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316 Posts
Professor of media & games @RIT. OG blogger and social computing adopter, dating back to BITNET and FidoNet.

So I understand that the bird site has started blocking links to common/known Mastodon instances, and that doesn't seem like free speech to me. So... I did a thing.

If you go to https://spacekaren.sucks it is now a URL shortener that blocks the twitter user agent. That means you can share that link that will redirect to your Mastodon account without the pouty baby stopping you. If you find this helpful can you boost so others can find it? #TwitterMigration #Mastodon #Musk #introduction

Space Karen Sucks

Free speech really should be free. To bypass the new censorship regime at twitter, use this URL shortener to link to Mastodon or other censored destinations. Considering recent policy decisions on twitter, please be aware that use of links generated from this site may constitute a violation of their policy.

My tool for making a simple, searchable, themeable archive of your public tweets and threads is now live:

https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-archive/make-your-own/

The tool runs entirely on your computer, in your browser. None of your data is uploaded anywhere in the process. The output is a zip file of a basic HTML website that you can upload to a web host if you choose.

The site also answers most of the common questions I get. Please read it first before asking me questions here!

Twitter archiver

A simple, searchable, themeable archive of your public tweets

Everyone is asking "What's the next Twitter going to be" and bemoaning the fact that the userbase is splintering. But splintering is a GOOD thing. The internet would be a lot healthier, more diverse, in instead of 3 or 4 dominant platforms, we had dozens or even hundreds of upstarts. Yes, centralization is convenient, but as we're seeing, it's also dangerous. If the result of the Twitter turmoil is to drive people to a more diverse, less convenient, less centralized web, I say AWESOME.
Totally, totally pathetic. Twitter is no longer allowing promotion of "prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms" like Instagram, Mastodon, Facebook, Post, etc. Free speech! https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy
Promotion of Alternative Social Platforms Policy | Twitter Help

Out of curiosity, I went to my birdsite home page to see what my feed looks like right now. It's...not good.

Of the first 34 items on the page, 11 were from people I follow (posts, replies, likes, retweets, etc). The other 23 were recommended posts or advertisements.

Promoted Posts (ads) = 3
Based on your likes = 7
You might like = 4
Posts from categories (not from people I follow): 6
"Who to Follow" section: 3

For reasons I can't fathom, Internet Archive Scholar got attention today, a mass of it, painting it as a "new" service. Actually, it has been out there for about a year. BUT....

If beautifully structured access to academic citations by the millions is your bag or desperately needed tool, especially ones that are ONLY left in the Wayback Machine, you are in LUCK. And this will be your favorite day. Try it.

https://scholar.archive.org/

Rate limit reached

I know that I have a lot of unix-knowledgeable friends around here. I need your help!

I have a LOT of student mp4 and associated srt files in a directory. Right now, they're in this form:
Last, First - some random name.mp4
Last, First - a different name.srt

What I want is a command that I can use to delete the " - " and anything between it and the file extension for all of the files in the directory.

Internet evolution:
Usenet: find your people! there are a few dozen of them on rec.arts.funny!
Listservs: find your people! there are 100 of them on this obscure list devoted to Marxist cultural criticism!
Blogs: find your people! each time one of them visits your site, your counter will increment! look! it has reached four digits!
Social media: find your people! there are several million strangers who are calling you names!
Post-social media: find your people! there are several dozen of them!

At #CHI this year, we added previews to simple sliders - and studied how 138 people used these to steer image generation.

Takeaway: Previews enable goal-directed control strategies.

So, users of prompt-based generators would likely benefit from live previews and GUI controls, too! E.g. prompt with text, refine with sliders.

#HCI, #AI, #GAN, #StableDiffusion, #NLProc, #NLP, #RepostFriday

At this point the most important elite social media network in the western world has been captured by a partisan actor who is weaponizing internal company (and possibly user) information for partisan / ideological purposes, with uncertain consequences for the next American elections.

I am not sure if this has fully sunk in.