Our voting system fundamentally doesn't allow for third parties to win the vote.

Even if we said "vote for a third party, there's a statistically significant chance they might win!" this wouldn't fix the issue, because Jill Stein doesn't take votes from both sides equally.

Jill Stein leans left, which means people who are otherwise Democrat voters are going to be the largest demographic voting for her.

Our voting system is first past the post, which means this will actually decrease the chance of a left-leaning victory.

Let's say Dems get 55% of the vote without Jill Stein, and Reps get 45%. Democrats win.

Then, we add in Jill Stein. A significant amount of voters switch over, even some Republicans. (which, in reality, would probably not at all, because Jill Stein's policies are even further from their beliefs than even the Democrats are)

Dems get 35% of the vote. Reps get 40% of the vote. Jill Stein gets 25%. Democrats & Jill Stein lose, Republicans win.

If Jill Stein were entirely impartial, and took votes equally from each side, then we could have a vote like...

Dems get 45% of the vote. Reps get 35% of the vote. Jill Stein gets 20% of the vote. Democrats win in the same way they would have whether or not there was a third party.

The issue is that, obviously, Jill Stein isn't taking equal parts of the vote, so this inevitably just reduces votes for Democrats, without reducing votes for Republicans.

It's not an ideal system, (which is why we should advocate for Instant-Runoff or Rated voting) but it's the option that will lead to the most left-leaning outcome, as opposed to a heavily fascist one.

It's a bit more nuanced than that, because a human can still develop artistic skills by observing non-artistic creations beforehand.

For instance, the world's very first artist probably didn't have any paintings or sculptures to build off.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree that the person isn't an artist because they rely on external training data, but generative AI models most certainly need to observe other works to 'learn' how to make art, whereas humans don't necessarily have to. (Although if someone were to make a reinforcement learning model based on user feedback as a way to entirely generate better and better images starting from random variation, that would make the original training data point moot)

About time.

For reference, visa charges about 1.5%-3.5% on everything.

Oh, plus ten cents for every transaction, because fuck you, that's why.

The most asinine, self-centered thing I've seen today has got to be you assuming that the emotional state of your employees, which the goods and services you offer depend on for sales, is something that they should simply magically suppress for the sake of customers.

Do you think this employee is going to check the mood of each customer?

Buddy, if every customer going through the checkout line at the grocery store I work for had this pin on, it would make judging how much small talk people want loads easier, and would save me, and them, a huge mental headache. That said, if only I were to choose to wear that pin, I don't think indicating to customers how up I am for small talk would make me an asshole.

If you were my boss, and wanted to deliberately disregard my mental state because you felt it would make you a few more bucks, that would make you the asshole.

Get your priorities straight.

For those who don't care to read the full article:

This basically just confines any cookies generated on a page, to just that page.

So, instead of a cookie from, say, Facebook, being stored on site A, then requested for tracking purposes on site B, each individual site would be sent its own separate Facebook cookie, that only gets used on that site, preventing it from tracking you anywhere outside of the specific site you got it from in the first place.

Adblockers are the largest consumer boycott in history.

Google isn't just disabling an extension, they're attacking a boycott comprised of 200,000,000+ people, all around the globe, standing up to forced manipulation of our beliefs and habits by profit-hungry corporations.

The "platform economy" is just another term for digital landlords.

Fuck 'em.

Good fucking riddance.

The sooner they realize the enshittification isn't working, and is only increasing the amount of people participating in the largest global consumer boycott ever, the sooner they'll actually try to improve the platform, or die resisting.

YouTube has continuously made the experience worse, adding more and more ads to users not using ad blockers, to compensate for those using them. Guess what, genius? People block ads because they suck. Adding more won't stop people from using ad blockers!

And they have the audacity to try selling YouTube Premium for a whopping $14/mo (nowhere near the actual revenue generated from a user watching ads,) then don't even provide any real benefit past ad blocking, after they deliberately killed YouTube Originals because it didn't instantaneously bring in immense profits.

And the content creators I personally know have shown me the amount of money they get from Premium users, and it's sometimes less than the value of an ad-supported user, even though the Premium user generates more revenue than an ad-supported one.

I would pay for YouTube Premium if it was a reasonable rate, and actually came with exclusive content, similar to Nebula, but it doesn't.

Instead, YouTube has continued to make the interface more and more bloated, slow, and inefficient, and increased the incentives for low-quality, mass-produced content, all while not paying creators enough to support themselves on YouTube's own platform.

YouTube can't see itself as being the cause of its own issues, because it's blinded by bad ad-driven fiscal policy that has only been a proven failure.

I used to like Odysee until I saw them clearly promote conspiracy theories and far-right, almost Nazi rhetoric on the homepage.

Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn't mean your centralized frontend can't be modified by you.

They never even made a single attempt to help others develop alternative frontends too, so the decentralization there was more akin to decentralization theater.

The majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal.

When Republicans say they want to ban abortions, and try to play it off as a popular position, they are lying to your face.

Even a substantial portion of Republican voters want abortion to be legal.

They aren't just fighting most Americans, they're fighting themselves too.

If the Justice Department pushes ahead with a breakup plan, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google’s web browser Chrome

Hell yes. If Android is divested from Google, that would significantly reduce Google's attempts to lock down the OS, and would probably make alternative app stores more popular as the Play Store becomes just one of many options for manufacturers that would no longer be required to provide it on all Android devices.

And as for Chrome, about damn time. A browser with that much marketshare shouldn't also be owned by the largest search engine and ad network. That's just a recipe for monopolizing internet standards and access.

Another option would require Google to divest or license its data to rivals, such as Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo

More competition in the search engine space? Sign me up. Google has too much control over the quality of search results simply due to their size.

The people making these ads can't fathom anything past pure efficiency. It's what their entire job revolves around, efficiently using corporate resources to maximize the amount of people using or paying for a product.

Sure, I would like to be more efficient when writing, but that doesn't mean writing the whole letter for me, it means giving me pointers on how to start it, things to emphasize, or how to reword something that doesn't sound quite right, so I don't spend 10 minutes staring at an email wondering if the way I worded it will be taken the wrong way.

AI is a tool, it is not a replacement for humans. Trying to replace true human interaction with an LLM is like trying to replace an experienced person's job with a freshly hired intern with no experience. Sure, they can technically do the job, but they won't do it well. It's only a benefit when the intern works with the existing knowledgeable individuals in the field to do better work.

If we try to use AI to replace the entire process, we just end up with this:

Claiming there'll be a stock crash if someone is elected is not stock manipulation.

If he made materially false statements, about a stock itself, deliberately meant to cause the economy to crash, then it would be a different story, but nothing he said was materially false, as he was just saying an elected candidate would be bad for the economy, in his opinion.

It would be stock manipulation if he acted upon insider information to manipulate the stock price, or used proven, materially false statements about the reality of a company/stock to deliberately drive the stock down in price.

TLDR; "weak people have to conform to social consensus otherwise they get hurt I guess?"

I, on the other hand, am a big, strong, high T alpha male, that isn't worried about what anyone thinks! I am a free thinker, and I know my opinions are correct because I instantly based this entire opinion on a subjective, anecdotal view of the world that I then extrapolated meaning out of, the best evidence! /s

Gotta love this quote from the article: "piracy doesn't mean a lost sale if the person pirating the game couldn't afford it in the first place."

I've seen this happen time and time again with people I know who simply couldn't pay even a single dollar for a game, and had no other options available. They deserve to experience culture and entertainment just as much as the rest of us.

If only they did what DuckDuckGo did and made it so it only popped up in very specific circumstances, primarily only drawing from current summarized information from Wikipedia in addition to its existing context, and allowed the user to turn it off completely in one click of a setting toggle.

I find it useful in DuckDuckGo because it's out of the way, unobtrusive, and only pops up when necessary. I've tried using Google with its search AI enabled, and it was the most unusable search engine I've used in years.

I don't think they believe it works.

I think they just believe that shootings are bound to happen, because why else would they be happening on such a regular basis?

It's the constant deflection of responsibility, from our choices as a society, to some indeterminate outside force.

Poverty and increasing cost of living? It's all those darn immigrants.

Your job not paying you enough? Must be overseas industry.

They don't think their prayers will prevent a school shooting, they just don't think there's other options to prevent it that will actually work without "taking away their freedom" (-to own a gun that's more likely to harm them than protect them)

The highest usage of ad blockers happens within the age range of 18-24, which categorically includes Gen Z.

The second highest age range is 25-34, and the third highest is 12-17, which is also included in Gen Z.

That said, I would argue that, while knowing how to use a smartphone doesn't make you tech savvy, knowing how to use an ad blocker doesn't either. It's as easy as installing an extension.

I just wish more software would support webp files. I remember Reddit converting every image to webp to save on space and bandwidth (smart, imo) but not allowing you to directly upload webp files in posts because it wasn't a supported file format.

If webp was just more standardized, I'd love to use it more. It would certainly save me a ton of storage space.

Here's a great mini comic that explains that paradox I picked up a while ago:

Banning phones in schools needs to be done very cautiously.

In my high school, one of my teachers had one of the best cell phone policies I'd experienced, which was simply, if you had your phone out, she'd just say "hey, what are you doing on your phone right now?" It didn't matter what exactly it was, and there was no judgement passed, but it kept us engaged if we got too distracted, encouraged us to find and share interesting new topics over just doomscrolling, and led to some legitimately informative and valuable conversations.

Other classes would let you use your phone after you got your work done, which acted more as an incentive for completing your work, rather than something you had to sneak in between the teacher talking.

That said, my high school was a competency-based school, which changed the incentives for self-governance of the learning process compared to traditional high school. And of course, it was high school, where most students had better self control.

That might say more about the state of education than the dynamics of phone use in the classroom, but I do feel like schools often try to make students conform to the system as their almost exclusive goal, rather than making the system work for the student, and thus, harsh anti-phone policies aimed at increasing attention in the classroom actually just make students even more angry at the system of schooling, and less likely to enjoy the process of education as a whole.

The best (worst) part is that they almost always just point you to the ways that you can already request your credit report and monitoring for free from the credit bureaus. 🥲

Sources, in case anyone's interested:

Independent photo from different angle pre-speech

Associated Press livestream & coverage

It looks like they were meant to be there as props to demonstrate how the price of food as increased. (the blurry signs above seem to be showing % increases in the price of goods)

Of course, they naturally didn't think through how it would look when zoomed in 😂

This simply isn't really possible.

Even if they published open-source code for their backend, it wouldn't prove that it's actually what their systems are running.

And when you are storing your data on their servers, and decrypting it by sending over your password, there's no way you can actually truly prevent them from accessing your data, if they were to modify how their systems function overall. (this is true for every company)

Even if they were using zero-knowledge proofs to verify and prove to you the computation done on the server matched what would be expected from published open-source code, then either their very own systems (and by extension, their administrators), or a different company's proprietary TPM module, would be the root of trust for those ZK proofs, and would still have the same underlying trust assumptions of at least 1 company having the ability to potentially steal your information.

If you want to rail against Proton for this, you have to be against every single cloud-based instance of code that hosts encrypted data, by any company, for any user.

Saying Proton acts just like Microsoft is a laughable comparison to make in order to justify claiming a lack of privacy or security on Proton's part.

Why? Is it because they're both companies that offer online services? Guess what, loads of companies do that. But you know what Proton doesn't do? Give away the contents of people's files, like Microsoft states they do in their own transparency reports, that they conveniently stopped publishing in 2022. Microsoft handed over the content (not just IP, email, etc, but actual docs, communications, stored files, etc) of thousands of people's accounts to law enforcement. Proton hasn't given out content once.

And this doesn't even consider the fact that Proton's business model is privacy. For Microsoft, their users will keep using their services regardless of their privacy, but for Proton, if it comes out that their services are no longer private, nobody will use them anymore, because nobody who got them for privacy would need them at that point.

I was happy when they used an entirely on-device AI to generate alt text for photos, but this is just ridiculous. They quite literally already have an extension that does the exact same thing this new "feature" offers.

Firefox was supposed to be a less bloated than chrome, but all they've done now is continued to add more and more to the browser that nobody actually asked for.

Give me bug fixes, UX and performance improvements, not entire sidebar popups for review checking that only works on 3 stores on the entire internet.

It applies only to individuals with at least $100 million in wealth who do not pay at least a 25% tax rate on their income (inclusive of unrealized capital gains). Payments can be spread out over subsequent years.

Within that $100 million club, you'd only pay taxes on unrealized capital gains if at least 80% of your wealth is in tradeable assets (i.e., not shares of private startups or real estate). One caveat for this illiquid group is that there would be a deferred tax of up to 10% on unrealized capital gains upon exit.

Without any changes, this would push investors towards the non-included class of real estate, which would exacerbate the housing crisis.

And on top of that, I can think of a million ways they could skirt this regulation with some clever accounting.

Create private startup as a personal asset holding fund > Transfer shares of publicly-traded liquid investments to private startup > Give yourself illiquid shares of the startup that have a time-bound restriction before they are allowed to become liquid (but don't have to become liquid, and can stay illiquid for any longer period of time chosen)

Result: You, the individual, don't hold all the liquid investments. You hold an illiquid asset that's backed by all of the liquid investments. Illiquid assets are not fully taxed under this proposal.

They need to fix this sort of loophole, otherwise it would just be an invitation for the ultra-wealthy to posture about how they're "already being subjected to so many harsh tax laws," while not actually paying the relevant taxes.

Always demand a human support representative until it gives you the option to, then the actual human will usually manually process your refund if you complain about how the initial refund never happened.

Bonus chance of success if you're a Prime member and say you're thinking about cancelling.

Sorry if my wording was unclear, let me rephrase.

Odysee is the platform, the site, the frontend, and the company. LBRY was the backend, the blockchain-based system that actually stored the videos themselves.

Odysee was the main interface to interact with the videos stored on LBRY, to essentially act like YouTube, but the videos were technically available to anyone.

Odysee then used the justification that the backend was decentralized to say that they had to remain entirely neutral to any content on Odysee, because a decentralized system inherently cannot have its content censored by one party.

This ignored the fact that they could choose to modify which videos their frontend would show to users. They acted as if this was not possible, even though it was.

Thus, a decent YouTube alternative with some good creators on it refused to censor any nazi content that started making its way there because YouTube rightfully deplatformed its supporters, and let it infect the platform without doing anything to stop it, pretending as if they had no choice, while in reality, it just brought them more revenue.

It actually already did break sponsorblock for a bit because user submissions would include the wrong timestamps, due to the ads changing the duration of the video.

This would be hard to implement, but I personally would be happy to donate more to fund the development costs for such features. Adblocking is the largest consumer boycott in history and I won't let a corporation try to crush it again.

It's not even entirely a matter of if what he said can be disproven in this case, because he didn't even reference a specific stock.

Speculating that the general market will go down, even if you use lies to say so, doesn't count as stock manipulation.

And even if he had singled out a specific stock, speculating on what would happen if an administration with opposing political views comes into office is not the same as saying, for instance, "the CEO of this company actually just stole 20 million bucks and it's gonna tank valuations" while shorting the stock.

How have I never heard of this before!? I've been looking for exactly this for ages now.

Already spinning up a docker container!

There are people who think that "positive" or "negative" words have a magic-like effect on natural processes.

From what I've seen, this was originally popularized in 2004 by Masaru Emoto's book "The Hidden Messages in Water," where part of his claims were that snowflakes would develop differently in containers labeled with negative or positive emotions.

Naturally, this turned out to be a complete lie, but many people, such as those in the original post, still believe that words can somehow influence things like mold development on food.

The difference between Odysee and YouTube is that YouTube doesn't claim to be a free speech platform that allows any possible statements on, and does often take down a lot of the harmful content. You only see the remainder, not the whole.

Odysee is quite small, and as such, could relatively easily moderate much more of the content on its platform, if they actually cared about doing so.

Odysee explicitly tries to allow as much speech as possible, claiming that they totally won't allow any bad content, while in reality, platforming LGBTQ+ misinformation, white nationalist rhetoric, anti-immigrant propaganda, etc.

All of those violate their Community Guidelines, by the way. But remember, it's guidelines, not actual policy as to what they remove.

Landlords don't create the value themselves, they are an intermediary for value.

Platforms don't create the value themselves, they are also an intermediary for value.

The value app stores provide is reach, but they don't get that value without the developer's effort. The only thing they provide is the network effect, which is nothing more than a consequence of making themselves the default option for users of these phones.

For the same reason that landlords don't provide inherent value, but still capture so much of the housing market, platforms don't provide inherent value, but still capture so much of the app market.

They push out competition. If a landlord buys a house, there's one less house for someone to buy. If an app store brings in another user, there's one less user that will use other means to acquire an app.

I myself primarily use alternative means of installing apps. Direct APK downloads, or F-Droid. The only reason these exist is because the apps I use are specifically targeting a privacy-conscious user base that is likely to be using alternative means to acquire apps in the first place.

Because these platforms immediately monopolize user acquisition by bundling themselves with the OS, they directly fight any pressure to use alternative means, which makes most app developer efforts to create alternative means not worth the time.

App stores can and should be free. Without an app store, Apple and Google would have barely any market for their phones.

These platforms exist to give the hardware & OS itself value. The only reason these fees exist is because they are monopolies.

Oh I know, I just thought using landlords would be a more concise term since most people don't know the term techno-feudalism as widely.

I'll definitely try to incorporate it in my writing more though, it's a term that I think should be known much more widely.

It's because they've conditioned their audience to believe a few key things:

1. "Voting" with your wallet is what matters over all other forms of action.
2. Giving money to "woke" companies harms you as an individual.
3. Buying products is the best way to signal your value as a person.

Let's break that down.

They want money to be more important than voting, because they understand that their political demographic does not win the popular vote in most cases, and their policies are inherently not popular with the majority. But when they can get money instead, then use that to influence votes and policy, well, that just might get them the policies they want without substantial votes from the public.

They want people to fear giving money to "woke" corporations because it makes them seem like the only source of real truth, and objectivity. They're the voices of reason in a world that's all against you. Then, you'll be willing to pay for their subscription streaming service, and their subscription streaming service for kids, and their merch, and their chocolate, and their razors, et cetera et cetera.

They want you to associate buying products as the way to define yourself, because when you so strongly identify with their politics, you'll spend as much money as you can signaling to those around you that you don't support the "woke" agenda through your wallet, you only support those who truly embody your cause. Giving them money becomes a symbol of your values.

And of course, they wouldn't get any sales without this as a selling point. If they just start a razor brand, not affiliated with their political ventures, who's gonna buy? Their razors are effectively the same price as Gilette's, just without the likely higher standard of quality and availability in physical retail locations.

But when they combine all three of those tactics I mentioned to make their target demographic believe they need these razors to display their values, stop a perceived evil agenda, and make their voice heard... well, then you've got a good revenue stream.

I haven't had a single issue with crashes, noise, heat, display, etc.

The positioning/gaps of the spacers are extremely tiny, and barely noticeable, and the only issue I've had so far has been my laptop not turning off fully when I shut it down, but that's fixed by just holding down the power button.

Oh, and I'm running an unsupported linux distro, (NixOS) so it's not like I'm starting from any advantaged position in terms of software integration.

Performance is great, cooling is great, games run well and it boots up quickly. Nothing much else to say other than it's a good laptop.

This is kind of just a bad argument.

Nobody is arguing that an abortion can save a woman from all consequences.

Nobody is arguing that death is impossible as a result of abortion.

But when somebody dies because something prevented them from getting a procedure that would have been highly likely to save them, that doesn't come into conflict with the possibility of death from the procedure. It's a matter of personal choice.

Especially considering the maternal mortality rate (# of deaths per 100,000 live births) is 17.4, while the case fatality rate for abortions (# of deaths per 100,000 legal induced abortions) is just 0.45

Now imagine how much higher that rate gets when abortions are performed illegally because legislation like this stops safe abortions from being possible, without curbing demand.

Yes, people die from abortions. Yes, people die from pregnancy. Yes, this woman could have died from the abortion procedure even if she was able to get it.

But her chance of death was significantly lower if she had been capable of getting an abortion, which she was not.

I haven't had any problems myself.

In fact, I regularly use their anonymized LLM Chat tab to help out with restructuring data, summarizing some more complex topics, or finding some info that doesn't readily appear near the top of search. It's made my search experience (again, specifically in my circumstance) much better than before.

I appreciate that take.

I just don't want to be yet another contributor of many to a problem, y'know? Like how even though corporations are by far the largest contributors to climate change, I still try to reduce the excess emissions I possibly produce whenever I can just to help a tiny bit more.

I'm still investing in the stock market regardless, I just want to make sure that diversifying my portfolio won't have an outsized negative impact on others since, well, that would suck. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯