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1 yr. ago

  • Fascinating how the federated Bluesky spam came from Nostr. Dorsey's lovechild vomiting crap all over his disowned brainchild. Clearly he bet on the right horse.

  • I could read the full article, not sure what's going on.

    Anyway, the journalist is writing about the Verge and 404 Media, and the more general potential benefits for the industry. There's nothing about Digiday.com following the same path.

    It's a nice write-up. The main things I learned is that the Verge is transitioning to WordPress, and 404 is using Ghost. Both hope to activate the ActivityPub capabilities of these platforms when they're ready - the Verge when it finishes transitioning, 404 when Ghost implants AP support.

  • I guess the rules of the instance you're posting from always apply, in addition to the rules of the instance you're posting in. If you're posting stuff that's not tolerated by your instance it will probably kick you out, no matter which communities you post in. :)

  • Yeah, it runs like a charm on my T14s. No that I've tried much else.

  • Artificial intelligence. There's nothing intelligent going on in an LLM model. There's learning, but not intelligence.

    The people objecting to the use of the term AI to describe computerized parrots are the people who think intelligence still matters as a concept.

  • Yeah, fair enough. I read the post more favourably, as a "at least my alternative is still working well for me", but then also being aware that every time Brave is mentioned someone jumps on and reminds everyone that the CEO is a jerk, so it saves us the time by addressing it right away.

    Both interpretations are valid I guess. :)

  • The vikings got a bit of a bad reputation, probably in large part because they were not too popular amongst munks in England (who were avid writers). Sure, there was raping and plundering, but not necessarily so much worse than other peoples, and there was also trade and coexistence. We had particularly close relations to Scotland, and England is hardly in the position to accuse anyone else of plundering! ;)

    Fun fact about the word viking: It literally means someone from a "vik", which is contemporary Norwegian for a cove. More traditionally, it's a dwelling by the coast, which explains the many -wich-towns in northern UK: The vikings would settle, usually for salt supplies, and name the place something ending with -vik.

    So a Viking is not a job description as much as someone dwelling by the sea!

  • I think there's a lot of us who would ideally want to avoid both Microsoft and Google, and now that Bing is having problems it's more relevant than ever. I don't really see how the comment is braggy or patronising.

    That said, I'm not comfortable using Brave either. I wish Mozilla or the Internet Archive would launch a search engine. Maybe both in cooperation. Then again, it would require Mozilla to bite the hand that feeds it.

  • I was paying for Kagi until recently, but they keep working on functionality I'm not interested in rather than lowering their prices. Other than that it was a fine experience, but too pricey, and the argument that that's the cost of running a search engine doesn't hold when they choose to develop all kinds of extra stuff.

    I wish I liked SearXNG better, but the results are sadly not that great for me.

  • Is it possible that I miss out on valuable insights by immediately dismissing the opinions of anyone who refers to machine learning as AI?

    Sure.

    Will I stop doing it?

    Sure as hell not.

  • Norwegians are generally leaning pro-Palestine.

    In a recent survey, 46% of Norwegians responded that they have more sympathy with Palestinians, whereas only 12% have more sympathy with Israelis. 32% responded that their sympathy with Palestinians has increased in light of recent events.

    I can imagine several reasons why Norway is so different from for example Germany and France in this regard.

    One is that we have a pretty well-organized civil society, including an organized Jewish community that is actively outspoken about Israeli extremism. My impression is that leading voices in the Mosaic community in Norway are frequently outspoken on the side of humanity.

    Another reason is of course that we are still bitter about the collapse of the Oslo Accords. There's simply no question Israel were the ones who killed it.

    Even before this, Israel might have had less goodwill in Norway following the Lillehammer affair where Mossad murdered some random waiter who was on his way home from the cinema with his pregnant wife. One of the agents involved in placing 13 bullets in Ahmed Bouchikhi has since stated that they knew they were shooting the wrong man.

    More importantly however, it probably relates to the story we tell ourselves as a nation.

    We're in all likelihood prouder of our war efforts than most of Europe, and certainly more than pro-Israeli countries like Germany and France. A lot of us (myself included) have family members who helped Jews flee the country following the occupation, at the risk of death penalty should they get caught.

    The author of our national anthem took active part in the Dreyfus affair, among other things writing in a French newspaper that the French government was the "most shameless of any civilized people".

    Other important national poets dedicated their lives to giving Jews right to statehood, wrote poems urging people to wake the fuck up to the horrors of nazism, or died bombing Berlin.

    These people, among others, make up the core of what we consider Norwegian national identity. As a result the average Norwegian might be less afraid of criticizing Israel than the average German (or French), as we consider ourselves to be firmly footed on the right side of history.

    Of course, history is more complicated than that. A lot of us will simply not read Hamsun, and never mind that Jews had to be allowed into the Kingdom in the first place. History is complicated, but the stories we choose to tell and the ways we choose to frame them matters a lot.

    Also, Norwegians are pretty left-leaning, and we put a lot of effort promoting ourselves as a peace nation. Probably doesn't hurt either.

  • Spain has been rallying for this for months! They're pulling their weight in this issue.

  • I think a good approach could be to think about how you could reach users of different platforms.

    A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility@a.gup.pe, might also help.

    I think Kbin/Mbin might be better suited for this than Lemmy, as it integrates better with other federated networks. You can follow microbloggers and boost content, which in turn makes them likely to follow you back and creates a community beyond which Lemmy community you choose to post in. Your Mastodon followers will see your posts, but it won't matter to them which community you post it in.

    It's hard for content to make the jump from Lemmy to Mastodon as Lemmy does not make itself discoverable, but as soon as content reaches Mastodon users nothing stops them from interacting with it (by boosting or replying).

    Sadly Kbin.social lacks sufficiently active moderation these days, so you might be better off with an mbin instance. I also have no idea how accessible Mbin is to blind users.

    Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don't want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don't value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.

  • Well, imagine you meet a guy travelling through the US. He's wearing lederhosen, has a freaking feather in his hat, and speaks with a heavy German accent. You ask where he's from, and he says he's American/Italian, as his maternal grandfather was born in the US and his grandmother on his father's side is Italian. However, this is his first time outside of Germany, and he speaks no Italian and hardly any English.

    This is what Americans tend to look like to Europeans.

  • I remember checking out Lemmy in December 2022, it was barely even a proof of concept. Now it's a whole ecosystem.

    it's incredible how far it has gotten in a short time. And while commercial platforms will only get worse with time, open source platforms will only get better. Growth might not always be a linear process, but I'm feeling optimistic. :)

  • If anything, this proves that forking Mastodon is a great idea. Not because any useful software would come out of it, but it would distract some of the annoying armchair managers out there.

    The biggest problem with Mastodon isn't the lack of feature X or the presence of feature Y; it's those exact assholes, draining the energy and enthusiasm from anything that crosses their path while scaring away anyone looking for a meaningful conversation.

    I hate to break it to you, but if you genuinely think you've figured it all out, chances are you're a fucking moron.