Matt Arnold @matt@penguicon.social

FINISHED! (Aside from washing and ironing, and choosing a frame so I can decide how to sign it.) The pattern is Mars by StitchingLand, it's about 20 cm across, and 10437 stitches. The photo doesn't capture how pleasing the texture really is, so many stitches so close together is deeply satisfying.

#crossstitch

You may finally use JSHint for evil

Link: http://mikepennisi.com/blog/2020/jshint-watching-the-ship-sink/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24051655

If this shader wasn't a headache generator I might use it for my game. Maybe if I rotate the hatching according to the normal map and make the movement more subtle...

a venn diagram lifted from twitter with no remorse or shame

All of this to say: I am incredibly excited to read Jack Dorsey's update on the Twitter interop project - to see that he views federation as a way to break the walled gardens and resolve demands to moderate at scale.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1288860270635311106

Twitter's Bluesky team is small, but it's a beachhead: Twitter is the only company that's large enough to make this happen but threatened enough to WANT to make it happen.

eof/

We undertheorize interop in these discussions because the web has made it so ubiquitous as to be invisible: imagine how Twitter would be if you couldn't include links to the web, or if you couldn't use some browsers with it, or if it didn't run on one of the mobile OSes.

7/

You - or a co-op, or a for-profit, or some other institution - could run a Nazi-free Twitter and only federate with other no-Nazi instances - something you can already do with Mastodon, but federation gives you the benefit of Twitter's scale.

In fact, this is what Mastodon and other fediverse technologies are lacking: a way for people to leave Twitter without leaving their communities. Federation lets you have one foot in both worlds.

6/

All of this means that Twitter - and Twitter alone, really - is set up to champion interop, as a way to reconcile its desire to be large and unmoderated with the pressure to do something about disinfo, harassment, and enabling dictators.

Letting small companies federate with Twitter will cost the company some of the rents it could extract through perfect control - but in return, the company could devolve moderation onto user communities.

5/

They do fear it. Look at Zuck's testimony and the accompanying docs from last week's Congressional hearings: virtually everything Zuck does is oriented around preserving his advantage against potential future Zucks, sitting in their own dorm rooms, plotting a Myspace rout.

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Of course, this is bullshit: it only works if you don't care how much "good" speech you catch in your moderation regime; to say nothing of the impossibility of reconciling the mores and laws of 150+ countries.

Beyond that, a regulation requiring filters and mass-scale human moderation constitutes a powerful moat around your business - a capex requirement that new entrants can't satisfy, which safeguards these champions of "disruption" from being disrupted themselves.

3/

Over the years, Twitter has grown progressively more closed and more fraught, as the problems of harassment, brigading, and hate speech have dogged the daily operations of the service, rising to the level of a global geopolitical crisis at times.

Facebook and Wechat maintain the pretense that this could all be solved if governments would just tell them what rules to enforce and then they'd use machine learning and boiler-rooms full of traumatized moderation subcontractors to make it so.

2/

Twitter is uniquely poised to lead on interoperability and federation; though they are very large, they are dwarfed by their major competitors, Facebook and Wechat. What's more, Twitter was initially built for federation, with wide, generous APIs that facilitated interop.

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Fucking hell

Hacker types! ​

If you haven't checked out Low Tech Magazine, you *really* need to. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/

Finished digital painting commission for Raqsuh! 🐍
the God of wrath and beauty Savariyah!

Process on my Patreon: https://patreon.com/ketopagano
Only 1 dollar a month to support access exclusive content

#art #artist #digitalart #digitalpainting #mastoart

🍂 I'm enhancing old artworks for a special artbook project: tweaking color for CMYK, adding bleeds, painting more details and resizing them for my desktop publishing in Scribus. It's a long process but very rewarding. Here is one of my fav with a new background:
#krita

Late last June, Google bought out "North," a tech company based in Waterloo, ON, which manufactured "Focals," a line of "smart glasses." A month later, the company is turning off the servers the glasses rely on, bricking every pair they ever sold.

https://support.bynorth.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045128691

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