Silicon Valley and the other billionaires got their president. Now realize that those guys are not, not ever, on your side.
Holy fucking shit.
It's cute that this software supply chain attack on NPM directly targets Ethereum users who are supposed to check every smart contract they want to interact with to protect themselves but don't seem to use the same rigour when checking code they include. (Original title: Hundreds of code libraries posted to NPM try to install malware on dev machines)
Ars Technica
Hundreds of code libraries posted to NPM try to install malware on dev machines
These are not the the developer tools you think they are.
Academic publishing is basically fucked up beyond all repair but this is really gonna push down the quality.
Hachyderm.io
Ethan White (@ethanwhite@hachyderm.io)
Attached: 1 image Start the countdown for the increase in the number of deeply inaccurate citations
Seeing so many people in my timeline being able to just declare their proper identity and have it recognized legally warms my heart. And it shows that we can win. We probably won't win all the battles but we can still fight to win. To stop playing defense. It's a good day.
Perplexity starts doing election information with their stochastic parrot. What could go wrong? "The AI summaries when I clicked on candidates had some errors, like failing to mention that Robert F. Kennedy, who’s on the ballot where I live, had dropped out of the race. It also listed a “Future Madam Potus” candidate that, when clicked, led me to the above summary of Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy, except with some meme pictures that aren’t in her normal summary." (Original title: Perplexity debuts an AI-powered election information hub)
The Verge
Perplexity debuts an AI-powered election information hub
Perplexity tests whether AI can be a good voter resource.
"Matt Mullenweg says Automattic is ‘very short-staffed’ amid WordPress vs. WP Engine drama" MAYBE THAT IS THE CONSEQUENCE OF YOU DIPSHIT FIRING EVERYONE WHO'S NOT A FUCKING SYCOPHANT? Goddammit. What a dumbass.
TechCrunch
Matt Mullenweg says Automattic is 'very short-staffed' amid WordPress vs. WP Engine drama | TechCrunch
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says the company is "short-staffed" amid WordPress's ongoing drama with WP Engine, which hosts websites built on...
Thinking about the OSI "Open Source AI" Definition and how to proceed. Like say they changed their definition to demand that all training data was "available" (right now you only need to describe it) meaning there are URLs that you can access. Think YouTube Videos or social media posts or whatnot. But not all content is under a free license, some explicitly copyrighted with "all rights reserved". Would you consider a machine learning system trained on that data still "open source" in the intention of the Open Source definition (
Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Definition - Open Source Initiative
Introduction Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open source software must comply with the fol...
)?
I do really think that a form of (don't kill me!) somewhat centralized archive of posts that is integrated with fediverse servers might help take some load off of instances. While also shifting away from the "every post needs to stay there forever" mode. Maybe your server only keeps a week or a month of posts (and assets) around and then they go to "the collective archive" (if people want their posts archived). You could even use the "login via OAuth" workflow to allow people to delete their own posts from the archive. So I think it wouldn't be massively hard to build. It would cost quite some money to run long-term but I think it's easier to collect that money as that form of organization. Also it would be a great resource for research. I do think the distributed social web needs more infrastructures like that.
tldr.nettime
tante (@tante@tldr.nettime.org)
Another Masto Instance going down. But not because moderation or something but because running bigger instances on Mastodon gets really expensive. ...
Another Masto Instance going down. But not because moderation or something but because running bigger instances on Mastodon gets really expensive. I think this is an issue that we need to put more work into: Not just finding better ways to sustainably fund the operation of instances but also the technical means to make running it on smaller hardware easier. This includes mechanisms to maybe push certain data into "archives" as to not have it in the live database/asset store. (Original title: RIP botsin.space)
RIP botsin.space