Notices by James Dreben :mw: (jdreben@mastodon.world)

@aral When I first moved to Puerto Rico I was surprised how often I saw Casio watches. Usually in gold.

There is something so aesthetically pleasing about them. Quite elegant.

How Can You Help The Internet Archive? (A Repost) http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/how-can-you-help-the-internet-archive-a-repost/

"Software is a just a tool to help accomplish something for people - many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don't over focus on the specifics of the tools" - John Carmack

Source: https://reddit.com/r/programming/comments/11wenmz/software_is_a_just_a_tool_to_help_accomplish/

If you ask #ChatGPT the following prompt, it gives you a different answer each time.

> What is the quote I'm thinking of? When society is like this it's insanity to be sane.

For this kind of question, use Search and verify the source. #LLMs can be confidently wrong about who said what.

@alcinnz I think this is well said. Reading this made me realize that I guess I think about UX as a kind of world building. You are building a set of all possible experiences, the fundamentals of how users will interact with your world. A very important perhaps the most important aspect of an ‘app’ - the dimensions and stories with which your users can actually interact with an app truly defines the app itself.

#Framework now sells 2TB #SteamDeck upgrade drives - #TheVerge https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593352/steam-deck-framework-2tb-m2-2230-ssd

@dtgeek it's heartbreaking and confusing to me that so many see Facebook as equivalent to the internet. I know they have made 'free' internet and services available to much of the world but I think we'll look back in history at their actions and say the cost of data collection and abuse of users that is going on in this era is criminal.

As Twitter kills third-party apps, new life blooms on Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@dsilverman/109773714322145615#

Edit: Originally I linked to an archive to circumvent the paywall, but I recommend reading the author's post and using their link instead.

If anyone hits the paywall and wants to read without giving out a real email address, I recommend using Firefox Relay https://relay.firefox.com/

@alcinnz yeah best of luck to you. That’s the hard part. It sucks to have to fork it yourself. 😅

@alcinnz a maintainer right? Is this a FOSS project? Sorry I jumped in but didn’t understand all the context you gave in the first post

@alcinnz Hmm that sounds frustrating. Liked the first half of that message and then saw the ‘not getting published’. It’s just sitting there?

https://reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/10einih/greed_is_the_only_thing_that_is_stopping_us_from/

#ShowerThoughts #Reddit #XPost #TV

The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

#GenArt #GenerativeArt #AIart #AI #DarkForest #CozyWeb #DarkWeb #HumanContent #ContentGeneration #News

@Jdreben “The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing ‘content creators,’ and algorithmically manipulated junk.

It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees.”

I want to highlight the 'Dead-Internet Theory'. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/

"Many people will say we already live in this reality. We've already become skilled at sifting through unhelpful piles of 'optimised content' designed to gather clicks and advertising impressions.

4chan proposed dead internet theory years ago: that most of the internet is 'empty and devoid of people' and has been taken over by artificial intelligence."

#DeadInternet #DarkForest

@angsuman just read this very quickly. Good article. Glad the top recommendation is #Signal and it even honorable mentions #Matrix and Line. Good stuff people who use SMS primarily should read this.

I personally still have an aversion to WhatsApp and Telegram and Slack and Discord and even Line - but WhatsApp much more than the others - because they’re all privately owned for profit companies.

While we’re at it it’d be good to one day start idk encrypting our emails e.g #Tutanota

@f00fc7c8 I hope we protect artist’s livelihoods somehow because they’re more important than the tools. But now that the tools exist it really seems like the nature of our relationship with the product they are selling must adapt.

This is separate to me from the art itself which by nature of society must be commodified for the artist to make money.

If we had #UBI we could embrace rather than have to handle the transition into a world with these tools... #ImagineTheEndOfCapitalism

@f00fc7c8 100%. They have to make money to survive and before these tools existed their ability to do make money off such art was greater and/or it is now threatened.

What happened to the economics of portrait painting when photography came about? If tools make parts of making products much easier then their value goes down and that hurts the market I guess.

@alcinnz @usernameswift @abasu @yuletide I guess to me a truly open source competition where one piece of software is way better than the others is not a monopoly, it’s a winner baby.