Sunday Paper

We’re going to think of AI as our friends when they’re not

Bruce Schneier write that we need to mindful about how we assign our trust to AI

Corporations are not moral; they are precisely as immoral as the law and their reputations let them get away with.

But they are not our friends. Corporations are not capable of having that kind of relationship.
We are about to make the same category error with AI. We’re going to think of them as our friends when they’re not.

Manuel Moreale thinks that we need fewer new technologies

We don’t need more technology. Technology won’t fix human behaviour. We need kindness, we need compassion, we need a willingness to interact honestly with strangers online. That’s not something you can solve with a better protocol. We simply have to fight the good fight, day after day, trying our best to make the web a better place.

Zsolt Benke remembers a time when Adium allowed us to use one app to chat with our friends. In 2006, I wrote about how I did it.

I remember when we had Adium and you could connect almost all of your chat services to one client.
- Some features were missing, but the basic texting part usually worked.

Sunday Paper - Brid.gy, ActivityPub and AT

"...there’s a 95% chance it was started by someone who was all to ready to be triggered by anything and everything so they could start some shit on the internet at that moment."

I recently discovered J.L. Gatewood writing but his last blog posts about the GitHub kerfuffle over connecting two social media platforms has been spot on with my thinking about the subject.

The preamble to On The Subject Of Connecting Federate Social Media Networks sets up the rest of his post:

The past few days on the Fediverse have served to remind me a few things:

  1. The internet is as smart and as ignorant (and everything in between) as the macrocosm known as “human civilization” reflects upon it.
  2. Sometimes the victims will become the victimizers in any given situation, usually without them being aware of it.
  3. Upon pointing it out to said type above, instead of working to acknowledge and understand, they will double-down under the guise of righteousness, again unwittingly using the exact playbook that they had been persecuted under at some point in the past.
  4. As usual, any attempt by a rational third party to diffuse whatever situation breaking out on the internet will lead to a wider conflict/argument/brigade session where everyone winds up digging their heels in and missing entirely the point.
  5. And finally, as usual, there’s a 95% chance it was started by someone who was all to ready to be triggered by anything and everything so they could start some shit on the internet at that moment.

Read Ryan’s reflection on the experience:

The scope of the fediverse has been hotly debated recently. Are we a big fedi? Or a small fedi? Are instances just nodes? Or networked communities? Which Camp of Mastodon are we in? How far should our replies travel? How about our blog posts and Bluesky skeets? Should we welcome Threads? Or block them?

Should we open the fediverse to everyone, let them exercise freedom of association, embrace the inevitable Eternal September, and get good at managing the problems? Or should we learn from Twitter that a “global town square” has big downsides, try to prevent those harms from the beginning, and only expand online communities once we have their consent?

Should there be one internet? Or multiple, sometimes separate internets?

What is an oligarch and why has the USA become one? What happened to "...government of the people, by the people, for the people"? In part 7 of his series, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich writes about how concentrated wealth and power are undermining US democracy.

The “OLIGARCHY” comes from the Greek word oligarkhes, meaning “few to rule or command.” It refers to a government of and by a few exceedingly rich people or families who control the major institutions of society, and therefore have the most power over other people’s lives. - How America’s oligarchy has paved the road to fascism (Why American capitalism is so rotten, Part 7)

Writer James Shelly asks a very important question: "What’s the fun in writing on the internet anymore?"

You could copy and paste this article into ChatGPT and say, “Please rewrite and paraphrase this blog post in such a way as to keep its main points and observations, but substantively reconfigure the text to make the original version undetectable.” And then, just like that, you have content for your own blog. So easy.

Or you could just copy the contents of this page and paste it into a site like plagiarism-remover.com so you could, as advertised, “Easily Convert Your Plagiarism article Into Plagiarism Free article.” Or you could use Spinbot. Or Jasper. Or QuillBot. Or Paraphraser. And so on.

Sunday Paper

What is the American Dream?

I would argue that democracy in the US, if it can be said to still exist, is weakened by decades corruption. It has been eroded to a thin veneer with little substance because the substance of democracy is the people. And the majority of people of the US stopped caring decades ago. Any sense of civic responsibility, of active citizenship has been eroded by decades of apathy. The truth is, America traded that responsibility for something shiny, something convenient: The American Dream. - The substance of democracy is us. To keep it we need to work for it everyday by @Denny

One developer's well meaning effort to bridge two communities has led to condemnation from both.

Bluesky is on the verge of federating its AT Protocol, meaning that anyone will be able to set up a server and make their own social network using the open source software; each individual server will be able to communicate with the others, requiring a user to have just one account across all the different social networks on the protocol. But Mastodon uses a different protocol called ActivityPub, meaning that Bluesky and Mastodon users cannot natively interact.

Turns out, some Mastodon users like it that way. - Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media

I believe there might be some resistance. I didn't get my bike for the daily commute. The reason was my bad knees. And really, how would they even enforce such a thing? Picture this: police officers on bikes, stopping folks out for a ride? It's hard to imagine.

Serious crashes involving those modes are so relatively rare, though — the National Transportation Safety Board recorded just 119 e-bike-involved fatalities between 2017 and 2021 vs. the 192,709 caused by drivers — that advocates say the legislation would do little more than increase already-steep barriers to human-scaled mobility posed by traffic violence, while undermining the climate, equity, and safety goals that low-speed modes can help communities reach. - Why Every E-Biker Should Be Worried About NJ's Proposed Micromobility Insurance Law