#kaia.addition

[kaiasky]

u shld make a like #kaia.debunks tag bc i love to read them

good idea some of them r #kaia.additions

[kaiasky]

its not 4channers though. like. anonymous sudan has been doing shit for ~6mo and during that time we have a pretty good idea of their capabilities and habits, and it doesn't really match the patterns of, say, 4chan anonymous DDOSes.

But more than that. In 2023 i have to read an unironic paragraph that basically boils down to 'the mysterious hacker known as 4chan'?? Like. 4chan isn't a mystery. its a public fucking website. if channers were behind this ddos, we'd expect noise about it, like there was noise about ddos plans during the heyday of anonymous.

(There is a debate to be had about the degree to which cybersecurity analysts, many of whom have defense connections, will overstate the connections between the kremlin and cybercrime in russia. sometimes u just happen to live in russia and can make some $$ doing crimes.)

the bottom line is i think 4chan is likely not behind this and would need to see any evidence of that whatsoever before i believed it.

I can't believe how goofy people are being about the AO3 DDoS situation. One side of the debate is like "ah, it's probably those Nefarious Russian Hackers carrying out another false flag operation!" and the other side is like "a real hacktivist group wouldn't use this sort of fandom-centric language, so clearly the attack never happened and AO3 themselves staged it in order to make themselves look like victims!", and these are both unhinged things to believe.

Like, it's fucking 4channers. It's always fucking 4channers. Pretending to be from a random African nation is literally a meme for those guys, and who else would be dumb enough to try and hold a registered nonprofit hostage for bitcoin?

[kaiasky]

I run @flowart-collection, which reblogs jugglers/circus performers/flow artists/etc. @fourteenfishteen is my friends at the table fanblog. Mutuals feel free to ask for my private/selfies blog!

Also find me on cohost! add me on discord: @kaiasky or email me n54y96naj (at) relay (dot) firefox (dot) com

I'm kaia. i live in canada and work on VFX software. As hobbies I play go/weiqi/baduk (kaiasky on OGS, ~7kyu, friend meee), play volleyball, and spin poi.

this blog generally gets used for whatever nonsense is happening on tumblr and as a personal blog. If there's something you'd like tagged, let me know

#kaia.oversharing: personal stuff about my life

#kaia.mypost: posts i have made

#kaia.addition: posts i have added something to

#kaia.gpt: in competition with openAI ive decided to offer my services as a chat assistant. if you ask kaiaGPT a question I'll answer it helpfully to the best of my abilities without guile or sarcasm unless i don't want to.

kaia.lint: programming opinions and shitposts

#textposting: old kaia.mypost tag i have to migrate over

#thanks for the ask!: asks i have received

#wings.: (note the period.) i read maximum ride in 5th grade and thats an important fact about me.

#dithering: when the pixel art has dithering

Always happy to get dms or asks--if you're curious what's up with me then ask me anything and I'm happy to talk!

[kaiasky]

(new tag structure pls ignore)

feel like tagging #textposting is not actually useful and the main divider is 'personal post' (#kaia.oversharing) 'any post i made' (#kaia.mypost) and 'post i added something significant to' (#kaia.addition). idk

[kaiasky]

At least back when i enjoyed reading about all this for fun, a term that was somewhat common in papers was "homuncular flexibility" and i always found that really charming

LETS FUCKIN GOOO

[kaiasky]

worth noting that the Cleveland Cliffs company is just like. another real-ass steel company. maybe I'm wrong but i think this isn't anything and the x ticker. Is just a coincidence

Beyond pathetic.

This is just the world's most expensive midlife crisis.

[kaiasky]

Not an expert at the intricacies of email marketing by any means, but at an old job the only thing that made us send less emails was the report-as-spam rate. if too many people report your marketing emails as spam, Gmail users etc stop seeing them, and the business folks at the top start freaking out because that's one of the numbers they love to put on their charts.

If any business sends you too many emails or makes the unsubscribe button hard to reach, if you're using Gmail or another service that lets you report spam to the company, smash that spam button & cause them problems

(Same dynamic for chargebacks and companies making it impossible to cancel their services.)

When I click the “unsubscribe from emails” button it should automatically send a “kill yourselg” to the bastard websites that forced me to subscribe to emails in order to apply for jobs

[kaiasky]

consider: when somebody plays you hey jude or whatever to teach the beatles. "ohhhhh i think i have heard them! didn't they also make radioactive?"

yeah okay im definitely pretending i dont know who the beatles are the next time i meet a new person irl and the opportunity arises

[kaiasky]

yeah! also california has by most reports ~3x the homelessness rate per capita as florida largely due to our fucking housing prices. so either

you think california is 3x the shithole as florida

you think california is less of a shithole because you support sweeps and criminalization to push the homeless out of 'acceptable' society so u don't have to see their suffering, and think ron desantis is failing only to be cruel enough (possible!)

u know this, but u dont actually care about homeless ppl beyond a symbol of decay you can use to score sick dunks on ur political opponents, because ur politics is fundamentally devoid of any substance (likely!)

hand a homeless person in your neighborhood a $20 bill today and build 40 apartment buildings on your street

DeSantis' wasteland swamp!

[kaiasky]

[kaiasky]

reddit still does not require an email (though the ui option for it gets better hidden each year lol). 4chan, though i won't hold it up as a beacon of the Good Web, doesn't require an email. IRC doesn't require an email. These services definitely existed and continue to exist. Which doesn't mean email-linked accounts are yknow, bad necessarily

there's a lot of revisionist nostalgia for an internet that never existed, but that that one post about "remember when we only had usernames and didn't need to use email to make accounts" is laughable. for a long time, email was the only way of communicating online! usernames distinct from email only came after the fact! and having the option for usernames gives more freedom and safety than the usenet days when people would just know you by your email

and using your email to sign up for a website, as opposed to just creating an account and moving on, is entirely logical. did people just, not forget their passwords back in the day? were there not communication which used email to work? even in the ye olde days of forums, this take is laughable

[kaiasky]

Explicit confirmation that there will be a toggle to turn off post collapsing is very good! 25 thousand ad-free users is honestly more than I expected!

The tumblr live. It's this product called Livebox (formerly VPaaS, more news articles under that name). And they offer this homogeneous streaming service and offer their talent incentives to stream on new platforms (and i think in some cases allow cross-streaming to multiple platforms? i remember it was a thing they (Meet Group) discussed but idr if it happened or not).

like. its stupid and i kinda expect it to collapse because even Twitch struggles to make streaming infrastructure profitable and this is a smaller operation with worse monetization. but i find it fascinating while it exists, in the same way a particularly poisonous frog might be fascinating

Just watched the Tumblr Live QnA Panel, and here's some of my thoughts:

* Had to toggle on Tumblr Live to watch and agree to the terms.

The stream itself was a little low quality visually, not terrible, but either they used a low quality camera or streaming isn't up to the same quality as other sites like Tiktok

* the gifting feature that mimics Tiktok was obnoxious. Users that seem to use Tumblr Live a lot where using gifts very often. The gift icons would take up most of the screen covering chat.

Some people in chat suggested that the gifters were Staff plants to make the site seem more popular than it is. There is no way to verify if they are or are not. But these individuals talked in the chat about how they use Tumblr Live all the time, and some dont even have blogs they only use Live. Which is????

I don't like the gifting emojis. But i dont like them on Twitch or tiktok either, so shrug emoji, i guess

Questions Answered (that i remember)

* The Chronological Dashboard will stay. They mentioned this several times that tumblr, while they are going to improve the For You algorithm, the main Chronological Dashboard will not change.

* Tumblr Live apparently isn't blocked in Europe and is just waiting for approval, which is soon. They said it being blocked was misinformation. (Which i have no way to verify.)

* LGBTQA+ and specifically Trans content getting flagged or censored is a bug, apparently. They said it happens from time to time, but reporting should fix it. Users in the chat were unhappy with this answer since the issue has lasted for such a long time and doesn't seem or feel random. But they did not comment further.

* Tumblr posts being collapsable was not super addressed. They sort of skimmed over this question and just said that they try lots of new features to see what works and what doesn't. Apparently, there will be a toggle to turn this feature on or off.

* Tumblr Groups was addressed. It was shut down because not enough users used the feature.

Apparently, not many users use Tumblr Live either, but they want to keep working on it to make it appealing.

* Another bit about Tumblr Live. CEO essentially said they will not give the option to permanently toggle off the feature.

One user had asked if Tumblr had investors. CEO said, "Of course."

CEO did mention they "might" add a way to permanently turn off tumblr live. But it if they did, it would be a paid option over $20.

* One user commented that they are epileptic and that certain ads trigger their seizures because of the flashing colors and wanted to know what they would do for this issue. Tumblr CEO said "Well you could pay for No Ads."

CEO talked about paying to go ad free a lot. Saying only 25 thousand users pay for it at the moment.

Personally, it seems really irresponsible to suggest that the only way to fix an accessibility issue is for a user to pay money. As if disabled people dont have to pay enough as it is.

* I had asked if they were willing to work with more artists for Merch and Badges. They said they are working on it and there is a feature called Creatr that is set up to uplift creators and work with them on merch ideas.

I've never heard of Creatr. He seemed like we should have known what it was? Maybe they should promote that more. I know we all want more ways to support artists.

* More Badges and Achievements are coming. Apparently, a Legacy Badge that shows how long you've been on tumblr is in the works. (Im personally very excited about Badges.)

* Tumblr is thinking bout doing more QnA and even meet ups at different conventions and some even at the headquarters themselves. (They did not acknowledge questions that asked for a Headquarters video tour.)

Anyways, that was about all I can remember. Staff didn't record the panel, so hopefully, one of the other users did.

They talked about other random stuff. Calling out gifters specifically and rambling about donuts and books.

Oh, also, they brought a ball pit. Which is, yeah. Lol

[kaiasky]

yeah i suspect it kinda goes both ways tho like if u keep posting eventually u accumulate followers and mutuals, but also lots of people join, don't get much interaction, and then stop posting

i don't have data for any of that

How does one gain followers on this god-forsaken app? Huh? Whaddya want? Memes? Commentary? Politics? Piss? What pleases you people?

[kaiasky]

I suspect (though admittedly I'm not an expert here) that the flapper is the one being derided. At least, here's other ones from the same few issues where the flapper is sorta equal parts foolish, aberrant, and desirable.

The magazine this comic is from which i really enjoyed reading through

Judge magazine, July 1926

[kaiasky]

Twitter's Community Notes work on a combination of the number of positive votes, and whether those notes come from people who have disagreed in the past. Secondly, participation in community notes is limited to users who've had an account for 6 months and haven't gotten warned for breaking rules.

The thinking is, eg, if all the corrections come from terfs who make a habit of creating transphobic community notes, then the algorithm can detect "hey, it's literally just this same group of 20 blogs upvoting these, they probably aren't unbiased corrections." Versus if something is legitimate misinformation, it will hopefully be scored positively by a broad range of people.

Not to say it's a perfect system--it definitely fails on twitter on occasion. But it does seem like broadly it does a good job of not showing community notes that are outright trolling or harassment.

I also note a lot of people in the notes saying "it would be good but it would need to be heavily moderated"--one of the advantages of twitter's community notes is that they aren't fact-checked by twitter. This means that, ostensibly, twitter is less able to throw its weight around for political ends by inserting or removing community notes (and, on a funnier note, musk can get community note'd on his own platform).

never thought I'd say tumblr should copy something from Twitter but tumblr desperately needs a community notes feature where everyone is forced to see when posts have misinfo, instead of the corrections just getting lost in the notes as people continue to blithely spread propaganda

[kaiasky]

ok that second to last one is 100% just a normal map someone thought looked similar

its. a way to store how bumpy an object is. its not for AI art protection, it's for doing this

I found a couple more of these on FilterForge! like this "Oil on Water" by Gene S Morgan. So I highly suspect these are all

just pretty pictures that do nothing to AI

stolen artwork used without permission!

I think it's an open question how well stuff like Glaze will end up working, and I'm certainly not an expert. BUT, if some approach like that is going to work at all, my guess is it likely won't be just a static image. Or at least, here's Glaze's FAQ:

AI disturbance overlays for those who don't have Ibis paint premium. found them on tiktok