humanist + humorist

Trying something new:

On Tumblr, I’m queuing a set of 30 past Leif & Thorn strips, with a bit of director’s commentary for each. No particular order, and I’m not trying to find my Favorite Strips of All Time, just “hey, I have something to say about this one.”

And then I’m crossposting them on Facebook, Instagram, Xitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky. (That’s right, I’m seizing the moment to experiment with Bluesky. If you’re there too, give me a follow.)

Which site gets the best response? Which posts get the most traction? Which platform(s) will I keep posting on after this project is complete? TBD!

(I’m not crossposting on Dreamwidth, or WordPress, because neither of those is a great “get your work in front of people who don’t already follow you” platform. Will stick to using those for, you know, regular old-fashioned blogging.)

Peak irony, no notes: guess where the “You Wouldn’t Steal A Car” ad music came from. “But then, in 2007, he bought a Harry Potter DVD and to his surprise, there was his music in the anti-piracy ad at the beginning. His composition had been taken and used without his permission. In fact, it had been illegally used on dozens of movie DVDs, both in Holland and overseas. You probably have one at home right now.”

Wattpad is on a fanfic-deleting spree, apparently targeting (but not exclusive to) NSFW and/or queer-centric fics. Seems to be a profit-driven move after they got bought by Naver (the same site that owns Webtoon) a while ago. Reddit is passing around advice about how to move to AO3.

Facebook deletes, suppresses, and flags posts about climate change: “Since August 2018, Facebook has limited the visibility of my page,” she writes, “labelling it as ‘political’ because I talk about climate change and clean energy. This change drastically reduced my post views from hundreds to just tens, and the page’s growth has been stagnant ever since.”

The previous article got a heck of a publicity boost when Facebook started auto-blocking everything from the local news site that posted it: “Until approximately 4pm ET Thursday afternoon, whenever people attempted to share any link at all to the Reflector, they were unable. In screenshots shared with The Handbasket, the warnings varied from saying the content was reported by others as being “abusive,” to labeling the link as spam, as well as a simple upload error.”

That said, rahaeli (Denise from DW) breaks down how this is genuine collateral damage from spam-filtering: “People keep claiming that if this were a false detection we’d hear about it happening all the time, but they genuinely do happen all the time.” And “The number of people who do not understand the sheer volume of garbage on the internet is either absolutely depressing as fuck or proof that we all do our jobs a lot better than people think we do.”

Dreamwidth story (featuring a guest appearance by an anon community, possibly FFA?): “For no particular reason, a story about weird detection systems: we don’t use a lot of automated detection or filtering, but we do some…”

Meanwhile, in software: “As the fallout of the Xz backdoor continues to rock the open source software community, people working on open source software are realizing (and reiterating) that a culture in which people often feel entitled to constant updates and additional features from volunteer coders presents a pretty large attack surface.”

There are a lot of comments described as “bullying” that…do not strike me as bullying. No personal insults, no dramatic hyperbole, definitely no threats. Just frank, fact-based project criticisms that could easily have been made in good faith. And then the critics would volunteer constructive help! It’s easy and obvious to say “don’t be horrible to volunteer coders,” but the world needs to take the next step and be supportive to volunteer coders…and how can you provide support that’s helpful and stress-reducing, after “support” was used as a major attack vector?

It’s a mess. I don’t know.

Twitter and other social networks:

twitter_refugees is a DW comm for Twitter natives encountering journal sites for the first time. I've been on journal sites way too long to know if this is helpful. Maybe someone else can give it a review?

"I posted a thread on Twitter about potential legal liabilities for United States people who decide to run a Mastodon instance, and the response made it clear there's a lot of people who could use the extended background. So here is a guide to potential liability pitfalls for people who are running a Mastodon instance, and how to mitigate them." Not for everyone making a Mastodon account, but if you're hosting other people's accounts, read it.

"Mark Zuckerberg (founder and CEO, Facebook): I was in my sophomore year at Harvard. It was 2003, which is the year that historians call The Dunce’s Millennium because the world was dark chaos. Everyone was running around with all of their secrets locked up in their brains. Nobody knew anybody’s favorite movies. Nobody knew what anybody else looked like in a bathing suit. I wanted to change that." Clickhole's definitive oral history of Facebook.

"Tesla Fire tracks all Tesla fires - including cars and other products, e.g. Tesla MegaPacks - that are reported by news articles or verified primary sources. We also tally the number of fatalities involved with Tesla fires and provide links to additional photos or footage wherever possible." (Total, as of this posting: 143 confirmed cases, 44 fatalities.)


AI things that are fun, actually:

A neural net AI, "when faced with predicting what would come next on this [New Year's Resolution] list, predicted first one drawing-related resolution, and then multiple others. Soon this became not just a list of resolutions, but specifically a list of drawing-related resolutions. It generated a broccoli-and-drawing-related resolution, and then the list became a list of resolutions by a painter/broccoli fanatic. "

Another one was set to the task of predicting color names: "Some of our other color scales have four coordinates (like the ones designed for print), but the common ones don't go up to 255. I like to think that Starbat is a color meant for birds to see, and the 1st color is actually meant for their ultraviolet vision."

"For nearly a decade, I’ve run @forexposure_txt, a twitter account that anonymously posts real quotes from people trying to convince artists to work for free. The humorous rationalizations it uncovers sometimes read like found poems. So I took 120 of my favorite quotes, and used Midjourney’s AI art creation tool to turn them into comics."


Crypto and other scams:

"A part of the popular narrative around NFTs was that royalties were built into the operation of the blockchain. This was never true." And now that the profits are slipping, NFT marketplaces are starting to ditch their obligations.

The writer of that one uses the tone all credible crypto-reporting should take these days: "If you are reading this and can still hold your mobile device even as you roll on the floor in a fit of “I told you so” laughter..."

Speaking of yelling about crypto, here's a video clip of a guy on Bloomberg News, yelling about how FTX was never regulated. The "...you idiots" is unstated, but surprisingly audible.

Back in traditional finance: "Etsy is now forcing shop owners to be part of their ads. We can not opt out. [...] Be aware that half the results WITHIN ETSY are ads as well, and if you click on one of those during browsing, even if you do not buy from that link, you have set a cookie within Etsy that tells them you’re shopping off an ad, and so they will charge the fee to whoever you buy from regardless if it was related to the ad you clicked. Please clear your cookies before you make an Etsy purchase. Yes really truly."