My big gamedev dream is to make a multimillion dollar JRPG but have the soundtrack be all MIDI.

Preferably with SC-55 sounds

With apologies to dril, you don't gotta hand it to them, actually. My best argument against ATProto is that Bluesky, a company that by all apparent actions hates me and would rather that I die, thinks it is in their best interests if I use ATProto.

It may well be that our interests overlap, but I haven't gone too wrong in listening to what my enemies want me to do, then not doing that; it at least works as a pretty good heuristic.

I really wish we could collectively stop pretending that Bluesky is anything other than a centralized, VC-backed, corporate social media enclave. It's just so exhausting to have Bluesky likers demand to be included in every conversation about decentralization and federation, only for the net result to be that Bluesky-the-company gets more money and gets to claim that they're "billionaire proof."

It feels very odd to have a conference dedicated to federated social media highlight ATProto, a protocol which turns out to be anything *but* federated in actual practice.

Any good faith I was willing to extend towards Bluesky and ATProto has long since been incinerated, with a few special highlights along the way:

• Overriding their own moderation team to protect Jesse Singal
• The then-CEO workshopping new transphobic slurs with Singal (that hilariously failed to take off, thankfully)
• Bluesky's declaration via Attie that anything reachable via ATProto is theirs for AI training
• Bluesky adopting vibe coding to piss off trans people they don't like

One thing I should add is that this donation almost had to be targeted personally at members of a group I'm deemed to belong to, whether by human employees or their chatbots, not just mechanically.

My GitHub account is almost entirely inactive and aside from a few very small projects I still have hosted on GitHub, it's primarily there as a place to receive donations.

So there's no way it was just "top N active accounts", "accounts owning top N FOSS projects", or anything like that.

6/N

RE: https://mastodon.social/@AnnaAnthro/117119590004530456

Just in case you thought any company’s claims to keep your data confidential were worth anything…

...if you're using a Gmail address with the recurring donation to DAIR, Google sends the thank you mail with the link to manage/cancel your recurring donation to the spam folder. 🤬

I have a hard time believing that's not intentional malice from the company that fired and tried to silence Timnit Gebru.

5/N

If anyone else is in the same position of receiving unsolicited AI money clearly aimed at softening your anti-AI stance or credibility to your community, I'd encourage you to do the same. It was really easy to setup, except for...

4/N

Today I contacted DAIR (somehow I missed the info on their website 🤦) about the possibility of forwarding these funds to them, and got back a nice response right away, so I have initiated a recurring donation of $50/mo to DAIR.

I have no idea if someone from OpenAI will see this at some point and be embarrassed and cancel their sponsorship, but as long as they don't, I'll keep this recurring donation active passing it on. 😁

3/N

If anyone was stalking my GitHub Sponsors page, you might have noticed something sus appeared there recently. On June 7, OpenAI signed up as a sponsor as a custom $50/mo level.

This was unsolicited and uncommunicated and I only found out about it through the usual GitHub emails about sponsor activity.

Naturally, I was and am uncomfortable with keeping this money, but I also do not see any good coming from blocking it or returning it to them. It may be a small amount for them to use for additional harm, but it would still be giving them something.

So, I've been looking for somewhere to forward it.

2/N

I have a financial disclosure I'd like to make, that I'd been putting off until I figured out exactly how I'd like to handle it. I've taken care of it now, so here it goes!

1/N

I took some bold and decisive action in a waiting room this morning: I walked up and turned off the loud TV. Nobody complained or said anything.

@aworkinglibrary I know people who wouldn't know how to survive without ordering basically everything off of Amazon all the time. 🫠 I haven't used Amazon in well over a year.

It's actually pretty straightforward not to use things, once you decide not to use them.

People are like, you can’t refuse LLMs forever, someday you’ll have to use them. But listen, motherfuckers, I have been refusing to drive a car for the entirety of the twenty-first century. I am *practiced.* Refusing AI is easy mode.

Hey so my child is still kidnapped by their other parent for the past two weeks.

We have a series of court hearings this week and next hopefully will resolve the kidnapping.

Aside from the stress of not seeing my child for weeks has been the challenge of NEW legal bills I can't afford.

If you can spare a few bucks for direct mutual aid it'd really help me prepare for court and keep fighting for my daughter's rights.

$50 / $50 - lunch and weed

venmo/paypal - $nullagent
zelle - DM please

You can be good at code w/o being good at people. But you can't be good at professional programming w/o being good at people.

RE: https://masto.es/@andrewblasco/117116298104503847

Daaaaaaamn, migration sucks on Mastodon, but at least it's possible. It just not being possible to migrate any data out of pixelfed.social is wild

Attention please! (Clears his throat).

Seeing that the Pixelfed.social server was receiving spam and scam accounts, I decided to switch server. Imagine my surprise when I discovered... I couldn't. You can't migrate a Pixelfed.social profile to another instance. Apparently, this has been the case for over a year, by other complaints I've seen.

The lead developer has said something like they're working on fixing it, but it's been like this for a while...

I asked @pixelfed for an explanation several days ago. They've posted things, but they haven't answered to me.

Meanwhile, they've disabled one of the main features of the Fediverse on the largest (and "official") #Pixelfed server.

In other words, they're holding all their users hostage, which goes against the philosophy of the #Fediverse.

What's more, Pixelfed has a function to export your data. However, exporting posts always fails.

I thought, well, at least I can import the people I follow. Nope, because the only import tool they've designed is one for importing your Instagram account. Disabled on the main Pixelfed.social server, by the way.

I even started to think it was because they were one version behind the server I wanted to move to (which would be strange, since it's the main server).

Well, no, they have the same version. But you can only migrate your account INTO Pixelfed.social, not the other way, OUT of Pixelfed.social. That makes the whole thing crystal clear to me.

In short: NEVER create an account on Pixelfed.social, or you'll be held hostage. I recommend another servers (Luzeed, Fotolibre, for example). And there's also @vernissage for sharing photos.

You can all follow me again at this account: @andrewblasco@luzeed.org. Because of course, without account migration, you lose all your followers 🤷🏽‍♂️