“This has never been about politics,”

Coward. It absolutely was, and is, about politics. The misinformation has ALWAYS been political. Countering misinformation is inherently political. As someone who's very existence is considered "political" I politely suggest we drop the apolitical angle and start getting fucking angry and aggressively political. I'm very glad there are organizations out there like his that are doing that work. Just be honest about it.

Thank you.

Now it's really in the cloud!

I don't think I'm quite the target of this comment because I don't pretend it doesn't exist or that it isn't something that people use or care about. But I do avoid using AI for anything that matters.. like at all. I also refuse to use chatgpt or any of the commercial offerings. I do play around with locally hosted stuff because the tech is interesting, but there is no way I would ever put my faith in it. Also, my feelings toward the biggest players in the industry are at best "disgust". So I don't want to use their products.

So my question then how exactly can I be in the room to help shape decisions? The only two levers I have to pull is whether or not to send those companies money, and whether to even use the free services or not.

What exactly am I supposed to do? The companies will just make whatever models and tune them however they feel will achieve whatever goals they have regardless. And presently, their goals do not align with mine.

I won't be surprised when we are fucked. I promise you that. I can see that coming. But I feel utterly powerless to stop the tech fascists.

"Let’s set aside the obvious conflict of interest and ethics questions at play here —" You can't, and you shouldn't.

"We can even skip over the security implications pointed out by a cybersecurity expert in the Times piece. " You can't, and you shouldn't.

"As a practical matter alone, there’s no obvious reason to add another ISP in order to improve Wi-Fi coverage" It doesn't take an entire paragraph to figure out what's going on here let alone an entire article.

As someone from north of the USA border.. PLEASE stop this man from stealing your country, Americans.

lmao I'm sorry I am 100% for gun regulation but this some big boomer energy and NOT the way to appeal to youth. If the intent is to say "Hey, we have no idea about what you are into but we are pretty sure we know better than you. Go to your room! No video games for a week!" then it's probably working.

Good for Will Ferrell! We love a good ally. Do not go to the comments section though, the trolls are out.

Yes Louis Brennan designed a gyroscopic monorail in the early 1900's but there's a reason it didn't work out. Every car needs its own gyroscope which is a lot of dynamic components that need maintenance. A regular two rail train is much simpler and cheaper to operate. The idea these techbros have that everything is made better with individual pods is pretty wasteful when we already have better and cheaper solutions to virtually every problem they have tried to invent for us. Are we even super concerned about rural folks taking transit? By definition they are a small portion of the population and have the greatest need for personal transport. Where we need transit adoption is in urban areas with large populations who all want to drive their personal 2 tonnes of plastic and steel right into town and park it (for free obviously) in their own little parking space.

A gadgetbahn like this will only serve a limited population and won't be able to tie into the existing transit network. There might be niche situations where it's not a terrible idea but it is not a good generalized solution.

Dang, this is such a cool project and it's a shame this is happening to it. It's understandable that Valve wants to be nowhere near Nintendo's proprietary libraries though. I hope this isn't the end of the project full stop.

"Tracking Protection" just means they are protecting their exclusivity in tracking you.

Well, the article (at least in the free part.. I'm not making an account just to fact check this site) mentions two studies right off the bat and claims that they shed light on the impact of corporate trolls on Reddit.

"Two significant studies, the Pew Research Center study conducted in 2018 and the Computers in Human Behavior study published in 2020, have shed light on the prevalence and impact of corporate trolls on Reddit."

If you look up these studies, the Pew Research Center has a survey they conduct and although the article claims they interviewed 2500 americans who use reddit the actual study had only 2,002 adults. It was also a study about what sites they used. It had nothing to do with Reddit. In fact, if you switch over to the Detailed Table, Reddit wasn't even mentioned as a response. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/03/01/social-media-use-2018-methodology/

I could not find a "Computers in Human Behavior study published in 2020" that matched the article's description. I did find a study published by them in 2020 about selfies and body image and especially snapchat. Once again, no reddit. But I can't say I found the article mentioned.

Then again, I can't say the articles mentioned exist at all. ChatGPT almost certainly hallucinated this.

Does the Fediverse have more of a mental health problem than other social media sites? Or is it just more visible and more likely to be hidden away?

"Privacy features like user-agent reduction, IP reduction, preventing cross-site storage, and fingerprint randomization make it more difficult to distinguish or reidentify individual clients, which is great for privacy, but makes fighting fraud more difficult. This matters to users because making the web more private without providing new APIs to developers could lead to websites adding more:"

Ohhh it's fighting fraud that they want to do! And here I thought it was entirely for the much more profitable goal of maintaining advertising revenue. Well, I'm SO GLAD to be wrong on that one. Slash S.