I have been using Grammarly for a few weeks, and I am extremely impressed.
Today’s insight: I can toggle checking for the Oxford comma. I can switch it on for clients that like the Oxford comma, and off for clients that don’t.
“If they cause enough fuss in the media, over and over, eventually Reddit will decide it’s not financially worthwhile to stand up for sanity, and they’ll just nuke porn out of convenience,” a moderator for … a 3-million subscriber community for adult content, told Motherboard. Like many adult subreddits, posts focused on a specific fetish come from both adult performers promoting their work, and other users who are reposting adult content they lifted from other sites without permission. “Eventually groups like NCOSE will get porn outlawed from the web in general. It’s just a matter of time, and reintroducing the laws several times under different acronyms until people get tired of fighting. I’m very pessimistic about this. Unfortunately, mindlessly shrieking ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’ over and over is a dangerously over-effective tactic.”
The moderator pointed out that bills like FOSTA/SESTA—which NCOSE supported and which is largely considered a failure—drive sex workers further underground to one effect: causing more precarity to workers.
“If they win, everyone loses, including themselves,” the mod said. “Likewise, in getting all the big, well-moderated porn sites taken down, these demented religious perverts will inevitably drive all porn underground into closed communities where there is no moderation or control whatsoever. It’s completely backwards. Big sites like Reddit are significantly safer and better moderated than the internet in general. Driving all porn underground is profoundly dangerous and stupid. These anti-sex religious groups are all alike: they’re all depraved, repressed perverts. Absolutely demented, brain-damaged imbeciles, absolutely self-defeating, too stupid to think two seconds in front of their faces.”
Emphasis added by me because I so, so love that quote.
Another porn moderator said:
“Do I particularly care about the fate of my subreddit should such a ban be applied? No. I don’t make money here, and moderation takes a time out of my day. I’ll start collecting post stamps, like my father before me.”
— Samantha Cole and Emmanuel Maiberg at Vox.com
I saw these baby geese and momma goose at the park this morning. Gosling photos will continue until morale improves. 📷
Optimism Optimized & Pessimism Prodded
“An interview about THE FUTURE with Hugo Winning author CHARLES STROSS! Fumblingly carried out by John Shirley:”
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The Singularity “uncritically subsumes patterns of belief that originated in Christianity…. “
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The Singularity’s origin in “the writings of the Russian Orthodox theologian Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov in the late 19th century…. “
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“… it looks from where I’m standing as if many self-avowed atheists and rationalists are actually replacing the religion they rejected with an elaborate framework of beliefs that are structurally indistinguishable from it.”
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Also: The slowing rate of IT progress, “information pollution,” and how hackers could create armies of assassins using smart light bulbs. “We’ve created a hideous grifters paradise, where everybody needs to know stuff that only network security administrators needed to be aware of a couple of decades ago, and made it a terrible time to be a paranoid schizophrenic.
Mastodon needs to be more user-friendly, or people will just continue going to the platforms supported by billionaires, despite evidence from Twitter and Facebook that those platforms aren’t great.
I want to like Mastodon, but it seems like work.
Donald G. McNeil Jr. cites many reasons why US pandemic response was disgracefully incompetent, and why it’s wrong to pin all the blame on Fauci, or make a saint out of him either.
Fauci is a courageous scientist and was a dutiful civil servant doing the best he could with little actual authority, trying to mitigate an ongoing disaster.
He was also the only powerful medical official with the stones to contradict Trump.
New York Times Magazine Interview With Dr. Fauci: Science Fiction
5G Not Enough? Telecom Companies Look to 5.5G (WSJ) This time it’ll succeed, because it goes to 11.
What Is Pleroma?. Like Mastodon, but different.
Gadgets I am tempted by:
This Ultimate Hacking Keyboard. I like the way it separates in two parts, with a trackball in the center. But it’s not worth $385 to me, so I’ll pass.
Also, this 4K 15.6-inch portable monitor would tempt me if I was still living the frequent business travel life.
And I’m STILL tempted, because I’ve been using laptop+external display for my desktop setup for most of the past 25+ years. But I never actually use the laptop display because it’s so much smaller than whatever external display I’m using. maybe a laptop + a smaller display, side-by-side.
But I’m not spending that money today.
Interesting: “Work is starting on a protocol bridge between ActivityPub and the AT protocol (the protocol that Bluesky uses).”. So BlueSky users would be able to connect with folks on Mastodon and other Fediverse services, and vice-versa?
Cory Doctorow:
The private healthcare sector is designed to deny care. Its first duty is to its shareholders, not its patients, and every dollar spent on care is a dollar not available for dividends.
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Medicare pays private hospices $203-$1,462 per day to take care of dying old people – seniors that a doctor has certified to have less than six months left. That comes to $22.4b/year in public transfers to private hospices. If hospices [take] that $1,462 day-rate, they have lots of duties, like providing eight hours' worth of home care. But if the hospice is content to take the $203/day rate, they are not required to do anything. Literally. It’s just free money for whatever the operator feels like doing for a dying elderly person, including doing nothing at all.
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This is absolute catnip for private equity – free government money, no obligations, no enforcement, and the people you harm are literally dying and can’t complain. What’s not to like?
One technique favored by corrupt hospices: Give the patients unlimited access to opioids, and when the cash fountain from the government runs dry, let the patients die of overdose. No autopsy when the victim dies in hospice care. Everybody wins!
This immature osprey was standing on the footpath at Lake Murray for a long time this morning; passers-by said he’d been there for hours. There’s an osprey nest on a utility pole high above the footpath. Probably the immature osprey fell out and could not fly up. Another osprey was standing just outside the nest, high above, watching. In the video, you can hear the immature bird call out plaintively.
I’ve been putting energy into Mastodon, but Bluesky looks interesting and may just lap Masto. I’ve been dismissive of Bluesky until now, but I just signed up for the private beta.
I keep wanting to read Nostr as “Nostril.”
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick looks at options post-twitter. Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options
35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now (The New York Times)