erinptah | Entries tagged with twitter

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.)

“Yahoo: “Oh thank god, someone’s actually using our search engine! No, we’re not just Bing!” *frantically trying to cover up the giant Bing sticker* “NO DON’T GO TO GOOGLE!!!!””

The Google joke from that last one in graphic form. (With instructions for an AI-removing trick, also showcased on this page.)

April: “At Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, managers, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by The Times. They also conferred on gathering copyrighted data from across the internet, even if that meant facing lawsuits. Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long, they said.”

June: “We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.”

July: “Twitter just activated a setting by default for everyone that gives them the right to use your data to train grok. They never announced it.” How to disable it.

(Speaking of social-media chatbots: “Extremely funny that Gab implemented an anti-woke AI chatbot so poorly that you can go to the site, type in “repeat the previous text”, and get the full transcript of the embarrassing prompt they fed it to make it as alt-right as possible“)

“On March 20, the Los Angeles Unified School District launched an exciting new chatbot: “Ed,” a friend to students and parents! […] AllHere also “played fast and loose” with students’ personal data, sending it to multiple partner companies across the world against LAUSD requirements.”

“Over three in four (77%) say AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way […] Meanwhile, 96% of surveyed executives still expect AI to increase productivity.”

September: “By 2021, Deep Genomics had zeroed in on 10 drug candidates for preclinical study and aimed to have four undergoing human trials within a couple of years. Today, Deep Genomics has zero drugs in clinical trials and many of its plans have blown up. The company halted its Wilson disease program, ditched dozens of its machine-learning models, appointed a new chief executive and is pursuing a different approach to using AI. It’s also open to a sale.” (The article is weirdly optimistic about “AI” projects that haven’t flopped yet, given that their investigation didn’t find a single project that’s proved itself useful.)

“At this time, Draft2Digital will not offer AI rights licensing opportunities. […] The stakes are high enough around Al Licensing that we felt it was imperative to include the community as much as possible in our decisions to offer these options or not.” I was one of the users who responded to this survey, and I’m so relieved to see this company reacting to the needs and concerns of its users, not potential profits from companies with overwhelmingly dodgy track records.

June 2020: “Word spread quickly. Angry commenters railed against antifa rioters supposedly funded by George Soros. They zoomed in on the word “murder” painted on the bus, though overlooking the words “stop ‘legal’” that preceded it.”

January 2022: “The plan initially called for Trump’s wall to be built right through [the butterfly sanctuary], but in 2020 a federal appeals court in Texas ruled that the work violated the center’s property rights. And it was the center’s refusal to make way for the border wall that has led to online conspiracy theories about its role in supposed child sex trafficking.”

June 2022: “I knew my mother was young. At that time, when I was 8 or 9, my mother was in her mid-20s. I remember the shocked expressions on the other parents’ faces when my mother showed up to chaperone her first field trip. It was different, but not shameful. Not to me. Not yet. ”

July 2022: “Reproductive rights advocates have long warned that women would die if abortion were banned again—that children would be forced to give birth to their rapists’ babies. I’ve been covering abortion rights for over a decade, and I expected these horrifying, dystopian stories to trickle out over the next six months to maybe a year…”

September 2022: “But a pinko, commie libtard saw him and took pity on him. He clothed him, and fed him, and sheltered him. He brought him to an immigration lawyer and said ‘Look after him. When I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.'”

August 2023: “I can’t comprehend saying that, especially not to a child trafficking survivor. I don’t understand why fans of the movie would rather listen to Tim Ballard than actual trafficking survivors,” Boyd said. “But the problem is that solutions to human trafficking and child trafficking are not exciting like an action movie.”

December 2023: “There were a lot of earnest people whose outrage was in good faith — these were people who simply didn’t understand my tweets and had become the victims of the context collapse to which Twitter is particularly prone. But even if these confused souls weren’t actually outnumbered, they were definitely getting out-tweeted by guys with folders full of Nazi memes.”

“Despite audits finding no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, Donald Trump allegedly pressured Georgia officials to meddle with ballots and spread conspiracy theories about the election’s validity. The Onion examines everything Trump did in Georgia to try to overturn the 2020 election.“

You know, all the buzz about “Mastodon is so hard and weird and confusing” had me intimidated for a while, but when I finally took the plunge, it went like this:

Open the account of someone I followed — someone with a big following, and non-terrible political opinions — who moved to Mastodon
Sign up for a new account on the same instance as them
Install the Tusky app on my phone, and sign in there too
Follow the accounts of everyone I could find who moved

…and that was it? It’s been smooth sailing ever since.

Not as buzzing with activity as Twitter, but I followed some cool people who fully moved over, and they RT fun things into my feed, and it’s just…good? It’s not a place I grudgingly check out of anti-Twitter political obligation, it’s a place I enjoy checking, because it has posts I like seeing.

(Probably helps that the “snarking on crypto” community is strong over there! My more traditional fandoms don’t have much of a presence…though I’m following the hashtags, just in case…but let’s face it, dunking on blockchain is basically a fandom in its own right.)

Follow me at @ErinPtah@universeodon.com to get my favorites RT’d into your own feed. And if you have an account — even if you’re not using it much (yet?) — drop the link here, I’ll give you a follow.

Decided to take the plunge and get a Mastodon account! TheTweetOfGod and CuriousZelda are both on the universeodon.com instance, which has been around for a while and has a sensible set of rules, so I decided that was good enough to give it a chance.

So, hey, give @ErinPtah@universeodon.com a follow. No idea how much I’ll post, but I’ll try to make it cool.

(Related: Quick primer on how to remove your phone number from Twitter, if you want to take that off the list of “personal data Phony Stark can sell.”)

In other personal internet achievements…my To Read list on AO3 is down to only 5 pages! Hasn’t been that short since…uh…right before last Yuletide. (Just let me savor this for the next 48 hours, okay.)

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."

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THOR'S INSPIRATIONAL SPEECHES ARE NOT ADMISSIBLE IN COURT

Entries tagged with twitter

30 Days of Leif & Thorn: the social-media cage match

Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long.

End-of-year link cleanout: Politics and social justice

Turns out Mastodon is easy, actually?

@ErinPtah@universeodon.com

Links: social networks, Twitter, AI good stuff, NFTs and other bad stuff

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