Meta announced a significant change to their content moderation practices yesterday. If you haven’t read it, it boils down to this (from Zuckerberg on Threads):
Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse. Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
Meta announced a significant change to their content moderation practices yesterday. If you haven’t read it, it boils down to this (from Zuckerberg on Threads):
Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse. Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
Meta announced a significant change to their content moderation practices yesterday. If you haven’t read it, it boils down to this (from Zuckerberg on Threads):
Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse. Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
If you remember the first Trump presidency, it seemed like some major news broke every month, either creating outrage or introducing a new avenue for corruption. Things were unpredictable and some level of volatility ruled the day.
My sense is that while things will be more stable - wealthy Americans and corporations seem prepared and willing to pay (or bribe) to enjoy some stability - there’s still a lot of risk.
Let’s start this post by sharing an embarrassing fact: between leaving Disney in early 2022 and leaving Ohai in late 2024, I have gained about 28lbs (about 12kg). This wasn’t a new trajectory - going back to the beginning of 2021, I’ve put on 40ish pounds. By January 2024, I was a very unhealthy weight and just plain unfit.
My checkup with my doctor at the beginning of the year raised some alarms.
It’s appropriate that I should revive this site for the first time in years to post about politics, I guess. We are entering dangerous waters as a nation. That’s why Bezos’s decision and editorial this past week was one more disappointment on top of so many others. I was sketching out an articulation of why the piece bothered me even more than the LA Times situation. Luckily for you you don’t need to read my writing.
Fatmixx has moved from Pair.com to micro.blog for hosting. This also means we’re no longer using Wordpress and are now hosted on Hugo. Old URLs should redirect to the new ones, images should be working if they worked on the old host. If you see anything weird, let me know.
If you want more technical details on why the change, I wrote more about this on UsefulClever.
BTW - this had nothing to do with the recent Wordpress controversy, I’ve wanted to do this just for efficiency & security & cost for months.
Hi folks - hope you're having a good Friday! I've decided to consolidate the tech things I'm doing onto my other site, UsefulClever, which is where I was putting some of the fun projects I'm working on. There's a little more to this move that I'll share later, but if you're a long time reader of this site, add UsefulClever to your RSS reader or wherever you get the blog. Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions or concerns.
Update: There aren’t APIs for most of the services that I’d want to use here, so I’m putting this project on pause for now. I’ll probably hack something together for my own use, but trying to turn this into a service doesn’t seem possible given API usage guidelines from these services.
I posted the following to Twitter the other day:
So, if all goes according to plan, all of my Twitter history up to yesterday-ish will be deleted, and I will have setup some code (that I control) that will delete everything older than 7 days on an ongoing basis.
Just as a public service announcement: I deactivated my Facebook account to see what it’s like to not have a Facebook account. I suspect I’m going to run into places where it’s impossible not to have one, but let’s see what it’s like.
Over the past year, especially since the 2016 election, I find Facebook… exhausting. Mentally, it’s draining. Lots of debate, lots of echoes, and mental noise in my life that I don’t really need.
The motto of the United States is not, in fact, “Fuck you, I got mine.” It was, and should have remained, “E Pluribus Unum” — out of many, one. We’re all Americans. We all deserve the blessings this country can provide. This one is willing to pay his taxes for the benefit of the many.
Source: John Scalzi (read the whole thing)
Like many of you who vehemently opposed a Trump presidency, I've been walking around in a bit of a stunned stupor these last few days. I'm gathering my thoughts on what I want to do next, and how I can do the most I can to help bring about a more respectful world. There has to be a better way for us to talk to each other, and a better way to be humans to each other.
But I tell you what, though. [Long pause.] I’m named Barack Hussein Obama. I’m African-American. And I’ve been elected twice to this office with the majorities of the American people. So something is working.
Vanity Fair
Wonderful interview with President Obama. Such a decent man with a deep appreciation for America and its history. We're going to miss him, even the folks that hate him right now.
Workers in the experimental group were told they could work wherever, and whenever, they chose so long as projects were completed on time and goals were met; the new emphasis would be on results rather than on the number of hours spent in the office.
NY Times
By most accounts, American Football1 started out with humble beginnings: a college sport that branched off association football (rugby) that spawned a bunch of disorganized professional organizations that eventually coalesced into the NFL and the college football behemoths we know about today.
The game started in the mid 1800s. The first professional game was in the 1890s, with the first player getting a secret single game contract that paid him $500 (a staggering $13,000 in 2016 dollars).
So, I may have a headphone problem the way some people have shoe problems.[footnote]though my wife swears I have a shoe problem, too…[/footnote] It's not quite as bad as what I see with hard core audiophiles, but still, it's bad.
Headphone addiction is kind of like they way people get hooked on adrenaline sports. You just need to get a taste, that first moment when a pair of headphones make you sit up and go, "
A year ago, I wrote that the Twelve South SurfacePad was my favorite iPhone case. After a year, I'm still very happy I bought the case. I love knowing that I can leave the house with just my phone knowing I have the two most important cards with it.[footnote]Interestingly, in the US, that's my driver's license and main credit card. In India, I just carry two credit cards since I don't have a valid driver's license.
In my previous post, I mentioned that I was looking at reducing my dependence on free services as an experiment to see if I can improve my privacy.
That post was about changing my behavior as a consumer. This time, I’m looking at the services I use in my personal development work, especially those services that feed ad networks. In the case of my personal sites, this means Google Analytics (GA).
I recently moved nearly all of my email off of Google’s services over to Fastmail, with MailRoute in front of it to block spam. [footnote]My @gmail.com address can’t be moved, and I’m keeping it. While I'm shifting most of that email to my main address, I'll still use it for some things.[/footnote]
So far, I’m really happy. The services are relatively inexpensive, and the features compare well with Google, both in terms of space as well as functionality that I used.
I’ve been using the new MacBook as a personal travel laptop for the last month or so. I’ve been coding and writing blog posts with it and I wanted to share my experiences.
If you care about these sorts of things, I’m sure you’ve read countless reviews of the device. So I won’t try to cover everything. Instead, I’ll hit on a few specific things that matter to me.[footnote]Two reviews that I’ll highlight, in case you missed them: Marco Arment’s review (he hated it) and Rene Ritchie’s review.