HarkMahlberg

Ever since reading about the challenge of deleting an image from your profile, a GUI for that. It should not only be an API call, not should you have to contact your instance admin to do it. It should be completely self-service from your profile page.

Which is still weird.

Alexander Sawchuk, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California … along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague’s conference paper. … Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy. The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Everything about the story sounds like it was a rush job, a decision made on a whim, after exhausting their existing catalog of test images. And who bring a Playboy mag to their university’s computer lab, and advertises their possession? They don’t even say who it was, probably to protect them from any embarrassing professional consequences. To me, that’s probably the strongest reason to retire it: it’s unprofessional.

Well said.

I would say that the “positive vibes only” trait is part of it, but the far bigger problem was the character limit. Even when it was double from 140 to 280, that still doesn’t not leave room for nuanced opinions. And then, the least nuanced opinions also become the most easily spreadable. Both traits really reward our worst instincts.

Wouldn’t this enable, for example, Trump claiming he didn’t make the “bloodbath” comment, calling it a deepfake, and telling Youtube to remove all the new coverage of it? I mean, more generally, what stops someone from abusing this system?

!meanwhileongrad