FriendOfDeSoto

This is sign that Google is worried that a market of 500 million people could decide to move away from the US tech giants. Very worried, judging by this flimsy fear-driven argument. Good.

I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram’s encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I’ll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn’t mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.

It happens. A very highly intelligent user will occasionally post something in a lot of communities and gets a rise out of downvotes, annoyed comments, and blocks. It’s annoying but that is often the nature of the internet. Report, block, and move on.

It’s only the very highly intelligent users who do this. So it doesn’t happen a lot.

Don’t engage with anybody you don’t know well on DMs. And if some other very highly intelligent person goes to the effort of sending you abuse via DM, take pride that you really got under their skin. Ignore it if you can.

One thing that what they call agenetic AI will undermine might be a lot of the subscription based biggies of the industry. I’m thinking about Adobe in particular. They charge a monthly premium for having user-friendly, low learning curve software that often has become industry standard. But there are open source alternatives for many of their big hitters (Inkscape, GIMP, etc.). If the agenetic model needs a tool to design a logo or expand an image - and you probably already pay for the privilege of using the agent model - this may prove to be a boon to the open source development of these intermediary software tools. Because the relative difficulty to use them as we hear from Adobe heads all the time won’t matter to the computer. And they are free (with a request to donate). So a chunk of interest and probably money and effort will move from those subscription services to open source alternatives and their development. This is just one positive effect so-called AI could have for some open source projects.

Sadly, at the same time we squander resources and kill polar bears.

I don’t think that what you are envisioning and the fediverse are necessarily a good fit. The fediverse is potentially able to network with every other instance operating on the same protocol. With every instance you add more potential to have bad actors within reach.

a system for stricter content moderation, especially something that would automatically delete NSFW/NSFL posts,

There is no tool that can automatically remove everything. There is also the Scunthorpe problem. And there aren’t enough moderators in the world to do this job safely for children that don’t also expect remuneration for their services. And then you need to add in the cross cultural differences in what constitutes NSF anything. Maybe in a few years you can train a model to do a decent job with this.

The protocol can probably be adapted to fit most of your requirements. But the fediverse is held together by donations, sweat, and duct tape. It’s having a hard enough time attracting adults; I don’t think a kids version is in the works. Plus, there are now real legal hurdles like in Australia.

Personally, I wouldn’t want my kids to social network until they are 15-16. Before that I’d try to keep them in services and settings where I’m the moderator. And only after having not only the birds and the bees talk but also the know about grooming, no nudes, and no bullying talks you can slowly release them into the wild. And at that age they will not want to sit at the kids table any more.

You’d be surprised how many people don’t take the time to read a long article like that but will have a quick glance at the comments.

Again, our proposal isn’t that we should cover all of this land in solar panels, or that it could easily power the world on its own. We don’t account for the fact that we’d need energy storage and other options to make sure that power is available where and when it’s needed (not just when the sun is shining).

This is a thought experiment more than a plan.

You are your own algorithm. If you see a lot of propaganda or whatever, it’s because you chose that content at one point or another. And you can just as easily stop seeing it by unfollowing and blocking.

Also, evidence. I see no signs of rampant propaganda on the fediverse, not on Lemmy or on Mastodon. Now, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But that’s where you should provide examples so I can check for myself.

To be fair to the lad, he didn’t peddle his wares. He just says if there isn’t a European strategy to develop their own models it is very likely that Europe would run on Chinese made ones that are more open source, whereas American ones become increasingly closed source and expensive to license. Now, that’s his prediction and I don’t really believe him. But this article at least doesn’t make it seem he wrapped his doom and gloom prediction in a Gemini sales pitch.

I’m not an Apple user so I cannot answer your question there. I just wanted to add another way to get ad-free podcasts. If the podcast offers a patreon feed, any RSS-based podcatcher anywhere will be able to do this.

They would have to try fighting it on non-trademark grounds. However, being able to point at having been awarded one afterwards may carry some weight there as well. My impression is that their strategy doesn’t rest on this alone.

The strategy behind this is also to be able to sue after the fact to get a cut of whatever was created from stuff that ought to have been protected but wasn’t. It’s not just a clip of him doing triple alrights that he applied for TM for. There is also one of him sitting down, one of him standing up. They tried to cover a whole spread of sora et. al. generated bullshit. It’s an interesting strategy that is only necessary because the law on the books lags behind the developments in image or video generation. It may not work at all but it’ll be a success if they win one case with this.

You go to this website, choose the theme, then look for the floating bar at the bottom, hit the hamburger menu icon (three lines), choose log in > forgot password

… back button hijack is starting to rear its ugly head again.

Are you basing this statement on this alleged case alone? I don’t get any of this behavior on this page on Vivaldi. Another person has done more of a deep dive and also came up short.

When reached for comment, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told the Daily Beast in a statement, “It’s sad that Daily Beast interns cannot grasp the concept of pro-growth policies that create jobs. Their minds are clearly warped after cheering on Joe Biden as he wrecked our economy for four years.”

The pettiness is unreal.

The commenter before me described the solution, give cops an override, as easy. I wanted to highlight that it isn’t that easy. Unintended side effects ought to be considered before coming up with seemingly easy solutions. And this problem is not dissimilar to the one about encrypted chats and law enforcement wanting a backdoor into that. If you build a backdoor, it’s not guaranteed that only the good guys use it. And that raises questions about privacy on the encryption front or questions about abuse, safety, and liability on the self-driving car front.

If you give police a backdoor to control self-driving cars, somebody is going (to hack it and) use it to kill somebody.

Microsoft chose to make a Chromium based browser with edge. They gave up on the idea of building an engine of their own. It goes without saying IE was shit but at least they tried. It’s also an example of why you want some competition in the market because when IE was dominant it was the focus of all hackers everywhere. The way chromium based browsers are today. (MS just made it too easy for them at the time.)

I don’t think OpenOffice is an apt comparison here. Every other browser with a modicum of market share is Chromium based. When even Microsoft folded, there is basically only Firefox. And the libres and the waters who piggyback on it. If Firefox is gone I think we’ll soon be in a complete monoculture of Chromium based browsers. No one should want this.

You don’t have to like what they do (I don’t either btw). You can predict all the opt-ins will be opt-outs (although I don’t necessarily buy into that). You can switch to any other browser. On desktop they ask for your feedback when you uninstall it so give them a piece of your mind. If you call for a crusade against Firefox you have to put more meat on the argument bones than the half-baked stuff in this overshared post. And if you can’t do that, kindly change your browser privately, is all I’m saying.

While I wouldn’t want to argue that Firefox hasn’t become more shit it doesn’t fit the Doctorowian definition of enshitification. And while they screw up stuff, to not an insignificant amount in communicating to the public what they’re doing, I do think their desktop browser is still better than most other browsers, all Chromium based ones included, and most of the terrible things are opt-ins. You don’t want them to install shit without you knowing? Then don’t participate in their experimentals. You don’t want the so-called AI crap in there? It’ll be opt-in as well so don’t opt in. If your standard was zero tracking then vanilla Firefox was never your right flavor. And virtually all mobile shit is trackable. So let’s take a chill pill and also appreciate if we push Firefox out of business, all the libres and waters will probably not be far behind.

Everybody is free to switch to any browser they like. Not every switch needs public announcing or result in a call to arms.