Mastodawn

[Edit: I'd like to request no more boosts for this post for now - my DMs are still open to, and please do still forward this to specific folks you think might be interested. I've got so many responses that it's going to take me a while to get to all of them - which I will. ❤️ you all for being so supportive of this idea.]

I have an offer to make: do you want to run an instance on the fediverse for a group that's underrepresented here?

I'll pay the bills. Period.

I'll do admin if needed (software updates and the like). But you decide what kind of community you want it to be, so you put together the mod team.

DM me.

Charlie Welch Sep 30

Chris Trottier Sep 30

🔥 Big update: the PeerTube co-op idea is taking off.

Yesterday I shared the proposal publicly—and the response has been outstanding. Seven people have already stepped up to become founder-members, ready to build a member-owned, democratically governed alternative to corporate video platforms.

What started as a loose idea is now a real plan—and credit goes to @Crissy for pushing me to turn the idea into a proper proposal.

We’re at the early stages: talking with existing Fediverse co-ops, and I’ve reached out to the BC Co-op Association to guide us through incorporation. Next up: drafting bylaws, shaping governance, and laying a solid foundation together.

Once incorporated, member-owners will decide everything—policies, hosting practices, monetization models. This isn’t just another social media platform. It’s a co-operative effort to build something transparent, resilient, and ours.

If this speaks to you—if you want to help shape a new, community-owned video platform—get in touch. This is how alternatives get built.

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/2289eb47-0f39-463d-a056-8568e12e70f3

Charlie Welch Sep 11

David Revoy Sep 10

The Amphora of Great Intelligence (AGI)

#webcomic #krita #miniFantasyTheater

Charlie Welch Sep 2

drmorr Sep 1

2005: Your website looks like it was designed by a 3-year-old and barely works, this can't be a trustworthy source of information

2025: Your website looks like it was designed by a 3-year-old and barely works, this is the last bastion of truth on the Internet

Charlie Welch Aug 8

Natasha Warner Aug 7

Yesterday the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics announced that Robin Lakoff, a professor there from 1972 to 2012, has died. I really loved Robin's pragmatics class in grad school. She taught us so much about pragmatics, the history of linguistics, and various other stuff. Partly I thought she was amazing because she was a deeply shy, reclusive person, but she was hilarious in class. And her jokes weren't re-used, they were timely to current events. One thing I learned from her is that lecture can be a performance, like theater. Another important thing I learned from her was from sort of an aside during one lecture: a field can keep expanding the set of questions that are considered reasonable to ask, and this is good. A question that comes across as silly and uninformed, like no actual linguist would ask that, might be a reasonable topic for inquiry 10 years later. She explained how a lot of the questions we were doing research on in the 90's were not considered questions a linguist should ask back when she was in grad school in the 60's or 70's, but by the 90's there were whole conferences on the same questions. Like the kind of questions where the rest of the class might giggle uncomfortably, and your professor would try to steer you back onto something reasonable. That one little aside during a lecture comes back to me often. She also taught us Gricean maxims and conversational implicature and presupposition, in ways that just astounded me sometimes. I only took one class with her and she was never on my committees or things like that, but I really appreciated her and have thought of her often. #linguistics #AcademicChatter

Charlie Welch Jul 24

Enerhpozyks Jul 23

Je découvre que DuckDuckGo a un domaine https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ qui permet de faire des recherches sans les outils IA du site et en plus avec un filtre anti-IA dans la recherche (c'est une curation humaine donc y'a des trous dans la raquette, mais c'est déjà ça) par défaut (tout ceci est configurable sur https://duckduckgo.com, mais ça ne reste pas en navigation privée, par exemple).

Dans firefox, vous pouvez aller dans les préférences de recherche (about:preferences#search) et ajouter un "raccourcis de recherche" (tout en bas) comme ça :
Nom du moteur de recherche: DuckDuckGo (no AI)
URL avec %s à la place de l’expression recherchée: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s

#AI #NoAI #DuckDuckGo

Charlie Welch Jul 16

Ben Lockwood, PhD Jul 15

The fact that I can click on a scientific article link and hit a paywall in 2025–when the scientists were paid with public money, the research conducted in public institutions, and the cost of publication subsidized by public funds–is an abject failure of society.

Charlie Welch Jun 13

How is there no cuckoo clock emoji???

Charlie Welch Jun 12