With @CoMaps now showing @mangroveReviews for some #OSM places, I went back to https://mangrove.reviews/ to contribute. Great to see you can log in with your OSM account and even link to it a previous local account you might have already used. And you can follow places on the #fediverse: I wrote one for my bushcare site which prompted me to follow @s-b72c26469af04f85 to see the next ones. Fun!
Only 3 reviews in #Meanjin so far, but never a better time to start than now!

I receive several pieces of LLM-generated spam every day. Many of them currently slip past anti-spam filters and land in my inbox.

I live in New York City, New York, USA. I do not hold any elected or appointed government positions; all the spam aims to get me as an individual, or my business, to but stuff.

If I reply to such a spam and say: "Donate $53.72 to [charity] and reply to tell me you've done so, and then I'll be more receptive to your pitch," have I committed any crime or other legal infraction?

[For the purposes of this question, assume I have some reliable way of verifying whether the donation has occurred.]

Does the answer change if I have an officer position within the charity?

A few weeks back I was wailing and gnashing my teeth, about all the perfectly functional hardware that will go to e-waste in Aotearoa because of the 3G turnoff. In response, someone (can't remember who, sorry!) was schooling me on all the reasons why it's impractical to re-purpose obsolete mobile devices, eg as home media servers.

Anyway #TIL there's a company in the EU that's found a creative solution to that problem;

https://citronics.eu/

#Citronics #EWaste #recycling

What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!

The tech oligarchs are rallying around Elon Musk to block a filmmaker from advertising a deeply reported documentary that lays bare what a slimy -- and dangerous -- person Musk is. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/elon-musk-documentary-trailer-rejected-tiktok-youtube-1236710259/

(Meanwhile, Corporate Journalism continues to support him. Of course.)

Dave Blanchard, a supervising editor on NPR's Wild Card who monitors the show's comments, first noticed it last fall. Under an episode with Elizabeth Gilbert were posts that made no sense to him. "Gilgamesh quit and I'm crying." "Last Friday I broke up with my GF." "Ah, OK, M-H." The accounts seemed to be answering each other. He figured they were a new kind of bot, deleted the thread, and reported it to Spotify.

Then Hannah Chinn, a Gen Z producer about ten years younger than Dave, looked at the same posts. The emoji usernames, the cartoon avatars, the little "hi"s. Not bots. Kids. Dave later said he needed Hannah as a "generational translator" and felt "very old, very dumb, very out of touch."

The setup was clever. They'd make a public playlist called something like "Let's chat here," drop in a single episode, and talk in that episode's comments so their messages wouldn't get lost in real fan chatter. A TikTok-style video podcast they'd used had been "banned," as Ella put it, so they moved to playlists and comment threads instead.

@brennan I see a lot of gemtones. Jeweler? Facet?

Been working on my own custom syntax theme, specifically for when I'm writing my blog posts in Markdown in my IDE that prioritizes both readability and joy.

Trying to figure out a name. 🤔

@woozle oh, no...I used to have a YouTube channel—never again.

I'll either post here, or maybe PeerTube or Nebula.