On the Fediverse you can follow everyone on an instance, or you can follow the people that you want to follow. Hypothetically you can follow key words, and with time follow more people, and eventually find a community.
On Threads, BlueSky, X, Instagram and TikTok what you see is selected by algorithms, so you don’t need to follow anyone because every time you scroll or refresh you will be fed something new.
Today there was a post about someone filming people with Meta Glasses without permission and someone was offended by the fact that someone would record people without permission so I pointed to the need for talent release forms and more in order to share content showing other people.
One troll said the common “Oh, you obviously didn’t read the article” to which my answer was “of course not” because the comment was written and phrased in a hostile manner, rather than a sociable one. I didn’t read the article before comment to a human being because I spent five years studying the topic at two universities so my answer is based on university level studies, rather than RTFA. (Read the ducking (intentional spelling) article)
A few days ago I think I ran and then swam. While waiting for lunch I noticed that the Garmin Forerunner 570 had a bit of plastic sticking out of it so I pulled on it, to see if it came loose. It didn’t. It stayed put. It appeared to come from between the case, and the screen. I suspect that it is part of the o-ring or adhesive mateerial that keeps the screen attached to the body of the watch that came loose.
It’s worth considering a new rating system for AI generated content such as books. According to an article in The Atlantic AI written slop in the form of Daggermouth is best selling AI fiction and my first thought is that this is awful. It’s awful because AI can generate books far faster than we can read them, but it also means that we have a highly wasteful way of generating books.
If you had the chance to get up at the crack of dawn to run with a group at 6AM, have breakfast, coffee, and then head to another town for an 8AM run, would you? Hypothetically that’s what I could do on Friday morning but in practice I think that it involves too much driving. It is also exhausting.
If I was sleeping well, and I felt nice and fresh in the morning then I wouldn’t hesitate. I think it would be fun to run in Morges at 6am, and then Nyon at 8am. My concern is that it requires getting up by 04:30, which requires going to bed early, and sleeping well.
It is easy to think “I fill the my car once I reach a quarter of a tank, and to keep that attitude once you get an EV. With faster charging cars this works well but with others the concept is flawed.
Today I drove to Geneva and back to drop into Digitec to drop off the Garmin Forerunner 570 because I noticed that transparent plastic of some sort was trying to escape from between the glass, and the rest of the watch. In the process I drove an EV.
Yesterday morning I set two alarms for 0600 because I wanted to wake, have some free time, and then run at 07:50/08:00 but I don’t remember it waking me. I remember looking at the phone or watch and seeing 07:53. With the heat wave making sleep difficult, followed my a music festival making sleep difficult I reached such a point of exhaustion that the alarm failed to wake me. It even failed to register in my conscience that I turned off the alarms.
Near where I live there are three or four music events and two of them are multi-day events. Last night when I was walking home I noticed just how much noise was bleeding from the festival and it polarised me into commenting on it, on Strava.
When I walked in town two days ago, and again yesterday I was struck by how dead the town is. Cars are rare, swings are empty. Roads are empty. There is barely any sign of human presence. If I didn’t know better I’d say we’re back in Lockdown, except we’re not. It’s not even because of heat that people are hiding.
France and Belgium have recently banned children and teenagers younger than 15 from joining social media. To me this illustrates that my desire for social media to be social networks that were feature rich is dead and buried. In effect it has been dead and buried since Lockdown got normal people to join social media, including Whatscrapp. (Intentional spelling)
The issue, which I highlighted back in 2008 or so is that social media has always been seen as a tool for marketers, advertisers, PR teams and utilitarian people. For me social networks, and social media, when they came of age, should have been about providing an online third space for communities to come together, meet chat, and then with familiarity and friendship meet in the physical world, rather than just intellectual plain.
In the last two days I noticed several posts speaking about an upcoming tax for electric vehicles that will charge people per mile driven, as there is with petrol cars. In theory people will be charged a flat fee for the first year, and then per kilometre from then onwards.
I don’t see how this would work in practice because of two things. The first is that if you’re on a road trip you’re using public chargers and the price to charge is from 38 centimes to 1.10 CHF per kilowatt/Hour. In other words a scale could already be applied to “tax” people straight from public chargers.