The president vowed not to pardon his son Hunter—and then did so anyway.
What a stupid article from The Atlantic.
A willingness to evade the rule of law is the foundation of Donald Trump’s entire career in business and politics, not a nepotistic exception…Biden chose to prioritize his own feelings over the defense of his country.
What’s the point of this article? The rule of law obviously means fuck all now. Half of Trump’s cabinet are rapists… Trumphimself is a fucking felon, 34 times over but he’s still about to be sworn in as president.
Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok? If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year.
Sounds about right. The Macquarie Dictionary in Australia picked “Enshittification”. Sums up 2024 beautifully.
Making it harder for Google to give its own products preferential treatment might not actually drive people away from the company’s search engine–but it could make them second-guess Gemini.
Good! Gemini is still terrible. The fact that Google already has that “sprawling ecosystem and user base” means that they can slap it on all of their hardware and suddenly they look like a legit AI company with as many users as anyone else.
I can’t help myself thinking that I’m getting to the point where the bigger you are the more unappealing you become to my eyes.
And that’s true not just for social media platforms but for creators and personalities in general. I’m an absolute nobody in this world. My blog’s not famous, my work doesn’t spread around. And that’s a good thing. Because it means I can still do the things that matter and that is taking the time to interact with every single person that gets in touch with me.
I’ve been feeling this a lot lately too. You can have 1000+ followers somewhere and 99% of your interaction is Likes and Reblogs with little meaningful conversation, if any.
Or you can have five followers and make five legitimate friends.
Or maybe you have no idea how many followers you have, or how many people like your posts because you’re on something like Micro.blog. That’s been the most rewarding and engaging community I’ve ever found online, and it does it without internet points. Small indie web communities are where it’s at <3
Walmart is linking up with Roku to release a full-length Christmas movie that will let viewers buy products on their TV during specific parts of the story
The film is titled Jingle Bell Love and stars Joey McIntyre, a member of the boy band “New Kids on the Block…”
“Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming Administration.”
After facing significant backlash over the past few years, Zuckerberg has chosen to distance both himself and Meta from political involvement for the foreseeable future. - via ColumbiaOne, September 26, 2024
You see, cranberry farms have been moving towards more organic farming methods which preclude the use of pesticides and so to keep the insect population down, the farmers encourage wolf spiders to live in the bogs.
I’m not particularly… comfortable around spiders, so to speak, but wolf spiders are one of my favorite species. They’re like little shy tarantulas. Still wouldn’t be caught dead on a cranberry farm but I’ll take spiders over pesticides.
The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID…It’s also noteworthy that it’s a “snapshot” of time on Bluesky, meaning it could, and probably does, include since-deleted posts.
I mean in a way, it’s similar to the Internet Archive. But they never really archived social media accounts did they?
This dataset could be used for “training and testing language models on social media content, analyzing social media posting patterns, studying conversation structures and reply networks, research on social media content moderation, [and] natural language processing tasks using social media data,” the project page says.
This is literally made for training AI right? I guess it’s just a matter of whether or not the resulting chatbot is publicly released but then the actual data is already available anyway.
“A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data. We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so,” - Bluesky, official account
I don’t know. I can believe the devs aren’t personally training AI on it, but it’s definitely a thing you can feed to a LLM. Regardless of who physically does it.
Personally? I don’t have a problem with AI scraping the dumb shit I post online. But I can understand why an artist or seasoned writer wouldn’t want generative AI learning off of their trademark style and then bottling it up for a monthly subscription fee.
I don’t think this is a Bluesky issue, it just got caught in the middle because it’s in the spotlight right now. I’m not a programmer or an AI whisperer so I could totally be wrong, but couldn’t anyone create a dataset of a public social network’s content using their APIs and then train whatever they like on it?
It’s shitty, but the cat’s already out of the bag. If you’re posting anything online it can, and probably is, being trained on AI.
Update: Looks like they took down the data already:
I've removed the Bluesky data from the repo. While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake.
Musk’s lawyers now claim that users don’t actually own their profiles on the supposed “free speech platform.”
Of course not. That’s why corporate social media is terrible. Granted, it’s usually the other way around; taking an account that belongs to someone else because Elon wants the handle.
Lucky for him the US loves rapists. His bottom shelf hooch will continue to do just fine over here. Hell, he might even get nominated for a Cabinet position.
The billionaire and buddy to the president-elect jokes about buying the liberal network. At least we think he’s joking.
His acquisition of Twitter started out as a joke too. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t at least make an offer. Fascist regimes need their state run media and he’s just preaching to the converted on Twitter now.
If you’ve been using Chrome because it came as the default browser on your phone, you might want to try something new. If you’ve been using Chrome for 15 years because it was so innovative when it was introduced, that’s no longer the case, and you should definitely try something new.
I’d also add that if you’re using Chrome on iOS, you’re just using a shittier version of Safari that spies on you.
“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General,” Gaetz wrote.
Whoa he really doesn’t want that report to come out 😆
The FDA’s inspection took place in May, and Tom’s of Maine responded to its initial results in June. The FDA’s latest letter declares that the company’s June response was “inadequate,” so the agency is calling for further action.
Great way to freshen up after munching on some Boar’s Head deli meat with a side of listeria.
T-Mobile detected suspicious activity in a recent attempt to access customer data and kicked the cyber criminals out before they were able to infiltrate deeper levels of the network.
I knew he wouldn’t go down without a fight. He’s just prolonging the inevitable, but he’s going to be as difficult and obnoxious as possible in the meantime.
From 1600 to 1990, it is estimated to have moved about 10-15km a year. In the early 2000s, it sped up to around 55km a year…In the past five years, the magnetic north pole has significantly slowed down to about 25km a year.
At first glance it looks like a terrifying conspiracy theory about earth spinning off its axis and killing us all but I guess it’s pretty normal uneventful stuff.
“Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme. I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don’t know.
Never thought I’d feel so strongly about a terminal app but I’ve been obsessed with Warp Terminal for the last week. It has built in AI so you can use natural language when you don’t know where to go next. I wish they had this kind of thing circa 2009 when I installed Ubuntu on my old HP Pavilion.
I’ve spent so many nights trying to install some obscure program, screwing something up and ultimately installing dependencies for dependencies for dependencies and breaking stuff to the point where I throw in the towel.
This morning, The Pew Research Center…published a deep 122 page report that found that the news influencer landscape skews male and leans disproportionately conservative, creating a concerning imbalance in our online news landscape that could ultimately have profound political consequences.
I find the whole influencer thing pretty wack to begin with but we do need more liberals in the space. And women. We need fucking crazy leftist conspiracy theorists actually. Clearly there’s a market for it.
An Epic spokesperson subsequently confirmed that it has given the green light for the games to be hosted on the Internet Archive, telling PC Gamer, “We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org and people are free to independently link to and play these versions.”
Finally some not terrible news relating to the Internet Archive! I was OBSESSED with UT ‘99 on the Dreamcast back in the day. Happy to see another classic saved from falling into complete obscurity.
I’ll go as far as saying it feels more like original Twitter than Mastodon, too. I don’t know what it is, like I was on mastodon for two years before Bluesky came out and I had already built a pretty nice little community over there. But Bluesky somehow feels more welcoming. Or at least it feels more like what I remember about Twitter circa 2013 when I was still having fun.
I like that both Mastodon and Bsky are mostly made up of regular every day people. They’re both decentralized, which is a plus. Though I never really put any thought into that before I learned what it meant through using Mastodon.
But one big thing I missed about Classic™ Twitter was realtime updates. Everything from news to celebrities - without radical far right crypto bro influencers sprinkled in. Maybe that’s what I like; influencers aren’t really a thing on Bluesky and there’s no MAGA nonsense. It’s like Twitter pre-Elon and pre-crypto.