Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 47

Following logically from that ...
"Oh, and it goes without saying that if the people of Group X are staring at you demandingly, waiting for you to hate the right enemies with the right intensity, and ready to castigate you if you fail to castigate loudly enough, you may be hanging around the wrong group ... Forgive your friends if some of them suggest that maybe Group X wasn't so awful after all..."
- #EliezerYudkowsky
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pvim9PZJ6qHRTMqD3/p/JKxxFseBWz8SHkTgt

It's always seemed to me there's an ethical business opportunity here ...

The degree to which non-geeks don't understand backups, why they matter, how to do them, and how to care for them, is deeply, existentially terrifying to me. There is an entire generation of family photos (and videos) whose copies exist only on one aging Windows PC, owned by a grandparent, with a few highlights posted on FB and other datafarms, who carefully prevent their long-term preservation by archiving services like the #WaybackMachine.

@noordinaryspider yup, the web is pretty much unusable on older PCs without a script blockers of some kind. I permanently allow JS I know to be libre (eg fediverse instances), and allow selected scripts when I have to, for online payments, banking, goverment websites etc. I never "allow all scripts on this page" though, that tends to open me up to datafarming by "tag managers", Goggle Analticks, anti-social media buttons, and so on.

@unklebonehead I assumed it was more like the anti-Gab, but *shrug*

All good points @bob but a drop in share price is not one of its failure modes. That CNN article says the company isn't even losing money, just not making profits as big as some investors expected this quarter. For exactly the reasons you give (critical mass of star users), plus still-growing overall user numbers, a low share price will just tempt more investors to buy in, hoping to buy low and sell high.
@mike

@mike Mastodon the software project? True. But there's nothing stopping an individual from setting up their own fediverse instance and following exactly the same business model as Titter. Start with a gratis, ad-free trap. Wait until a critical mass of wild users have wandered into it and sunk some costs. Then ramp up the ads and/or #datafarming. Account migration could migitate that, but they could just turn it off. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

"Similarly, if you wanted to ensure that a group of "rationalists" never accomplished any task requiring more than one person, you could teach them only techniques of individual rationality, without mentioning anything about techniques of coordinated group rationality."
- #EliezerYudkowsky
(2/2)

"I can think of ways to sabotage someone's intelligence by selectively teaching them certain methods of rationality. Suppose you taught someone a long list of logical fallacies and cognitive biases, and trained them to spot those fallacies in biases in other people's arguments ... And you do not warn them to scrutinize arguments they agree with just as hard as they scrutinize incongruent arguments for flaws."
- #EliezerYudkowsky
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate

@bob @certifiedperson good suggestions, would definitely work for some people. This particular elder is not the LibCom type, their leftism consisting mainly of voting consistently for leftish parties (often to the left of #NZ's major liberal party "#NZLabour"), and arguing for abandoning neo-liberal policy and returning to a social democratic approach. They are also living in the country, so they get as much in-person time as any of us can manage, and local leftism is thin on the ground :/

@perflyst see the preceding post to which that one was a reply. Basically just giving you props for being the first person to tell me about Nitter :)

#HatTip to @perflyst for the headsup.

#Nitter.net is to Titter as Invidio.us is to ThemTube. It provides a freely licensed (#AGPL) web app for their backend. You can login to your T account without using their nonfree Javascript, and manage it in ways that are a pain with the JS-free, legacy version of the T web UI.

@onepict life imitates satire:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2019/04/19/facebook-considering-stricter-regulations-on-social-platforms/

Engrish! 😜

I'm starting to notice a pattern of lonely elders spending a lot of time listening to talk radio and scrolling FarceBook and going down an alt-right rabbit hole. In one particular case, an elder in my family - a staunch lifelong leftist - started sharing anti-Greta videos, some of which quickly turn into rants about the mythical #GreatReplacement. We're all concerned. What can we do?

#ShowerThought imagine a hybrid blog/wiki platform where the primary author UI is a blog editor, but drafts are saved and versioned as wiki pages. The visitor UI would be a bit like #CoActivate.org, with separate sections for reading blog posts in published order, and for browsing through wiki pages. The wiki could also be private, allowing a trusted group to give feedback on drafts in progress, a la #Medium (do they still have that feature).

@mike I agree this makes the fedi more resilient that Titter. But FWIW CNN is sensationalizing. Titter has been overvalued for years and its microbubble has finally deflated a bit. This is very bad news for the professional gamblers who are speculating on Titter's share value going up, and good news for anyone with a short option, gambling on it going down. It makes no practical difference to the day-to-day running of the platform, its staff, or its users. Just another day on the internet.

TIL the #situationist writer and activist #RaoulVaneigem - author of 'The Revolution of Everyday Life' - is still alive! Here's an interview he gave in 2019, discussing the #YellowVests movement:
http://www.notbored.org/yellow-vests.pdf