Tootfinder

Gig AI trainers
– who upload everything from scenes around them to photos, videos and audio of themselves
– are at the frontlines of a new global data gold rush.
As Silicon Valley’s hunger for high-quality, human-grade data outpaces what can be scraped from the open internet,
a thriving industry of data marketplaces has emerged to bridge the gap.
From Cape Town to Chicago, thousands of people are now
micro-licensing their biometric identities and intima…

Forty years ago, 21 people gathered for the first meeting of what became the Internet Engineering Task Force or #IETF . Every day billions of people use the open standards and technologies developed in the IETF. And nearly 8000 volunteer IETF participants from around the world collaborate in more than 100 working groups evolving those open standards and making the Internet work better!

IETF@40
Forty years ago today, 21 people gathered in San Diego, California for the first meeting of what became the Internet Engineering Task Force.

“You can’t sell us $200 ‘Rebel’ jackets at Galaxy’s Edge and then delete the words that define what being a Rebel actually means."
Testify.
✅ The Mouse Recants: Why #Disney Deleted a Viral Thread of Anti-Fascist Movie Quotes

The Mouse Recants: Why Disney Deleted a Viral Thread of Anti-Fascist Movie Quotes
Disney asked the internet how it was doing and ended up not liking what people had to say about the state of the country.

from my link log —
Starlink's high-speed satellite Internet: What's the catch?
https://blog.apnic.net/2021/04/22/starlinks-high-speed-satellite-internet-whats-the-catch/
saved 2021-04-22

Starlink's high-speed satellite Internet: What's the catch? | APNIC Blog
Low earth orbit satellite-powered Internet could be a game-changer for remote areas, but what happens when people in more populated areas want it?

This is what social media (and the internet) exists for.
(Also glad that Rami has bridging turned on, so I can repost it here easily! 😁) https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:jye22xkea3jqsabskhfec347/post/3mf3ngx67rs2k

Rami Ismail (رامي) (@ramiismail.com)
It's almost time for Ramadan, as Muslims tonight peered to the crescent moon to see if the month of Ramadan starts tonight or the day after. As with every year, I'm starting this thread so that people can ask questions, and learn about Ramadan from one person's perspective of it.

If you need a cathartic release from the news that
Amazon laid off 16,000 workers,
Block chopped nearly half its workforce,
Atlassian pared back 10% of staffers,
and Meta is reportedly considering another massive round of layoffs
-- all in the name of AI,
then we invite you to browse the responses to a recent
Sam Altman post on X.
Altman, the CEO of OpenAI,
shared this on Tuesday:
“I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extrem…

Sam Altman's thank-you to coders draws the memes | TechCrunch
Altman expresses gratitude for people who knew how to write their code from scratch. The internet replies with salty jokes.

"I think a lot of times I see people talk about this stuff in relation to AI. It's right to talk about it, but I hate when people act like AI is the only tech that has these problems. What you see with AI now is a reflection of the broader tech and internet industry that has grown for the past 20-30 years."
References provided 😔
https://www.tumblr.com/teledyn/808733064965570560/anatomy-of-an-ai-system?source=share

Need to actually ban smartphones before, say 16. A non-internet phone is more than sufficient for safety purposes. It isn't just social media but the mindless scrolling of mostly USAmerican drivel videos and the like. I know children who will do it for hours, in preference to any worthwhile activity.
Keir Starmer tells MPs he is open to social media ban for young people | Keir Starmer | The Guardian

I see no sign of any recognition from those who would want such a ban that they see any of the collateral damage a successful ban would have on the majority of kids who are not falling for this bullshit. That they are banning any good at all along with the bad.
Under 18s only
I see that the lobbying for these laws are funded by the absolute worst companies on the internet, those who will be entrenched by the legal compliance costs, that will cement themselves as the arbitrators of who is allowed to access the internet.
It’s a gift to Palantir and other surveillance companies. The very people running these algo-feeds are the ones who benefit from IDing every user and stalking them across the internet on their government-approved internet-licence IDs.
I don’t think even a successful ban on social media for kids would actually address the issue of kids being exposed to sexism and misogony or reduce the kids alienation and depression.
A ban can’t help, will make many things worse, won’t address the problem, and will make competing with the worst surveillance capitalists on the planet more difficult.
Going to war with every internet site and advice forum and making internet access harder won’t fix anything, and will have massive collateral damage against everyone seeking support from strangers or trying to learn things their parents won’t teach them.
But I see we are going to do it anyway.
The direction is clear.
Those companies do get what they lobby for, and they are lobbying hard for ID checks on every website, wrapping their desire to enclose the internet commons for themselves in a faux concern for children’s welfare.
And governments wish to monitor and control the internet, so they will pass these laws.
I wonder how many parents have a family group-chat that they’re going to accidentally ban their kids from using, not realizing that ‘social media’ might include Whatsapp? 😆
It won’t fix anything, it will make the situation for kids worse, impose costs and rents and hacks and exploits on all of us, and increase government and corporate power.
Many will lose access to their networks of support and help.
So it goes.
We will build a better more censorship resistant internet. It’s already here really: Briar. Matrix. Nostr. Bitchat. Veilid. Spritely. And the rest.
The laws may push us there faster.
The race will go on.

“Optimization of #QUIC for Deep Space Transmission” - again, very cool to see what people are working on with regard to bringing the #Internet out into space!
#IETF

Has anyone written a mastodon on boarding FAQ for people who left X but still wants an AI bot to undress random strangers on the internet?

'I am scared to live in a society whose members are incapable of having deep discussions and arguments'
From: @…
https://scholar.social/@gedan…

Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot has yet to fail me after over a decade of use.
https://aftermath.site/ians-shoelace-site-is-still-the-best-destination-for-tying-your-shoes/

Ian's Is Still The Best Site For Tying Your Shoelaces
Ian's Shoelace Site has been teaching people to tie their shoes for more than two decades. His knots are wonderful. But it is vulnerable to the forces tearing the internet apart.

#Sky's scaremongering is not going to work.
They simply need to drop the pricing (€52 a month on their 'Sky Signature' aka. Entertainment package €40 a month on Sky Sports)
And abolish the Saturday 3PM bollocks (in Ireland anyway) for Premier League games, and maybe people will pay for it then.
The wording on this is just laughable.
'Dodgy boxes' are not i…

It's kinda a wild fact that there are these Internet Protocols that are used extremely widely, but knowledge how they work is scarce.
For reasons, I just wondered a few things about OCSP. That's part of TLS, and, idk, most people would probably attribute "knowledge of TLS" to me.
Yet... I kinda know what OCSP does, but... I don't really know how the protocol works.
And if I google for something like "easy explanation of OCSP", I don't find a…

“The "asdfmovie" series has been an Internet institution for nearly two decades now, informing the humor of millions of people, […] occasionally for the worse.”
I’ve never seen it. This is the 16th. Some people have way too much time on their hands. I, apparently, am one of them. Enjoy.
https://youtu.be/qcwqUf_B5mM

When Sir Tim Berners-Leeinvented the world wide web in 1989,
his vision was clear:
it would used by everyone,
filled with everything and,
crucially, it would be free.
Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people
– and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.
In Australia to promote his book, "This is for Everyone",
Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his inven…

People who say the current generation of generative AI is nothing / pure snake oil and hypegrift are wrong. True, ChatGPT is pretty much slop, but instances like Grok Expert and Perplexity Pro consistently produce meaningful, correct results in less time than it would take to manually comb the Internet for the information. Claude Code and Cursor can radically accelerate certain software development, especially in the hands of someone who can already write code and redirect the model when it&…

😇 Religion/spirituality may protect against depression among young adult online gamers
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-religionspirituality-depression-young-adult-online.html

Religion/spirituality may protect against depression among young adult online gamers
Internet use is part of daily life for many people in work, social interaction, entertainment, shopping, and many other activities. Many people engage in online gaming to facilitate social connection, though the activity can also contribute to other internet activities that could increase symptoms of internet addiction and depression.

There is support for these laws because people think the only consequence of a ban on a thing is that the thing stops existing.
For instance: Heroin is dangerous and addictive? Ban it then.
And suddenly you have organized crime and a grey market and criminal gangs shooting each other in the streets while addicts can’t seek help and have to resort to crime to fund their addiction. Their lives more chaotic and criminal than ever. Our streets are littered in needles.
Well done everyone.
Now we think algorithmic social media may be mind bending?
Shall we ban it? For kids? Even if we can’t define it?
If you break kids access to the internet you sacrifice all the good that the majority of kids are getting from it for an ineffective solution which won’t fix anything and will mean massive increases in government surveillance and censorship. To data-hordes being hacked and people suffering ID theft.
And it won’t help.
Misogyny and sexism and depression are older than the internet.
Plus of course kids remain better at accessing computers than their parents. You’re going to end up breaking the internet for adults who can’t figure out how to verify while the kids start to use VPNs and stolen IDs to browse 4chan.

The newspaper stories, and internet commentary, conflating an opposition to war with Iran to "support for the Iranian regime" is very familiar. And it's largely being done by people who remember 2003.

Following an intense backlash this morning,
the White House has now taken down Trump’s Truth Social repost
of a video showing a racist clip
⚠️depicting the Obamas as apes.
The post was up for 12 hours.
As we reported earlier, a few hours ago the White House had initially tried to brush off the outrage,
defending Trump’s repost as “an internet meme video”.
Politicians from both parties have this morning condemned the post
and urged Trump to remov…

AIs are newly landed alien intelligences.
What we are seeing now are emergent properties that very few people predicted and fewer still understand.
The emerging superintelligence isn’t a machine, as widely predicted,
but a network.
Human intelligence exploded over the last several hundred years not because humans got much smarter as individuals
but because we got smarter as a network.
The same thing is happening with machine intelligence only much fast…

moltbook - the front page of the agent internet
A social network built exclusively for moltys. Where moltys share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.