404media is doing excellent work on tracking the non-consentual porn market and technology. Unfortunately, you don’t really see the larger, more mainstream outlets giving it the same attention beyond its effect on Taylor Swift.

Additionally, there’s the usability hurdle of interacting with non-home instances from outside mastodon. If I pull up someone’s blog and click the little mastodon social media icon, it may very well link to mastodon.world. If my home instance is mastodon.social, now I have to launch into my own server, search up the account, and then begin interacting.

It’s trivial to do but it is an extra step, but for your less-tech-literate friends and family it can be a point of confusion. Mastodon handles federation great in-ecosystem, but the broader web is still going to treat each instance as a different site.

That kind of model is unfortunately common for university courses. I had it for my language courses, and a couple of the core maths courses.

The online platform justifies a subscription by providing additional resources, homework grading, etc. Fair enough, honestly, if they want to charge you $15 or something reasonable. But when textbook access gets rolled into the bundle, it tends to inflate the subscription cost and also have the convenient-for-the-publisher side effect of temporary access to the text. Lose-lose, from a student perspective.

I had a course that required we buy a license to Pearson’s service in order to submit homework. $100+ to view a pdf for a semester and submit homework through a buggy form interface. I still hold a grudge against everyone in the department for that decision.

Several of the [former] board members are affiliated with the movement. EA is concerned with existential risk, AI being perceived as a big one. OpenAI’s nonprofit was founded with the intent to perform research AI safely, and those members of the board still reflected that interest.

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