Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

having ADHD is great if you hate the idea of finishing 100% of a task but love the idea of finishing 2% of 50 tasks

On Monday, I wrote an essay about climate and biodiversity for Scientific American. I tracked proportional engagement, calculated as (likes + shares + comments)/followers, over six social media platforms.

The winner? MASTODON, by a landslide.

Second place? INSTAGRAM. It's harder to share posts on IG, but lot of people like things there!

The loser? FACEBOOK, also by a landslide.*

* On Facebook, I've been shadow-banned since August 2018 when they listed clean energy and climate as "socially sensitive topics" so my page there stopped growing 6 years ago and now only about 1% of my followers there ever see my posts if the mention climate. It's actually too bad, because that's the platform where I reach the most conservative audiences through their connections to friends and family. So even though it's dead last, I still persist.

** For example, I had a post on FB a few weeks ago that didn't mention climate or clean energy. Its engagement levels were 3.7% which would put it just below Instagram.

As "smart interfaces" become more common, regression to the mean will be a serious problem.

For example, Google's swipe keyboard has trouble with rare words. I use a lot of technical terms. It seems like the swipe gesture model has no problem understanding what I mean, but then the language model kicks in and says, "'evolutionary'? Pfft, no way. They obviously meant 'employment'."

It's annoying having to fight with autocorrect, but I'm more concerned about the large scale effects. Will AI subtly nudge all of our communication and art to the average, making our culture more homogenous and bland?

Minnesota enacts right-to-repair law that covers more devices than any other state

Just one state demanding free repair manuals could benefit all fixers.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/minnesota-enacts-right-to-repair-law-that-covers-more-devices-than-any-other-state/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

in mysql they don’t say "byte" they say "tiny int" and i think that’s beautiful

So not only does the new Outlook preview only support Outlook & Gmail accounts (lol) but it also shows ads huh

talking to a buddy about this hobby he picked up, and i asked if there are specific youtube channels he follows for information or whatever.

and he said that honestly what he's learning a lot from are Discord servers. and god it makes me uneasy that those are increasingly becoming our repositories of specialized information.

i miss web pages so fucking much, lxds.

due to cutbacks and the current market conditions 🤦‍♂️

In the retro gaming community, we don't say goodbye; we say "emu later". And I think that's beautiful.

I cannot get this updated US risk map out of my mind.

In the last 6 months, half the US states have escalated anti-LGBTQ legislation to such a point that many—especially trans people—are in active danger. Florida has been designated a “don’t travel” state by Equality Florida. The NAACP also issued a no travel warning to FL for overlapping reasons, including the erasure of Black history.

This piece by Erin Reed details the information found in the maps: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/may-anti-trans-legislative-risk-map

#lgbtqia

Want to help us make web archiving easier and more accessible for all?
Webrecorder is hiring for a brand new Program Manager role:
https://webrecorder.net/jobs#program-manager

PSA, if someone asks you for contact info (e.g. a phone number) of someone you know, the correct response is "I can't give that to you, but I can give them yours".

It's efficient and adds no round-trips, it's privacy friendly, it's non-awkward and it's social engineering resistant. It's a universally good rule.

And the corollary, of course: Don't ask someone for another person's contact info - ask them to pass on yours.