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  After experimenting with local LLMs for a couple years now, I'm excited to release my newest project: The Ethical Assistant! It provides all the benefits of an LLM assistant but with low energy usage, completely private, and no cost to use. https://tinysubversions.com/ethical-assistant/

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  You're telling me an n ed this Flanders?

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  Discovered today that one of the most formative books of my childhood, Math For Smarty Pants (1983), is available as a full PDF online: https://arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/mathpants.pdf It's not a super well known book, though I bet there are plenty of Fediverse nerds who loved it as much as I did. The book was full of cool math stuff, but also wonderful cartoons and stories. Reading the sentence "The mathematician believed that every rule probably has exceptions" at age 7 b...

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  The ActivityPub Trust & Safety Task Force is looking for a new Co-Lead (I'm stepping down because I'm leading the Social Web Working Group now). Specifically we'd like someone with trust and safety experience! Doesn't have to be paid/professional experience (volunteer moderation workers welcome). If you're interested, please leave a comment on the Github issue here: https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-trust-and-safety/issues/135 For more on what the TF does, check out...

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  There are a lot of reasons I've been in a creative funk recently but one of them is the chilling effect where I think about the inevitable LLM plagiarism that will occur and I think, huh, do I really want to release anything publicly? I feel myself more drawn to making stuff that never goes on the internet at all. Like, the idea of playing in a bar band around town feels more inviting than the idea of creating a cool web-based toy like I used to.

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  Looking for recommendations on either books or websites that have quite serious, para-professional baking recipes. I generally like stuff from Serious Eats (Stella Parks et al), and generally speaking I like recipes that pay attention to weight and hydration percentage and so on. Usually I find stuff in the genre of shortcut recipes for busy parents -- which to be clear are perfectly fine but not what I'm looking for! EDIT: Seems like King Arthur is the consensus, thank you!

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  ...you're telling me a gott fried this leibniz??

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  I am VERY much open to feedback on this project. It is in very early days and I'm sure there are a million great features that could be added. The project's Github is the best place to file feature requests: https://github.com/berkmancenter/activitypub-fuzzer/

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  Lol. Lmao. From @fediversereport https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr162-eu-regulation-wont-save-open-social-networks/

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  Okay, #Hometown v1.1.0 is coming out tomorrow! There are so many changes (and I will explain them all in the release notes) but I think I am most happy with the tweaks to the Mastodon v4 mobile layout. * Removed giant header * Retractable right hand menu (click the top right hamburger icon) * Reduced margins overall for a more compact layout Attached pics: before, after, and after with retracted menu. Note you see a whole extra post in the 'after' screenshot due to all the remo...

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  Okay, #Hometown v1.1.1 is now released! Massive release notes here: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v4.0.2%2Bhometown-1.1.1 Admins, please let me know if you run into trouble on the upgrade. This is a tricky one, mostly due to Mastodon v3 -> v4 stuff. You'll get a lot of mileage searching the Mastodon issues repo for production errors you run into on the upgrade. I'll repeat what I said on the release notes: if your installation is customized in...

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  US House Rep Nancy Mace, a noted anti trans legislator, was speaking on a panel at the Project Liberty Summit. She was disrupted by @evangreer . I was walking out of the room when it happened. It was awesome. Evan is doing okay. https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-11-21-transgender-digital-rights-activist-confronts-hate-monger-rep-nancy-mace-at-internet-summit/ Edited to add: non TikTok version of video in my reply to this post

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  @aparrish@friend.camp @futurebird@sauropods.win lol I remember when I was in the NY Times basically begging people to ignore preprints

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  Great article from @dajb about governance on Mastodon servers. Like social.coop, Friend Camp has started using Loomio to make group consensus decisions around things like non-obvious defederation, and it's working out really well. https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2022/11/25/defederation-and-governance-processes/ I recommend instance admins look into Loomio. Once we have used it a bit more on Friend Camp I am going to post a how-to and best practices for small servers.

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  "Don Quijote (Pierre's Version)"

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  I've been talking with an academic researcher who is interested in speaking with people who have shut down their fediverse servers, for any reason. I know it's a touchy subject so I didn't want to just refer her directly to people, but if you are seeing this message and you're interested, please DM me and I will give you her email. I did a 1-hour interview with her on more general topics and really enjoyed the experience. (Boosts appreciated!)

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  I finished my stint as a Mozilla Fellow and now I'm relaunching my Patreon with a focus on, well, fixing social media. This means I'm going to continue my concerted work trying to make the fediverse a better place, in the form of best practice guides for running instances, external advocacy, and technical tutorials and training so that more people can contribute software to the fediverse at large. You can read a partial summary of my work so far at my new Patreon page! https:/...

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  Sometimes I remember that I can just poach eggs for breakfast. And then I do. And it's good.

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  Can't attend #FediForum today but looking forward to tomorrow and Thursday...

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  @Tijn honestly this sounds like my first attempts at making midi music when I was 13? I didn't play any instruments or anything as a kid, I just downloaded a shareware midi sequencer program and tried to make music-shaped things. Truly I think this could be an earnest attempt at writing music by a very young person with late 90s or early 2000s shareware/freeware tools

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  the sickening thud of a thickening sud

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  Someone get the CEO of antifa on the line. I've composed the official antifa jingle. It goes: do re mi so la ti do

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  Saw an AI influencer-type on another social network say > It’s been shocking to see Claude go from an AI model that seemed one upgrade away from taking over most of the routine tasks in my day job to not even being able to reliably download a webpage without lots of prompting. I'm excited for people who claimed "the models are 90% there but if line keeps going up we'll be at 110% soon" to hit a wall at approximately 130mph

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  Fuck, they really are automating all the factory jobs aren't they

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  I'm pleased to note that even https://dolphin.town, my Mastodon server where the only letter you are allowed to post is "e", has seen increased activity in the last few days. Thanks Eeeeelon!

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  > Scams are usually imagined as a game with two players: con artist and mark. But today’s scams are more like massively multiplayer online games. They are, as I have put it, “network scams.” In this economy, everyone is reminded to respect the hustle of the next person, to always try to out-hustle them, but to accept when they themselves have been out-hustled. "Social Media in the Scam Age", a new essay from fintech scholar Lana Swartz https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/...

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  The Polish language edition of my 2014 book on how the game Jagged Alliance 2 (1999) was created is now available! Honestly I'm really pleased with this given how much more popular that game was in central Europe than in the US https://wydawnictwoopenbeta.pl/p/game-story-jagged-alliance-2-ksiazka/

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  I just walked past two security guards for an armored truck and overheard one saying to the other, "...two days after my daughter was born..." My dude, a videogame protagonist is about to you knock you out or worse

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  Quick question for any New York Times columnists out there: as an Iranian-American, how many "death to America"s am I allowed to say following Trump's threat to wipe Iran's civilization off the face of the earth? One? Three? An even dozen?

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  omg it's Rex Manning day. all xennials report to the record store posthaste