Posts by kissane@mstdn.social
 (DIR) Post #AWHxqeR9TbIpoNZpI0 by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-06-02T17:42:36Z
       
       0 likes, 2 repeats
       
       Honestly "no one got killed, there was no drone, there was no AI, there was no actual simulation, it was all a role-playing scenario run by someone *not even in the Air Force*" is exactly the pratfall I needed this week, what a clownshow https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a33gj/ai-controlled-drone-goes-rogue-kills-human-operator-in-usaf-simulated-test
       
 (DIR) Post #AWJZvN7rG0iazCBrUW by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-06-02T16:56:29Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       I wrote about my sense of what’s happened to the way we hang out together online, and it’s a ghost story. Come for the haunted medical equipment lab and the fencing foil, stay for the, uh, spectre haunting the internet?https://erinkissane.com/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow
       
 (DIR) Post #AWOYLa5iRj6yboMEzo by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-06-05T19:21:26Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       oh so *that’s* what betting on the next pandemic looks like.
       
 (DIR) Post #AWQIvf7W12n5gGInQ0 by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-06-06T14:59:23Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       If the mastodon ~community wants to be more welcoming to more people, someone is going to have to do bystander training for dealing with people like this dude. (And the other guys who told her to just block.) He responded to a Black woman’s post about it feeling super white here and went on for like seven posts telling her how to speak and how he was helping her be better. By not making this guy’s replies visible to most people bc of federation weirdness, the software plays a role, too.
       
 (DIR) Post #AWV4HTLjvqZm1WhHBA by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-06-08T23:40:56Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       the final rhododendrons to bloom in our microclimate are these gorgeous faintly menacing ones I don’t remember ever seeing before
       
 (DIR) Post #AWcfLf0BwWS0hRM4YK by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-06-09T16:38:44Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       The strangest thing to me about our social tools and networks is how super-limited their feature-sets and philosophies have been in human terms. It feels like designing a house entirely around the best use of new light-switch technology. How can we reinvent the bathmat???It's weird.https://erinkissane.com/all-this-unmobilized-love
       
 (DIR) Post #AWibxymaRVWm5BbyoC by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-06-15T14:18:11Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       The first thing I wanted to know about chatgpt and co. when I learned about them was how the makers were going to protect the models from training on LLM output. But what happens when they *do* eat their own output is so much funnier than I expected. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.17493v2.pdf
       
 (DIR) Post #AWtViQ1KwWJQwLGbei by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-06-20T17:59:12Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       This is more semi-meta, so do what you will with that, but I want to explicitly tie together two conversational threads from yesterday: 1. I think the structure of Mastodon really amps rumors and misinfo because the mechanisms we use elsewhere to pass around and find corrections (visible replies, quote-posts, search) don't work here.2. Instance admin politics are rarely discussed in a public, easily re-findable place—that, too, fuels the rumor-mill, as we saw re: Meta meeting discussions.
       
 (DIR) Post #AWv7IdjPKoDjLmyWwq by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-06-21T14:19:31Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Yes ProPublica Guild YESSSSSSS https://www.propublicaguild.org
       
 (DIR) Post #AWvTMX2aLmaIkXCrmS by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-06-21T19:07:57Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       I don't ever do polls but quick before the iced coffee wears off should I spend this afternoon working on a neolithic building structure (and the internet) post or flip to a deep read of the Atlantic Council's new report on trust & safety or a(n actual) secret third thing
       
 (DIR) Post #AXG7XTHf1AVqSAqexM by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-07-01T18:25:16Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Welcome to fleeing Twitter ppl ❤️If you’re looking for stable spots I will note that Bluesky is currently down/unstable, presumably as a cascading result of the exodus, and also it’s…pretty weird over there rn due to bizarre moderation choices. I’m not a “Bluesky Is the Devil” person but I wouldn’t recommend it just yet. Masto has some real problems, but if you get on a good server it still seems like the best lifeboat to me.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXGQ30uHrAiEsx6cLI by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-07-01T21:28:02Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Hey masto, if you’ve been here for more than a few weeks and you really like your instance and have a minute, could you weigh in here and name it and say why you like it? We have new folks coming in and I never know where to point them for real-talk instance recs. Would love to know whether your instance is open to new people, whether it strictly moderates abuse (racist, misogynist, anti-LGBT, disability-linked), how aggressive its defed policies are, whether it’s technically stable.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXHuSSgotD0s4goj56 by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-07-02T15:14:36Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Hi new/returning people, here is a collaborative list of instance recommendations for those looking for a spot.Weirdness note: Use the little contextual menu on the below post to open the post in a browser. Once you do that, many more replies will suddenly become visible. This is one of the core design problems here—the main thing to know is that when you view other people’s threads, you won’t see all replies unless you open in a browser. (Some 3rd party apps can help.) https://mstdn.social/@kissane/110640947682542163
       
 (DIR) Post #AXMX4G8EbKqX1PvjMG by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-07-04T20:47:51Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Literary Twitter is pretty clearly doing a full migration to Bluesky this week.I saw quite a few writers try Mastodon last fall and bounce off for the usual reasons. I'm sure people will chime in to say that they were clearly all ~lazy clout monsters~ or whatever but it bums me out.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXRMjcgp6xfYRclkW0 by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-07-06T20:47:01Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       "Federating with Meta will be fine, we have no actual plans for *preventing* damage but each instance will totally yeet each individual Threads account involved in the mass-scale brigading instigated by e.g. Libs of TikTok *after* they start terrorizing our users" is gonna be a disaster for very specific groups of users.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXRMjdRyHfNonqpP0K by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-07-06T20:47:57Z
       
       0 likes, 0 repeats
       
       I can see how this maybe makes sense to people who have never been the target of persistent mass abuse for just existing, but if your whole strategy once an Instagram-scale brigade kicks off is to stay reactive, you're planning to use your trans/queer/Black/high-viz users as ablative shielding.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXd33Neq5sqcjcFLn6 by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-07-12T18:16:22Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       Not a huge goods and services person but Eighth Generation is one of maybe five companies I feel intense loyalty to—totally unmatched wool textiles, Indigenous-owned and run, featuring all Indigenous artists—and they are having a big sale this week on summer and back-to-school stuff, so I'm taking that as an excuse to link: https://eighthgeneration.com
       
 (DIR) Post #AXlWCKXJWJIvaz1f7Y by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-07-16T16:16:27Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       Bluesky had a bad week as a company in relation to its community of users but a thing that is totally alive there rn and really not here is Black journalists and writers and internet people having non-101 conversations about rhetoric and networks at full speed without being hit with hundreds of identical replies about not seeing race or being asked to prove the existence of racism. I hope fedi people who care about this stuff are paying attention and not just smugly writing them off.
       
 (DIR) Post #AXuXUEEmSXZJkRjE00 by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-07-19T19:09:57Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       Soliciting personal recs for great medium-sized to large instances you love that aren't defederating over personal conflicts between admins and that *do* use Oliphant's level-zero (or greater) blocklist. Preferably not locked to a locality.If you like an instance but don't know anything about its blocklist, I appreciate you! But please don't recommend it in this specific spot. <3
       
 (DIR) Post #AXvltv0CBuHs8X0hgO by kissane@mstdn.social
       2023-07-21T00:24:24Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       But what is the actual PROBLEM with Mastodon?? Said one hundred dozen people over several months of threads here. So I wrote it up. It's too long, but we got bad doors, stilt-walking French shepherds, water bugs, a bunch of @/shengokai@zirk.us quotations, What The Fuck Is Up With Bluesky, and more.https://erinkissane.com/the-affordance-loop