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If there's a kind of cringe porn I can enjoy, the Horizon scandal is it. I'm seeing a bunch of little crimes and sorta-kinda engineering all stacking up to produce catastrophes. Looking forward to the definitive pop-tech-history full-length book.

BBC News: 'Damaging' testimony withheld from pregnant postmistress trial (By Nalini Sivathasan and Lorna Acquah)


Matthew Exon reshared this.


at last, someone is building the “how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline”-to-“blowing-up-a-pipeline” pipeline. https://offset.labr.io/about/

Matthew Exon reshared this.


Matthew Exon reshared this.


Australia’s cities have flags, and they are awesome! https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-17/australia-city-flags-sydney-redesign/103585696

Matthew Exon reshared this.



Weird to recognise myself in the first part of a "history of" video 🧓 So glad to see 春游 only going from strength to strength!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0O9UDQKpH_c

#china #music

YouTube: History of Chun You Festival(春游历史短片)

Music Feed reshared this.


Matthew Exon reshared this.


THREAD: 7 months of work later, my Globe & Mail investigation into an Ethiopian state Facebook campaign reveals that at least 200 Ethiopian state institutions, from town administrations to ministries & even academic institutions, are using their Facebook pages to misinform & lure vulnerable women into being recruited for domestic worker jobs in Saudi Arabia, despite the grave dangers that enable human trafficking.

Another example of Meta platforms causing real life harm.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-ethiopia-domestic-work-saudi-arabia-facebook/

This entry was edited (6 months ago)

Matthew Exon reshared this.

in reply to Zecharias Zelalem

To make things worse, when Meta penned its deal with the Ethiopian Ministry of Labor, Ministry official Nigusu Tilahun described the deal as one that would “prevent the use of Facebook by individuals who spread fake news and strive to create friction between people and government.” Coming from an authoritarian government that detains journalists and critical voices, such comments are hardly reassuring. So again, why would Meta get involved in this?
in reply to Zecharias Zelalem

While looking into the matter we learned that in 2021, Meta hired Helen Yosef Hailu, a former Ethiopian government official who until 2019 was a secretary in Prime Minister Abiy's office. She became Meta's Public Policy Manager for the East Africa region. Here, at the Meta partnership ceremony, she reunited with Labor Ministry rep Nigusu Tilahun, who in 2019 was her former colleague working in the Ethiopian Prime Minister's office. There are screaming potential conflicts of interest.

Matthew Exon reshared this.


The Fedivision song contest is ON!

What is Fedivision? We are a light-hearted musical competition among amateur musicians on the Fediverse. You can submit one original unreleased piece < 4 minutes long in any genre. In May 2024, we will listen to all the entries and the fediverse votes on the best song!

Now in its fourth year, we have a brand new dedicated instance. Please follow this account to be kept informed. PLEASE BOOST this post so that all your musician friends get the word.

Matthew Exon reshared this.

in reply to FediVision Announcements

@announce Hope this version doesn't support genociding Palestinians like normal Eurovision does
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Negative Øhio

@announce I’ll let the other organizers speak for themselves; for my part: the genocide in Gaza must stop immediately and the IDF brought to justice.

Matthew Exon reshared this.


AI models found to show language bias by recommending Black defendents be 'sentenced to death'

— The thing about this that terrifies me is the implication that lethal racism is embedded pervasively in our written culture at so deep a level that simple attempts to sanitize the LLM input data corpus doesn't even scratch the surface of the problem. https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/03/09/ai-models-found-to-show-language-bias-by-recommending-black-defendents-be-sentenced-to-dea

Matthew Exon reshared this.





Matthew Exon reshared this.


Tipoff from @kw217: Kazakhstan, which has not observed daylight saving for 20 years, is turning the clocks back at 0:00 on 1 March 2024, to 23:00 on leap day February 29 2024.

Definitely playing time zones on Hard Mode, Kazakhstan. Thanks for doing some QA on stacked edge cases for us all!

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/kazakhstan

Matthew Exon reshared this.

in reply to Deborah Pickett

right but it's not daylight savings, the change is permanent: Kazakhstan will change from using two time zones to observing only one time zone in the entire territory: UTC+5.


Author:

Perrin pressed forward through the beech woodlands. Where an oak or a larch broke through the tree cover he enjoyed the cool breeze. At a creek he could pick a few hawthorne berries. But as he rested under an old willow, he wondered if he could reach the pine forest before nightfall.

My brain:

Dude is in trees. There are trees and also trees and trees. There was wind. At a water he ate tree fruit. He sat under a tree. He wants to get out of the trees and into different trees.



Heard someone seriously mention "the 30s" for the first time just now. I've been looking forward to the end of our long millennial linguistic nightmare for decades, and finally victory is in sight.


I'm very excited by the recent movement to build #transitous, a single #publictransport routing API based on public GTFS feeds. But this coverage map from transit.land is a shocker. That is, I assure you, not an accurate representation of the world's public transport. There are all kinds of wrong directions you can travel in if this is your starting point.

Matthew Exon reshared this.


How #FOSDEM helped to kick-start the setup of an open public transport routing service: https://volkerkrause.eu/2024/02/10/fosdem-2024-open-public-transport-routing.html

Very excited to see where this will go!

Matthew Exon reshared this.



@tagesschau reported for two and a half minutes about this chart without mentioning the C-word once. #CoronaIsNotOver
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Matthew Exon

The best part was the owner of a tiny electronics factory complaining that at one point almost half her staff were out sick at the same time. What on earth could cause that?


I've never had any accountancy training. But at one point zaomengshe.com needed financial reports, and I said "How hard can it be? I'll write some Python scripts." So the one thing I do know about accountancy, is that it is FUCKING HARD with financial partners who are incapable of attaching unique IDs to transactions. Which is all of them.

That's why, although I barely dare to say it, I kinda have some sympathy for Fujitsu here.

#PostOfficeScandal #Accounting



Woah! I did not expect this to go through at all. I had fully expected to begin the process of giving up my existing citizenships this year.


https://ard.social/users/tagesschau/statuses/111781537631783164



Bundestag entscheidet über schnellere Einbürgerungen

Ausländerinnen und Ausländer sollen schneller die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit erhalten können, aber nur unter Bedingungen. Über die Pläne der Ampelkoalition stimmt heute der Bundestag ab. Die Kernpunkte der Reform im Überblick.

➡️ https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/bundestag-staatsangehoerigkeitsrecht-einbuergerungen-100.html?at_medium=mastodon&at_campaign=tagesschau.de

#Bundestag #Staatsangehörigkeit




The Wandering Shop: Charlie Stross (@cstross@wandering.shop)


This seems like the perfect chance to pitch my phone OS based on neoliberal orthodoxy. Instead of calling malloc() like godless communists, apps bid for memory in an on-device currency. And not just memory! CPU time, network connectivity, storage. Programs can trade off space/time performance based on the device's current market conditions. As the consumer, you can mint as much currency as you like, and allocate it to apps according to how much you value their use. Preorders will open soon, as soon as I get my Bahamas bank account set up.
(Not a reply because I believe Charlie has blocked me. And this post isn't likely to do me any favours either.)


Matthias Pfefferle reshared this.


Wordpress ActivityPub plugin 2.0.0! FWIW, Bidirectional Comment Federation is the last piece I personally was waiting for to declare this thing "feature complete". It means instead of a discussion on your blog and another discussion on social media, there's now a single conversation. Congratulations @Matthias Pfefferle !
Unknown parent

Matthias Pfefferle
@henrik subfolders are always tricky and you have to tweak some things, but it should work: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/#what%20if%20you%20are%20running%20your%20blog%20in%20a%20subdirectory%3F


Debugging DNS logs on a laptop is like exploring the crawlspace under civilisation's house. I was perfectly happy not knowing those things were down there. Now I'm gonna have nightmares.


Interesting quote from Google's #gemini team:

"LLMs also struggle with tasks requiring high-level reasoning abilities like causal understanding, logical deduction, and counterfactual reasoning even though they achieve impressive performance on exam benchmarks."

Which is another way of saying LLMs are the exact opposite of critical thinking. That could be a useful shorthand. "Is critical thinking important in this task?" "Yes" ⇒ "LLM-free zone".

https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/06/google_gemini_ai/

reshared this



"Ford’s methods were so influential that they became known simply as Fordism (something that Google and Facebook still haven’t achieved.)"

I dearly hope "Googlism" becomes a term for something you keep vague when telling people you have a doctor's appointment.

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/11/08/silicon-valley-is-the-detroit-of-the-future/




October cold is the worst kind of cold because you're constantly thinking about how much worse it'll get.


"We're migrating the company wiki, as part of the cleanup all pages without an edit in the last 6 months will be archived."

-- real thing said by a free-roaming employee not wearing a Hannibal Lecter muzzle.

in reply to Matthew Exon

"If you'd like a page not to be archived, please add a 'noarchive' label to it" he added, the struggling kittens splashing water over his wrists.




Huge news if true. This would be a worrying escalation that could throw the whole region into chaos, with implications for the supply chain worldwide. #bbc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-66887236

BBC News: Giggles on the sofa! Pigeon CCTV has BBC hosts in tears

#bbc


Ow ow ow my eyes! Sadly, much as I'd like to blame this on ChatGPT, I'm betting a human is responsible.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/arts/ai-chatgpt-curators-museums.html

The New York Times: Museum Curators Evaluate A.I. Threat by Giving It the Reins (Zachary Small)




I would definitely have gone with the headline "Repair company lobbies for law change to permit expanding business into commercial machinery." Sometimes clickbait tactics are used for good, not evil. #ifixit https://youtu.be/2uCpY3tFTIA

YouTube: Why McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken and How To Fix Them

IXI reshared this.



Thought I'd check in and, whaddayaknow, still there.
This entry was edited (7 months ago)


My reaction when Naomi Wu went offline was basically "that's a shame, but you're probably right not to make a big fuss or fight this." Guess I misinterpreted that.

"Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me. Now that they know that I could be dead in a ditch tomorrow and no one would give a shit or say a word I’m 1000x less safe here."

https://www.hackingbutlegal.com/naomi-wu-and-the-silence-that-speaks-volumes/

#China

This entry was edited (7 months ago)

in reply to utzer [Friendica] Friendica Developers reshared this.

@utzer [Friendica] For reals, see https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/13344


How can airlines justify forbidding "skiplagging"?




I bumped into the name "Horatio Alger Association" but decided I couldn't be bothered following up. Slacktivist puts it in context:

Hard work and clean living were never enough for the street urchins and matchstick boys in his books. The ones who achieved success only managed to do so because they were assisted by older, wealthy, unmarried men who took those boys off the streets and into their homes.
If you think there might be a creepy subtext to that, you’re wrong. It’s not a subtext at all.


https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2023/08/11/ragged-dick/

slacktivist: Ragged Dick (Fred Clark)



Oops, maps.me finally went away. It used to be a good app, it worked offline and almost all the screen was map. They gradually cluttered the screen with more and more junk, and now you can't download more than ten regional maps, not enough even for a whole country. It's now useless as an application for, like, viewing maps.

Are there any free apps for viewing OSM offline any more? #openstreetmap

in reply to Matthew Exon

There’s also OsmAnd, if you’re looking for more advanced features/customisation 🙂
in reply to Tobia Alberti

I tried OsmAnd. It says "You can download 6 maps for free", which is the reason I dumped maps.me in the first place. It's also far too willing to interpret my zooms as rotates, which meant I was constantly having to tap the compass icon to reset things to sanity.
in reply to Matthew Exon

And there is of course
#OsmAnd~
Global Mobile Map Viewing & Navigation for Offline and Online OSM Maps
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/


Meat Lego Gnosticism put on a good show, but anything after the first two albums is unlistenable. https://crookedtimber.org/2023/08/09/mary-harrington-on-the-family/

Crooked Timber: Mary Harrington on the Family