawmakers are grappling with how to address a new form of peer-on-peer image-based sexual abuse that disproportionately targets girls.
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Stop Killing Games - EU Initiative 1 MILLION ACHIEVED! + More signatures needed
Edit2: As of third of July we've achieved the minimum amount of 1 million signatures! But organizers recommend as many signatures as possible to cover for possible invalidations (1.5M would be ideal). If you have not yet signed, you can still help!
Onto the post.
Yarr citizens of the high seas! The Stop Killing Games movement is still ongoing and we've recently had a second wind. It's within reach!
We're all lovers of media in here, and games currently have no safeguard that guarantees that they won't be locked down long after being released and abandoned. If crackers help us, they can still be played long into the future, but many times there isn't such a possibility, specially in multiplayer games.
This initiative seeks to change that by mainly:
- Disallowing planned obsolesce in paid video games. (Ex: By disallowing phone-home based DRM after the game reaches end of life. Like in Ubisoft's The Crew)
- Ensuring that paid multiplayer games can still be reasonably played long into the future. (Ex: By releasing relevant server hosting software)
If you didn't sign yet, there is only one month left. Tell your friends too.
Do you live in the EU?
- You can sign it here: eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/…
Do you live in the UK?
- You can also sign a different one here: petition.parliament.uk/petitio…
Do you live elsewhere or would like to know more?
Disclaimer: Reminder post, sort of relevant since piracy movements have much to benefit from this initiative.
Have a fine day!
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Either stopkillinggames.com has crashed...
Or the counter has exceeded its max possible value.
UPDATE:
We've done it.
Don't stop signing up!
Get these damn numbers as high as they can go!
...
Clocked at about 16:13 UTC/GMT, or 4:13 PM UTC/GMT, Thursday July 3rd, 2025.
...
Fuck July 4th.
Gamers....
This is our independence day.
Telescopio Einstein, anche due premi Nobel a favore della candidatura di Sos Enattos
La Sardegna sarebbe "un sito eccellente" per ospitare il telescopio Einstein : a dirlo sono stati due premi Nobel per la fisica, Arthur McDonald e Takaaki Kajita , che hanno espresso il loro sostegno alla candidatura italiana durante un evento a Expo2025 Osaka organizzato dall'Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare nell'ambito della Settimana della Regione Sardegna.
Arthur McDonald e Takaaki Kajita, insigniti del premio Nobel nel 2015 per i loro studi sulla massa dei neutrini, hanno avuto modo a Osaka di parlare della cooperazione scientifica tra Italia e Giappone nel campo delle onde gravitazionali e hanno anche dimostrato di apprezzare le caratteristiche uniche che contraddistinguono il sito sardo di Sos Enattos, candidato dall'Italia a ospitare il futuro rivelatore di onde gravitazionali.
Einstein Telescope, even two Nobel Prize winners in favor of Sos Enattos' candidacy
They are the physicists Arthur McDonald and Takaaki Kajita: their support for the Italian project on the occasion of the Sardinia Week at Expo2025 in OsakaRedazione (Unione Sarda English)
Bradisismo Campi Flegrei stabile dopo terremoto di magnitudo 4.6: pubblicato il nuovo bollettino INGV
Secondo il bollettino INGV del 1° luglio, nei Campi Flegrei la sismicità settimanale (23-29 giugno) è in calo, con 38 terremoti e magnitudo massima 1.9. Si segnala però una forte scossa di terremoto il 30 giugno. Stabile il sollevamento del suolo a 15 mm/mese. Nella fumarola di Pisciarelli, oltre ai 94° C di media, si segnala una diminuzione dell'emissione di anidride carbonica.
Nei Campi Flegrei, secondo quanto emerge dall'ultimo bollettino dell'Osservatorio Vesuviano dell'INGV del 1° luglio 2025, si registra una sismicità settimanale in calo, ma con un importante evento sismico di magnitudo 4.6 avvenuto il 30 giugno. Durante la settimana di monitoraggio dal 23 al 29 giugno 2025 sono state registrate 38 scosse di terremoto, con una magnitudo massima di 1.9, un dato in diminuzione rispetto ai 58 eventi della settimana precedente. Il bollettino segnala il significativo terremoto di fine mese anche se fuori dal periodo di riferimento settimanale. Il sollevamento del suolo dovuto al bradisismo rimane stabile, con una velocità media di circa 15 mm al mese, in linea con il trend registrato da inizio aprile. Per quanto riguarda i parametri geochimici, la temperatura media registrata presso una fumarola a Pisciarelli è di circa 94 °C. Nello stesso sito, il flusso di CO2 dal suolo ha mostrato una rapida diminuzione locale, che dovrà essere verificata con i dati futuri.
continua su: geopop.it/pubblicato-bollettin…
geopop.it/
A podcast episode with heavy-weights of the Fediverse and ActivityPub - fredrocha.net
A podcast episode with heavy-weights of the Fediverse and ActivityPub - fredrocha.net
The main idea here is you post once on your own website, and automagically your content is displayed across the Fediverse (Mastodon, Flipboard, Pixelfed, WordPress, and Threads).Fred Rocha (fredrocha.net)
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Giuseppe Cesaro, “Si pubblicano troppi libri, abbandono l’attività di scrittore”
Lo scrittore Giuseppe Cesaro in una lunga lettera spiega i motivi della sua decisione: troppe uscite, pochi spazi in libreria, nomi famosi che tolgono spazio agli emergenti i motivi principali
> “Sui libri sventola bandiera bianca” potremmo dire citando un celebra del 1981 di Franco Battiato per raccontare la vicenda di Giuseppe Cesaro, scrittore di Sestri Levante nato nel 1961 e autore professionista dagli anni Ottanta. “Con “Fatico a ricordare il tuo viso. E, ancora di più, la tua voce” (La nave di Teseo) si chiude la mia vicenda di scrittore”. Così inizia la lunga lettera di Giuseppe Cesaro rivolta a tutti: editori, autori e lettori.
> Ma perché ha deciso di abbandonare l’attività di scrittore? Il suo non è un capriccio, ma un grido d’allarme legato al mondo dell’editoria oggi.
> Leggiamo di seguito la sua lettera in cui racconta la sua sofferta decisione.
La lettera di Giuseppe Cesaro
Giuseppe Cesaro, "Si pubblicano troppi libri, abbandono l'attività di scrittore"
Lo scrittore Giuseppe Cesaro in una lunga lettera spiega i motivi della sua decisione: troppe uscite, pochi spazi in libreria, nomi famosi che tolgono spazio agli emergenti i motivi principaliSalvatore Galeone (Libreriamo)
Mastodon 4.4 RC for developers si sta avvicinando alla sua versione finale: la caratteristica principale dell'aggiornamento è il supporto integrato per i post di citazione
Release v4.4.0-rc.1 · mastodon/mastodon
WarningThis is a pre-release! This has not been as widely tested as regular releases, although it is still tested on mastodon.social and some other servers. If you update to this release, you will ...GitHub
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Duolingo 365, l’inizio della fine…
Mi era passato di mente il dato a dir poco pazzo e avvilente di aver raggiunto il fantomatico slancio di 365 fottuti giorni su Duolingo… e la cosa è assolutamente terribile, perché se ne viene con il suo bel malloppo di implicazioni scomode. (A parte il fatto che non ho iniziato a usare il servizio […]
octospacc.altervista.org/2025/…
Duolingo 365, l’inizio della fine…
Mi era passato di mente il dato a dir poco pazzo e avvilente di aver raggiunto il fantomatico slancio di 365 fottuti giorni su Duolingo… e la cosa è assolutamente terribile, perché se ne viene con il suo bel malloppo di implicazioni scomode. (A parte il fatto che non ho iniziato a usare il servizio il 29 giugno 2024 come sembrerebbe, ma una o due settimane prima, perché nel corso dell’anno qualche volta ho perso dei giorni… cazzo di gufo.)
Innanzitutto… ora ho lo stato di “VIP”… che pare una roba da pazzi detta così, ma in realtà semplicemente aggiunge una scrittina “🔥 1+ year” sotto il nome nelle classifiche. Molto meh, ma… è ancora peggio il fatto che in un anno ho imparato relativamente pochissimo!!! Non poco quanto i tizi super anti-Duolingo dicono, ma comunque… フクロウのせいで、私の生命が危ない!!! Purtroppo non ho sia tempo che voglia di fare gamin’ a quanto pare, quindi sono nella cacca, e l’unika a parte usare anke Anki sarebbe di procurarsi qualche manga tipo per i bimbi dell’asilo, non lo so… ☠️
![June 29:[I'm on a365 day learning streak!duolingo]> però ora basta.](https://poliverso.org/photo/preview/1024/51643566 "June 29:[I'm on a365 day learning streak!duolingo]> però ora basta.")
Digital Freedoms Enshrined: Building Unbreakable Constitutional Safeguards for Human Rights in the Age of Surveillance and Algorithms
PDF.
This report advocates for the thorough protection of fundamental human rights in the digital age, arguing that addressing rights protection at a constitutional level offers a stronger, more enduring framework for confronting emerging digital threats than ordinary legislation alone. As digital technologies increasingly influence the exercise of civil and political rights, as well as other fundamental freedoms, robust constitutional safeguards are essential for addressing new challenges—from unwarranted surveillance and censorship to algorithmic governance and data monopolies.Enshrining digital rights in a constitution offers a uniquely durable and robust framework for safeguarding fundamental rights against novel challenges in the digital era. Because constitutional provisions are harder to amend and take precedence over ordinary laws, they help anchor protections for fundamental rights and freedoms across evolving technological contexts. By embedding digital rights in a constitution—often a nation’s most symbolic articulation of shared values—countries can ensure consistent and uniform protection across various jurisdictions, especially in federal systems, while also providing stronger checks against both governmental abuses, such as unwarranted surveillance or censorship, and potential overreach by private actors, including large technology companies or data monopolies. Beyond its legal strength, constitutional recognition sets a clear standard for ethical and accountable corporate conduct and sends a powerful signal at home and internationally that digital rights are taken seriously and safeguarded at the highest legal level.
This report examines the impact of digitalization on fundamental rights and freedoms, discussing how modern digital technologies influence fundamental rights—particularly civil and political rights—and also considers the various actors that shape these rights in the digital age, outlining ways to ensure accountability beyond traditional governance structures. It is divided into several sections that collectively provide an overview of the current landscape of digital rights issues, outlining existing constitutional protections and highlighting considerations for strengthening these protections to meet the challenges posed by the digital age.
The Introduction provides a general introduction and overview, while Chapter 1 delves into how digitalization affects core civil and political rights. This chapter includes an analysis of how freedoms such as speech, expression, association and non-discrimination are being reshaped by modern digital technologies.
Chapter 2 explores the adaptation and expansion of constitutional protections to address the novel challenges presented by digital technologies, covering a range of emerging digital rights, such as digital privacy, data protection, the right to informational self-determination, and rights related to Internet access and connectivity. The chapter also discusses rights aimed at ensuring democratic participation in the digital era and highlights the importance of new rights such as the right to digital disconnection and cybersecurity. To understand how different countries have addressed these issues in their national constitutions, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) has mapped constitutional provisions on these rights, capturing global comparative examples. Additionally, selected case law examples illustrate how courts around the world interpret constitutional rights within digital contexts, often navigating the balance between competing rights and addressing matters of public interest and security.
Chapter 3 assesses the role of new actors, particularly tech companies, and public–private partnerships in the digital domain. It discusses the horizontal application of rights as one way forward in ensuring that non-state actors that assume or are vested with quasi-state powers respect fundamental rights.
The report ends with some short conclusions in Chapter 4.
Previsioni del tempo dieci volte più rapide e mille volte meno impattanti dal punto di vista energetico grazie a un nuovo modello del Centro meteo europeo
Previsioni del tempo sempre più accurate, generate dieci volte più velocemente, con un consumo energetico mille volte inferiore a quello richiesto dai metodi di previsione tradizionali.
Per il Centro europeo per le previsioni meteorologiche a medio termine (Ecmwf), il cui Data Centre è ospitato al Dama Tecnopolo di Bologna, un ulteriore passo in avanti grazie all’utilizzo dell’intelligenza artificiale, con l’introduzione di un nuovo modello di previsioni meteorologiche che permetterà ai 35 Paesi membri di Ecmwf di migliorare in maniera decisiva i loro servizi al pubblico.
Aifs Ens, questo il nome del nuovo modello diventato operativo il primo di luglio, sarà disponibile per i servizi meteorologici nazionali collegati ad Ecmwf nelle prossime settimane. Il modello permette di costruire diversi scenari probabili su come si svilupperanno le condizioni atmosferiche e sfrutta le opportunità offerte dall'apprendimento automatico e dall'intelligenza artificiale, offrendo un miglioramento del 20% in accuratezza rispetto ai modelli fisici tradizionali.
“Quella introdotta da Ecmwf- dichiara Vincenzo Colla, vicepresidente della Regione Emilia-Romagna con delega allo Sviluppo della rete regionale Alta tecnologia e Tecnopolo di Bologna- conferma la qualità della scelta della Regione di ospitare a Bologna il Data centre del Centro europeo per le previsioni meteorologiche a medio termine, una struttura che continua a fare del Dama Tecnopolo un punto di riferimento per la comunità scientifica internazionale, capace di tenere insieme tecnologia e umanesimo. Le previsioni del tempo sono un elemento sempre più centrale nella nostra società, determinanti per garantire la sicurezza dei cittadini, ma anche per uno sviluppo economico che può contare su strumenti di sicurezza per il territorio”.
Previsioni del tempo dieci volte più rapide e mille volte meno impattanti dal punto di vista energetico grazie a un nuovo modello del Centro meteo europeo
Grazie all’utilizzo dell’intelligenza artificiale, il nuovo modello aumenta l’accuratezza delle previsioni meteo globaliprotezionecivile.regione.emilia-romagna.it
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Crunchyroll Accidentally Reveals They've Been Using ChatGPT for Sub Translations
Crunchyroll Accidentally Reveals They've Been Using ChatGPT for Sub Translations
Anime viewers have spotted evidence that Crunchyroll is using ChatGPT for translating its subtitles.Ami Nazru (CBR)
Kanye West officially banned from entering Australia
The controversial musician, who is married to an Australian, has officially been banned from entering the country.
Archived version: archive.is/newest/news.com.au/…
Note: Reposted the story, since the original post was not in compliance with the guidelines.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
[EN] v11.28.0 Release Notes
v11.28.0 Release Notes | Floorp Release Notes & Blog
Discover the main changes in the latest Floorp v11.28.0.blog.floorp.app
Kanye West was denied entry to Australia after releasing antisemitic song
Minister reveals Kanye West was denied entry to Australia after releasing antisemitic song
The rapper had a valid visa cancelled over antisemitic song lyrics, Australia's Immigration Minister has revealed.RNZ News (RNZ)
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India accuses Prada of cultural appropriation over sandals
The Kolhapuri chappals inspired a new Prada design. The luxury brand only acknowledged this fact after critics accused it of replicating the iconic sandals without recognizing the footwear's cultural roots.
Archived version: archive.is/newest/dw.com/en/in…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
US to halt shipment of weapons pledged to Ukraine, White House says
The US is halting shipments of some promised air defence missiles and weapons to Ukraine due to concerns about its own stockpile levels, officials said. Meanwhile, Moscow has intensified its missile and drone strikes against Ukraine.
Archived version: archive.is/newest/euronews.com…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Snakes On a Plane 2? Passenger Caught With 16 Live Reptiles
While the smuggling attempt was foiled, it is further evidence of an alarming trend.
Buy European: Miele, Rex Electrolux, Beko (Turkish, don't get into that), Smeg, Candy, AEG, etc...
Don't want to jinx it, but my Electrolux washer-dryier is 7 years old and still like new, despite being relatively cheap and despite combined machines being more problematic.
Smeg
They make acceptable and pretty toasters and similar appliances, but avoid this brand like a plague for fridges
Chris Robinson Brotherhood - BIg Moon Ritual (2012)
Che Chris Robinson fosse un inguaribile 'fricchettone' è un dato di fatto che ormai dovrebbe essere risaputo. Che fosse però così fricchettone ed anacronistico forse non se lo aspettava nessuno... Leggi e ascolta...
Chris Robinson Brotherhood - BIg Moon Ritual (2012)
Che Chris Robinson fosse un inguaribile 'fricchettone' è un dato di fatto che ormai dovrebbe essere risaputo. Che fosse però così fricchettone ed anacronistico forse non se lo aspettava nessuno. Così, chiusa (temporaneamente, speriamo tutti) l'avventura dei Black Crowes, il frontman della Georgia si lancia anima e cuore in questa nuova avventura solista, realizzando il terzo disco della carriera lontano dal fratello Rich. Forse, però, non dovremmo neppure definirlo come un disco solista. Già dai due album del 2003 e del 2004 (l'altalenante New Earth mud e l'esaltante This Magnificent Distance) Robinson si era circondato di una vera e propria band, ribattezzata New Earth Mud, e non solamente da un gruppo di turnisti scelti per l'evenienza... rootshighway.it/recensioni/crb…
Ascolta: album.link/i/523824703
Home – Identità DigitaleSono su: Mastodon.uno - Pixelfed - Feddit
Big Moon Ritual by Chris Robinson Brotherhood
Listen now on your favorite streaming service. Powered by Songlink/Odesli, an on-demand, customizable smart link service to help you share songs, albums, podcasts and more.Songlink/Odesli
Big Tech CEOs Spent Millions to Influence Trump and Republican Lawmakers, Attempting to Secure Billions in Tax Handouts Paid For By Ripping Health Care, Food From Families
Warren Slams Big Tech CEOs for Spending Millions to Influence Trump and Republican Lawmakers, Attempting to Secure Billions in Tax Handouts Paid For By Ripping Health Care, Food From Families | U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
The Official U.S. Senate website of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusettswww.warren.senate.gov
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It’s too easy to make AI chatbots lie about health information, study finds
Well-known AI chatbots can be configured to routinely answer health queries with false information that appears authoritative, complete with fake citations from real medical journals, Australian researchers have found.
Without better internal safeguards, widely used AI tools can be easily deployed to churn out dangerous health misinformation at high volumes, they warned in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
“If a technology is vulnerable to misuse, malicious actors will inevitably attempt to exploit it - whether for financial gain or to cause harm,” said senior study author Ashley Hopkins of Flinders University College of Medicine and Public Health in Adelaide.
Il caos della montagna coreana invasa da miliardi di mosche dell'amore - Il blog di Jacopo Ranieri
Il caos della montagna coreana invasa da miliardi di mosche dell'amore - Il blog di Jacopo Ranieri
Con contegno inspiegabilmente giovale, l’escursionista si aggira tra i recessi di quello che alcuni tenderebbero senza particolari esitazioni a definire come l’Inferno in Terra.Jacopo (Il blog di Jacopo Ranieri)
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace could put sensitive data at risk because of a blind spot in default email behavior
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace could put sensitive data at risk because of a blind spot in default email behavior
Google and Microsoft fail in different ways, but both failEfosa Udinmwen (TechRadar)
Amazon Now Has 1 Million Robots Steadily Pushing Humans Out
Amazon Now Has 1 Million Robots Steadily Pushing Humans Out
Do the robots get their own bottles to pee in?AJ Dellinger (Gizmodo)
SLRPNK Community Discussion - July 2025
Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.
This July, we'll be talking about the SLRPNK Outage, the upcoming 50501 Protest, and fun projects to do with others to build community.
🌟 Community Highlights 🌟
- !Foraging@slrpnk.net - A new foraging community, where we come together to explore the bountiful wonders of the natural world and share our knowledge of gathering wild goods!
- !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net - A community about implementing urbanist improvements Via direct action
- !Signs@slrpnk.net - A community celebrating clever and inspiring anti-fascist art at demonstrations.
🔌 The Great SLRPNK Outage of 2025 🪫
Last month, SLRPNK went offline on the 4th of June, and lasted a total of 7 days; the longest downtime since its creation.
The length of that downtime was due to multiple unexpected and unfortunate circumstances, all intersecting at once. For one, our main Sysadmin, poVoq, had taken on obligations that took him outside of the country for an extended period of time (3 months). In addition, the other sysadmins that had physical access to the server coincidentally also had taken on responsibilities or had gone on vacation, which prevented them from being able to access the server as well.
As the server seemed to be working perfectly fine for a long period of time, it didn't seem like it would be much of a risk to leave it unattended for that duration. Unfortunately, things chose to go wrong after everyone who could attend to it, now couldn't..
The primacy cause of the outage was a recent change in IP assignment by our ISP, in addition to what looks like an very recent bug in our firewall software (IPfire).
Previously, our ISP would assign new IP's to us slowly, 3 times a year. But recently they have been assigning them more frequently. IPfire normally catches this, automatically changing the Dynamic DNS to the new IP, and all was dandy. However, before the trip, IPfire was updated, which introduced a new and yet unknown bug, which ultimately prevented it from automatically updating the DNS when a new IP was assigned. All other fail-safes previously put in place by poVoq to notify him of this problem also failed, which lead us to assume there was a hardware failure in the Firewall, preventing us from being able to access the server remotely.
However, a few days later, poVoq received signs of life in the form of an automated e-mail sent from the server, indicating that the it was still running, meaning something else was preventing access. They would have to find out what the new assigned IP was manually to access it.
With the help of a friend, they were able to help track down the new IP by performing a port-scan on over five hundred thousand IP's in a subnet that was known to contain our server, narrowing it down to 20 possible IP addresses by looking for open ports that are used by XMPP servers (as we also host an XMPP chat messaging service). After trying each one, they finally hit pay dirt, and were able to log in for the first time since the outage! By the 11th of June, we were back up and running.
We'll be taking many lessons from this event to bolster the reliability and accessibility of the server to hopefully prevent an outage of this scale from happening again, such as:
- Switching to a new and hopefully more reliable Firewall/Dynamic DNS software & adding additional out of band notifications on IP change
- Installing a KVM on the main firewall that is connected to a separate IP to make it possible to connect to it directly, giving us the ability to reboot and troubleshoot remotely even if the main connection is lost.
- Experiment with a Wireguard tunnel on a rented VPS, which could allow for a more stable connection, and could be used to host essential services like our XMPP, which would help it remain accessible even if the main server went down.
As unfortunate as this outage was, due to the efforts of poVoq and his friend, it was thankfully far, far shorter than it could've been, and we're extremely grateful to have such a dedicated admin hosting our little corner of the web. Three cheers to poVoq and his friend! 😁
📢 Good Trouble ✊🏿
Last month on June 14, millions took to the street in strategic non-violent protest. News about the results of past protests, and announcements of new direct actions are welcome in all of the localized communities at 50501.chat.
While protests are good for demonstrating unrest with the regime, they are also extremely potent milieus for sharing information with like-minded individuals. It is typical to find political and labor organizations distributing information from xeroxed flyers to printed newspapers. If you feel inclined, we encourage you to invite people you meet in the streets to join the Fediverse. If you come up with flyers or zines to help do this, we'd love it if you shared it in this month's meta to help others do the same.
John Lewis was a civil rights leader who eventually transitioned to become a United States politician. He is famous for saying, "Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America." This July 17th, organizations across the world are mobilizing for a sequel to the wildly successful "No Kings" protest, called "Good Trouble Lives On" in honor of the five-year anniversary of John Lewis' death of cancer at 80 years old.
While this protest movement is nominally for the United States, the trend towards authoritarianism as the climate crisis worsens is a world problem. Mobilizations have already been announced in Florence and Dublin. This is not a 'US' problem, it's an 'us' problem. If we hope to push back authoritarianism, we must do it together through solidarity. The signs in the streets remind us that we are part of a world-wide resistance movement - from Ukraine's resistance to Russia's imperialism, Palestine's struggle to be free from the tyranny of the IDF, to the barricades that just went up recently in Belgrade, Serbia. We are all connected.
🛠 Fun Projects to Build Community 👩🏾🏭
Meeting your neighbors, fostering goodwill, and having a real sense of community is a powerful thing. It's the main building block that all other actions we have in our arsenal rely upon. Without it, we're far less able to build the vision we all share of a more hopeful future, and less capable to resist the darker visions others have for us.
With summer here and hopefully some good weather gracing a good amount of us, now's the time to bust out some tools (maybe from your local library if they have a tool section!), gather some friends, heed the primal call, and do some solarpunk style community building with direct action!
In the clickable drop-down below are a few ideas to get started. I'm hoping more of you chime in with your own in the comments as well! 😁
::: spoiler 🔽 Community Projects🔽
* First off, seek out a local group already engaging in mutual aid in your area. That could take the form of a Food Not Bombs chapter, a local Anarchist group, or even a progressive church if you're in a more rural area and that's all that's around. This is possibly the best method to meet like-minded folk who you can befriend, and who will already be open to the idea of fostering and building community with you, and might even join in on some of these other projects!
* If know of an area near you where food security is an issue, building a community garden is a great way to alleviate that while also fostering a sense of community.
* If you have a front yard, that could be a great place to create a small community garden that your friends and neighbors could partake in with you! But If you live in an HOA which doesn't allow that, it might be worth considering reaching out to receptive neighbors and collectively joining the HOA board to change the rules. Alternatively, if you can manage to find a larger piece of land to, that would be ripe for a . Garden's like these are incredibly powerful community building tools, and could also be a main source of food to stock your community fridge with!
* Little Free Libraries are a great way to spread goodwill with your neighbors, and encourage kids in your neighborhood to read. It's also a good place stock with cool zines! (Check out our zines community at !zines@slrpnk.net for info on how to make them and other ideas)
* Engage in some Guerilla Gardening! It's not only fun to do with friends, but (over time) can create green spaces with lots of shade, or even become , which can be a gathering place for your community to hang out and connect (and that shade will be critical to making climate change a little more bearable too). Just be sure to use native species in your area! They're already adapted to your local climate, and won't out compete with other native plants. Do your research!
:::
🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪
Now it’s your turn to share whatever you’d like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community you’d like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If you’re a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction 😀
SLRPNK Community Resources:
Community Wiki - Moderators: you can create your own Wiki here for your communities!
Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)
Etherpad - Collaborative document editor
Guerrilla Gardening: Resist and Reclaim Our Common Spaces
Guerrilla gardening is more than just planting seeds in neglected urban spaces. It’s a form of civil disobedience that challenges the status quo of urban development, land ownership, and…JM Heatherly (Weeds & Wildflowers)
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What drew you to ActivityPub?
This question was asked by mike@flipboard.social on Dot Social's latest episode about the blogosphere on Fedi.
johnonolan@mastodon.xyz: "we wanted to connect Ghost blogs to each other, but then we discovered ActivityPub"
pfefferle@mastodon.social: "we wanted to connect WordPress blogs to each other, and ActivityPub has been the most successful attempt"
[paraphrased for brevity]
Did you catch the subtext? Both those answers, and my own answer with NodeBB contain the same seed idea... that we originally wanted to connect our software with itself only. We went through years of building a company and vying for profitability that it never occurred to us to work towards cross compatibility with anyone besides out own software.
Then ActivityPub came along and quite literally expanded the potential for the entire endeavour a hundred-fold, because not only are you connecting your own software to each other, but every other ActivityPub enabled software in existence. Blogs, microblogs, forums, image boards, etc. all with a built-in user base ready from the get-go.
It's no wonder that after discovering AP, it becomes the protocol to utilise.
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julian:
Then ActivityPub came along and quite literally expanded the potential for the entire endeavour a hundred-fold, because not only are you connecting your own software to each other, but every other ActivityPub enabled software in existence. Blogs, microblogs, forums, image boards, etc. all with a built-in user base ready from the get-go.It's no wonder that after discovering AP, it becomes the protocol to utilise.
This feels like a misattribution of cause and effect. Particularly, this bit stands out:
julian:
a built-in user base ready from the get-go.
It's not the protocol that brings the value; it's the user base that you gain access to. Unfortunately, the way the protocol gets used currently (not ActivityPub) is not sufficiently defined, and brings with it too many constraints to be able to reach full potential. Access to the existing user base comes at a cost.
---
To share my own story, what drew me to ActivityPub was less ActivityPub itself, but rather that Mastodon claimed to use it.
I had flirted with distributed social networking in the past -- identica, diaspora*, GNU Social -- but ended up mostly active on Twitter, because that's where "my people" were. But of course, Twitter was steadily getting to be uninhabitable, and the value of being on Twitter was eventually outgrown by the cost of being on Twitter:
- 2008: I join Twitter
- 2009: I have fun on Twitter and make friends
- 2010: ads were introduced in the form of "promoted tweets"
- 2011: trending hashtags became trending phrases
- 2012: API restrictions, limiting apps to 100,000 users, cutting off competitors
- 2014: a greater focus on "viral content" instead of talking to friends, which helped propel Gamergate
- 2015: shadowbans made some people invisible; quote tweets meant i started seeing a lot of toxic garbage due to dunking culture
- 2016: reverse chronological timeline is no longer the default; Twitter rebrands as a "News" app instead of a "Social Networking" app; entirely too many out-and-avowed Nazis harassing me; added to a transphobe's blocklist which gets imported by Wil Wheaton and prominently advertised in his pinned tweet, leading to my account getting shadowbanned
- 2017: I stopped using Twitter
- 2018: CEO Jack Dorsey states during an earnings call that "We are not a social network. We do not benefit from social graphs. People come to us when they're interested in events happening in the world [...] We've been biasing a lot more of the service towards interest and topics."; I deleted Twitter
Luckily, in November 2016, a comrade of mine posted about mastodon.social as basically "Twitter without Nazis". So people moved there in waves; the April 2017 wave was a sort of cambrian explosion that brought a lot of cool people into the same space. In many ways, it was the peak era; this era lasted through 2019 or so.
Being what you might call a "power user", I got involved on the Mastodon issue tracker, reporting bugs, making feature requests, and eventually writing the documentation at the tail end of 2019 (and revamping it in the latter half of 2022). And of course, Mastodon was powered by "ActivityPub". So I looked into it.
There was a dream idea of multiple disparate services interoperating on a commonly shared set of social functionality. It sounded great! "What if you could use your Twitter account to follow a YouTube channel, comment on a YouTube video, and so on?" After the relative success of Mastodon in April 2017, Gargron was toying around with an ActivityPub-powered clone of YouTube called Cobalt. (It didn't go anywhere, but PeerTube filled that niche soon after.) It felt like the App.net dream might actually come true, on a far grander scale. Unfortunately, it didn't quite end up playing out that way.
Maybe part of the disillusionment was that by several indications, Mastodon was going the way of Twitter... in a concerning way. It wasn't as bad as Twitter by any means, since at the very least the quality of the service was still there. The moderation was still worlds better than Twitter. It was still "Twitter without Nazis"... but it felt like Mastodon was slowly repeating Twitter's mistakes. In 2018, Mastodon added a "trending hashtags" feature, which was met warily by early users and eventually led to its removal... although it eventually got added back and expanded on with trending links (although concerns remained) and also trending statuses (although concerns remained).
So, what do you do when one "ActivityPub" project starts going in a direction you don't like? Well, the promise of open decentralized networks is that you should be able to move to something else while still being part of the same network, right? ...right? Unfortunately, the more I learned and the more I saw things (d)evolve, I grew concerned that the fundamentals were unsound. When SocialHub came about, I tried writing some SocialHub threads about some of these problems. When the FEP process came about, I tried writing some FEPs. Meanwhile, I was growing somewhat distraught that progress had frozen, the Social CG had gone inactive, Mastodon was refusing to take responsibility for the de facto protocol it could have stewarded... The reversal of course on many early decisions came slowly at first, then much faster after November 2022 and the Elon Musk stuff. The revival of the Social CG gave me some more hope for a bit, but that has been waning over the past couple of years.
I have had to grapple with bigger questions of general strategy and in developing a theoretical understanding of digital social communication, and I have come to realize that I just do not believe in social media platforms at all anymore. If anything, I was trying to make friends and understand the world. I have only ever been able to feel that kind of environment with early Twitter (2009-2011 mostly, but it was definitely over by Gamergate), and 2017-2019 fedi. By now, most of "my people" have quit fedi or been driven away by a growing sense of cultural shifts and alienation from the spaces we used to inhabit, the spaces we carved out for ourselves.
I think what it comes down to is the promise that because these projects are open source and because the spec describes an open protocol, that anyone can get involved, that anyone can change things for the better. The reality has unfortunately not delivered. There are simply too many missing stairs. The true implicit protocol has ossified and remains widely inconsistent and undescribed. The software that has been built is fundamentally untestable and unverifiable, because it does not fully and formally define correct behavior. And the UX gaps seem nigh unsolvable, because they are caused by protocol issues bubbling up all the way to the UX layer. The best you can hope for is quadratic combinatorial explosion as N devs need to talk to N-1 devs... some of which they might not be aware of. You can never be sure of how other systems will interpret your activities, because the semantics are being overloaded by everyone, and you not only have zero guarantees, but you also have zero signals.
It's the sort of divide that I have called "fedi vs web" in a rambly thoughtpiece I wrote at the end of last year, though I never got around to continuing that series of articles because I wasn't sure anyone would really take them to heart. Perhaps the most effective thing I can do with my time right now is to learn more and research more and develop those writings and theories into concrete models so that I can prove the concepts rather than describing them over and over. And more than anything, I want those models to "scale" in the sense that others can easily adopt those models for themselves, but the models also need to be self-justifying so that they can't be captured, coopted, or compromised.
Ultimately, where I stand today is that connecting to the fediverse is valuable in that it brings access to users... but you have to give up a lot. Mainly, you are bound by the "lowest common denominator" user experience, where you can't even remove a follower in some cases because there is no formally specified way to remove a follower, and the "follow state machine" is horrendously infamously buggy because it depends on both sides keeping track of follow state, instead of only the sending side. You are bound by having to squeeze everything you output into a shape that Mastodon will find acceptable, because without Mastodon, you don't get to access most of those users that are probably the reason you're bothering to connect with the fediverse in the first place... and if it's not Mastodon, it's some other ad-hoc compatibility target like Lemmy. You have to struggle with the vast inconsistency that comes with everyone using the same terms with different meanings, with every implementation having its own quirks and undeclared requirements, some of which conflict with each other. You have to deal with the knowledge that your own desired feature set is immediately compromised by your peers not understanding you, and even if they understand you, it comes at a great loss of fidelity. You have to deal with the paper cuts and bruises and little-deaths that are taken for granted; the ambiguity, the uncertainty, the lack of guarantees; the burden of having to implement an entire web browser from scratch and also implement an entire mail server from scratch, and then still having your application logic to worry about.
The reason I'm still on the fediverse is because I have nowhere else to go. Everywhere else has simply become inhospitable.
---
All of this sounds cynical, and it probably is, but I do think that we can build better software, provided that we share the same goals and principles. I think that "connecting services with other services" is on balance an improvement compared to a world where services aren't connected to anything at all, but I would posit that we need to go further than that. We need to connect people and enable them to communicate more effectively. We need to build better avenues for self-expression. It turns out that you don't need to adhere to the fediverse model to achieve this. Rather than distributing the content, you can federate the identity. You can give people more control over where their posts end up being syndicated. You can build explicitly managed reified spaces that people can intentionally participate within. There's so much we can do, and we should be willing to evolve beyond a model where only services can exist. We should be willing to build a real Social Web, where the entire Web can participate.
(Somewhat ironically, I think that ActivityPub and ActivityStreams are better fit for actual "activity streams" rather than trying to manipulate a network of syndicated Notes. "Activity streams" have their place, but I don't think you can unify all of digital social communications under this one paradigm. Rather, we should recognize that resources can belong to multiple classes at the same time -- that Thing that's an Article might also be a Post, an Asset, a Review, and so on.)
Formally define a mechanism to remove a follower
EDIT: Some earlier discussion of this issue in #338 Currently, the spec allows you to send a follow request, and when it is accepted, you are added to the followers collection. But there is no cons...trwnh (GitHub)
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This is definitely something I’ve seen a lot of over the years. Take curation, for example. WordPress has a discovery portal for blogs and interesting content. So does Ghost. So does Medium. To some extent, so does Blogger.
A lot of these platforms get caught up in self-discovery and promotion amongst their own kind, when they’d all clearly benefit from showcasing a wider part of the Web regardless of underlying platform.
I really love the idea of Ghost’s “Reader View” which highlights articles from publications you’re subscribed to. It would be amazing to see this kind of utility and a social feed in all blogging platforms.
FundMECFS
in reply to db0 • • •“revolutionary state capitalist”
Often comes with some nice totalitarianism and atrocities sprinkled in.
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