Venting my spleen*

The more I get to see AI generated text, be it from tech support, a search engine answer, or posts about how AIs fail in generating believable answers to fact based queries and then defending their mistakes, the more it grates on me.

Today I finally realised why their style pisses me off so much. It reminds me of a manipulative ex boyfriend of mine many, many years ago, just as eloquent, condescending and glib, and trying to deceive me and others at every single opportunity, even after having been found out. This person inoculated me against a lot of bullshit behaviour later on, so at least there was a use case for him in my life, albeit being a tough one.

And there are also some use cases for AI. However I loathe the shitty AI generated websites that pop up everywhere these days when trying to find answers for my questions. This is all going downhill way too fast.

On top of that it makes me feel sick to the core that this style of manipulative communication seems to be thought appropriate by the developers and their bosses. This probably all happens on purpose to keep us engaged with these wonderful new toys so that they can keep playing with their AI tools that use huge amounts of energy, needing their own dedicated power stations which are not always using sustainable energy sources. For what exactly?

I better stop here.

* This is the translation I got when looking up the German word “auskotzen”… The title I had in mind was “Einmal auskotzen bitte” which sounds so much better 😅 – literal translation would be “vomit once please”.

#SylkewebBlog #Tech

As I said before, Friendica is fantastic. You can even add an RSS feed from a website to your home feed there.

Today I took that a step further and set up a new account that mirrors all of the incoming news posts from a website into the Fediverse. That way all of us (well, those who follow) can now see news posts from my hometown (that doesn’t seem to like anything outside the walled gardens of X and BlueSky). And I don’t have to curate anymore when reposting as it’s all automated.

Since Friendica is part of the Fediverse and supports the Activity Pub protocol, users from all services that use the that protocol too (e.g. Mastodon, Firefish, or Hubzilla) can follow this new account just like they would follow another user account on their own instance and/or social media service.

I had to work my way through a number of settings for for my new profile and the RSS driven contact but as long as you are a little technically minded and clear about what you are trying to achieve, it’s fairly straight forward. However, I would not recommend this for someone who is completely new to Friendica. Learn your way around the service first, so that you understand what all the elements and settings are for.

https://sylkeweb.com/2023/12/06/using-an-rss-feed-in-friendica/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Friendica #HowToFediverse #Mastodon #SylkewebBlog #TestingTheFediverse

Ever thought of using an RSS feed to add posts from a website into your home feed?

#SylkewebBlog #Fediverse #TestingTheFediverse #ActivityPub #HowToFediverse #RSS #Mastodon #Friendica

http://sylkeweb.com/2023/12/06/using-an-rss-feed-in-friendica/

I‘ve updated my blog post about the interconnectivity of Fediverse services with a new table. There are still many gaps where I need to test more but here we go for now:
https://sylkeweb.com/2023/10/15/testing-the-fediverses-interconnectivity-how-it-all-began-or-the-fediverse-is-more-than-mastodon/

#SylkewebBlog #Fediverse #TestingTheFediverse #ActivityPub #HowToFediverse
#WordPress #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Friendica #Firefish #Hubzilla

Posting to my WordPress blog using Friendica

A symbol for the Fediverse

https://loma.ml/display/373ebf56-2065-5bdb-b365-9c2278452026

The more I‘m finding my way around the Fediverse, the more I‘m enamoured with Friendica. It has so many useful features that make it incredibly versatile.

Earlier this evening I read a post describing how you can post from your Friendica account straight to your WordPress blog , so I decided I need to test it out.

My first attempts didn‘t work. I only generated a Friendica post, nothing arrived in my blog. I had a sneaky suspicion that this had something to do with the two factor authentication that I use on WordPress. After a lot of looking through possible settings in WordPress‘s labyrinthine user interface, I stumbled into my User Profile and spotted Security. In there I was able to set up an application password for Friendica and bingo, my next posting attempt went through.

What I didn’t quite expect was that the test post was automatically distributed via my two Mastodon accounts that WordPress is connected to. I get the feeling that I‘ll also have to add hashtags and categories from within WordPress but for good measure I‘ll add some hashtags to this Friendica post. And a picture.

If Mastodon is the easy entry point to the Fediverse for most users, then Friendica is the next level up for those people who prefer to write their posts in a more feature rich environment. However, it takes a bit of time to learn about everything it can do.

#SylkewebBlog #Fediverse #TestingTheFediverse #ActivityPub #HowToFediverse #WordPress #Friendica

Read the original post and comment stream on Friendica

https://sylkeweb.com/2023/11/20/posting-to-my-wordpress-blog-using-friendica/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Friendica #HowToFediverse #SylkewebBlog #TestingTheFediverse #WordPress

A quick blog post as this was getting too long for a Mastodon post.

For most people social media comes as a dedicated app these days. However, all of the services can be accessed via a web browser too and usually this gives access to a more feature rich experience. I’m the web browser kind of person, trying to find out everything you can do with a specific social media service and to bend them to my needs wherever possible – but I have also used apps, when they were well done, like Tweetbot.

I’m not sure about the terminology as I’m not a programmer but I’ve come across the term “frontend” recently and from what I understand, this means the interface that is used to access the main service. So an app would be a typical frontend that people are familiar with, presenting a service in its own unique way. There are also “web clients”, they do the same but within a web browser. Some of them are made by the same people who own the service, some aren’t. They all have in common that you need to enter your service credentials and trust the interface owners not to abuse them.

With everything that happened to Twitter/X a lot of people were looking for a replacement that offered a similar experience. A number of apps and web clients for Mastodon were developed to provide that to a degree but because Twitter/X and Mastodon are not the same this did not always work out. See a list of web clients here, some popular apps are Ivory, IceCubes, etc.

Some of the frontends to services kind of warp the original service experience quite a bit. It should not really have surprised me that much as I had come across web clients for Mastodon already that tried to do that too but there is one called Newsmast that does it even more so than others. Newsmast is a Mastodon project centred around “communities”. It gathers posts from across the Fediverse (e.g. from Pixelfed) and presents them as feeds/streams/channels (not sure what to call them) that people can subscribe too. This helps quite a lot when you are new to the Fediverse and struggle with finding content for your home feed that suits you. I can see this feature being appealing to newcomers.

The one thing I really don’t like about Newsmast is its preselection of social links users can enter. There is everything I want to stay away from and Twitter does not even exist under that name anymore. Even though Newsmast is part of the Fediverse and actively pulls in posts from all kinds of Fediverse services into its “communities” feeds, there are no other Fediverse services listed in the “Socials” and the only field that allows you to enter a “free” link is the Website one. I just tried entering my Pixelfed account under Instagram and it was reformatted into an Instagram address. It’s like Newsmast is living in the past, sorry.

=======

The best place to comment or ask questions about this post is my Mastodon – Testing account: Sylkeweb on Mastodon

https://sylkeweb.com/2023/11/17/mastodon-frontends-newsmast/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #HowToFediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFrontEnd #MastodonWebClient #Newsmast #Pixelfed #SylkewebBlog #TestingTheFediverse

Yesterday we sent out our rental termination notice.

Last year we bought an apartment in the same building where we are renting a place since we relocated from the UK in 2018. There was so much to do, nothing much had been done there for nearly 50 years. We had to get most of the pipes replaced and almost all of the electrical and telecommunications/network installations had to be redone to be fit for our needs. Some old walls were ripped out and new walls put in. Bathrooms and kitchen were completely stripped and redone. Internal doors were replaced. A huge cupboard/wardrobe was fitted in one of our hallways. It all took its sweet time as tradespeople and material weren’t always available and on top of that the prices kept rising. The neighbours probably hate(d) us, despite me trying to give them some warning every time when it got really noisy.

The place is now at the point that only a few minor improvements need finishing before we can properly move in. A number of bigger things are still missing but they are not essential right now and can be done next year with us living there.

We have three months for moving and while we had already moved a wardrobe from the cellar to our son’s new bedroom some months ago, today marked the first day of more serious moving. The reason for this was that there is a pipe leakage in a service shaft in our rental which last night made itself known in our son’s current bedroom. It is high time we are getting out of here before the plumbers make our life hell – as it probably means that they have to rip open our one and only toilet from where the water seems to originate.

We borrowed a small trolley for moving heavy items and it was really useful already. We did several trips to move a small wardrobe, a bigger shelf unit and all of their contents. It’s great to be able to do this with plenty of time as we can sort out at the same time. The best thing is that my son is all grown up this time round and is able to lug things around with us!

https://sylkeweb.com/2023/10/29/a-new-chapter-is-about-to-begin/

#Diary #Moving #SylkewebBlog

This is what my husband brought us home yesterday. Luckily it’s only the windscreen. There was glass in the car too but nothing that’s bad enough to injure him!

From all he can gather it was a bird (possibly a pheasant) that hit the car at full impact on the middle of the busy M3. This could have gone terribly wrong, he was quite lucky.

Our son was most enamoured by the recovery vehicle delivering our car and his dad. He was allowed to move the ramp back (using the little levers on the real thing) and was mightily impressed. Here is his rendition of it:

https://sylkeweb.com/2011/10/19/a-suicidal-bird/

#Diary #SylkewebBlog

Things that lamps are useful for.
One thing is for sure, this abomination won’t move with us into the new apartment.
#SylkewebBlog #Diary

http://sylkeweb.com/2018/10/19/the-new-lamp/