Want to work on Mastodon full time? I’d like to pay a Rails dev for the next 3+ months to implement some auth improvements that matter to me but also just burn down bugs, make perf improvements, whatever is needed as this place grows. Remote 100% ok but need 3-4 hrs of Pacific time zone overlap, fair pay, meaningful work. #fedihire #ruby #rails #job

This and other stories make it clear "human trafficking" as politically discussed is a white-washed suburban victim fantasy of Instagram posts about zip ties on car doors, instead of social systems collapse and Main Street business labor practices.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immigration-hyundai/

Presenting: "Space Karen".

This is Karen Nyberg, who was a NASA astronaut from 1991 to 2020 and logged 180 days in space between 2008 and 2013. In 2013 while stationed on the ISS she knitted a stuffed dinosaur, believed to be the only stuffed animal ever manufactured in space, out of fabric scavenged from Roscosmos food containers and stuffing from a shredded T-shirt.

I'm thinking about switching away from DigitalOcean for hosting my instance. My memory usage is above 90% for the 1GB droplet that I'm on. For the same price I can move to Hetzner and get double the resources...

I finally got umami (https://umami.is/) set up for analytics on both my personal site (https://www.heathanderson.net) and this instance (https://social.heathanderson.net). So far it seems nice, and is fairly easy to self-host.

Just testing out the meta tags on my site for url preview card generation: https://www.heathanderson.net/2022/website-updated

I finally updated my personal website. It was getting dangerously close to a decade since I've touched it. https://www.heathanderson.net/

An example of using harp to generate a static blog: https://github.com/handerson/harp-blog-example

Earlier this year, I became aware of STANDARD EBOOKS, a donation-dependent group of edtiors and layout experts who have been doing the amazing work of taking out-of-copyright books, turning them into top-quality ebooks, and then releasing them for free.

Some of the books they've done are in the Internet Archive here:

https://archive.org/details/standardebooks

They're seeking 75 patrons in December to keep themselves afloat, consider donating to this amazing cause.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks

A rainy day near Mentone, AL.

#photography

Photos from Scottsboro, AL. Taken in October 2022.

#photography

The Turing Test poisoned the minds of generations of AI enthusiasts, because its criteria is producing text that persuades observers it was written by a human.

The result? Generative AI text products designed to "appear real" rather than produce accurate or ethical outputs.

It *should* be obvious why it's problematic to create a piece of software that excels at persuasion without concern for accuracy, honesty or ethics. But apparently it's not.

in the good timeline, GPT finally trains humanity to understand that someone who's eloquent is not therefore automatically trustworthy

logic gate

we were so worried about "malware" (software that deliberately spreads and causes harm) that we forgot to protect against "mallware" (software that transforms every single computing experience into a shopping mall) and it took over the world oops

The earliest major inflection point in Twitter's adoption was when
@aplusk
raced CNN to a million followers, and Oprah created her account. As of this week, the fediverse has 33% more active users than Twitter did at that point; Mastodon alone is larger. https://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/17/ashton.cnn.twitter.battle/index.html

A pasture in Fort Payne, AL. Photos taken in early Nov.

Cohost finally fixed their exif data bug that exposed geolocation data of some uploaded photos. It only took them 3 weeks after I reported it. I never heard any response from my report 🤷‍♂️



https://cohost.org/staff/post/430376-cohost-patch-notes-v

Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) adds another nail in the coffin of effective altruism (EA) with her piece for WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence-sam-bankman-fried/

For me, this follows »The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?« by Linda Kinstler: https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/11/15/the-good-delusion-has-effective-altruism-broken-bad

And »Against longtermism« by Émile P Torres: https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo