To read and come back to: AI Influence Level (AIL) v1.0
A transparency framework for labeling AI involvement in content creation
Recent Hacking - Search/Analytics for my Mastodon feed
For a long time I've been wanting to be able to search my Mastodon feed - not just my own posts (toots, blah) - so this past weekend I started hacking on a tool to download my Home timeline and dump the data into a local DuckDB database for querying.
Some notes so far:
My first discovery was the the number of Statuses returned from mastodon.timeline() (using the mastodon-py library) is server-dependent. I think these timelines are kept in memory by Mastodon and are limited to a certain number of Statuses. The default seems to be 400, though my server - hachyderm.io - will return 800 results.
My initial solution was to define an ORM model using SQLModel (a python lib that combines Pydantic and SQLAlchemy to provide a friendlier ORM interface). I then wrote simple functions to convert a Mastodon API response entity to the appropriate ORM model. This works ok, but I'm unlikely to use the ORM for querying, since I'm probably going to use more data-leaning tools (DuckDB, Pandas, some dashboard app) for searching and analytical tasks. This has me wondering if I should just be dumping results to files that DuckDB can easily load and query, like JSON or Parquet.
However, the dump-to-files approach probably makes more sense if I were to combine (de-normalize) data such that status data and account data are in a single file or set of files, and I'm not sure that's what I need. So, that's an architectural decision I'm still thinking about.
There are annoying differences in the data that Mastodon has (or provides via API). A Status has updated_at but Account doesn't. Status has reblogged, favourited, and bookmarked which reflect whether the logged-in (or requesting) user has performed those actions on the post, but Account doesn't have something similar for followed, which means I need to merge results from the timeline call with results from a call to mastodon.following().
More updates as I go.
The World according to Seeming
Listening today: The first 5 tracks off the pre-order album The World by Seeming.
Another album that Daneel put me onto. They introduced me to Seeming a while back and the band never dissapoints. Raw, synthy and shouty, music filled with joy and ennui.
Redditor passionately explains why geeky 80’s kids are confused with ChatGPT
Man, I felt this Reddit post so hard.
u/Quick_Butterfly_4571 passionately explains why geeky 80’s kids are confused with ChatGPT
So, you'd lay it all out, step-by-step, just to be super sure that you were helping and not confusing the kindred spirit you found half a world away.
Every CRS Report
I only recently learned about this site (and can't find the Mastodon post that mentioend it):
We’re publishing reports by Congress’s think tank, the Congressional Research Service, which provides valuable insight and non-partisan analysis of issues of public debate. These reports are already available to the well-connected — we’re making them available to everyone for free.
Nava announcements at Open Source Summit: OSCER/Strata
Today I am at Nava PBC's (I work for Nava) Open Source Summit in Washington, DC. Nava today announced our open source Strata platform, and OSCER (Open Source Community Engagement Reporting) tool.
OSCER
A comprehensive platform for managing Medicaid community engagement requirements: built to help states implement and administer work requirements and exemption processes in compliance with federal regulations.
OSCER is a new tool for government agencies that now must require reporting of work or community engagement by HR1. OSCER is a "sidecar" app that can be deployed alongside an agencies existing systems to enable beneficiaries to easily report work activities, and agency staff to review/validate/process that data. There are well-documented integration touchpoints that make it easy to initiate the workflows and processing the outputs.
OSCER is built on Strata:
Strata
Nava Strata is a modular, open-source platform that enables our government partners to rapidly and effectively modernize while avoiding vendor lock-in.
Strata is Nava's new platform for building government solutions more quickly, and provides pre-built workflow and interaction components for various common tasks in benefit systems.
Nava Strata currently includes:
Infrastructure templates: A set of templates for quickly setting up production-ready, cloud-native infrastructure
Application templates: A set of templates to quickly begin building user-facing and backend applications
Software Development Kit: A suite of composable software development tools for building human-centered digital services applications
Coming Soon: The Oil Wars
From Council State Media via Mastodon:
After many months contemplating war on Iran, and later Venezuela, the US president has set his sights on… Nigeria. In one of the strangest coincidences of recent times, all three countries just happen to be rich in oil. What are the chances?
Source: By a strange coincidence, all the countries Trump wants to bomb are rich in oil
Look forward 100 years and I can easily imagine a documentary about how #TheOilWars contributed to nation state decline and our eventual Solarpunk future.
Happy Birthday Godzilla
More than seven decades after producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, director Ishirō Honda, and special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya first unleashed Godzilla in Japanese theaters on November 3, 1954, the King of the Monsters remains a beloved symbol of imagination and cinematic innovation.
Source: How to Celebrate Godzilla Day 2025
Godzilla really goes through candles.
KYBERKLANG
Kyberklang is a minimal, high-polish audio player for local files engineered for Linux and macOS. Developed by revengeday, a music producer from Berlin. No clouds. No distractions. Just your library, with style.
In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information
In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information | Tom Burkert
Also, unlike algorithmic feeds, it allows me to pick what category of my interests I am in the mood for. If I’m in the mood for something lighter, I can just look into my “Fun” folder to check out new stuff from The Oatmeal or xkcd. If I feel like reading something more thoughtful, I’d dive into my “Reads” folder for The Marginalian or Sentiers.
A Robot, a Nazi and a Poorly diguised Russian walk into a timeline...
A cartoon in 2 frames:
Frame 1
Nurse: Are you OK love?
Minister: Yes I’m just hearing legitimate concerns from real voters
Frame 2
Nurse: That’s a robot, a Nazi and a poorly-disguised Russian
[Show that the people he is talking to are precisely these characters]
Hashtag-No-Kings
Drove over to the local #nokings protest yesterday and waved our own signs. It was great seeing so many folks out and being very (and inflatably!) visible!
Django + the IndieWeb
Now that I'm back on the blogging horse, I spent a minute searching for Django (which runs this blog) implementations of Webmentions, because if I'm going to blog I wanna do it right, circa 2002.
So I'm now reading about django-indieweb:
django-indieweb provides IndieAuth, Micropub, Webmention, and h-card support for Django applications.
I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong
Syntax highlighting is a tool. It can help you read code faster. Find things quicker. Orient yourself in a large file.
Like any tool, it can be used correctly or incorrectly. Let’s see how to use syntax highlighting to help you work.
Niki Tonsky makes some good points.
I'm currently listening to Innuendo by Queen from Innuendo.
Pre-Storm Clouds
Hurricane Priscilla sent a week of rain to the Southwest, which is generally great, but also brought a lot of flooding.
It also brought some lovely clouds! Here's a couple of shots I took on Monday as we came out of a movie (Tron: Ares, pretty but fairly dumb), just 10-15m after these were taken the clouds had darkened significantly and the rain started.
Why We Need "Shortwave 2.0"
On RADIOWWORLD, Kim Andrew Elliott guest writes about an old technology that could come back to help us route around the coming billionaire-and-fascist-censored internet:
Radio is the ultimate internet circumvention tool because it is not the internet. And it can’t be tracked.
This brings us to “Shortwave 2.0.”
Shortwave 2.0 won’t reach the audience of millions as in the heyday of shortwave decades ago. It will reach those who seek comprehensive, reliable, credible information. This audience will be technically inclined: radio amateurs, hobbyist shortwave listeners, scholars, technology enthusiasts and government and military personnel with access to receivers. They will pass on the information they have received to the larger audience.
Then comes this kicker:
An important feature of Shortwave 2.0 is that it is not limited to audio.
Starting about 2010 I was introduced to the digital modes of amateur radio. I was amazed that such a weak signal, in noisy conditions, could produce text. At that same time, VOA, RFE/RL and RFA were starting to feel the effects of internet blocking, especially in China and Iran. These two developments, combined, pointed to radio as a possible solution.
Starting in 2013, I was able to test the concept in “VOA Radiogram,” an experimental weekly program on the Voice of America. Instead of voice and music, we transmitted, on a conventional amplitude-modulated double sideband transmitter at Greenville, N.C., the warbles of the amateur radio digital modes.
The big advantage of text via shortwave is that it can be received successfully in poor reception conditions, in which voice broadcasts are difficult to comprehend. Text can be read and re-read, and passed on to others through personal media.
White leftists, fake allyship, and liberation
eva on Mastodon:
I need for folks to be better than that, white leftists have got to get their shit together because the fact of the matter is, their contributions are needed. We are not so blessed with solidarity and comrades that we can out-organize fascism without them. It's the truth.
Worldwide, the people of the global majority do not have the luxury of waiting for most of y'all to get your heads out of your collective asses on white supremacy. Stop huffing the fucking Klan glue and get serious. It's past time.