I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.

🍁⚕️ 💽

Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)

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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Otter@lemmy.catoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldmetastasis
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    17 hours ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_leak

    In 2021, an internal document leak from the company then known as Facebook (now Meta Platforms, or Meta) showed it was aware of harmful societal effects from its platforms, yet persisted in prioritizing profit over addressing these harms. The leak, released by whistleblower Frances Haugen, resulted in reporting from The Wall Street Journal in September, as The Facebook Files series, as well as the Facebook Papers, by a consortium of news outlets the next month.

    Primarily, the reports revealed that, based on internally-commissioned studies, the company was fully aware of negative impacts on teenage users of Instagram, and the contribution of Facebook activity to violence in developing countries. Other takeaways of the leak include the impact of the company’s platforms on spreading false information, and Facebook’s policy of promoting inflammatory posts. Furthermore, Facebook was fully aware that harmful content was being pushed through Facebook algorithms reaching young users. The types of content included posts promoting anorexia nervosa and self-harm photos.

    In October 2021, Whistleblower Aid filed eight anonymous whistleblower complaints with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on behalf of Haugen alleging securities fraud by the company, after Haugen leaked the company documents the previous month.[1][2][3] After publicly revealing her identity on 60 Minutes,[4][5] Haugen testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security about the content of the leaked documents and the complaints.[6] After the company renamed itself as Meta Platforms,[7] Whistleblower Aid filed two additional securities fraud complaints with the SEC against the company on behalf of Haugen in February 2022.[8]

    In response to the media fallout, Facebook executives went on press tours to express Facebook’s position amidst the frenzy.[9] Facebook also did internal damage control with employees through in person sessions and memos.[10] They went on to do a rebranding and changed their logo as well as their name to Meta.[11]



  • What is softwareen, or “software en”

    I guess if someone wants to do the equivalent of an interactive project tutorial every week, for their own curiosity, that’s not a big deal. If they want other people to USE the projects, then they probably shouldn’t be advertising it as shovelware

    Even before LLMs, if I saw a developer’s page was filled with dozens of unrelated simple projects, I wouldn’t install them. They’d be abandoned at best, or ad-riddled messes at worst













  • Realistically, maybe a few weeks or a month minimum 😄

    Right now the plan is:

    • cleaning up the data (removing rows that are clearly errors, tests, or duplicate submissions)
    • figuring out the best ways to graph each question
    • cleaning individual data rows into a format that’s easy to graph
    • generating some basic image graphs

    Then once we post those, we want to have the interactive version on our site as well. We’ll be working through all that during off hours from work / other life tasks

    If you have a specific question you want to know the results for, I can give you an approximate breakdown sooner. I assume the data won’t change significantly during the cleaning, most of the responses look legitimate



  • I appreciate that you are gathering community feedback!

    Right now it feels like the website is geared towards the style and content that technical users appreciate. I agree with the other comments that it would be nice to simplify the website down. Technical users are willing to explore for more information while the average user taking a quick look will likely leave.

    Taking inspiration from other Fediverse platforms, my favourite landing pages are from Peertube and Mastodon:

    How about the instance selection wizard (click “join a server” on the homepage), which lets you select topics and languages to select instances. Do the current options make sense?

    This is likely a biased opinion, but could you add ‘region’ as a field, or ‘regional’ as a topic? For our instance, I think that’s how a lot of people are choosing to make an account with us given recent events. It also helps the user find an instance that is nearby (for lower latency), and within a jurisdiction that they are familiar with / can have an influence over through voting or other means. pangora.social seems to be down right now, but I recall them having a nice way of organizing that

    Another biased opinion, I agree that it’s better to have large instances near the top since they’re more likely to be up / fixed quickly / on top of moderation. You could include a note saying that larger instances are near the top because of XYZ, and that people can always make more accounts down the road if you change your mind. That way there’s less pressure to pick the “correct” instance.

    And the list of apps, what can be done here? For one thing the data is rarely updated, so we would appreciate pull requests.

    Could you potentially collaborate with https://lemmyapps.com/ ? It would be easier for users to submit updates to one place (whether it is a PR to you or an update on that site)

    If I were to try and critique the site in excessive detail, from top to bottom:

    • Could you make the logo have a rectangular / circle background around it? Right now edges look odd over the dark background. The hover effect looks nicer, maybe with different colors
    • In the header: News, Docs, & Contact can be collapsed into a dropdown under ‘About’ or something similar, since those are pages that someone would go searching for
    • Instead of ‘Join a server’, ‘Donate’ and ‘See all servers’, it might be better to have one massive “Join a Server” button/card on the front page that leads to the instance list page.
      • Join a serve and See all servers are very similar for a user that’s not familiar with how this all works, and they end up in the same place. So instead of a popup, could you have it as a responsive widget on the instance’s page? That way users can quickly figure out how the instances are tagged
      • Since the donate button is already in the header, it might be better to have a large section on donations further down the page.
    • The paragraph is a large block of text. I’d prefer something closer to what Peertube did
    • The screenshots could be larger and more prominent
    • The images give off ‘AI generated’ vibes, even if that wasn’t their origin. Could you have large cards with simple icons, similar to the 3 header cards on our site: https://fedecan.ca/en/
    • I like the ‘Create your own discussion platform’ card’s format. It’s a bit hard to read, but otherwise nice
    • The ‘more features’ section could be simplified down to the important points, and maybe even combined with what is being done with the screenshots area

    On the servers page:

    • The community explorer and fediverse observer are external sites, but they look like widgets right now.
    • Is every instance under one topic, or would it be possible to let the user select multiple and have instances appear and disappear from the list live?
    • I like Pixelfed’s join page since I can quickly narrow down an instance based on what’s important to me: https://pixelfed.org/servers

  • Well yeah, what I said was

    It’s useful in some contexts while being hot garbage in others. Learning to use it for what it’s good at is fine, trying to shoehorn it into everything is stupid.

    Same as relying on it for everything. That’s not adapting, that’s being easily replaceable.

    Use it for the few things it’s good at, and ignore their false promises on the rest.

    This post was about tech companies trying to shove LLM based “AI” into everything. I’m looking forward to when investors move on from this one specific type of algorithm and we can get back to innovating properly.