flamingos

Since when were we posting out of Iowa?

A Christian website that published a story about sprinter “Tyson Homosexual” because of its auto-ban on the word “gay” has vowed not to make the same gaffe twice.

Right wing website OneNewsNow wrote how “Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has”.

The story sparked a storm on Twitter yesterday, but it later emerged that the furore was a little late - four years late, in fact, as it was actually from Beijing 2008.

The website reported: “’It means a lot to me,’ the 25-year-old Homosexual said. ‘I'm glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me.’”

It continued: “Wearing a royal blue uniform with red and white diagonal stripes across the front, along with matching shoes, all in a tribute to 1936 Olympic star Jesse Owens, Homosexual dominated the competition.

“In Saturday's opening heat, Homosexual pulled way up, way too soon, and nearly was caught by the field, before accelerating again and lunging in for fourth place.”

A convicted murderer serving a life sentence in Australia is challenging a ban on prisoners consuming Vegemite - the polarising, salty spread that has become a national symbol.

State authorities say inmates may use the strong-smelling paste to disguise contraband substances or brew alcohol behind bars.

But Andre McKechnie argues that the ban, in place in the state of Victoria since 2006, denies him the right to "enjoy his culture as an Australian", according to court documents seen by AFP and AP.

Post announcing this (warning, it's JSON): https://john.onolan.org/.ghost/activitypub/note/61fa1ab7-8612-4780-a894-7d5d63062efd

A US teenager was handcuffed by armed police after an artificial intelligence (AI) system mistakenly said he was carrying a gun - when really he was holding a packet of crisps.

Toot

Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana, has filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Republican State Superintendent of Public Instruction, is under investigation after he was allegedly caught streaming pornography on his office TV during a meeting of the state Board of Education.

Oklahoma’s Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton (R) confirmed in a July 25 statement that the state’s Office of Management and Enterprise Services is leading an inquiry into the incident, according to The Oklahoman.

The outlet, along with Oklahoma media nonprofit NonDoc, reported Friday that Oklahoma State Board of Education members Becky Carson and Ryan Deatherage said they had seen images of naked women on a television in Walters’ office during the closed-door executive session portion of a July 24 meeting.
[…]
Carson and Deatherage said that Walters, who drew bi-partisan criticism in early 2024 for appointing anti-LGBTQ+ hate influencer Chaya Raichik to Oklahoma’s library advisory committee to remove supposedly “pornographic” books, neither apologized for the incident nor mentioned it further.

A Reform UK election candidate standing in the postponed North Northants Council (NNC) election for Higham Ferrers could trigger an immediate by-election if he wins the seat after he moved to China.

Alan Beswick had been on the ballot paper as one of the two Reform UK candidates for the May 1 elections but, due to the death of Liberal Democrat John Ratcliffe just before polling day, the election in the two-seat Higham Ferrers ward was postponed until June 12.

Names of four nominated Reform candidates were submitted to NNC’s election team. A party spokesman says Mr Beswick’s circumstances changed but they were unable to remove his nomination.

As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.

The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.

Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.