"To a remarkable extent, inequality, which fell during the New Deal but has risen dramatically since the late 1970s, corresponds to the rise and fall of unionization in the United States." https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-decline-inequality-rises/

Yall, the Twitter archiver that @darius made is seriously bonkers. You give it the zip file from Twitter, and it generates a magical website that you can host that contains EVERY TWEET you ever twot and you can search them instantly and view them and share them and they show up with previews LIKE A PRO.

https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-archive/make-your-own/

Here is mine that I made it took about 3 seconds:

https://benbrown.com/twitter/

The new Twitter policies re: linking to other social media platforms are designed to do two things: to make it harder for you to export your social graph and to make a rule so broad that it can be used as an excuse to ban just about any account.

🚨🚨🚨

This is what it looks like when the parasite of white supremacy eats its host…fuck both these dudes 😂🤣😂

This just hurts my soul. Microsoft basically hid a Black cemetery on land they got for free after tax breaks and then allowed for the desecration of the graves. The county and newspaper aren’t off the hook either. Same with the consultants and archeologists. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-authorities-erased-historic-black-cemetery-virginia

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