Aaron Rodericks

@aaron.bsky.team

Canadian wanderer in Ireland. Trying to make the internet a better place. Bluesky Head of Trust and Safety. File a report in the app or via moderation@blueskyweb.xyz - not via mentions/replies. https://aaronrodericks.com

I tried to cut my kid’s nails with one of those buzzers and instead I seem to have sharpened them to wolverine claws. Wow tiny humans can have razor sharp little nails.

To be clear I love open models and run whatever runs on my PC. Not sophisticated enough to do cloud inference but neither do I actively code. I’m projecting years (hopefully) out where script kiddies and gangs in Africa targeting youth with sextortion are deploying these at scale.

Aaron Rodericks@aaron.bsky.team · last wk.

Perhaps a controversial take but if you think about parallels between the discussion on open models for AI and gun safety we seem to be charging towards an American perspective on AI safety. Everyone gets to carry a gun and somehow everyone is “safer“. Not sure that’s how it worked out for the US.

Perhaps a controversial take but if you think about parallels between the discussion on open models for AI and gun safety we seem to be charging towards an American perspective on AI safety. Everyone gets to carry a gun and somehow everyone is “safer“. Not sure that’s how it worked out for the US.

*puts on reading glasses* y'all were maybe too young, but at Twitter circa 2012 and earlier, "getting verified" involved a dev SSH'ing into one of the prod rubyy-on-rails boxes and using the ruby REPL to flip the verified bit on an account. now extend that analogy to the rest of "trust and safety"

Thorne 🌸@ens0.me · last wk.

People think modern social media is a hellscape, but back in 2002, we didn't have "trust and safety teams" we had volunteer mods that were teenagers ill-equipped to handle any serious drama

there was a recent bug in the Bluesky app that caused some people's chat permission settings to switch to "No one" we already fixed the bug, but folks may want to double-check their settings to make sure they are set the way they want. go here: bsky.app/messages/set... look for these settings:

Screenshot of the chat notification settings in the Bluesky app.

One realization I just had is that in North America - if I'm drinking with a friend, the drinking is the activity that bonds us - ie the foundation that enables you to chat. In Ireland, the drinking is the purpose, and that's a completely different dynamic.

Our automated detections are usually built to catch specific behavior. But because the world is messy, you also catch plenty outside what you were aiming at. Catch what you meant to, that's a true positive. Catch something outside it, that's a false positive. 🧵

On an ironic note. I was reaching out to people a few weeks ago as I was purging an old hard drive and just found out that my wedding photos were deleted as well!

Every so often we hear from folks wondering if they may be suspended for blocking the moderation service. (tl;dr: no.) Let me explain the backstory behind this bit of Bluesky lore. /1

I tried to access Fable earlier today, but kept on getting API errors. Then gave up. Changed the model to Opus, and now the queries are going through. ... except due to the language of my queries Opus has decided to role-play as Fable. I have accidentally created a frankenstein monster.

Was excited to try fable again on a few projects only to remember that I don’t live in the US, I’m not American, and access hasn’t been turned on as yet for folks like me.

When you move internationally you have to deal with all sorts of questions that you wouldn’t normally consider in the day to day. One interesting issue is your ‘domicile’. Ie you can pay taxes somewhere, be a citizen elsewhere, but your domicile is your permanent home in a sense.

Having worked as a wedding photographer for quite a few years - I was pretty insane about backups. There’s nothing like the dread of a failed card or drive that can cook a critical chunk of/or an entire wedding.