I was surprised reading this article! I’m a descendant of settlers/invaders, but I grew up on Gangulu country, on a farm about 40 km from Woorabinda, the town mentioned in this article. (I think that one of the factors contributing to the loss of the local language was that the Queensland government forced people from lots of different places in Queensland and who spoke different languages.) https://newsmast.social/@ausgeo/112544768489251893
@PeterWyrm Aboriginal culture and language has been deliberately erased. I spent the first 25 years of my life in Australia. Other than a couple of generic bits about the Dreamtime, it wasn't taught.
I can tell you about Cook, Macquarie and countless white explorers, but when I looked up the names of the lands on which I grew up, the names are not familiar. I'd never seen them before.
I was taught Latin, but not the name of the land on which I was standing.
I really like the lightweight front page. Feels like Google used to circa ~2000.
Some more feedback:
I can choose the interface language (English, Deutsch, français). Great. However, this defaults to English. My browser has already sent you my language preferences in the Accept-Language[1] request header. Better to use that.
Mojeek has a dark mode option in settings. Why not use the prefers-color-scheme media query?
@Mojeek 3) Location is "detected automatically" based on IP. IP addresses are not accurate for geolocation. Better to turn off location and let the user enable that if they want it.
@Mojeek With Accept-Language set to the same value in Firefox, I get English from a UK IP address, and French from a French IP, so it appears to be ignoring the Accept-Language header that Firefox constructs.
FYI. This is with language preferences set to fr, en-gb, en
Firefox translates that to an Accept-Language header of "fr,en-GB;q=0.7,en;q=0.3"
Perhaps you're not processing the weighed quality values, but only checking for the languages "en", "fr" etc.?
LinkedIn offers a verification tick for "free" - just give them (and the NSA) your data
privileged folks sign up because ticks make them feel important. This encourages others. Soon, it becomes expected.
enshittification kicks in, and this becomes a Premium feature you have to pay for. You can still have a free account, but you lose the tick. They keep your id.
Has anyone else noticed the list of languages @Mojeek supports? After being initially grumpy that they don't index a whole bunch of major world languages which I tried to use, I had a look at what they do have listed as search languages. Not the list you might expect.
No Mojeek, entering a query in Russian does not mean I'm a bot. I'm just trying to search for the lyrics of a song. A little less xenophobia, please...
Language is the strongest filter bubble we have. You can't avoid bias by locking us into a small subset of Western languages.
If you add Russian, but not Ukrainian, we only get one side of the story. There are major world events unfolding, and Mojeek is not indexing any of the primary sources in Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew or Arabic.
NB: I'm not saying community service is a bad thing. Far from it. But it should never be compulsory.
I earned my Queens Scout Award from age 14-18, which involved hundreds of hours of community service. It's valuable, educational and humbling, but it shouldn't be handed out as a punishment, or used as slave labour.
If the point of #NationalService is education, make it part of schooling. Learning by doing, in the community, while at school? Sure, but we don't call that #NationalService
@hedders These days I'd like to chisel the royal titles off these things, but yes. It was great training. Initiative and creative thinking are emphasised, not discouraged.
@Theriac@hedders Rather ironically perhaps, it was the community values instilled in me while working on my Queens Scout Award that largely led me to be staunchly anti-monarchy. The values I was taught are not compatible with Queens and Dukes, compulsory #NationalService and other fascist concepts.
This year's topic was decoding digital colonialism.
This session was particularly improvised as the original plan was to share a dialogue with @hellais on open technologies to guarantee human rights. Enjoy!
#EmpoderaLive emailed me an invitation to speak, but after confirming with them that they had no #CodeOfConduct nor #HealthPolicy in place I declined. A pity, as it otherwise looked interesting.
I'd love to go to #EmpoderaLIVE another time, if the organisers can be persuaded to adopt a #CodeOfConduct and #HealthPolicy - I'm afraid that's a hard requirement for me to attend any event. If the event is as welcoming as you say getting those in place for next time should be possible. I'm happy to help with writing the policies if the organisers are keen.