The counterargument in the ChatGPT lawyer debacle is that the AI's summarization of the precedent, being based on a statistical summary of the relevant legal debates, is a better Hayekian distillation of the common law tradition than any ordinary exercise in legal pedantry carried out by humans combing Westlaw. The hallucinated citations are a purer form of the caselaw than any merely existing cases in our sordid sublunar realm could possibly aspire to being.

Marvel/DC comic fans:

Musk is out there comparing George Soros to Magneto. What Supervillain best fits Musk? Galactus is my first thought but he is too powerful. Doc Octopus? The Joker?

I admit comic book memory is limited.

The onslaught of cryptospam continues. You can turn off DMs from people you don't follow in preferences -> notifications (if you're on a Mastodon-based instance). This should mitigate the current tactic of DMing a bunch of people.

and if you get one of these: don't click the link. best case it's a scam, more likely it attempts to exploit your system in some way.

I am sure this is not new but my mother was caught in a social engineering scam to take over her Facebook account.... which they then use to try to take over other Facebook accounts.

The basic mechanics are simple. They contact someone via messenger and claim that that Facebook is asking them to have 2 friends confirm their identity. Please provide them the code that was sent to your phone.

Of course, the code is actually the 2FA for a password reset request. Someone helpfully responds with the code and voila, they now pwn their Facebook account.

The constant-threats-to-defederate thing is going to kill this place, seriously.

Defederating an instance is an extreme measure and it should only be taken in extreme circumstances.

Finding out I might stop getting posts from people I explicitly follow because they happen to be on an instance being defederated by mine all because a bunch of admins I don't know got in a spat over a user I don't follow is just about the most annoying value proposition imaginable.

https://federate.social/@mattblaze/110317006852580015

As one WaPo commenter put it: "I am sick and tired of articles that seem to absolve the Republicans of their own idiocy and then blame the Democrats for not protecting us from the harm caused by Republicans." https://presswatchers.org/2023/04/republicans-threaten-to-tank-economy-media-blames-biden/

I suspect Mastodon.social has made a big mistake (as in big is part of the problem) by making themselves the default server with open sign ups. They might as well have hung a "trolls enter here" welcome sign out. Moderating well at scale is hard and requires a lot of human effort, it's going to be an instance full of newbies who will be encountering trolls while not understanding how the fediverse works and who have a client mentality (let me speak to the manager!). They're also going to end up being walled off from a lot of the smaller, more conscientious instances who want to protect their members so won't even get to see what the fediverse can be.

I suspect the fediverse really would be better served by slow growth on it's own prosocial path than trying to compete with platforms run by antisocial billionaires. We're not competing for customers, those number metrics aren't important, it needs to be quality over quantity and thinking of fediversians as citizens not clients. I know that's a hard mindset for some people, especially people who have had to work in corporate environments, to let go of but it's essential to let it go to be truly able to build prosocial things (not all competition is bad, of course, but the corporate kind is). It's always important to think about whether we're being treated like a citizen/person or a client/product (whether it's by our governments, a healthcare professional, and in terms of technological tools). Do you belong or are you being used while you're profitable? And is someone trying to confuse you about which is which so you can't tell? (The latter means you're actively being conned.)

*I, of course, hope I am wrong and it all works out wonderfully. However, my instance having to silence mastodon.social because of trolls and bad actors and increased reports of crypto spamming, has made me think about how big instances require a very big, well trained/sensitive moderation team (aka professional moderation, there's not magical technological solution for this problem and AI isn't a magic fix either, these kinds of tech solutions are usually harmful as well). People are a slow medium, we can't solve our social problems with some form of magical automation.

*edited to add that mastodon.social does seem to be being responsive and getting a handle on the flood of crypto spammers that making themselves the point of entry has caused. It's good to see other servers silencing then unsilencing them as problems get resolved.

It turns out you can simply serve a file from a domain to use it as your bsky handle.

So this guy is now S3. All of S3.

I'm pretty sure 60 years of civics classes taught by football coaches is what got us here.

Did you know that if you change the `dl=0` at the end of a dropbox link to `dl=1` it'll just automatically download instead of taking you to that dumb webpage that plays videos terribly?

You did? Great.

DID YOU ALSO KNOW THAT IF YOU CHANGE IT TO `raw=1` IT WILL LOAD THE ACTUAL FILE IN THE BROWSER WINDOW WTF HOW DID I JUST FIND THIS

Crime really is out of control downtown:

S.F. Marriott Hotel illegally kept [or, you know, to use the more common term, stole] $9 million in workers’ tips, judge says
https://archive.ph/uCqm1

A whole new approach to social engineering: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/11/pentagon-leak-traced-to-video-game-chat-group-users-arguing-over-war-in-ukraine

From the court to the sidelines.

Once a star as a player, Dejan Milojević is now helping the next generation learn the tricks of the trade as a coach with the Dubs.

@TriNet@twitter.com || #YourPeopleMatter

ChatGPT reminds me of my mom: it thinks I’m one of the top cyber researchers to follow on LinkedIn, and it’s convinced I worked for the NSA.

What happens when you click a phishing link in your corporate email system. https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/129do6h/a_comment_i_found_engineers_being_engineers/

This is going to cost Shasta County millions by the time the litigation is over and at least a couple of members of law enforcement should have absolutely refused to participate in this sham.
I hope the prosecutors take a long, hard look at criminal charges against 4H and that the school system considers banning them entirely.

But at least they taught that 9 year old girl a lesson!

And put an end to mom's embarrassing Facebook campaign to save the goat.

I predict at least 2 or 3 4H executives will need to jump on a sword before this is over.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-30/goat-slaughter-shasta-county-fair

This seems like a really excellent day not to be on Twitter any more.

Just found this fantastic piece Maggie Smith wrote about her divorce.

"I felt missed as staff." Leave it to a poet to make a short piece count; it is astonishing to me how many women I know who resonate to those words.

https://www.thecut.com/article/book-excerpt-you-could-make-this-place-beautiful-maggie-smith.html

#Feminism #InvisibleLabor #GenderRoles #Divorce

My brand new VW ID.4 keeps warning me that my emergency call service license has expired because it can't find 2G/3G coverage. It turns out this is a known issue that cannot be fixed without a software release.

I bought an ID.4 but I got a VW Bug

I just checked my spam folder and found that Twitter has been emailing me tweets every day for months..