Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices

Pulling this in because this cost factor is endemic in all of these spaces we work on/in.

Non-corporate social media is *expensive* (it is inherently expensive, that's why they sell your info, lol).

Hachyderm is a large well run Mastodon instance.

This is from early 2025 (so looking back at 2024 costs). About $1600USD/month for infra.

The expensive part, like with all systems, would be paying _people_.

www.mariosangiorgio.com/link/1137932...

The radicalizing part, for me, was how clear it became that the workplace, and public spaces generally, were designed for the functionally childless, and how much even nominally left-leaning people just assumed families were somehow assigned a wife/extra income/picket fence on having children.

NASA and Mamdani are proving that Americans are desperate to see their money spent in ways they feel good about.

This, however, is not the same thing as simply spending the money on things we would feel good about but never know happened. People need to be able to see it.

The closest to my memory was AOL when I was a kid. I remember people inventing crafts for what to do with all the extra free AOL CDs everyone was getting flooded with

bsky.app/profile/kyle...

2.3.6. A program that makes one Mastodon post Choose Social Media Platform: Bluesky| Reddit| Discord| Mastodon| No Coding Below is a computer program written in the Python programming language. The program will make a Mastodon post. The post w...

I've started making the Mastodon versions of the bot activities in our textbook: Social Media, Ethics, and Automation by me and @susannotess.bsky.social

(activities are already in Bluesky, Reddit, and Discord)

social-media-ethics-automation.github.io/book/mastodo...

the thing is that sometimes there are cases when the fans are actually right

and it’s still not a good idea to listen to them because then you start listening to them when they aren’t, which is most of the time

It’s inaccurate to say Mario is brave and Luigi is cowardly

Luigi is afraid of death, so he runs away from danger. Mario is afraid of living, so he runs towards death. Both brothers are cowards in their own way

a two panel meme panel 1 - geordi signalling 'no' with the text data centres and images of data centres Panel 2 - geordi signalling 'yes' with the text "data centaurs" and a crudely edited image of the character data from star trek pasted on top of a centaur

do you ever wake up at 3am and think "shit that's a good idea, I better write that down so I can share it later on"

Scott Wampler (1980/81|1 - May 31, 2024) |21 was an American podcaster and film journalist. He was the co-host of the Stephen King fan podcast The Kingcast. He was a writer for Fangoria. 34|51 He was found dead at his home in Austin, Texas on May 31, 2024. 6] The 2024 film The Life of Chuck is dedicated to his memory. ^ References 1. ^ [@ScottWamplerRIP]. "people out here telling me about Siskel and Ebert and Pauline Kael like I'm not 40 whole-ass, disgusting years old" X, 5 November 2021, 8:23 PM, https://x.com/ScottWamplerRIP/s

The Wikipedia reference for guessing Scott’s age is incredible

I think some amount of generative AI will be useful in the future (some legitimately useful, and plenty of use for spam and scams), but the way it is being rolled out is reckless and destructive. And AI in literally everything feels like the websites for literally everything before the dot-com crash

12.5. Ethics of copying Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022 has long been known to copy others’ images and jokes and post them as his own without attribution (often specifically cropping images to hide any attributio...

We talk a little about the ethics of copying on social media in our book:

social-media-ethics-automation.github.io/book/bsky/ch...

Though the Gen AI copying is worse since it is done by corporations in their walled garden access to information (and their "information" floods the internet with BS)

An anthropological introduction to YouTube YouTube video by Michael Wesch

The Internet has also been based on illegal copying.

Per this 2008 anthropology of YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO...

"we can remix this culture that’s being thrown at us, where we can take it, re-appropriate it and throw it back. […] Most of what we do is actually illegal."

I keep seeing the "earlier technologies weren't pushed on us this hard," and maybe that's true, but AOL made literally 1 billion of these CDs.

Yes, AOL was bad for having a walled-garden internet, and the dot-com bubble crashed in 2000, we still use the internet today.

www.vox.com/2015/5/12/85...

UC Berkeley CS major enrollment on pace to drop by 59% as part of nationwide trend The decline in campus computer science graduates mirrors a trend across the UC system, with CS major enrollment across the university decreasing in 2025 for the first time since the

www.dailycal.org/news/campus/...

2.3.6. A program that makes one Mastodon post Choose Social Media Platform: Bluesky| Reddit| Discord| Mastodon| No Coding Below is a computer program written in the Python programming language. The program will make a Mastodon post. The post w...

I've started making the Mastodon versions of the bot activities in our textbook: Social Media, Ethics, and Automation by me and @susannotess.bsky.social

(activities are already in Bluesky, Reddit, and Discord)

social-media-ethics-automation.github.io/book/mastodo...

i really don't like the tendency to glamorize this sort of thing, because it is dysfunctional and abusive behavior. "all good websites are full of people who hate the developers" is a truism that is very revealing about the people who say it

The final product of Jupiter Ascending is the type of movie Carrie Fisher said it felt like they were making with Star Wars.

@jamieloftus.bsky.social @caitlindurante.bsky.social

Listening to The Bechdal Cast on Jupiter Ascending and I keep remembering this Carrie Fisher quote:

"I’m acting with an eight-foot yeti and a four-foot Brit in a rolling trash can! We shoot [...] with ray guns that don’t even have a trigger. This movie is going to be a f***ing disaster."

I’m looking for an automated way to read others’s scientific data without giving credit or acknowledgement, and also claim full credit for insights from it. And I want it to have a fitting name

OAI: say no more

Comic. [Person and person with white hat facing two boxes stacked with $80 price tag and sale tag on each box.] PERSON 1: They want $80 for this? I could make one myself for $10 in parts, an hour of work, a trip to the hardware store, another $30 in parts, another few hours of work, two more trips to the store for $20 more in parts, another hour of work to redo the first hour of work because I messed up, and $80 to buy this when the one I made breaks.

Make It Myself

xkcd.com/3233/

The Word of the Year is Divest On leaving toxic spaces to invest in the future we want to see

It’s taken me forever to write this post about divesting from Substack, mostly because I am scared of the financial implications and also I am TIRED. Just like everyone else! But the upside of divesting is being able to invest in the world we actually want to live in: substack.com/home/post/p-...

What a day! Did we mention that today was the day we removed invites from Eurosky accounts? Anyone can create an account straight away.

So something interesting that happened this week: Mastodon announced that they'd received €614,000 from Sovereign Tech Agency (german), and with part of that funding they're going to be implementing support for the FediMod FIRES protocol which I spent last year building whilst barely surviving.

Comic. One... two... THREE! [text in red] X Deprecated [line break] One... two... three... GO! [text in red] Deprecated [red curly bracket around top two lines] Too easy to mix up [line break] Three... two... one... GO! [text in green] [check mark] ISO Standard [caption] If I were in charge of ISO, the first thing I’d do would be to standardize the way people count out loud before doing something in sync.

Countdown Standard

xkcd.com/3232/

Ticketmaster is an illegal monopoly, jury rules The DOJ settled, but more than 30 states kept litigating against Ticketmaster anyway.

Ticketmaster is an illegal monopoly, jury rules

👀

The covid amnesia shell game happened DESPITE THE DATA, in part bc we never had a reckoning or real memorialization

The *moment* we replace this regime, they will memory-hole everything they did. If we don't keep clear records and then make them into public memory, they'll get away with it.

Making events into public memory is a cultural technology you have to do on purpose and repeat over and over. The fight to keep hold of the truth never ends it's generational and idk, maybe we're bound to lose in the end. But I have to believe we can do better than we did in the last six years.