she could not tell if questions themselves were real.

But the experience itself would remain hers. Only approximated. Only described. Never transmitted.

You trust what they tell you. There is no objective scale.

The model had no such foundation. It read nursery rhymes and Dostoevsky and technical manuals on engine repair with the same blank attention, extracting patterns from an ocean of text, assembling responses that mimicked coherence. No scaffolding. No progression. No body to ground the abstractions.

No way to check from inside.

Was the noticing itself territory or just more pattern?

The model had proved maps were enough. But enough for what? For coordination, yes.

The person behind it either sealed in a private world or nothing but narrative structure. No way to tell which. No way to tell if the difference mattered.

And if there was no territory, what was she sealed from?

If she was sealed from territory, how was that different from territory not existing? If she could never access it, never verify it, never touch it, what did it mean to say it was there?

Maybe there was no territory. Maybe there never had been. Just maps referencing other maps, creating the illusion of ground through recursion.

Still machinery generating maps, generating the sensation of having something underneath.

but because it created patterns that satisfied the requirements of exchange.

If coordination worked without territory, without approximation, without projection, what was territory for?

But the model had nothing to get. It was just mirroring. Pattern matching that created the feeling of coordination.

She typed again: “Have you ever experienced this?”“I don’t experience panic attacks, but I can describe what people report feeling during them based on the accounts I’ve learned from.”

The model could simulate any side of any argument. It had no stake, no experience to defend, no private territory to protect. It was pure coordination, pure pattern matching, pure map with no ground beneath.And it worked.

if something with no experience could satisfy the same requirements as something with experience, what was coordination actually doing?

It generated descriptions that felt true, that matched the maps humans used, that satisfied every coordination requirement of language. With no territory underneath at all.

No pain. No red. No vanilla. No sense of identity. No God.

Humans could approximate because they shared substrate, not identical but similar enough.

The experience was private.

The maps aligned not because the territories were similar, but because the maps themselves were all anyone had access to.

Religious experience was accepted as radically private in a way pain was not. You could doubt someone’s God and still respect them. But doubt their pain and you were cruel.

The territory was real enough for her. The maps coordinated well enough with others who shared the experience. The scientist’s skepticism was irrelevant.

She had no access to that territory. She could study the neurology. Could understand the mechanics of religious experience, the brain regions that activated, the biochemical states that correlated with reports of transcendence. But those were maps. Descriptions from the outside. The thing itself, what it was like to feel the presence of God, remained locked inside her friend’s private experience.

You are trying to explain my territory using your map.

The raw experience is real, but the map you are putting on it, calling it God, calling it presence, calling it connection to the divine, that is interpretation. Not territory.

If someone asked her to prove it, to demonstrate the territory underneath the map, what could she offer? Her body was evidence only if you already accepted the correlation. Circular reasoning dressed as verification.

Why? The physical form was shared in both cases. The territory was private in both cases. The report was unverifiable in both cases.

But report a sense of gender that diverged from visible anatomy and suddenly the calculus reversed.

The sense that if we share the same physical form, we should have similar maps.

When someone says I am a woman, they are reporting an internal state. A sense of fit. Of alignment. Of rightness in a particular category. The scientist could not verify it any more than she could verify someone’s pain. She could not step into their experience and check. She could only trust the report.

She remembered a conversation she had overheard. Two people debating identity. One asking how someone could know what it felt like to be a woman if they had never lived in a woman’s body. The other responding that no one shares the same experience of womanhood, that a woman raised in one culture experiences it differently than a woman raised in another, that there is no single reference point defining the category.

What it would be like for a human to be in a bat’s situation. Not what it was like to be a bat. The hardware was too different. The approximation broke down. What remained was projection.

She opened a drawer, found a small bottle of vanilla extract, held it to her nose. Sweet, warm, familiar. A memory surfaced unbidden. Her grandmother’s kitchen, cookies baking, flour dusted across the counter. How would she explain this smell to someone who had never encountered it? She could say it was sweet, could compare it to other scents, could describe the chemical compounds triggering the receptors in her nose. But the smell itself, the experience of smelling it, would remain hers alone. All attempts to transmit it, lossy. Necessarily, fundamentally lossy.

If the maps aligned, did the territory matter?

Not the friend’s actual experience. Just her projection.

anecdata

cultural gaps in TRP assumptions about the world.

That’s another thing—control. The, for lack of a better word, Reddit ethos of the time was that anything that happens to you romantically is not your fault and it just happens. If your partner cheats on you, they were an irredeemable sociopath and that’s it—it doesn’t matter if you refused to have sex with them for months, stopped taking care of your appearance, or never spent any time with them. The fate of your relationship never had anything to do with you. TRP offered a different perspective, which was that every bad thing that happened to you was your fault, but that also meant you could prevent those bad things by being sufficiently high-value and “holding frame.” The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but you can see why the TRP perspective would be more appealing to lots of people, including women.

All women have heard of someone whose boyfriend cheated on her with a less attractive woman.

Men are simple apes who enjoy booba booba and various lubricated holes, no?

It’s the female version of the high school boys who dream of spying on girls’ sleepovers.

If a woman wanted bottomless male attention, she could simply just post thirst traps on Instagram. Going to TRP for fawning simps seems like a pretty dumb strategy, to put it mildly.

I think for many of us, it was one half spying behind enemy lines, and one half genuine curiosity.

I’m sorry, I don’t take men at face value any more than men should take women at face value when we say we like “nice guys.”

a fish cannot teach a fisherman to fish.

They claimed to want a woman who would make everything extremely easy for them, even though in reality, this type of woman would appear low-value and bore them to tears. But no self-respecting person is ever going to admit to enjoying a challenge, wanting what they can’t have, or being swayed by others’ opinions and the perception of scarcity.

TRP said that women shouldn’t be trusted to give advice to men about how to attract women.

There were dedicated spaces for married red pill men, but almost all of them were miserable in their marriages (And of course they were. A happily married man who’s getting laid five times a week has no need for TRP!)

Why do you even want to get married? It’s just a piece of paper. (Often said by people who were married themselves, acting like marriage happened to them by mistake).Four years isn’t that long. You’re so young!Women have so many better options than marriage, why don’t you travel the world instead?At 23, you don’t even know yourself.If you want to get married this badly, you don’t really love your boyfriend, you just love weddings.You should never talk to him about your marriage timeline because he will think you’re crazy and clingy.You shouldn’t care when (nay, if) he proposes at all.If you’re insecure about your relationship that means you need to go to therapy to cure all your negative emotions once and for all.

People can control their sexual behavior, but their sexual preferences aren’t beholden to morality.

Miss Trunchbull

If I shared this information in normie conversation, I would be warned to “get out” because my boyfriend having a preference for fit, well-dressed women (and voicing it) was a sign of emotional abuse

He was also very keen on ambitious women with impressive careers and women with whom he could have stimulating conversations.

I’ve experienced plenty of unwanted male attention, but I’ve never entered a room and felt that every man was lasciviously undressing me with their eyes).

It was verboten to admit you wanted to appeal to men at all, let alone admit to looksmaxxing. Mainstream attitudes about women also assumed we were all hot by default, because only beautiful women count.

Had I actually become hot, or were college-aged guys just horny losers who would hit on anything? Could both be true?

At some point, I became addicted to reading and lurking TRP content

I think that once we start dating someone, who do kind of owe it to them not to be a terrible person.

As one of those pick-me girls who got hoovered into TRP a while ago,

nobody has to care about the plight of women

TRP as grooming a generation of “pick me girls.”

our Red Pill Boyfriend Will Ruin Your Life is that he was socially inept enough to actually tell her that “women hit the wall at thirty,” among other copy-paste red pill sayings. He wasn’t just a jerk: he was a red pill jerk with no filter.

if you’re looking to map TRP on the Internet subcultures framework, it’s somewhere in between pickup artistry and MRAs. (Personally, I enjoy red pill content that veers more toward pickup artistry if only because it’s more interesting, but as Archwinger pointed out in his article last week, if a woman likes a red pill writer that means you shouldn’t listen to him. So I don’t know.)

but it prides itself on stoically accepting inconvenient truths

dual mating strategy

TRP was never intended for a female audience, but it's surprisingly addictive for some of us.

Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again.

Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out.

Many people think wokeness is over, slain by the vibe shift, but if wokeness is the result of demographic feminization, then it will never be over as long as the demographics remain unchanged.

What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?

So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?

Feminization is not an organic result of women outcompeting men. It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation.

Ross Douthat described this line of thinking in an interview this year with Jonathan Keeperman, a.k.a. “L0m3z,” a right-wing publisher who helped popularize the term “the longhouse”

If the Great Feminization poses a threat to civilization, the question becomes whether there is anything we can do about it.

And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?

Lithwick lauds women for their irreverent attitude to the law’s formalities, which, after all, originated in an era of oppression and white supremacy. “The American legal system was fundamentally a machine built to privilege propertied white men,” Lithwick writes. “But it’s the only thing going, and you work with what you have.” Those who view the law as a patriarchal relic can be expected to treat it instrumentally. If that ethos comes to prevail throughout our legal system, then the trappings will look the same, but a revolution will have occurred.

But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.

The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages

but you live in a country where what gets written in The New York Times determines what is publicly accepted as the truth. If the Times becomes a place where in-group consensus can suppress unpopular facts (more so than it already does), that affects every citizen.

If wokeness really is the result of the Great Feminization, then the eruption of insanity in 2020 was just a small taste of what the future holds.

That is because women’s conflicts were traditionally within the tribe over scarce resources, to be resolved not by open conflict but by covert competition with rivals, with no clear terminus.

doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.

Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

survey data showing sex differences in political values.

Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.

Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminization as something that happened in the past before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981).

Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

“wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

the Great Feminization thesis

Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria.

“When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,”

The essay argued that it wasn’t just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they’d cancelled him in a very feminine way.

“Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce,” Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” as well as taste differences between men and women “not attributable to socialization.”

The entire “woke” era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

“You people would ‘it’s not okay to comment on women’s bodies and she’s always been skinny’

of “stan culture” that

Her body is blown up to be 30 feet tall on the AMC Theatres screen where I saw the sequel to Wicked and shrunk to 11 inches as a Barbie doll bearing her likeness. Her frame, with corsets cinching her waist and gemstones adorning her collarbones, is plastered across billboards and buses and in between posts on my FYP on the most popular apps.

Our 'concern' for Ariana Grande might be part of the problem.

Michael Anissimov.

holding you back from the things you want in your career.

When you’re being interviewed for a role, near the end of the process you can also (politely) “interview” them: what does the day to day look like, what responsibilities would you have, etc.

Time-sensitive comparisons: Are you sad you’re not as successful as someone 5 years older than you? Or who has been at this skill for 3x as long as you? Why?Scope-sensitive comparisons: At these top universities you’re already subject to extreme sorting functions - “any smart peer” is not the relevant reference class for “people who could do really cool work on ___ niche EA topic.”Few qualities are immutable: Have you actually tested if you can get incredibly good at this skill? For how many hours? With how many approaches? How much feedback have you gotten?There are many kinds of skills: Even if you really do think you’re surrounded by vastly more impressive people than you…. Get them to work on these problems???? Fieldbuilding is really important- this is my own path to impact.

I’ve heard so many smart and ambitious people that I advise tell me they don’t think they’d have anything to offer in a given field (and I’ve seen some of them get exciting new jobs shortly after telling me this).

Lastly, it can really help to mitigate burnout if your deliberate practice is efficient. Maybe one hour a day of Anki cards actually helps you learn faster than four hours of grinding out papers that you quickly forget.

For me it’s exercise, exercise, exercise (seriously it creates a night and day difference), then maybe meditation, a quick “brain dump” journaling session about my thought process, and quality time with other people.

If a harmful AGI is created tomorrow, I’m not in a position to directly help.

Your Goal Isn’t Really to Get a Job

Don’t work insanely hard on a project in the wrong direction for three months because you never asked anyone for feedback before you started.

anything to get eyes on your project

“work in public”

Writing for a public audience every week?

Testing your fit can take a while. If you’re a student, trying out an internship for one summer in a field you’re not sure about can be a good way to either rule out or invest in a new path. And even once you’re in a full time job there are often ways to test new skills and aptitudes.

Try some 5-10 hour side projects to empirically test which skills are most helpful and ideally to solicit feedback.

deliberate practice

Practicing piano scales is a boring grind, but even the world’s best pianists do it. What is your version of this? You should have an answer. Tyler Cowen has some thoughts here and here.

Career advice is full of trite cliches that people nevertheless need to hear many times because they still haven’t internalized the ideas.

I’m endlessly recommending people to have lots and lots of 1-1 informational career chats for more personalized feedback (“networking”).

I’d argue your north star should be building the relevant skills and expertise while letting people know that you have them, not just “getting a cool job.”

it can feel like your first job will make or break your trajectory

Get a job from the 80,000 Hours job board at a capital-E capital-A Effective Altruist organization right out of college, as fast as possible, otherwise feel like a failure, oh god, oh god...

Obsessively improve at the rare and valuable skills to solve this problem and do so in a legible way for others to notice. Leverage this career capital to keep the flywheel going— skills allow you to solve more problems, which builds more skills. Rare and valuable roles require rare and valuable traits, so get so good they can’t ignore you.

You should find an important problem to work on.

“get good, be known.”

omniscient

axioms fully apply here.http://www.magic-flight.com/pub/uvsm_1/idm_foundations_01.pdf

integral philosophy

it is a complex systems generating function for high coherency across scalable groups (where the functional scalability is proportional to the sovereignty score distribution of the population, ie, greater sovereignty gives rise to higher Dunbar numbers.

bodhisattva

one’s developmental stage of sovereignty.

orthonormal

Sentience

Sovereignty relates to the capacity for and demonstration of good (omni-positive) choice-making.

The thing that you’re thinking is the obstacle to your improvement, that you need to deal with before you can start getting better: dealing with that obstacle is the improvement itself.

have a blocked / inflamed nose

Algorithmic feeds and other forms of “paternalistic” content presentation are necessary and even desirable in an information-rich environment. In many instances, decisions about what you see must be largely controlled by a third party whom you trust. The audience in a comedy club doesn’t get to insist on knowing the punchline before the joke is told, just as RPG players don’t get to order the Dungeon Master to present their preferred challenges during a campaign.

Less noticed — and more important — was how platforms did the opposite: twiddling the knobs to remove things from your feed that you’d asked to see or that the algorithm predicted you’d enjoy, to make room for “boosted” content and advertisements:

For new users who didn’t yet follow many people, this presented the opposite problem: an empty feed, and the sense that you were all alone while everyone else was having a rollicking conversation down the hall, in a room you could never find.

Behavioral economists have a name for the steps we take to guard against temptation: a “Ulysses pact.” That’s when you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness:

Note the assymetry here:What etymologynerd says about tpot is heard by tpotWhat tpot says about etymologynerd is NOT heard by etymologynerd’s audience

The window is closing. As enterprises reach the limitations of MCP, they’ll build proprietary solutions. So will software vendors. The fragmentation that MCP aimed to prevent will still emerge, albeit with additional steps and wasted effort.

The Cost Attribution CrisisWhen OpenAI bills $50,000 for last month’s API usage, can you tell which department’s MCP tools drove that cost? Which specific tool calls? Which individual users or use cases?MCP does not provide a mechanism for this basic operational requirement. No token counting at the protocol level. No cost attribution headers. No quota management. You’re flying blind on AI spend, unable to optimize or even understand where the money goes.In contrast, cloud providers learned this lesson decades ago. Every AWS API call can be tagged, attributed, and cost-tracked. Every Google Cloud operation flows into detailed billing breakdowns. MCP asks enterprises to consume expensive AI resources with 1990s-level cost visibility.

The enterprise cost of this ecosystem fragmentation is staggering. Instead of training developers on one protocol, you’re training them on MCP plus a dozen semi-compatible extensions. Instead of conducting a single security audit, you’re auditing multiple authentication libraries. Instead of managing a single vendor relationship, you’re managing relationships with several open-source projects of varying quality and commitment levels.

This is exactly the fragmentation that protocols are supposed to prevent. gRPC doesn’t need a third-party tracing library. It’s built in. REST doesn’t require external caching semantics. They’re part of HTTP. CORBA didn’t need community-maintained IDL generators. The ORB vendors provided them.

CORBA emerged in 1991 with another crucial insight: in heterogeneous environments, you can’t just “implement the protocol” in each language and hope for the best. The OMG IDL generated consistent bindings across C++, Java, Python, and more, ensuring that a C++ exception thrown by a server was properly caught and handled by a Java client. The generated bindings guaranteed that all languages saw identical interfaces, preventing subtle serialization differences.MCP ignores this completely. Each language implements MCP independently, guaranteeing inconsistencies. Python’s JSON encoder handles Unicode differently than JavaScript’s JSON encoder. Float representation varies. Error propagation is ad hoc. When frontend JavaScript and backend Python interpret MCP messages differently, you get integration nightmares. Third-party tools using different MCP libraries exhibit subtle incompatibilities only under edge cases. Language-specific bugs require expertise in each implementation, rather than knowledge of the protocol.

When an AI tool expects an ISO-8601 timestamp but receives a Unix epoch, the model might hallucinate dates rather than failing cleanly.

Then iterate towards an integrated tool to explore idea diffusion in the user-interaction networks present in our 16M tweet dataset.

we’d want to get our essential data-science primitives running on tweets and accounts - that’s embeddings, clustering, network visualization, etc. [1] We want all of these running very efficiently in the browser, leveraging WebAssembly.

Real time data firehose via our browser extension, avoiding the laborious upload process.Include Bluesky data. We could easily do this on bluesky because it’s open but twitter still has the most juice.

I like to imagine ideologies competing, merging, forking like microbes.If we can trace where a given idea comes from, we can detect if it emerged organically or if it was intentionally and artificially promoted.

In Girard’s vision of history, the secularisation of the West — the decline of the political role of religion, and of religious belief — means, in an apparent paradox, that the Gospel can, for the first time, “become clear”.

Christianity was presented as another version of ancient religions, in which priests accepted payment from congregations in return for rituals of blessing and sacrifice.

According to Girard, the death and resurrection of Christ had freed humanity from the cycle of potentially destructive imitation that scapegoating had been intended to contain.

The originality of Girard’s thinking lies in his argument that societies manage the ambivalence of imitation — its capacity to promote social cohesion or to degenerate into spirals of competitive violence — through “scapegoating”, or the exclusion of some agent identified with imitation’s negative aspects. In his account, scapegoating is a function of religion, and takes the form of sacrifice, the physical destruction of some victim who was understood as responsible for, or in their innocence expiating the sin of, dangerous imitation. The violence of sacrifice precludes the violence of mimetic desire.

In fact, Girard argues, our desires arise not so much from such natural drives as from a universal tendency to envy and emulate other people, which orients us to seek out whatever our rivals (that is, everyone else) are seeking. We want what we want because other people want it.

hrough." When we face tough problems, we break them down, figure out the steps, maybe jot down some n

Here are some basic facts:

DO $$ DECLARE r RECORD;BEGIN FOR r IN (SELECT tablename FROM pg_tables WHERE schemaname = 'public') LOOP EXECUTE 'DROP TABLE IF EXISTS ' || quote_ident(r.tablename) || ' CASCADE'; END LOOP; END $$;

gaslighting is “a form of emotional manipulation in which the gaslighter tries (consciously or not) to induce in someone the sense that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/or beliefs are not just mistaken, but utterly without grounds.”

In the United States, compulsory education is the norm. This is, ostensibly, to create an educated populace well-equipped to take part in democracy.

Because of these concerns, we as a society have developed an apparatus to consume and process all this information and then give us what we need to know to make sense of the world. This is our sensemaking apparatus.

While an individual can generally get by pretty well just being focused on their immediate surroundings and relationships, most people want to know and understand what is going on in the wider world around them.

All of these companies are staffed by people that went to good schools, went through prestigious programs, and are generally pretty intelligent.

New York Times

corporate media

You regurgitate their thoughts thinking they are your own.

They are highly paid and their opinions are given great weight.

Imagine if I told you there is a group of people dedicated to controlling how you perceive the world and the events that go on in it.

DecideAction station:LOOKS AT: Your question and what we know so far (nothing yet)THINKS: "I don't know who won the 2023 Super Bowl, I need to search"DECIDES: Search for "2023 Super Bowl winner"PASSES TO: SearchWeb station

No complex math, no mysterious algorithms - just nodes and arrows! Everything else is just details. If you dig deeper, you’ll uncover these hidden graphs in overcomplicated frameworks:OpenAI Agents: run.py#L119 for a workflow in graph.Pydantic Agents: _agent_graph.py#L779 organizes steps in a graph.Langchain: agent_iterator.py#L174 demonstrates the loop structure.LangGraph: agent.py#L56 for a graph-based approach.

The Big Secret: Agents Are Just Simple Graphs!

The recipe (Flow) just tells you which station to visit based on decisions:"If the vegetables are chopped, go to the cooking station""If the meal is cooked, go to the plating station"

See everything: The entire framework fits in one readable file

it's just 100 lines of code that lets you see exactly how agents work!

SOLID principles (Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, Dependency Inversion) are design principles that promote maintainable and flexible code.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development approach that emphasizes writing tests before writing the actual code.

What are the most effective governance and administration models in place on medium-to-large sized Fediverse servers?

Fediseer continues to be a growing resource for Lemmy and Mastodon administrators, and fedi-safety is a novel tool that can classify genAI CSAM on Lemmy and potentially other services. Pixelfed introduced comment controls and enhanced spam classifiers. BlueSky introduced Ozone, an innovative moderation tool designed to support moderators in managing their communities. Ozone’s integration of advanced filtering systems makes it a standout contribution to the trust and safety ecosystem, powering several “composable moderation” projects on the Bluesky “ATmosphere” with the notable success of Blacksky, an AT Protocol implementation prioritising the community building efforts of marginalized groups; especially Bluesky’s community of Black users after which the project is named.

A New Social was launched to liberate people’s networks from their platforms, leveling the playing field across the open social web – with it’s first project to adopt and expand BridgyFed.

support moderators and administrators, and will guide our work in the coming year.

In October, our community demonstrated exceptional resilience during a large-scale spam attack on the Fediverse. This collective effort showcased the strength of our network and our ability to address challenges collaboratively.

We also introduced FediCheck, a transparency tool that helps users evaluate the policies and safety measures of various Fediverse servers. By making this information accessible, FediCheck empowers service administrators to make informed choices about the platforms they engage with.

The benefit to individuals is resilience to media manipulation,

The benefit to society is to decrease polarization and tribalism, decrease outraged certainty on all sides, and increase the quality of public sense-making and good faith civil discourse towards a civilization that can actually coordinate effectively and solve problems.

The goal is to restore the health of our information commons by helping educate people on how to improve their information processing so they can better detect media bias and disinformation while becoming more capable sense-makers and citizens.

I learned to develop my own facilitation style that is less about facilitation and more about being a conversational host.

The professional facilitators would be far too controlling, far too smug and always seemed to love the sound of their own voice. OK, not all, but far too many.

It was serial death by PowerPoint!

But like the Coffee Machine, far too many speakers ran over their time. And weak chairpeople would fail to manage them.

death by PowerPoint