404media had an interesting inteview with a Kenyan “data labeller”. He talks about his jobs working with AI companies, and how he had to pretend being all kinds of things. He’d work at least 18 hours a day, constantly switching between roleplaying different characters of different genders to people who thought they were talking to AI.

So even people who think they are talking to robots might be sexting some underpaid guy in Kenya.

Yeah, it’s tricky. I donated to Mozilla in the past, will look into making some donations to Servo moving forwards as I really think that’s the way things are headed for me. I keep trying to use GNOME Web which is WebKit based and it keeps getting better, but it’s not quite there yet for me. So for now Mozilla is my best bet in spite of everything.

A lot to unpack here.

She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.

I feel like this summarizes the time we’re living in. Some poor bastard somewhere sitting on his computer chatting with some lady he believes he is paying for attention, but in fact he is just being pitied by some unnamed underpaid worker in the Philippines. Meanwhile they’re both filling the accounts of an online influencer and some onlyfans tech bro, both of whom are surely completely miserable in their own right.

Yeah, I returned to FireFox after the latest release because of the kill switch. Still I’m uncomfortable with using software that’s full of stuff that I hate, even if it’s disabled. This is not really rational I guess, just me being weird.

I was thinking the same thing when I read this:

A small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack. Positioning Digg as simply an alternative to incumbents wasn’t imaginative enough. That’s a race we were never going to win. What comes next needs to be genuinely different.

Small team, completely reimagined, not simply an alternative, genuinely different… They are describing a federated instance.

Oooh, neat community! Joined!

I guess that’s one benefit of a smaller site - if you put down the effort in it, it stands out more. But community discovery is absolutely a challenge.

That’s interesting and I missed that post, thanks!

It can be easy to lose track of how successful the fediverse already is, as the number of users will remain negligible compared to mainstream platforms for a really long time and possibly forever. Seeing how it easily outperforms a major player like Digg trying to re-establish themselves puts things into perspective.

I tried Librewolf for a while and found it to be a bit too much for me when all I really want is Firefox without AI. The privacy options are probably great but not for me.

Just installed waterfox. First impression is that I am super happy to be bock to the previous Firefox theme - it takes less space and looks nicer in my opinion. Seems promising. Thanks for the recommendation! :)

Did it have niche communities that had successfully moved over, but that were not featured on the front page?

Sorry if it’s a stupid question, I just always had the impression I didn’t understand what I was looking at and now it’s gone and I’m genuinely curious.

How was it? Did it feel lively?

I just checked the front page a couple of times out of curiosity, but I never bothered really checking it out too much. I was always surprised how dead it looked from the outside, but that might have been the wrong impression.

Edit: As an illustration, the last snapshot of Digg on internet archive a couple of days ago shows a front page where almost all posts had less than 30 upvotes, and the only two posts breaking above 50 are tech nostalgia posts about a Windows 98 screensaver (105 upvotes, 9 comments) and some young woman reviewing instagram 15 years ago (59 upvotes, 6 comments). Fitting for a platform from the past, worrying if they wanted to be part of the future.

In terms of activity, Digg thus never seemed to be able to keep up with more famous and well-funded competitors such as eviltoast.org. Never mind that a lot of the users seemed to have been trolls upset about being banned by Reddit. SEO is probably part of the problem, but it seems unlikely to be the full story. I think their problem is that it never took off.

Managed to refuse… In more than half of the cases. That does not look good. By any reasonable standard failing in one of a thousand would be disasterous.

Yeah, I find that the point is rarely well made and it’s often because the whole argument is a bit confused. People want to present it as being easier than it is.

Open registrations on the fediverse is a problem in general. Trolls abuse it to make accounts specifically to harass specific users. Those not being harassed will not notice this - before the “fetch all replies” feature was introduced they wouldn’t even see the replies. And because it seems so much better than other platforms unless you’re actively being targeted, you’ll have minority women or whatever raising the problem and a bunch of white men will respond that they have no idea what they’re talking about and that there is no problem and that they should just block the trolls. Blocking the trolls is just not efficient if they keep popping up all over the place.

One way to avoid this as a server admin is to defederate instances with open registrations that are being used in this way. But Mastodon.social is too big for this strategy to really be viable.

Of course, open registrations is also key to people bothering signing up in the first place. People are not used to resistance, and they don’t want to write a letter of motivation to sign up for social media. So the issue is not easily solved. Mastodon is working on better moderation tools. Hopefully they’ll manage to address it that way.

relies on the supplier being truthful with their documentation for their production

So the supermarket needs documentation and to take precautions, because they are to a certain extent responsible for the legality of the stuff they are selling.

In the real world supermarkets don’t just pick up carrots from some random guy showing up with a trailer full of them. In online markets, this is closer to how it works. Those running and profiting off online platforms should be accountable for what they sell. If Amazon lists electrical products that don’t meet fire safety standards on their website they should be held accountable for selling these products, even if they only act as middle men.

If companies can just take the money without any responsibility we’re fucked.

I think it would be reasonable if this was a problem of small indie titles that do not have a publisher and basically wouldn’t exist without Steam. If Valve allows for content on their platform they have an obligation to ensure this content is legal. If a supermarket cooperates with a local farmer to sell their produce directly without middle men, it’s partly their responsible if the produce is made using illegal pesticides.

However, it seems unreasonable when it’s about stuff like Forza and FIFA. Then sue Microsoft and EA, for fucks sake. These games have publishers.

My most recent ThinkPad also overheated an insane amount at whatever use I could put it through, and the fan was constantly running full speed. It was like that from day one, and there was no dust or anything, it was just a terrible machine.

In six years I have burnt through two Lenovo ThinkPads. In the first the USB C charging port malfunctioned, and it turns out the charging port is soldered directly to the motherboard so they had to replace the whole thing. Ever since I got it back from repairs it enters into kernel panics all the time, no matter which distro I install.

I was in the middle of writing my thesis so I had no time for repairs when it broke, so I ordered mysef a new ThinkPad. I had to choose between pre-assembled models, and I wanted a high resolution display, a good processor, and some other things. I got one with not quite as much RAM as I really needed, and found out when I wanted to upgrade that they had rendered upgrading RAM completely impossible in that model of ThinkPad. It wasn’t even one of the new slim ones, but a pretty traditional bulky one. Complete bullshit.

Both of these laptops are recent enough that had they not sucked I would still be using them years from now. I’m happy Lenovo appear to be changing their ways, but I wouldn’t touch another ThinkPad with a stick after my experiences with them.

Currently I’m using a Framework 13. Hopefully it’ll last me decades.

And every Ubuntu Touch device with support for external monitors for the last ten years or so. Here’s a demonstration running on a Fairphone 4.

I don’t even mind subscribing to 404media, as I feel like their operation makes sense. But there’s no way I’m going to pay to read some sponsored content on a page riddled with trackers.

Yeah. Sites like CNET and TechRadar seems completely uninteresting at this point. Wired and the Verge seem to have done a better job at transitioning into reporting on how tech affects society, which is much more interesting. 404media seems to be doing well in that business.

The leading article of the Verge at the moment is on what is real in the age of deepfakes, relating to war and disinformation. Wired writes about “All the ways big tech fuels ICE and CBP”. 404media runs a story about how “CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements”. Meanwhile, CNET is headlining how “Apple’s new MacBook Air is faster. It also costs $100 more”, and TechRadar tells us about “the seven best gadgets we have seen today”. I cannot even imagine caring. I wouldn’t even have cared back when I did care.

Besides, if a tech site does their job these days their readers will not be using Google any more at all.

Oops, obvisouly, was thinking about the Muslim world and getting terms mixed. Fixed.