Martin Ruskov @mapto@social.cleverlibre.org

Beyond melting ice caps: Why climate change is a security issue https://www.euractiv.com/section/defence-and-security/opinion/beyond-melting-ice-caps-why-climate-change-is-a-security-issue/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Found an incredibly useful app for finding people to follow on Mastodon. It crawls your social graph then finds the people who your followers follow the most that you don't follow.

https://followgraph.vercel.app/

@interfluidity @b0rk I found this to be particularly important:
"A lot of people are on smaller servers, so when they’re participating in a conversation, they can’t see all the replies to the post.

This means that replies can get pretty repetitive because people literally cannot see each other’s replies. This is especially annoying for posts that are popular or controversial, because the person who made the post has to keep reading similar replies over and over again by people who think they’re making the point for the first time.

To get around this (as a reader), you can click “open link to post” or something in your Mastodon client, which will open up the page on the poster’s server where you can read all of the replies. It’s pretty annoying though."

“Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server” by @b0rk https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/11/some-notes-on-mastodon/

// lots of good observations/information about mastodon and the fediverse

law trumps physics, sometimes. storing and streaming digital works is so much cheaper in real resource terms than maintaining a library of DVDs you phyically ship. and yet. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/business/media/internet-archive-emergency-lending-library.html?unlocked_article_code=SHhC1zCbybhNFFee1y2yE7uXqng9k_IfnWuZkvknItNyMGa8BjDb1bXtRT0vokzjJaZZ4n4b5tyDwKHX_OKblh5-fgx1H7U_y940V0RgncogyolvY7rx8-IY95ySMtAVyUXnSCINtoXVM-oHLsNncfS2VAmgWe5FGNQlJzFNLs7K-66gISBTvh364RoH3jmjvdf704Eoq-qNuSQEBshAMCUANLHBkCI9sJKVgDaiOsJwhoCfC2QXb5Kj7uwSQN78xBz6_V4R-HISPaCICnwsD-nwEhWDA0cxHLsC6PWPeRa_hhNetXGpM0wml5p0AqvzzAZ8idCCbUc-qcV9IuZ04aw92MN5ogprGrzF4bSZcBdsGFka7hzM13MxzQ&smid=url-share via @carlmalamud

What if the rise of ChatGPT wasn't just an opportunity to talk to our students about academic integrity, but to talk about the nature of knowledge, skill, and why they're pursuing education in the first place?

@jeffgreene @edutooters @psychology

Replies will appear in the Home timeline on Mastodon if:

- The reply mentions you

OR

- You wrote the reply

OR

- The reply mentions someone you follow

OR

- Someone you follow is replying to themselves to create a thread

Other replies will not be shown in Home, but they may be visible to you in other places such as profiles or threads, if the replies are using a visibility setting that includes you.

More info about post visibility settings on Mastodon at https://fedi.tips/who-can-see-my-posts-in-mastodon-how-do-i-send-dms-in-mastodon/

The U.S. is averaging 2 mass shootings per day so far this year, but these figures alone don't capture the full scope of the gun violence epidemic.
https://t.co/vK37WLCrum

Amazon is crawling with travel guides written by AI -- vague, crappy, and pushed up in search results by astroturfed fake five-star reviews: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/travel/amazon-guidebooks-artificial-intelligence.html?unlocked_article_code=Gmcb6fkRXSAX7JUdbTpFyhH1lSBWBcI0RuiXgcku3gVTdQV7s_SPvl1tKw76F_txTehAmHdU0bZ3PUoPyH0h-dybeb8_bGL7UzysZynt-SFcx9yByC4wr37_65cVodjr_Z-sRcqUfioeOsUAKJpEECejhG2SlL4jPCoaBG8PFnu_YLKDXA0hkzvhrJnGuD5kw59N8Bz7T7D7UOeJXLkowJnnoB6IDt6bHn6XiBvlH--t6M_9xmGCkNlYdtiiScdbS3ebGG5C3xKkCxwacaT96yLi9NK5dx9YHwhHSPdoVJPqslvVGAwQFvpSQvDvgHZGOFxW09EeUVAHYZl6uI-aSYS0_UfYhcXjDi6J2-M1oFlpWg&smid=url-share

That's a "gift" link so you don't need to be a New York Times subscriber to read it

It's a great investigation, and highlights the real problem, which is ...

... unsurprisingly by now, Amazon seemingly does little-to-nothing to stop this

The site is just soiled top to bottom with fake crap in every category

Cities are not loud. Cars are loud.

#nyc #bikenyc #SummerStreets

Wer noch nicht mitgemacht hat - wir dürfen wählen, wie die nächsten #Banknoten aussehen werden.
Hier finden sich Infos dazu von der #EZBEuropäischeZentralbank direkt und hier geht es zur Umfrage: https://survey.ecb.europa.eu/euro-banknote-survey?lang=de

PS: Ich fände es schon sehr witzig, wenn "demnächst" Vögel auf unseren Scheinen abgebildet würden.
PPS: Die Umfrage dauert ein paar Minuten. Bringt etwas Geduld mit.

While #genAI firms are being faced with criticism for their models containing detailed personal data about individuals, and thinking of how to mitigate this, UK intelligence #SIGINT agencies (e.g. #GCHQ) are seeking powers to effectively lower their oversight in building models precisely to be able to draw unstructured data into personal data about people, claiming that AI firms can do it (whether or not legally!) but they can't https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/01/uk-intelligence-spy-agencies-relax-burdensome-laws-ai-data-bpds?CMP=share_btn_tw #IPA16

A narrative is now emerging that Elon Musk might have actually done more harm than good for the EV industry as a whole.

But it largely ignores a crucial role played by the stock market. https://t.co/VR1vgitO5B

Small-ish instance admins: how much do you pay per user per month for hosting?

Our instance (hci.social) pays around $0.30 USD per user per month. I'm curious how that compares to other similarly sized instances.

We have several thousand registered users and around 800 users per month.

#mastoadmin

The Electronic Frontier Foundation will award Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of the 'pirate' library Sci-Hub, for her efforts to provide access to scientific knowledge.

Without Sci-Hub, many academics would be unable to complete their research projects.

#EFF also highlights that Elbakyan’s work helps to challenge the current academic publishing system, where researchers are used as unpaid workhorses.

https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hubs-alexandra-elbakyan-receives-eff-award-for-providing-access-to-scientific-knowledge-230728/

#elsevier #springer #scihub

“Fundamentally speaking, if you do want to save the planet with AI, you have to consider also the environmental footprint [of AI first],” she says. “It doesn’t make sense to burn a forest and then use AI to track deforestation.”- @SashaMTL ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/01/techscape-environment-cost-ai-artificial-intelligence

This week, I went over to Bluesky and asked people who'd left Mastodon why they left, and lots of people told me. I grabbed the replies and crunched them and wrote up a summary. I think it's really interesting and often kind of wrenching.

https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

#meta

@carnage4life Hope they fix this e-waste problem! In the meantime, @codemonkeymike has been trying to rescue some from the waste bin, install Linux, and thus give them a second life.