Notices by Charles Stanhope (cstanhope@social.coop)

"Protip: Don't delete your Python virtual environment while you are using it."

From my upcoming book "Protips: Things to NOT Delete". All chapters are based on my hard earned experience of deleting things and then regretting it a moment later.

I'm really not excited for the future where cash is eliminated and you have to have an account on a dominant social media platform and a working surveillance device to buy anything. Also, in general, I find it very hard to care about how giant companies split the transaction fees.

@jjg Reading through that article again, I think there's an unstated goal besides people's safety. Facebook wants the AI so it can filter out people posting or live streaming their suicides. Even if people aren't helped, if these events don't show up on Facebook, then they don't get negative press...

@jjg Oh man, we really should not want Facebook to be our "machines of loving grace" here. And I hesitate to think about who are the "first responders" to most situations like that here in the US. AI instigated swatting...

@gcupc This resonates with me very strongly. "I can speak only for myself here, but personally, my interest in the moguls’ experience is vanishingly dim; what matters to me is the internet itself and the people who use it."

@zyx This is painful to read: "On Facebook, ignorance of the algorithm had serious conse-
quences. Our participants used News Feed to make inferences
about their relationships, wrongly attributing the composition
of their feeds to the habits or intent of their friends and family.
Users incorrectly concluded that friends had dropped them
due to political disagreements or their unappealing behavior."

After all the negative attention, SQLite community decided to adopt the "Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines" for their CoC.

https://sqlite.org/codeofconduct.html

@dajbelshaw Here's a writeup from @satochmoz@mastodon.sdf.org on his recent experience using /e/. https://notlocked.in/post/e-initial-thoughts/

@natecull Automating recommendations is just not a pressing problem. That's what a "social network" is for. People recommend things to to others they know one-to-one or by broadcasting to the world (hopefully with some trust involved). And we can have "social networks" that don't require surveillance. Why do these things keep coming up? Who are the people that have difficulty finding things to look at? What real value to people are there in these things? :/

Are two of the common complaints about federated systems, picking an instance and discoverability, only problems when you try to take people out of the loop? Before the web, when you were faced with making decisions or finding things or people and you lacked information, you would reach out to others. People you knew and trusted, or people you could probably trust (e.g. librarians). Trying to automate away reliance on others isn't always the right choice.

When encountering a technology for the first time that is "horribly flawed", before we (publicly) dump all over the people involved and their efforts, perhaps we can take a moment and consider a historical perspective. They were likely just people doing the best they could to achieve a goal with constraints that are not obvious. Nobody is perfect. No tech will be perfect. It's possible to build on imperfect tech as we can, and work to improve it when we can.

From Greg Wilson et al. The annoucement:

http://third-bit.com/2018/07/15/teaching-tech-together.html

The book: "...knowing a few things about psychology, instructional design, inclusivity, and community organization can help you be a more effective teacher. This book presents evidence-based practices you can use right now, explains why we believe they are true, and points you at other resources that will help you go further."

http://teachtogether.tech/

Woke up with a thought. In light of the news of Microsoft thinking about buying github combined with the ever increasing trend of creating locked down computers: phones, ChromeOS, MS Always Connected, it occurs to me that the next steps will be to require permission not just to distribute software (app stores), but to also be a developer. Access to the tools will increasingly be through the cloud mediated through these locked devices. Permission to develop could be revoked at any time.

EFF is reporting that John Perry Barlow passed away this morning: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/john-perry-barlow-internet-pioneer-1947-2018

@risabee It was all terrifying, and this part stood out to me: "Certain Chinese cities even change the sound you hear on the phone when a blacklisted person calls you, blasting them as some kind of criminal from the start."

Yay! Software Freedom Conservancy is now on Mastodon! @conservancy

@cwebber You look down to find that you have unknowingly shaved half a yak, and you realize you can't just leave it looking that.