Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

You know what? I'm gonna say it louder for the folks in the back:

THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT WRITING SOFTWARE THAT MAKES US BETTER THAN ANY OTHER WORKERS

Tech Workers Stop Thinking We're Somehow Not Like Everyone Else Challenge 2023 (difficulty: quite easy, actually)

Funny how people always go with the classic,

"If you're not doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide."

over a far more sensible:

"If I'm not doing anything wrong, you should have no reason to spy on me."

#privacy #surveillance

Omg one other trans femme at this festival please speak to me

Just saw that #Etsy has had three articles about how they mistreat their sellers in as many days. As an independent #artist myself, I've been struggling to find purchase (and purchasers) on the platform, which is why I started building #magpiemarket - a #federated Etsy-alternative. These articles just go to show how much we need a new space that helps #artists rather than uses them. Please #boost this to help us spread the word.

Cory Doctorow: "Mastodon is far from perfect. But I only have so many hours in the day, and only so many days left in my life. I would much rather spend those precious hours making a open service better than using a temporarily superior closed one. I have seen that movie. I know how it ends"
https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

How to automate away the CEO:

Basically start a co-op which automates away CEOs, pitch yourself to investors as a cost-reduced way to deliver better performance to one of the biggest costs on companies. The "automation" is actually a combination of some automation-based tools but also, like most AI/automation, has real humans behind it, but just for much cheaper, and likely with much better decisions. The co-op runs by an internal dogfooding of the same structure.

In the early 2000s this setup of mine was peak cyberpunk.

Alt text isn't just helpful for the sight-impaired. By reading alt text I can identify what the OP is calling attention to in the pic, helping me get the joke or social commentary that would otherwise be illegible to me. (Without this I'm like, I see a thousand details and I don't know which one matters to you.) #ActuallyAutistic

So the first part of things is just a big, public peertube instance.

I have the know how, the capacity, the ability. The trick is that it's still difficult and expensive to host peertube for other people.

So I'm going to charge of it. Not much, but enough. We charge folks for their storage quota.

$12/year for 10GB of storage. $50/year for 50GB of storage. Other packages at higher rates.

That's $1/month for 10GB, or ~$4/month for 50GB. We'll charge by the year to reduce transaction fees.

Cheap, but not free. That reduces a lot of our burdens around hosting, while keeping the thing accessible. It makes us enough money to give accounts away when people can't afford hosting, etc.

It let's us really do Community media.

I just stumbled upon Ploum's blog. Their latest article is called "splitting the web", it describes how the internet - mainly the WWW - is splitting in two: A corporate version filled with ads and trackers, and a hobby version, the darknet where none of that shit exists. Very recommended read. https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html

Just a few minutes after reading that blog, this conversation happened between me and another person on Mastodon:

What site do you recommend me to do this or that? I'm asking because I want to be sure which domain I add to my javascript allow-list.

You see, the add-ons list in my browser (not Chrome, God forbid lol) includes but is not limited by:

Privacy badger
uBlock origin
noScript
and another one whose name I forgot, sorry.

When I find a site I like, I have to follow this ritual where I carefully select which cookies and javascript subdomains are strictly necessary to operate that site; the others remain blocked. I wonder how anyone else just manages to browse the internet. Are they as paranoid as I am? Or have they just given up and simply assume Big Brother is monitoring every single thing they watch online and just obliviously live their lives, like that lady in the transparent house, I wonder? 🤔

Have you ever taken a look at your browser's console when you try to read a manga scanlation? Dozens, dozens of trackers keeping tabs on you, some with completely nonsensical combinations of letters in their domains and subdomains just to make it even harder for you to block them. It's a literal jungle, hence the mastodon message in question.

Writing that message in such a casual manner made me realize that we're already living in an online, virtual version of a cyberpunk dystopian setting: We're the outcasts, the people who are trying to live by; we are living in the slums where there are no commodities, no fancy stores, no malls, no holographic assistants, no flying cars and no gigantic glass skyscrapers; but we're also free from the high tech surveillance machinery, the hovering camera drones and servitors and police agents wearing faceless helmets and ready to strike down on anyone who gives them a bad look.

Like Ploum said in their essay, this place - the so-called "dark web" - used to be filled with criminals and seedy services but now more and more normal people are driven to it out of necessity because life in Babylon City has just become impossible to keep up with.

The web's infrastructure is crumbling, and tons of services exist just to monitor who-watches-what for advertisement purposes. Over 90% of the space from that one-page article you're reading is filled with obnoxious ads with microscopic close buttons - some don't even have a close button, depending on who made the juiciest deal with the website - and over 90% of internet traffic is not the content itself, it's thousands of requests between you, the site, and ads & tracking companies.

If you're zapping YouTube, over 50% of your time is spent watching mandatory ads that don't give a shit how much content you actually watch, and most of the other half is you inadvertently getting pulled by the riptide of recommendations designed by a behavior-aware algorithm. And while the algorithm says to itself, "oh, this person's behavior is exactly as predicted, feed that info to the algorithm!", the truth is that you forgot to click pause and went for a bathroom break while running YT on autoplay. The overhyped AIs sold to surveillance companies keep feeding on their own data like Ouroboros - the snake that eats its own tail, except you're part of it sometimes... just sometimes. The algorithms have passed their usefulness and are devolving, like a runaway tire out of its car, driven by inertia and only spinning around. I'm willing to bet that not even the engineers are entirely sure how their own algorithms work (the poor bastards are probably praying to $deity that no court ever decides to audit the spaghetti code coiled around their TensorFlow setup; good luck, buddies).

On a global scale corporations and states are all fighting each other like dogs to harvest that surveillance data; meanwhile, all the economy, all the jobs, all the air conditioned rooms with server racks and nVidia AI rigs and CAT-5 tendrils, all the cloud services, all the fast food restaurants strategically located, are spiraling around the very surveillance machinery users want to get rid of. It's just a matter of time before the entire thing collapses beautifully like a 3D domino tower, and we are the outsiders who want to be in a safe place when that happens.

Away from us-east-1, us-west-2, and other cloud servers where the nasty stuff is taking place, we are setting up our crappy DIY web servers on Thinkpads running Apache or nginx where everything looks like a bad 1990s website written by a 15yo kid who just discovered their fandom; but it just works and our friends are happy with it.

Welcome to the Sprawl.

#Cyberpunk #privacy #surveillance #musings

New gender just dropped

Geoffrey Litt shares how Potluck can take a regular text document and gradually enrich it to have computational behavior that is personalized to your needs. https://youtu.be/bJ3i4K3hefI #personalsoftware

@david_megginson I want a world where artists and authors don't starve, and that's the exact opposite of the world of copyright (where corporations can lay claim to the works of others while censoring new works).

We need UBI or better direct financing methods (though Patreon helps), not a tool of abusive publishers, record labels, and studios.

#copyrightistheft

The blog post also has details that @fission is #hiring

We’re looking for a #Rust engineer with interests in distributed computing to work along side @zeeshanlakhani @expede and the rest of the Fission team

Check out the careers page for all the details https://fission.codes/careers

BIG NEWS! 📣 We're pleased to announce that Fission has received an $800,000 USD grant to support further applied research of the InterPlanetary Virtual Machine (IPVM) protocols and the Homestar reference implementation from the Arcological Association and the IPFS Network Capital Pool.

We're also #hiring a full-time software engineer to work on the Homestar implementation.

Learn more here: https://fission.codes/blog/ipfs-impact-grant-ipvm-decentralized-wasm-computation/ #WebAssembly #Wasm #IPVM #decentralizedweb