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July 30, 2023

  • Had to do the usual Ruby yakshaving to get things working both locally and in Github Actions, which as you know, only happens after midnight
    • Installed rbenv and got things on 3.1.4
    • This tip on reading the .ruby-version into your Gemfile was kind of neat #Ruby
    • But what I actually had to do was update it in the Github Actions file
    • All publishing! New site is up https://bmannconsulting.com
  • Some things to know about Mastodon by Maria Antoniak #Mastodon
    • This is a list of things I think are important to understand if you’re new to Mastodon. A lot of how Mastodon works isn’t immediately clear, but the effects of how it’s designed can have a big impact on your experience.

  • Manton Reece Next Steps for Activity Pub #ActivityPub
    • Responding to Dave Winer, talking about interop and standards, including a common posting API; the #Mastodon/API is used rather than AP or #micropub
    • ActivityPub is not really one thing. There’s the ActivityPub spec itself, but also ActivityStreams, HTTP Signatures, WebFinger, JSON-LD, and the working group note on authentication.

  • Ben Werdmuller ActivityPub API Service #ActivityPub
    • ActivityPub is too hard for most people to implement on a whim. What would it take to allow developers to create something that sits on the fediverse inside of an afternoon?

  • Reminded of BlotIM, which is a very simple hosted #SSG that works by syncing a Dropbox folder, #Google/Drive, or Git repo
    • It supports wikilinks and specifically talks about using it with Obsidian
    • With Google Drive or Dropbox, I could see this perhaps being useful for less technical users in jointly maintaining a #Digital Garden
    • Yes, it’s also open source and technically self hostable
  • Eric Scouten pointed me at the Zola #Rust #SSG, which I tried back in Mar 14th, 2021
    • I did a quick search and found obsidian-zola for making a #Digital Garden site with it
  • The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem by Emelia Smith
    • We’ve also seen various contributors start to face financial hardships given the lack of funding available for their crucially important work. I know this first hand, as my personal savings being decimatedwhilst I struggle to make contributing to the fediverse sustainable — and I’m not alone here.

    • There are a couple of topics being covered here, but at its core is #commons funding and the “classic” problem of financially supporting #opensource maintainers
    • What’s new is the additional issue of operating #DecentSocial servers — from hosting to moderation — on a volunteer basis
    • Users have expectations that have been set by global corporate advertising based platforms, and often times don’t care about open source or federation
  • A long delayed golden age: or why has the ICT ‘installation period’ lasted so long? by Carlota Perez
    • after four revolutions replacing manual labour, the new technologies have found an enormous new territory to mechanise: mental labour! This has led MIT’s Brynjolfsson and McAfee and many others to consider it as the beginning of a ‘second machine age’. Nevertheless, even if that can prolong the experimental installation period, it should not stop a golden age from being unleashed.

  • Cryptography may offer a solution to the massive AI-labeling problem MIT Technology Review
    • Covers C2PA as well as it’s relevance for #LLM content
    • Launched two years ago, it’s an open-source internet protocol that relies on cryptography to encode details about the origins of a piece of content, or what technologists refer to as “provenance” information.

    • The project, part of the nonprofit Joint Development Foundation, was started by Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic, which formed the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (from which C2PA gets its name). Over 1,500 companies are now involved in the project through the closely affiliated open-source community, Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), including ones as varied and prominent as Nikon, the BBC, and Sony.

    • I shared with #DDC WG — how can content addressing, #IPFS, and web3’s self-verifying data properties help here?
  • First DWebYVR/Community Garden Dinner tonight

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