luciferofastora

all not of legal status

Ah, you used cheap labour from undocumented workers and it came back to bite you? There goes my sympathy.

As for the science, there are studies to suggest measures like shelter-in-place had an impact, and the fact that literally every form of mask reduces risk of transmission at least slightly has been established long before the nature of viral infections was understood. You could easily find these things online or through a university library, given how scientifically versed you are. But I suspect you'd cherry-pick the ones you like anyway, so why bother?

I understand. I assume you paid them well for fair work hours under good conditions, provided for all the safety precautions, worker's compensation, proper healthcare and all the good things a decent employer would do? Paid taxes on your income to fund the infrastructure you're using?

In that case, yes, you're a good samaritan and got shafted by an unfair system.

Doesn't change the fact that scientific data suggests all those Covid measures had some impact, but I'll take back my cheap labor comment then.

gets shown some facts about masks and propaganda

"I am person that likes to think for myself and actually look at facts not propaganda"

That aside, the way small businesses were left hanging was definitely a political failure. I don't know what business you have or why you had to fire people, but I'll happily blame a lack of compensation for businesses that can't operate.

Actually, compared to the US at least, we do get decent comp. I believe the meme spawned from that one incident was more along the lines "We want Pizza Parties" because we've got the rest already.

A moment ago, it was 2330 and I figured I should go to bed.

It is now 0058.

When sexist objectification accidentally teaches a point against sexist objectification

Most international experts consider the outbreak of a third world war unlikely in spite of global surges of violence

Not mundane, but the implications would be horrifying to 1923 society still recovering from "The Great War".

Domestic violence? Let's shoot at the wife too - no more domestics, no more violence.

Surely they'll actually comply, not be caught in an audit years down the line and given a friendly "Now now, we talked about this: don't get caught breaking the law again!" slap on the wrist for failing to delete and instead further monetising that data?

Right? "Oh look, country with huge population has more downloads than country with small population!"

He's the epitome of Cognitive Bias. He knoes a little, enough to think he knows enough, but not to recognise just how much there actually is to know. His own narcissism¹ and self-image as a genius would never allow him to critically reflect and question whether he might be wrong.

He's like the type of engineer that will abstract a premise to a concise and calculable model, solve the problem on paper, then assume the rest is implementation details. Except he doesn't even do the modeling - he takes the layman's approach to technology and biology where he assumes that it should be doable to replicate what biology does with machines.

Nevermind that biology is still flawed and you'd have to significantly outdo biology for a technology to reach public acceptance.

¹I'm not a psychiatrist nor familiar enough with him to actually diagnose a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but his behaviour lines up with my lay understanding of it, so I'll use that shorthand. The irony of applying my own lay understanding while criticising his is not lost on me, but I hold that my assessment doesn't put anyone's life at risk.

What I find even more reprehensible than the sentiment "Without the threat of consequences, why should I be decent?" is that their own fucking book holds the answer to their goddamn question (not an expletive here, their god should and probably would damn them for it):

"So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets." - Matthew 7:12

The first half of this is a principle independent of religion, a fundamental social contract, the most critical idea underpinning any functioning society: Expect your behaviour to be reciprocated, and act accordingly. If you want others to help you if you need it, help people (if you can). If you want others to be kind to you, be kind to others. If you're gonna be a prick, expect others to be just as prickly to you.

If all that keeps you from murdering people is the threat of eternal damnation, you forget that your own scripture says "If you kill people, expect that others may kill you in turn."

Bonus: the biblical Jesus was known to hate hypocrites that pick out one piece of scripture to follow and ignore another and pharisees that carefully interpret and follow the letter of the law to find loopholes and ignore the heart of it. Those people lawyering their way around the otherwise unmistakable passages about generosity and giving away your wealth? Believe it or not, straight to hell.

More disgusting than the sentiment mentioned at the start is the hypocrisy of selectively applying it, the inconsistency in their own beliefs, the hollow facade of devotion while spitting on the principles they perjure to obey.

Signed, an apostate whose faith was shattered by fallacy of preaching love while children suffer and threatening hell while blasphemers thrive.

I simply call it Ex-Twitter - acknowledging the name change, but not simply adopting it

As someone on the outskirts of Data Science, probably something along the lines of "Just what the fuck does my customer actually need?"

You can't throw buzzwords and a poorly labeled spreadsheet at me and expect me to go deep diving into a trashheap of data to magically pull a reasonable answer. "Average" has no meaning if you don't give me anything to average over. I can't tell you what nobody has ever recorded anywhere, because we don't have any telepathic interfaces (and probably would get in trouble with the worker's council if we tried to get one).

I'm sure there are many interesting questions to be debated in this field, but on the practical side, humans remain the greatest mystery.

Did you confuse NSA (American gestapo) with NASA (a bunch of nerds that really like space and use American funds to indulge that passion)?

An eternal arms race: Ads vs. Adblockers. Just like malware vs anti-malware protections. System penetration vs. system hardening. It iust entered another stage of technological development, but that doesn't mean it's over or that we need to throw the towel.

Two years
A few major events

My god, they must've really fucked up their shit

How can my workplace admin block Pornhub even when I'm using private mode? He shouldn't even be allowed to see what I do privately!

Whether or not the gun was loaded, the person wielding it sure was, and it's much easier to say "Call the cops on him" if you're not worried about whether that guy might be rich and vindictive enough to ruin your life over it.

No matter whether Musk would have actually had any way of doing so, the fear of the possibility alone can be enough to cow you into compliance.

A much higher number of justifications for that government to crack down even further. First you demonize the enemy, then you strike against them, and when they inevitably defend themselves, you have a justification to kill the people trying to kill yours. That playbook is millenia old and still works.

Government trying to steer a herd of impulsive and selfish citizens into doing what makes sense for the collective (or what they believe makes sense (or what they're trying to convince us they believe makes sense))

Capitalism will force them to provide good service or be driven out by the competition!

What competition?

uhhhhh

Are there any news you're expecting to find?

The first problem, as with many things AI, is nailing down just what you mean with AI.

The second problem, as with many things Linux, is the question of shipping these things with the Desktop Environment / OS by default, given that not everybody wants or needs that and for those that don't, it's just useless bloat.

The third problem, as with many things FOSS or AI, is transparency, here particularly training. Would I have to train the models myself? If yes: How would I acquire training data that has quantity, quality and transparent control of sources? If no: What control do I have over the source material the pre-trained model I get uses?

The fourth problem is privacy. The tradeoff for a universal assistant is universal access, which requires universal trust. Even if it can only fetch information (read files, query the web), the automated web searches could expose private data to whatever search engine or websites it uses. Particularly in the wake of Recall, the idea of saying "Oh actually we want to do the same as Microsoft" would harm Linux adoption more than it would help.

The fifth problem is control. The more control you hand to machines, the more control their developers will have. This isn't just about trusting the machines at that point, it's about trusting the developers. To build something the caliber of full AI assistants, you'd need a ridiculous amount of volunteer efforts, particularly due to the splintering that always comes with such projects and the friction that creates. Alternatively, you'd need corporate contributions, and they always come with an expectation of profit. Hence we're back to trust: Do you trust a corporation big enough to make a difference to contribute to such an endeavour without amy avenue of abuse? I don't.

Linux has survived long enough despite not keeping up with every mainstream development. In fact, what drove me to Linux was precisely that it doesn't do everything Microsoft does. The idea of volunteers (by and large unorganised) trying to match the sheer power of a megacorp (with a strict hierarchy for who calls the shots) in development power to produce such an assistant is ridiculous enough, but the suggestion that DEs should come with it already integrated? Hell no

One useful applications of "AI" (machine learning) I could see: Evaluating logs to detect recurring errors and cross-referencing them with other logs to see if there are correlations, which might help with troubleshooting.
That doesn't need to be an integrated desktop assistant, it can just be a regular app.

Really, that applies to every possible AI tool. Make it an app, if you care enough. People can install it for themselves if they want. But for the love of the Machine God, don't let the hype blind you to the issues.

Because it's what my father installed and set as default on all PCs. By the point I had my own and could have made the decision myself, I was just so used to it that I didn't wanna switch.

The ideological conviction came later.

I might be the minority, but I'm more inclined to click a video that says "Plasma 6.1: Release, features and my opinions" than one that proclaims it THE BEST THING (unless it's from a creator I already know and like anyway, they get a pass as long as the content is good)

Slipping in mud and landing face-first in animal droppings is perfectly natural too

"Here's an easy solution to your issue" "I fucking hate the problem!" "...yeah? We actually don't like that problem either, which is why there's a solution here..."

I'm guessing they expect you to crack down hard, zero tolerance style, and hate that you create a small, contained outlet instead.

To be honest, in the face of how dumb that lie would be and how I have come to view stats-based decision-making (where companies favour decisions they can point to some KPI for because it makes them seem scientifically grounded over ones made "just" with human reasoning), I'll invoke Hanlon's Razor and say:

I absolutely think it's possible some middle-manager looked at the view stats and decided they'd look better if they cut some chaff, never mind just what that chaff may be. Protests - if issued ar all - went unheard or unheeded, and the change went through because the numbers told them to make it.

It's awful optics, in any case, but I'm willing to concede it may be dumb coincidence paired with dumb decisions, probably made by someone wholly uninvolved with the pricing change decision, rather than actual dumb malice.

(Doesn't excuse the rest of their bullshit, of course)

Still in bed

I like how that report is both very neutral and apathetic, yet very scathing in its matter-of-fact presentation of accusation and defense. Or what passes for defense, anyway - I put more effort into pretending I didn't steal the last cookie as a kid than they did into selecting a canned generic response.

Because all the other people they care about are on there too. And they won't leave because all the other people they care about are on there too. And theh...

It's a form of interdependence, in a way. Those who rely on Ex-Twitter as a platform to broadcast their microblogs (be that a tech service proviser using it to report on ongoing system outages, a content creator promoting some new content or a news outlet, well, announcing news) are reluctant to migrate while their audience is still there. The audience, in turn, is gonna be relauctant to move away from the platform their service providers, news outlets and content creators use.

The more people make that leap, the stronger the encouragement will be for the rest to leap as well, but the other issue is "where to?" There are multiple competitors, and particularly between BlueSky and Mastodon, the decision apparently isn't as straightforward as it may seem for those of us that are already entrenched in the fediverse. I'd like to believe Mastodon wins out in the end, but it's not so clear cut for some of the people I talked to.

Plenty of people want to leave, but between the things holding them back and the daunting question of "where to?", they're afraid to. As things start to shift, competitors emerge and trends become visible, more and more may decide to finally jump ship, but that's going to take time.

Install the Musixmatch app, get the lyrics for free from the original service instead of Spotify's embedded player.

I pay for premium, personally, but that shit is just scummy.

The idea of "I've got a spare room that I'll briefly rent out for cheap" is nice, but as all nice things, it inevitably gets ruined by twats on all sides. Likewise with ridesharing apps that could serve the use case "I'm heading that way, maybe someone needs a ride that way too", but end up a shadier version of Taxis.

In Unicode, it is separately encoded as U+037E ; GREEK QUESTION MARK, but the similarity is so great that the code point is normalised to U+003B ; SEMICOLON, making the marks identical in practice.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark

I'm still curious whether it would be accepted by the code interpreters / compilers of various languages. I'm not bold enough to assume they all normalise properly.

Not really. Global Scale Wars were a unique thing back then. The Great War, the war to end all wars, was thought (hoped!) to be the only one of its kind. They had a lot of conflicts between major powers, but at least for the west, 17 million deaths excluding the spanish flu epidemic was a massive outlier.

Even the Mexican Revolution, listed on Wikipedia with an upper estimate of 3.5 million, wasn't a quarter of that, and it wasn't global. The last thing in the west that came (somewhat) close was the Napoleonic Wars with an upper estimate of 7 million, a hundred years earlier. China has had several massive death counts in various wars and rebellions, but that won't have been very present to the average western civilian.

WW1 brought with it a slew of new developments in military technology and capability for destruction. For the world to have not just one, but potentially two conflicts considered at least on par with The Great War would be very concerning.

Number one rule of Christian Narcissism: That rule was written for the others. It doesn't apply to me. I'm not doing anything wrong.

Because the links actually work to send me to those communities

...or at least so addicted they'll spend themselves into trouble

I wonder: Did the people who successfully pulled off the Facebook strategy get replaced by dumber, greedier ones, did they get overruled by dumber, greedier decision-makers, did they get overconfident and thought their current market position would let Meta get away with it, or did they get lucky in the first place and fail to take any notes on why it worked?

Corporations tend to run on "if it works, why change?" so mixing up your entire strategy to this degree seems like it must've been a deliberate decision. I'm just curious who made that decision, and by what reasoning.