I don’t think that kind of anti-labour attitude is likely to be prevalent among people who play daily NYT word games. A more mainstream response is probably more like “whatever, nerds.”

The Featured Snippet quoted an article from the Mayo Clinic, highlighting the words “Caffeine may cause a short, but dramatic increase in your blood pressure.” But when she looked up “no link between coffee and hypertension”, the Featured Snippet cited a contradictory line from the very same Mayo Clinic article: “Caffeine doesn’t have a long-term effect on blood pressure and is not linked with a higher risk of high blood pressure”.

On the one hand, Google sucks. On the other hand, if people are unable to a) understand how those two snippets are not contradictory, and b) read at least one very short simplified-for-laymen Mayo Clinic article about the topic before thinking they’ve learned anything at all about medicine, it’s hard to see the problem as being primarily due to Google. There is something deeper, and worse, going wrong when people habitually take that kind of extreme shortcut to thinking that they know the right answer about almost anything, and it has little to do with whether any one-sentence snippets they’re given are biased or accurate.

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Just think of all the juicy benefits of replacing journalists with machines. They’ll never stumble or cough while presenting the news, they’ll never call in sick, never age, never get mad as hell and decide to not take it any more, never resign from the editorial board in protest no matter what garbage you tell them is the news. Machines are just better suited to the job, it’s inevitable.

Too long to read? I get it. Here’s the summary. Download Firefox.

Yes. One option is to download it from here: https://librewolf.net/

Isn’t this basically just the old trick of estimating (x * y) as (x + y - 1) when x and y are somewhat close to 1?

I missed the Internet Archive yesterday when @[email protected] casually mentioned “Keppler illustrations for Puck” as if we’d all know what that meant and the best-looking link that came up on search was to a collection of them there.

Meh. It’s not a problem of scale. It’s a problem of we have no idea how the fuck to do that. Scaling up existing techniques is neither necessary nor sufficient.

If you can’t handle the shocking reality of someone choosing unusual pronouns to refer to themselves, fediverse may not be the social media for you.

It looks like your opinions about Linux are outdated and need an update.

Where is it? It’s in the 1970s. Tempted by Lucifer to get brighter and brighter, we collectively chose to leave it behind.

Typical call to the AI safety hotline:

Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don’t trust it at all, I’m worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me…

It does not require compromising your free software ideals

By which of course I mean what I think of as free software ideals, which I’ve come to understand in large part through the teachings of Richard Stallman even though I’m not personally such an idealist as he is. He Sometimes he even goes so far as to recommend people to services with non-free software on the server side, so long as it requires only free software on systems that the user controls. Your standards may differ. But anyway, if you had to quit fedi because someone set up a fediverse/telegram bridge I think it would not be a practical way to live. Where you draw the line is of course up to you, but I wouldn’t expect many people to follow you that far from the usual FOSS positions.

I don’t think even RMS himself would refuse to participate in something on the grounds that Telegram users are also able to do so. It does not require compromising your free software ideals. By all means point out to them that you believe them to be doing something wrong, but the method you’ve chosen to try and get them to change their ways seems very likely to be ineffective and also counterproductive. It does further divide the community, even if others have already done even worse.

It looks like you are more of an xmpp advocate than a free software advocate. If you want to join a matrix room and it’s too burdensome to do so through your xmpp client, then use a matrix client for that. Without some much better reasons for doing so, setting up a competing xmpp room is not a reasonable alternative.

… I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.

I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who’ve learned that it’s necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.

I find myself suspecting that chatbots getting really good at talking people into believing whatever their operators want people to believe is going to start a lot more conspiracy theories than it ends.

The Great Shopping Mall of Alexandria

The agonizingly slow progress into mainstream discourse of this idea that we should all stop using twitter continues at its steady pace. Will the obvious truth of it mean that it continues until even the politicians get it? Or will it in time become be one of those “yeah we probably should’ve done that” things that never gets done?

It’s not for the end user’s boss, it’s there to collect data for the future Microsoft user behaviour analysis tools that will be sold to the end user’s boss’s boss.