I peek at Meta's Threads every now and then. Just saw an ad for an app that lets me bet on things like "what will Mr. Beast say in his next video?" though completely unclear what yes/no means in this context. I looked it up and this is being considered A Very Serious Company by other very serious companies. It's just lightly regulated betting, but they call it "direct investment hedging against unpredictable macroeconomic events". I hate our reality

Business Insider

Prediction giant Kalshi strikes a new media partnership with CNBC, days after its CNN deal

Prediction site Kalshi is partnering with CNBC, days after striking a deal with CNN. Prediction sites are popular but getting regulatory pushback.

Websites that let me log in ONLY via email recovery feel like they are personally punishing me as a password manager user... like, come on, I have an awesome, one click, client side way to recall a long unique password for your website but sure, allow me to personally increase your email service bills I guess In return I get One More Email To Deal With. Thanks pal

Here I am talking a bit about the ActivityPub Fuzzer and how it's intended to help improve interoperability on the Fediverse.

browser extension to replace ✨ with 💩

I remember a while back someone on fedi posted a little thing they built that was a personal url shortener in a single HTML page. If I remember correctly they just loaded in an array of ids and destinations and then you'd point someone to mysite.example/short?id=123 and the page would just redirect via window.location... something like that. Which one of you clever people was this? I reimplemented it this morning but I wanna see/credit the original

Extremely pleased to announce the release of the ActivityPub Fuzzer! This is a tool that runs in a local development environment and (partially) emulates known ActivityPub software. It can even create a fake local "public fire hose" shaped like what you might see if you hooked your in-development software up to the real Fediverse. I built this because I wanted ways to test in-progress fedi software for compatibility without actually making it live and breaking things.

Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University

Introducing the ASML ActivityPub Fuzzer: Improving Testing in the Fediverse - Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University

The ActivityPub Fuzzer is a small program to help developers build social media software on the Fediverse by emulating known Fediverse software.

I've learned recently that there are adults who do not know that 1mL of water weighs 1g. If you didn't before, now you know.

I'm sure other people have noted this but at some point we went from talking about "social network sites" to talking about "social media sites". At first, the network was the thing that mattered. Then, the media was the thing that mattered. A quick Google Trends query shows the shift might have happened around 2012: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%22social%20network%20site%22,%22social%20media%20site%22&hl=en

if you are intolerant of people who are tolerant of people who tolerate intolerance, that's the paradox of the paradox of intolerance of tolerance of intolerance

Weird that I can't think of this off the top of my head but... who on the fedi is based in the PNW and is an implementer of / contributor to Fediverse software? (small projects fine! tinkerers too! technical role or not! just trying to consider who I might be able to wrangle together to talk about stuff because I feel professionally isolated sometimes)