I posted about switching to Firefox as my "daily driver" browser as a little tiny step away from Chromium browser hegemony, and I had a ton of people in the replies suggesting I should just use Brave or Edge or Opera or Vivaldi instead.

I'm a little concerned that people don't realize just how pervasive this problem is. Every single one of those sits on top of the Chromium codebase.

OpenAI released a tool which purports to detect AI-generated text. At the highest end of detection, it labels text "possibly" or "likely" AI-generated. 21% of human-written text falls under "possibly" and 9% of "likely" does. That's 3 in 10 students being defamed and/or harmed.

Just like other providers of academic surveillance software, OpenAI states that their detector "should not be used as a primary decision-making tool".

It will be, though. And harm will follow.

https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/

Algorithms aren't the enemy. Chronological feeds don't scale and the signal-to-noise ratio will plummet if this ever gets popular. The real problems with today's algorithmic feeds are non-transparency, lack of choice, and optimizing for engagement instead of healthy discourse.

Open-source is a perfect opportunity to fix all this. Have there been any efforts to create a Mastodon instance with a (community governed) ranking algorithm? Is that technically feasible? Or is the idea simply anathema?

For those who have downloaded their #Twitter archive data, you might want to check out this Twitter Archive parser by @timhutton:

https://github.com/timhutton/twitter-archive-parser

This converts your Tweet archive to #markdown and HTML, and replaces t.co URLs (which will break once Twitter goes away) with their original versions.

Afterwards, it asks if you want to try downloading the original size images.

Just ran this myself without any major issues, really easy to use as well.