It's the ten year anniversary of XKCD 1425, one of the all-time greats and one that resonates slightly differently today. Wrote up some notes on that here: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/24/…
To be honest, the fact that we now have this power is extremely scary, and I don't think we're seeing the ramifications just yet.
Tech companies will soon have the ability to scan every picture we send, every article we write and every conversation we have, in a way that can't easily be beaten by euphemisms or thinly-veiled references.
The obvious use cases are fighting CSAM, fighting spam, child safety, censoring all evidence of protests and finding everybody who expresses anti-government sentiments. The non-obvious use cases, which are, in many ways, even scarrier, are ensuring that people don't break platform rules.
Think "dating app where you can chat for free, but the app will ban you if you try to meet up IRL without paying a fee first."
This gives tech platforms weird powers and business models they never had before.
This won't affect Whats App (as long as end-to-end encryption holds), but it will definitely affect Tinder, Airbnb, Craigslist, Instagram, Uber, eBay etc.
And not just China, I like to watch people reading Reddit stories on YT when doing chores, and "redrum" (murder), "grape" (rape) and "spicy time" (sex) are words these people have to use to avoid drawing the ire of the allmighty algorithms.
For now that's just "simple" keyword and voice / face recognition. As tech progresses and models get smaller, it'll become a lot more pernicious.
I think a "no more discussions of copyright infringement and vaccine conspiracy theories on the internet" law (that actually works) is something we will get in the next 20-ish years in at least one major country.
🏠 Stěhování je vždy těžké a postihlo to také web infoek.cz.
🔄V současné době dochází k přesunu na nový server. Několik hodin nebudou publikovány nové příspěvky, web bude zcela nedostupný, bude docházet k problémům s načítáním obrázků a mohou nastat i další potíže....
🚀Brzy bude infoek.cz mít nový domov, aby mohl nadále růst.
A new service that helps web devs keep up to date on changes to support for web features; you can subscribe to RSS to get weekly reports on BCD changes. From your chums at @igaliameyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/202… (Vivaldi browser has a built-in feed reader, just sayin..)
I’ve been thinking about what a new protocol could be like, and I think there’s room for a suite of simple, strictly-defined protocols that collectively account for all requirements to federate. Something like that would be much easier to implement, and could therefore be bolted onto existing fedi backends.
diasporafoundation.org/ I heard diaspora is promising but I have never looked into it. I genuinely don't know what's "promising" about it but I do know that friendica supports diaspora (and some other protocols). I'm curious to how realistic it would be to make instance software that has dual support for diaspora & AP.
Out today: Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo. I’m actually gonna grab this from the local bookstore today while I’m out and about. amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/03…
"We need #UBI not to protect us from some future prospect of zero employment but to cushion the blow from the constant disruption that automation has imposed on the labor market for hundreds of years."
In honor of Frazer Hines's birthday, Big Finish is having a limited time sale where many of his stories are available at discount prices. bigfinish.com/search_results?s… #DoctorWho
One of the upcoming features is the drawing tablet assistant. Install Plasma 6.2 Beta, try out the assistant with your own device. If you find a bug 🪲, report it!
#TrinidadYTobago🇹🇹 anuncia que retirará las tres carabelas de Colón (que “descubrió” las islas en su tercer viaje) de su escudo de armas y las reemplazará por el instrumento musical nacional, el ‘steelpan’.
El ‘steelpan’ es a su vez una apropiación de un símbolo imperialista: los trinidadeños descubrieron que si martilleabas un barril de petróleo (traído por las multinacionales estadounidenses para llevarse el oro negro del país) podías afinarlo
In the September Community Office Hours, we chatted with the voice of our community - the Thunderbird Council! @dannycolin and @clokep, two current council members, talk about the council's origins, its responsibilities, and how to get involved.
To the extent one defines "enshitiffication" as "increasing margins in very tiny increments, at the cost of large damage to user goodwill", it is structurally pretty hard to enshitiffy open source. But...
I just learned from @podcast episode 303 (transcript at livingblindfully.com/lb0303tra…) that the percentage of working-age blind people that are unemployed hasn't changed in 60 years; it has stayed high. I'm not saying it's hopeless, but when we look at it this way, it seems obvious that we have to do something different. I don't know what, though.
That one stumps me as well. Educational outcomes are better, we have all this fancy technology to help us, what is the missing piece? Cynically, I want to suggest attitudes of sighted employers, but I have nothing to back that up.
I've looked at this at one point, and the percentage was very different between countries. US was the lowest I could find.
There was 0 statistical rigor to that analysis and the studies might very well have been comparing Apples to oranges, so take that with a grain of salt.
From Brian Vogel: Advice to those reporting accessibility issues to companies where accessibility is not one of their central focuses . . . groups.io/g/tech-vi/message/78…
ChevronWP7 was a "jailbreak" tool for Windows Phone 7 that abused the lack of HTTPS certificate validation to enable sideloading apps... Microsoft fixed this bug *but* in the process they talked to and worked with the ChevronWP7 team to offer a $9 unlock in the form of ChevronWP7 Labs, which would later be integrated into Windows App Hub as a $20 fee, and made free in Windows 10 Mobile
wait is apple's developer offering even comparable to what windows Phone had? when I read "sideload" and "unlock" I imagine it becomes fairly easy to install additional apps and without a limit; even though it's free, Apple's offering is still just painful for anyone to use unless you're developing the app (which is still painful, you just are generally moreso expected to be able to deal with it), because it must be self-signed and it only lasts like a week and you can only have like 3 apps at once (or was it 5? also some BS limit on the number of times they can be reactivated within X time period, last I checked)
was the windows phone thing equally awful to what Apple has been offering for years now? (price aside)
by "jailbreak" and the fact that windows apps are generally not very isolated and can do various interesting things at a closer-to-the-system-shell level (I don't know how this differs on Windows Phone 7, though), i also assumed this actually means you can install arbitrary things, not just those that could easily map to a PWA (easiest analogue to describe a certain kind of app; I don't mean web app, but restricted like an iOS or Android app would be, and a PWA is the best cross-platform concept like that); in which case Apple just clearly does not offer that and never have.
New from 404 Media: Google is serving AI images of mushrooms when users search for some species. Very risky, potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to find what mushrooms are safe to eat. Could have "devastating consequences" one expert said 404media.co/google-serves-ai-g…
The COSMIC development team is working on accessibility features! Fill out this survey to provide your input and help make #COSMICdesktop better! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…
Let's create Wayland Protocols but much more iterative.
Wayland Protocols has long had a problem with new protocols sitting for months, to years at a time for even basic functionality.
This is hugely problematic when some protocols implement very primitive and basic functionality such as frog-fifo-v1, which is needed for VSync to not cause GPU starvation under Wayland and also fix the dreaded application freezing when windows are occluded with FIFO/VSync enabled.
We need to get protocols into end-users hands quicker! The main reason many users are still using X11 is because of missing functionality that we can be shipping today, but is blocked for one reason or another.
the governance model of wayland-protocols is set up in such a way that encourages and sustains all of these problems. there isn't really a realistic path for doing this sort of iteration in that model; nor a path for me to fix any of the other issues as an "outsider."
The wayland-protocols governance model was created in the early days. People wanted lots of features in, we feared that many of them are designed like X11 and violate the Wayland design principles, and so there was more disagreement than agreement on how to design things in order to get the features end users need. We always wanted downstream projects to develop extensions first for themselves, then see if they work for others as well.
A big problem with Wayland extension is that their stability requirements are greater than those of a library ABI. If a library breaks ABI, one can at least vendor an old copy of the library with an app. That is not possible with Wayland. Protocol fragmentation hurts interoperability, which is why wide agreement on extension is very desirable. Getting wide agreement is also the hard part of design, as everyone knows.
Some Wayland extensions should get wide agreement, while others are fundamentally enabling something that will never get that wide agreement. A good example are the protocol extensions that make wlroots the modular base for anyone to build a custom environment by choosing and picking helper programs. That design is inherently against the fully integrated product design used by e.g. GNOME. Both have good reasons to exist.
I think in the past at least some people have seen the acceptance to wayland-protocols as means to force everyone to support the extension. It does not work like that. Some extensions should get wide adoption, others do not need to. That is how the wayland-protocols namespaces wp, xdg, and ext came about. It is possible for an ext extension to become widely supported, too, but there is usually not as wide agreement initially that it would have made it into wp.
What are the concerns of easily accepting new extensions into wayland-protocols? Fragmentation, causing interoperability problems between apps and compositors. Some fragmentation is unavoidable, but I think it is still good to at least try to minimize it by looking for wide acceptance. Doing major revisions to extensions is a breaking change too, increasing fragmentation.
But anyone can just make extensions and ship them outside of wayland-protocols. This was even a goal in the early days when @krh was still developing Wayland. Let downstreams mature extensions, and then let them grow their support organically.
I think that idea still carries, but we need to think how to deal with the fragmentation.
wayland-protocols partly came about from the desire to have "blessed ground" for known-good extensions.
I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head as to why we have a problem now and why frog-protocols now exists.
When I talk to folks who develop compositors, the majority of them don't support this idea that protocols need to be perfect before they land. On the contrary, it seems to be burning people out to try to deal with that expectation. Also, I think that the "principles" had little influence on adoption of Wayland, but rather desperation to replace X11.
In practice, it does not seem to be as hard as it looks to get wide agreement, it's just much harder to get *universal* agreement. It often seems like the latter is necessary to get anything done, and that's something we need to put more effort into squashing.
There also seems to be a fear of "dead batteries", but I don't think that's something we should be concerning ourselves. Things tend to naturally work themselves out over time anyway.
Wayland, as used today, is already not functional without things that aren't in wayland-protocols. On the GNOME side, there's both private protocols and a mixture of private and public D-Bus interfaces. On the KDE side, they use private protocols and third-party protocols. Most other Wayland environments follow the KDE approach too. A lot of them are the same third-party protocols. That says to me we're not doing a good job of integrating things that are commonly needed.
Hello everyone! We've just made the first release candidate for version 0.17.0 of GoToSocial Adventurous admins who want to try the new features and help us spotting bugs can get the release from below:
⚠️ This release contains several database migrations which will run the first time you start up this new version. Be sure not to interrupt this migration process. This will take anywhere between a few seconds and an hour or even more (on slower hardware / big databases). Please be patient! Back up your database file before updating! We had to rejig the entire statuses table to introduce interaction policies (see below). ⚠️
Release highlights:
Interaction policies: This release gives you the ability to set interaction policies on your statuses using the settings panel. Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped. This feature is still a work-in-progress as we will almost certainly have some kinks to work out in terms of implementation etc, but we wanted to get it into people's hands as quickly as possible. User docs here: docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/… Federation docs here: docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/…
Much wider range of support for different media types: In this release we've embedded a webassembly build of ffmpeg into the GoToSocial binary, so that users can post many different types of media than previously, including mp3, flac, and other audio types, and many more video types. Admins: you don't need to have ffmpeg installed on your server for this to work.
Audio player: to complement the new media types, we adapted our current video player to also play audio, so people visiting your profile can play MP3s and FLACs. Album art is supported when embedded in the audio file!
Header/avatar alt text: You can now set alt-text for your avatar + header images, so that screenreader users visiting your profile can read a description of your beautiful face.
Better threading model for statuses: On the web view of a thread, conversations are now indented at different levels, to make it easier to see who's replying to whom.
Prefers-reduced-motion is now supported, so that folks with animations turned off in their operating system or browser aren't confronted with lots of animation when they open your profile.
Conversations view: You can now view a list of your direct message conversations, making it much easier to keep track of who you're talking to.
Import/export csv files: It's now possible to import Mastodon-compatible CSV files for accounts you follow and accounts you block, making it much easier to migrate across instances. Export of these files is supported too.
Exclusive lists: You can now mark lists as "exclusive", which means that posts from accounts in an exclusive list will show up only in that list and not in your home timeline.
Show/hide posts on your profile: Previously only Public posts were shown on your web profile. This is still the default, but you can now choose to show unlisted posts on your web profile too (the Mastodon default), or to show no posts at all.
Lots of new themes: solarized, brutalist, ecks pee, and more.
Store worker queue on restart: when you stop the instance, pending tasks are stored into the database, and loaded again when you start up the instance, so that no tasks get lost between restarts.
Thanks for helping us find bugs everyone! You've found some good ones so far and all the bug reports have been very specific and helpful, which is great! ^_^ We're working away on squashing them in preparation for v0.17.0-rc2.
One thing we've noticed so far is that some folks have struggled with the database migrations from 0.16.0 or below to 0.17.0-rc1. This is a reminder to please please please back up your database before doing this update, and also please please be patient and let the migrations run.
It's a huge set of migrations because we had to change big chunks of the statuses table for the new features, and for storage-saving reasons. If your database is small and new you probably won't even notice the migrations but if it's a large-ish database of a few GB and you're running on a low-powered machine they might take bloody ages.
If the migrations fail, running them manually is a huge pain in the arse, so the best bet is always to just restore your pre-update backup and try again; this is why we added the "back up your database" steps to the update instructions.
If you're running in very resource-constrained environments (ie., 512MiB ram machines, machines where you're pushing up against your disk size limit), you may want to free up a bit of overhead before doing the migrations, as we've seen (on SQLite) that they can be a bit demanding.
Anyway! As stated above, most people haven't had problems, but better safe than sorry!
We fixed some bugs! Quite a few bugs actually. And we snuck a new theme in there, and updated the way we distribute Accepts of interactions.
If updating to this release candidate from 0.17.0-rc1, there's just one little database migration to run, which should be quite fast.
For instructions to update to this release candidate from versions prior to 0.17.0-rc1, please read the release notes for v0.17.0-rc1 carefully, but replace all occurrences of rc1 with rc2.
If updating from 0.16.0 to this release candidate, there are several config file changes and some very large database migrations that will have to run.
We've found one bug in the RC so far to do with replies to statuses from remote accounts not being put into "pending approval" state. We'll make a fix tomorrow or so :) Apart from that, hearing positive reviews of this release candidate so far, so we're getting there!
Fixed a couple cheeky bugs related to status web views and pending replies not being marked pending correctly.
For instructions to update to this release candidate from versions prior to 0.17.0-rc1, please read the release notes for v0.17.0-rc1 carefully, but replace all occurrences of rc1 with rc3.
If updating from 0.16.0 to this release candidate, there are several config file changes and some very large database migrations that will have to run.
So far we've seen that there may be some memory issues for FreeBSD users running their instances with SQLite. The issue is that memory usage is far higher than it should be on those specific setups. We're currently investigating why this might be happening.
If you are one of the unlucky folks running into this issue, could you please try using this alternative build of the GoToSocial release candidate that we just uploaded, which uses a different SQLite driver?
Calling all coders! Developers! Programmers! Hackers! Whatever you want to be called 😊 Join the LibreOffice Development Workshop at our upcoming conference, and learn more about Git, Gerrit, C++, building large codebases and more: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl…
Darf ein evangelischer Theologe hinter die #Allmacht Gottes ein Fragezeichen setzen? Beginnt nicht das Apostolische #Glaubensbekenntnis mit der #Omnipotenz Gottes? Ich habe in der Bibel und bei #Bonhoeffer nachgelesen. Mein Blogbeitrag dieses Sonntags.
My wife Kirsten @MoonCat and I decided to give potential podcasting a go. I know, 'Not another one?' But we hope this might be a bit of light entertainment for you. Consider this a pilot to see how things go.
In this first episode we discuss a somewhat annoying Tiktok trend I heard about in a video, the point of hugging and our love of the 'Cautionary Tales' podcast from Tim Harford.
@menelion I've only literally just made it now, so I don't have an RSS feed or even sure how to set one up, but I've just put it up on my server, for those who don't want to go near youtube.
I have nothing against YouTube, it's just a matter of catching up quickly. If you need tips for setting up a podcast, ask here, I or someone else will definitely help.
@TheCube @jakobrosin Yeah, either install something like WordPress, or, I guess the geekiest way, to write a script that would generate the feed for you.
In der Schweiz zahlen Milliardäre einen höheren Steuersatz als in Deutschland und Menschen aus der Mittelschicht dafür einen viel niedrigeren. Eine Vermögensteuer ist machbar. Das Bürgerbegehren „Tax the rich“ sammelt dafür gerade EU-weit Unterschriften. #TaxTheRich gew.de/aktuelles/detailseite/w…
Adventurous admins who want to try the new features and help us spotting bugs can get the release from below:
miki
in reply to Simon Willison • • •To be honest, the fact that we now have this power is extremely scary, and I don't think we're seeing the ramifications just yet.
Tech companies will soon have the ability to scan every picture we send, every article we write and every conversation we have, in a way that can't easily be beaten by euphemisms or thinly-veiled references.
The obvious use cases are fighting CSAM, fighting spam, child safety, censoring all evidence of protests and finding everybody who expresses anti-government sentiments. The non-obvious use cases, which are, in many ways, even scarrier, are ensuring that people don't break platform rules.
Think "dating app where you can chat for free, but the app will ban you if you try to meet up IRL without paying a fee first."
This gives tech platforms weird powers and business models they never had before.
This won't affect Whats App (as long as end-to-end encryption holds), but it will definitely affect Tinder, Airbnb, Craigslist, Instagram, Uber, eBay etc.
Simon Willison
in reply to miki • • •miki
in reply to Simon Willison • • •And not just China, I like to watch people reading Reddit stories on YT when doing chores, and "redrum" (murder), "grape" (rape) and "spicy time" (sex) are words these people have to use to avoid drawing the ire of the allmighty algorithms.
For now that's just "simple" keyword and voice / face recognition. As tech progresses and models get smaller, it'll become a lot more pernicious.
I think a "no more discussions of copyright infringement and vaccine conspiracy theories on the internet" law (that actually works) is something we will get in the next 20-ish years in at least one major country.