Thomas Dickerson @elfprince13@mumak.app

good enough, sending it

After George Floyd was killed miles from my house, I quit my corporate law job to build @TurnSignl—an app to instantly connect drivers to a lawyer on a video call 24/7. TurnSignal:
✅ Auto records the stop
✅ Is voice activated
✅ Free for low-income folks

Download @ link in the about tab!

For the holiday, a thread on how to befriend crows.

--

Befriending crows is a wonderful thing.

I have many crow friends at home and at work. They bring joy at unexpected moments and can rescue a miserable day even without shaking down the dust of snow that Robert Frost described.

This thread is an updated version of one I posted at the bird site in July 2019.

#birding #birdwatching #birds #urbanbirding #crows #corvids #crow #corvid #crowfriends

@jonobie not all quote tweets are intended to flag bigotry. #qt’s are critical to a certain kind of viral conversation that’s at the heart of #blacktwitter and other “yes, and…” social communities—where the ability to showcase your take on a growing meme or to add your reaction to a post is both an amplifying element and an act of participatory performance.

U.S. Police kill more than 1100 civilians annually—unprecedented in the developed world.

A new app called TurnSignl, built by Black civil rights lawyers, deescalates police interactions with civilians & get everyone home safe.

Here's how it works.
1. Download the app
2. When pulled over by police, face time a lawyer on demand via voice activation. The call is also auto recorded
3. The lawyer guides the convo.

Download TurnSignl here or gift it to a loved one for free: https://www.turnsignl.com/gift

Fascinating to see people hating on a journalist who just said their opinion on wanting a feature on here.

Great work everybody demonstrating that you don’t need said feature to harass and dogpile. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Journalists will never stick around this app long term sadly unless it adds quote posting. We desperately need it to communicate effectively, build on each others ideas, and add crucial context to posts. These are things replies simply do not accomplish. Also quote posting or reblogging does not = harassment! Tumblr, for instance, has had the feature since the beginning. We need it here now too 🙏🏻

@mekkaokereke A version of the story linked below was on NPR yesterday. It was unbelievable to me—though it shouldn't be.

"KRAIG LEWIS WAS living in Connecticut and was nine credits away from his MBA when the neighborhood he had spent his life trying to get away from came back to haunt him."

https://theintercept.com/2019/04/25/bronx-120-report-mass-gang-prosecution-rico/

A couple people have pointed to relays as a potential fix here - that's a Mastodon feature where you can partner with other instances and have them send you a firehouse of every public post they encounter (from their instance or from elsewhere)

I'm loathe to set that up for my own instance-of-one though - it just feels really resource-wasteful to funnel thousands more posts an hour into my instance purely as insurance against me maybe not seeing a reply to something!

I feel bad for Mastodon. It's the cozy tea shop down the street from a raucus punk club that was just taken over by Nazis, and now all the punks are hanging out because there wasn't anywhere else to go and no one is quite sure what to do because they're good punks but they're not that into tea.

This whole Musk-Twitter scandal just stretches on and on. #ElonGate

#DadJoke

The bit about a lawyer being stopped from entering a music hall in the US because its facial recognition system picked up that she's part of a law company that's suing them is even crazier than I thought.

The law company isn't suing the music hall - it's suing a restaurant, in another state, which is owned by the hall's parent company MSG Entertainment. MSG gone ahead and harvested photos of all the lawyers in the firm and fed it to an image recognition system to ban them from every MSG Entertainment owned location.

People always tell me that if you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to fear. She's got nothing to hide and they still went after her.

If this doesn't start making people worried about facial recognition then there's serious trouble coming.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/facial-recognition-flags-girl-scout-mom-as-security-risk-at-rockettes-show/

1/ I've been active on Mastodon for over a month now, and a few thoughts about what it's been like. Following M protocol I'll make the rest of this thread Unlisted, so if you are not a follower, you'll need to click on this to see the rest. (Followers, sorry, you get the whole thread in reverse order…)

First off, this is my 6th SN: Usenet, G+, Fb, Quora, Twitter, and M. So I've been through all the stages, and gotten used to picking up and moving home. (I have not quit Twitter entirely.) ↵

Enjoy this short clip of the raccoon that is currently trying to catch snowflakes on my deck. 🦝 ❄️

The discourse around QTs/QBs on here is so frustrating. There's a bunch of people saying they're useful, valuable, even *essential* for many sorts of positive and prosocial communication needs, that even on twitter where they were weaponized like everything else, they were a net positive.
And on the other side, a lot of people asserting without evidence that they're universally bad, cause abusive behavior, that no one has articulated their value, or that no one who wants them was ever brigaded.