Alex Schroeder 🐝 @kensanata@octodon.social

Being followed by a faceless and silent avatar is creepy.
Here’s my suggestion for newbies: set a picture and write at least one, preferably four posts that tell us something about yourself, about what to expect.
If you follow me, I will look at your profile and maybe I’ll follow back. But I’m not following a faceless and silent avatar.
Now... how to get this message out to newbies... 🤔

Some pictures taken with the bigger camera. Remember to mute the thread if you have seen enough. Apparently we will get new flowers in March. 😄
#Hippeastrum #Photography

The Latvian Radio Choir singing Rachmaninov's All-night Vigil, Op. 37 "Vespers". The best music for crying and programming, both at the same time. Here I am, tears streaming down my face, thinking about some data import into an Oracle database. And I keep thinking: this is the time we live in. Crying, chagrined, as the world slowly turns into a swamp.

"I’m feeling small because all these giants are standing on my shoulders!" – me, when thinking about copyright

A reminder of why I think deleting old posts on social media is important: "I don’t think they have much value going back months and years. I never read through years of tweeting history! This only benefits your enemies, never your friends." https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2017-04-27_Record_Keeping

I tried to buy the first season of The Expanse on Amazon but they wouldn’t let me because I’m in Switzerland and they are in Germany. I think I might have to try something else…
🏴‍☠️
#copyright #drm

Well, after having written that unhappy rant I figured it out. The important “handle” is the one in the middle between the two windows, not the one at the top which allows you to rearrange the two windows. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I like my iPad but sometimes I manage to open a split Safari window (seen on the screenshot on the right, with Firefox still running on the left) and I can’t see a way to close the window. What tentacle-fingered programmer decided this was a good idea what earthworm intelligence designed the user acceptance test this feature must have passed. Because this was tested, right? And it passed, right? And I’m not sitting here – professional programmer and all – helpless before the machine, right?

Know also that in this day and age it is not enough to ironically claim to be the thing. We all know about these replies. It’s also not enough to be shitposting. That’s as boring as spam itself. It has to be wrapped in enthusiasm, concern, fake counter arguments, politics, identity. I expect nothing less from the new AIs trained on all of it. All that is great, and all that is garbage online.

How can we flush out an AI amongst our followers? I’m thinking: if they were trained on the web then maybe their handlers made mistakes and didn’t carefully differentiate between texts written by humane humans and spammers. If I mention Viagra and Cialis, an AI trained on the web might think it a reasonable prompt and tell me something about these products. What do you think?
(I’ve been listening to the 99PI #podcast.)

Jack says: "Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵"
https://nitter.net/jack/status/1204766078468911106

When linking to Twitter I like to replace "twitter.com" with "nitter.net". Somebody on here showed me how to do it and it works even with all the adblockers I have installed.