✨Ben Hamill✨ @benhamill@octodon.social

One of my various failings as a human being is my intense love of jazz-oriented video game soundtrack covers. And at the top of that niche, for me, is a Japanese band called Fuchniobe Quest.

This short playlist of standard Square-Enix favorites is anything but "standard." The arrangements here are playful and clever in ways that make these old tracks feel fresh. They're a great treat whether you played the games or not.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2j4eHPQyVyMH39xzcRyFA6WDyeWq2EJ_

If I didn't have too many projects going on, I would consider learning #mastodon enough to see if I could have GitHub/Gitlab-style reactions. Arbitrary emoji to posts would be awesome.

Waiting the snow by Kirokaze https://mastodon.social/media/4ixmiLLstM5EXhtvvK8

@benhamill Gaming it for evil might mean making lots of accounts just to raise eyebrows at someone/an instance. As usual, it comes down to the "whose opinion is credible?" question.

@benhamill I think it might be worth being able to view an instance (why isn't it just called a "server"?) with suspicion.

I mark a person with a raised eyebrow. My instance notes the raised eyebrows I've put on people from that instance, as well as total raised eyebrows. Eventually, everyone from that instance starts life with a raised eyebrow, and I get to set the number of raised eyebrows I want to see in my client.

MATRIX (2017): Set in a world like ours, one where everyone has seen THE MATRIX (1999), except that afterwards everyone became viscerally aware that film was true—all of humanity is living in a simulation.

More a documentary than an action movie, MATRIX captures the effect of this revelation on society. There are three kinds of people: those who didn't care; those who wanted to escape to reality; and those who fell into catatonia.

Spoons are an object of ridicule and dissent. They are banned.

the answer to many of the questions about harassment is "rely on your instance admin" - but right now, visibility on how to pick an instance is so low, you could very easily not know:

- who your admin is
- what the CoC for your instance is
- how soon can you expect a response

https://mastodon.social/users/creatrixtiara/updates/1863951

Read. Assimilate. These are serious points to consider. All in all, the community here seems to mostly view people suggesting changes as probably silly, probably trying to make it "too twitter", but this is legit. This is stuff that stops Mastodon from welcoming people who could benefit from it's systems.

I am by no means any sort of expert at running a Mastodon instance and am pretty much winging it on a couple tiny instances, but if you represent or know representatives of an underrepresented group looking to get an instance off the ground on a VPS but without a good picture of how to start, I'm willing to put some time into helping you set yourself up if you're interested, gratis.

Feel free to reach out and I'll see what I can do or point you to something closer to your needs.

If you design an AI, is this the environment you want to determine its system of decision making?
http://www.newsweek.com/2017/04/14/harvard-business-school-financial-crisis-economics-578378.html

But that also means that this issue is not insurmountable. That's a vanishingly small number of people!

In short, we can get our design shit together, or we can answer the Fermi Paradox with, "Being smart turns out to be dumb."

The problem now is that we're (for specific values of "we") literally building systems to outsmart ourselves. It's the worst, stupidest form of Singularity.

And it's because the standard is not, "produce goods and services for our society, species, ecosystem, and planet," but "produce value for the shareholders."

That evolutionary pressure is bad fucking news. Because you know what actually controls shares?

Hint: it's not humans.