Some years ago, employees sued Amazon because the company had a lengthy security scan when people left, to prevent theft. Apparently it could take half an hour to go through, and they argued that this was unpaid overtime.

They lost, which seems like bullshit: as far as I can tell, the sane way to look at it is, if you’re obligated to do what the company tells you and go where the company says, then you’re on the job and should be paid for it. Once you’re out the door, you can choose whether you want to go home or go to a bar or just sit on the sidewalk; you’re not on the clock and you’re not getting paid.

If the company wants you to work 8 hours in the warehouse, then spend half an hour in the security scan, then you’re doing company business for 8.5 hours.

BURNINATED!

Minix.

But then I wised up and switched to FreeBSD.

I splurged for my birthdays a few years ago and got a Waterman Expert, and then a Carène. Combine that with a Clairefontaine notebook, and it’s completely frictionless, like writing on room-temperature ice.

In fairness, it’s pretty smart, IMHO: one of the big difficulties in getting a social site started is getting a critical mass of people together to sustain conversation. Facebook already has plenty of Instagram users, so giving them all access to Threads seems like a pretty good way to bootstrap Threads.

I prefer the feel of a fountain pen, myself.

The algorithm decides what you read and how you engage, even if it’s negative content or something bad for your mental health.

This may be the wrong place to post this, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. “Algorithm” isn’t a dirty word. And in fact, IMHO Mastodon could benefit from a few alternatives to its most-recent-first algorithm.

For instance, I might want to see posts by emergency services in my area first, followed by posts by friends, and posts by a bot that posts a cat picture every minute further down. Or someone might be going off on a rant, and I’d like to turn their firehose of posts down to a trickle for a few hours. Or maybe I’d like Mastodon to just stop showing me anything after a few hours of activity, to encourage me to take a break.

The reason Twitter’s, Facebook’s, algorithms are evil is that they encourage you to do things you wouldn’t want to do, and because they show you content you don’t want. Not because they’re algorithms.

In a perfect world, every user on every instance would be able to choose how posts are presented. But that may be too computationally expensive, especially for large instances, especially when you start trying to figure out things like the mood of a post. But maybe each instance could decide which algorithm it wants to use, and user can migrate from one instance to another, depending whether they like how things are presented.