Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social), page 47

ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US - https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16932350/ice-immigration-customs-license-plate-recognition-contract-vigilant-solutions

An apology:

I was pretty hasrh on @rw's piece here: https://robek.world/featured/what-is-gnu-social-and-is-mastodon-social-a-twitter-clone/

There are some inaccuracies, and I feel they should be corrected, but we also just don't have much history at all written and instead I should focus on getting more and correct history written rather then tearing down one of the rare attempts. I'm sorry for that, and I'll focus on trying to encourage more work in that space. It's hard to do, given the little amount documented.

Nice article by @nextcloud folks about their current and future ActivityPub support! (Or is it ActivityPup? Don't fix that... cutest typo of all time!) https://nextcloud.com/blog/activitypub-the-new-standard-for-decentralized-networks/

(HT @falgn0n for the link)

How did this article about federated social networks on LWN pass by me? It's pretty good though https://lwn.net/Articles/741218/

I'm not endorsing HN, but I am endorsing being #1 on HN ;)

Wow hey, ActivityPub is #1 on Hacker News right now

"Victory for libre networks: ActivityPub is now a W3C recommended standard" https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/victory-for-libre-networks-activitypub-is-now-a-w3c-recommended-standard

It's also worth saying: ActivityPub wouldn't have made it to W3C Recommendation without Mastodon's community. About 8 months or so ago, I was in despair because it seemed clear that we wouldn't have enough time to wrap up the work that needed to be done in time to make it through the process before the group's charter ran out. Mastodon's interest in AP directly lead to an extension and a renew of enthusiasm.

Thank you everyone. It means a lot to me.

ActivityPub was basically 3 years of my life, and there were points were I wasn't sure if the time and energy I was spending on it was worth it. I'm sure it was today. Thank you everyone who participated in the standards process, have implemented... or are going to implement! You made it all worth it!

ActivityPub is a W3C Recommendation! Yes! At last! Finally!

Let your social networks be free! https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6785 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

@balrogboogie it's ok, nobody is a good programmer

OMG OMG OMG: PeerTube federating with Mastodon over ActivityPub https://peertube.cpy.re/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a-4ec8cbdca701

HT @Chocobozzz

I mentioned I was writing a Mastodon client named Rackstodon.

It's till very WIP, but you can see a screenshot here: https://dustycloud.org/tmp/rackstodon_test.png

Soon I'll refactor it into an ActivityPub client that "translates" itself to Mastodon's API and rename it "Postsaurus".

@bgcarlisle “We still don’t know in a very concrete way what these machine learning models are learning”

I had an interesting convo w/ Gerald Sussman where he said relevant things: http://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/

> "I'm not interested in that. I want software that's accountable." Accountable? "Yes, I want something that can express its symbolic reasoning. I want to it to tell me why it did the thing it did, what it thought was going to happen, and then what happened instead."

Somber post by @wingo

"Spectre and the End of Langsec" https://wingolog.org/archives/2018/01/11/spectre-and-the-end-of-langsec

Racket on Chez Scheme status report http://blog.racket-lang.org/2018/01/racket-on-chez-status.html

the safest way to use computers remains abstinence

Places Morgan and I support, and maybe you'd like to too:

- Software Freedom Conservancy https://sfconservancy.org/
- FSF: https://fsf.org/
- ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/
- Give Directly (now running an MBI experiment): https://www.givedirectly.org/
- Oxfam: https://www.oxfam.org//
- Doctors Without Borders: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
- Population Services International https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/where-to-donate/population-services-international
- The AIA: https://www.archaeological.org/giving/donate

For those of you (and I know not everyone easily can) who do year-end donations, but maybe don't know where to donate to, I recommend checking out The Life You Can Save https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/