Obscene. They've become the Labour (command) Party https://novaramedia.com/2022/12/15/labour-backs-plan-to-use-army-to-break-nhs-strikes/
I used to like wearing a watch as a kid, now I can't stand it and it seems impossible to get used to again. I hate having anything strapped to me besides a backpack, really. And having to retreat to my desktop running a TV all the time isn't the most convenient… but my eyes are absolutely done with near work for awhile. If you do a lot of close focus for some reason or another -- say, a full time job's worth of time on the phone -- consider limiting now before it really interrupts your life.
If you have an (understandable) predisposition to expect ill of someone wearing a smartwatch, make sure you retain the consideration that they may have a disability or some particular need. Using a phone is destroying my eyes, so I need to switch to using a watch like a pager.
I get it, they're expensive for how useless they are to most people, and represent affluence and luxury in public view, but some people actually need them. My secondhand Apple Series 3 is already too old for cell service
I don't want to serve a huge userbase. I don't want to "lead" a community, much less with directness of a steering wheel. I want to build something together with people who are just as committed to self-management as I am. I suppose I'm fortunate that almost nobody's joined all year, so I can still make that decision.
I think Hellsite is going from public to "request an invite" only.
How is it that Cory Doctorow @pluralistic is so thoroughly, exhaustively RIGHT about everything?
There's a Mastodon instance for people who want to toot in Esperanto.
I'm old enough to remember when Yahoo! Groups unceremoniously nuked every single LGBT mailing list overnight, leaving people completely untethered from communities they had relied on and loved. When that happened, we got angry at Yahoo!. And yet when people flee from Twitter, anger is directed at those "defectors". Twitter is not a country, and we were not its citizens. It is a corporation. If Twitter is driving people away, it's Twitter's fault. It's not our job to fix it. #noxp
How to ban 3600 books from school libraries
This year, at least 102 books have been removed from the shelves of school libraries in Clay County, Florida. Many of these books were pulled at the request of one man: Bruce Friedman. . . Friedman said he had compiled "a list of over 3,600 titles that I believe have concerning content"...One is The Girl From The Sea, about a 15-year-old girl who develops romantic feelings for another girl. There is no sex, and no nudity.
https://popular.info/p/how-to-ban-3600-books-from-school
The Flickr Foundation is a new nonprofit organization "dedicated to keeping the wonderful Flickr collection around for 100 years". The Flickr Commons is one of the best things on the internet and I'm glad they're building on it. https://www.flickr.org/announcing-the-flickr-foundation/
So, your Mastodon instance:
- who are the admins?
- who is holding the bag legally for content on the server?
- what is the editorial policy around trending hashtags? Trending posts?
- how active are the moderators?
- can they tell the difference between someone harassing a user, and someone just being generically awful,, and which ones do they moderate?
- is there a different standard for local behavior than remote?
- what reports will they act on?
- how timely?
- how are decisions on all of the above made?
Today is the birthday of Peter Kropotkin—anarchist, scientist, and author of Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.
To honor the occasion, we invite you to read this account of his daring escape from prison:
anybody no longer considering a raspberry pi for their next project might consider one of these 20 other single board computers https://www.ubuntupit.com/best-raspberry-pi-alternatives/
AI image generation tech can now create life-wrecking deepfakes with ease. All it takes is 5 social media photos
It might be time to take your photos off the Internet
I wrote about it for Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/thanks-to-ai-its-probably-time-to-take-your-photos-off-the-internet/
Scrappy queer