gru:Bz
Average millennial living life on the edge (of the Midwest). Probably too immature for Micro.blog but I like it here.
Mark Zuckerberg meets Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago
“Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming Administration.”
Well I guess the foreseeable future was about two months, eh?
After facing significant backlash over the past few years, Zuckerberg has chosen to distance both himself and Meta from political involvement for the foreseeable future. - via ColumbiaOne, September 26, 2024
Orcas start wearing dead salmon hats again after ditching the trend for 37 years
Orcas off the coast of Washington State are balancing dead fish on their heads like it’s the 1980s, but researchers still aren’t sure why they do it.
I love these guys. They’re just as intelligent as we are. Probably more so.
Ohio governor signs bill limiting bathroom use by transgender students
I fucking hate this. We’re making leaps and bounds in the wrong direction. Fuck DeWine.
I recently switched from namecheap to name.com for my domains. Transferred out of Micro.blog just because, and it was INSTANT since that’s what MB uses for domains purchased here. No fee either! Their dash is a lot cleaner and less cluttered, I’m really digging that too.
Cranberry Bogs Use Spiders Instead Of Pesticides
You see, cranberry farms have been moving towards more organic farming methods which preclude the use of pesticides and so to keep the insect population down, the farmers encourage wolf spiders to live in the bogs.
I’m not particularly… comfortable around spiders, so to speak, but wolf spiders are one of my favorite species. They’re like little shy tarantulas. Still wouldn’t be caught dead on a cranberry farm but I’ll take spiders over pesticides.
Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for ‘Machine Learning Research’
The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID…It’s also noteworthy that it’s a “snapshot” of time on Bluesky, meaning it could, and probably does, include since-deleted posts.
I mean in a way, it’s similar to the Internet Archive. But they never really archived social media accounts did they?
This dataset could be used for “training and testing language models on social media content, analyzing social media posting patterns, studying conversation structures and reply networks, research on social media content moderation, [and] natural language processing tasks using social media data,” the project page says.
This is literally made for training AI right? I guess it’s just a matter of whether or not the resulting chatbot is publicly released but then the actual data is already available anyway.
“A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data. We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so,” - Bluesky, official account
I don’t know. I can believe the devs aren’t personally training AI on it, but it’s definitely a thing you can feed to a LLM. Regardless of who physically does it.
Personally? I don’t have a problem with AI scraping the dumb shit I post online. But I can understand why an artist or seasoned writer wouldn’t want generative AI learning off of their trademark style and then bottling it up for a monthly subscription fee.
I don’t think this is a Bluesky issue, it just got caught in the middle because it’s in the spotlight right now. I’m not a programmer or an AI whisperer so I could totally be wrong, but couldn’t anyone create a dataset of a public social network’s content using their APIs and then train whatever they like on it?
It’s shitty, but the cat’s already out of the bag. If you’re posting anything online it can, and probably is, being trained on AI.
Update: Looks like they took down the data already:
I've removed the Bluesky data from the repo. While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake.
— Daniel van Strien (@danielvanstrien.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 9:19 PM
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‘Enshittification’ Is Officially the Biggest Word of the Year
2024 will go down in history as the year humanity managed to enshittify the entire planet.
Elon Musk wants to block the transfer of InfoWars' X accounts to The Onion
Musk’s lawyers now claim that users don’t actually own their profiles on the supposed “free speech platform.”
Of course not. That’s why corporate social media is terrible. Granted, it’s usually the other way around; taking an account that belongs to someone else because Elon wants the handle.
UK and Irish retailers pull products associated with Conor McGregor
Lucky for him the US loves rapists. His bottom shelf hooch will continue to do just fine over here. Hell, he might even get nominated for a Cabinet position.
Update: Ope, maybe not! Conor McGregor dumped by Proper No. Twelve Whiskey, multiple UK retail giants in wake of sexual assault verdict - Yahoo Sports
I still stand by my Cabinet position comment though 💁
USSR: The United States of Sudden Regression
I was in the middle of writing this post about how, pretty much until the middle of the 20th century, people took the law into their own hands if they saw fit. And they probably got away with it too.
Like this photo I saw on Reddit:
That’s a feel good ACAB justice kinda story, right? I’m not sure of the source or legitimacy of it; I mean after all it was just a random Reddit post, but OP had a little blurb to go along with it:
Farmers “arrest” the sheriff for trying to evict a woman from her farm on behalf of the insurance company. Michigan, 1952.
So basically the sheriff came to evict this sweet little old widow and some farmers from around the way stood up and (violently) stopped the him from going through with it. Back then that was just the end of it, right? There were no records logged in a police database, the cop wasn’t wearing a body cam; it was the 50’s.
…
…and I was just going to ramble on about how easy it was to get away with crazy shit back then compared to nowadays.
But then I actually thought about it. It was only white guys who got away with everything. If you were some old Sam Elliot type with a cowboy hat and handlebar mustache, you could get away with murder. Literally. If you were black? Or a woman? Or a black woman?
Different fucking story.
Segregation wasn’t that long ago. Women didn’t have fuck all for rights until pretty recently. White men ruled everything until pretty recently.
What am I saying; they still rule everything.
And that’s what MAGA wants to really hone in on and refine. That’s the “great” America they’re working around the clock to bring back. The US is a great melting pot alright. One made of racism, sexism, misogyny, and LGBTQ+ phobia hate, “but for a brief moment in time”, we’ll say in our future history books, “we were actually making some progress.”
What else is there to say?
All you have to do is open any news app you like and the screen populates with headlines too stupid to even be satire. If anyone would’ve pitched some of Trump’s concepts of plans ideas for the movie Idiocracy, they would’ve said it’s too unrealistic and in bad taste.
Who would joke about the kind of shit Donald Trump is about to do?
I subscribed to the print editions of a couple websites I like recently. Magazines are such a cool nostalgic experience. The original adhd doomscrolling device, in the flesh.
Elon Musk Muses About Buying MSNBC: “How Much Does It Cost?”
The billionaire and buddy to the president-elect jokes about buying the liberal network. At least we think he’s joking.
His acquisition of Twitter started out as a joke too. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t at least make an offer. Fascist regimes need their state run media and he’s just preaching to the converted on Twitter now.
Would you live on a cruise ship for four years to escape the Trump presidency?
If only I had a cool $160,000 to secure a spot
Microsoft is testing a new in-game browser
Doing what they can to get people to switch to Internet Explorer Edge 😏
You deserve a better browser than Google Chrome
If you’ve been using Chrome because it came as the default browser on your phone, you might want to try something new. If you’ve been using Chrome for 15 years because it was so innovative when it was introduced, that’s no longer the case, and you should definitely try something new.
I’d also add that if you’re using Chrome on iOS, you’re just using a shittier version of Safari that spies on you.
I like that Feedbin uses the same key commands as Nethack
I really like Reeder 5 on iOS but I use Linux on my desktop so I’ve been constantly syncing OPML files between that and different web based RSS readers. I used Inoreader for a couple years but it’s so expensive for something that constantly suggests features to try and upsell you to the next tier. I switched to Feedbin a couple weeks ago and I think this is where my feeds will live for now. $50 a year and easy sync between iPhone and random Linux box.
Gaetz withdraws from consideration for Trump’s attorney general role
“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General,” Gaetz wrote.
Whoa he really doesn’t want that report to come out 😆
The FDA’s inspection took place in May, and Tom’s of Maine responded to its initial results in June. The FDA’s latest letter declares that the company’s June response was “inadequate,” so the agency is calling for further action.
Great way to freshen up after munching on some Boar’s Head deli meat with a side of listeria.
T-Mobile actually stopped some hackers from stealing customer data
T-Mobile detected suspicious activity in a recent attempt to access customer data and kicked the cyber criminals out before they were able to infiltrate deeper levels of the network.
Well now I’ve seen everything 🙃