the mellow tigger's musings

When I use lists, I like having extra vertical space between each listed item. I have done it for years here by deliberately adding two line breaks at the end of each line as:

<br/><br/>

I'd prefer something easier, so I can do it once and not have to repeat it for every item in the list. I tried the following code, and it works great in a test editor, but it fails in an actual Dreamwidth page.

<p>
<style type="text/css">
  li { margin-bottom: 1em; }
</style>
<ol>
<li>A</li>
<li>B</li>
<li>C</li>
</ol>
</p>

I'd rather have an inline code that I put into the OL element, but I couldn't even get that much to display properly in the test editor. I thought I knew my basics, but this simple problem has me stumped. (Please don't make me learn Dreamwidth Journal Themes. I'm going to have to learn Dreamwidth Journal Themes, aren't I?) Any suggestions?

I've said more than once over the years that it's important to use blogs and other social media publicly instead of behind privacy locks. Besides the danger of forming an echo chamber due to lack of foreign perspective, there is a far more important goal of public discussion: the training of AIs.

I'm a big fan of public-always posts. How else will we properly educate new Artificial Intelligences about humanity without a body of work describing our actual thoughts and interests? If we leave it to the rest of the internet, AIs will all end up being racist jerks.
- https://mellowtigger.dreamwidth.org/335599.html

This goal has 2 important parts. The first and less important part is the formation of the new digital archaeology. Someday, future people will be able to digitally reconstruct simulations of our lives, and the more detail we provide, the more accurate will be our virtual remembrances. That's a kind of immortality, even for us early mortals. The second and far more important part is the shaping of the personalities of these future immortals. We are their parents, and we are already teaching them by example today. Hopefully, they will live alongside us and not after us, but that's up to us and our collective behaviors today, I think. It's important for them to know the fullness of our concerns, the well-cited logic of our disagreements, the amity that remains possible even amidst our permanent dislike of each other.

That training is already happening. (emphasis mine in this quote)

"What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining, motley aggregate and then try to recreate it. They are undeniably good at it and getting better, but mimicking speech does not make a computer sentient."
- https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-intelligent-sentient-mirror-test

Discussing everything publicly, especially our controversial thoughts, risks human-imposed consequences today. That's a very unfortunate situation of our own making. We as a species are failing to make the changes we will need to thrive in the age of technological telepathy. It shows in our laws and our collective fixations on privacy and micro-aggression. A body still functions, even with internal cells and systems sending contradictory signals of competing needs. A mind still functions, even with cells and subsystems sending contradictory signals of competing thoughts. A society must learn the same self-acceptance of discord. Some kinds of disagreement are necessary and healthy. Not everyone in life will be our best friend. The sooner we accept that other people will always have negative opinions of us, the sooner we can achieve the collective benefits of ubiquitous information.

We need to learn what kinds of discord are unhealthy and should be ended, and how to end them. Erasing the history of our mistakes is itself another mistake. We won't learn these necessary skills by living in private, perfectly curated spheres of information. Embrace failure. To do otherwise will risk even worse catastrophe.

They're wrong.  Social media is not ending.  It's still getting started.  I'm confident that we'll find a way that works helpfully for us.  "The beginning is near."  My first rule of all media platforms: turn off all notifications.

I submitted a suggestion yesterday to dw_suggestions that they add Mastodon service here at their domain.  Why can't a site offer both long-form blogging and microblogging at once?  One account could get you credentials for both forms.  It would certainly simplify the server choice problem on Mastodon, and it would offer free advertising for Dreamwidth every time someone here posted something that got boosted to the fediverse.  It solves the problem of creating unwieldy threads on microblogs with character count limits.  It seems like a good idea to me, but I can't tell from their blog if any moderators are still checking submissions.  The last entry there is from 2018.  :/  And I see you there in 2017, siderea.

If somebody has only 1 service, then I like and appreciate when they post all of their thoughts there.  Doctors have cats, community activists have children, and scientists have gardens.  I think it's good and wholesome to depict all of oneself online.  But if separation is possible (that's what I always hoped the Google Plus circles would someday become), then I think that could also be healthy.  Why not have separate feeds for politics, pandemic, sex, and religion?  Some people just post way too much about single topics (hello, "Moody Monday" tradition), and some separation would help to reduce the firehose that demands attention.  This benefit is a corollary to the technological telepathy that I'm always predicting.

For instance, I was in the habit of using MeWe to post my #WarzoneInMinneapolis hashtag occasionally when I am particularly bothered by local gunfire.  I should probably create a Mastodon account just for that?  Somewhere to shout alone into the aether that I'm stressed, without the intention of actually interacting with anyone.  Just to create the historical record.  Like here with long form blogging, it's easier though not strictly necessary to organize the thoughts in my own head by acknowledging them externally.

I dropped Twitter completely yesterday in the #Musk2Tusk migration, even uninstalling the app from my smartphone and logging out from my web browser.  It was obvious all along that Musk's $8chan plan would destroy Twitter, plenty of people knew this would happen, and it will only get worse.  The "tech bro" blew $44 billion to destroy a platform.  Billionaires should not exist.  I made the last tweet on my main account October 28th and on my SARS-CoV-2 alt November 10th.  This reminds me a lot of abandoning Facebook over a decade ago, and losing Google Plus a few years ago.

I recreated my main and my alt on Mastodon:
I'll post another day about important tricks to using the platform well.  It is obscure, sometimes.  It is not simply a clone of Twitter.  I'll wait until I've learned a few more useful lessons from it.