Francis 🇾🇪 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @francis@greenplenty.social

A source of new Fediverse accounts is dev.brighteon.social.

46,862 were discovered during the past day.

Brighteon is known for spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories all over Facebook and Twitter, and it looks like they’re trying their hand at the Fediverse now.

I’ve looked at the accounts on that server, and the overwhelming majority look like bots. The goal seems to be spamming misinformation.

Personally, I recommend putting brighteon.com on #Fediblock.

https://botsin.space/@mastodon_daily_active_users/110107223841240128

There's really nothing more to say.
#BlackMastodon

Shout-out to socialist Eugene Debs, who got almost 1 million votes for president in 1920 while in federal prison for encouraging young men to dodge the draft for World War 1.

A striking visualisation of #climatechange: the date of Kyoto cherry blossoms' reaching full bloom, plotted over the past 1000 years.

Thanks to the cultural significance of cherry blossoms in Japan, we have data on the specific day of the year when a very particular species of cherry blossom (P. jamasakura) reached "full-flowering" (満開) in a specific area on the outskirts of Kyoto (Arashiyama), all the way back to 800 AD.

The trend of the past 50 years is hard to miss…

Let’s get one thing straight: prosecuting a former president isn’t radical if he broke the law.

It's just like Les Misérables, except Jean Valjean is worth $200 billion and he wasn't stealing bread to feed children, he was stealing employees' charitable donations to fund his failing vanity project.

Trump is demanding to be tried by a jury of his peers. Now it's a just a question of finding a kindergarten full of psychopaths.

Y'all told me Andreesen was smart, Thiel was smart, Rabois was smart, Musk was smart, they have all outed themselves as lucky and dumb. You need to stop assuming being rich and being smart are the same.

The very first citation in this stupid letter, https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/, is to our #StochasticParrots Paper,

"AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research[1]"

EXCEPT

that one of the main points we make in the paper is that one of the biggest harms of large language models, is caused by CLAIMING that LLMs have "human-competitive intelligence."

They basically say the opposite of what we say and cite our paper?

France in Flames

https://crimethinc.com/FranceinFlames

In #France, a powerful movement has erupted in response to an attempt to raise the retirement age. While millions have gone on strike and poured into the streets, President Emmanuel Macron and his henchmen have attempted to crush this movement by escalating police violence to lethal extremes. In this report, we offer a chronology of the events of the past week, including a translation of an account by one participant in the movement and a statement from the parents of another who remains in a coma.

This is an important graph. The share of national income going to the richest 10 percent was lowest (and share to lower 90 percent highest) when union membership was at its highest. As unions have weakened, inequality has widened. It's not about economics. It's about power.