As most who have already commented here, I'm somewhat unimpressed (and would expect more analytical subtlety from a scientist). Wittgenstein already fully dissected the notion of "free will", showing its semantic variety of meanings and how at some depth it becomes vague and unclear. And Nietzsche discussed why "punishment" is necessary and makes sense even in a completely deterministic world... Sad that such insights are forgotten by many scientists. Often unclear if some scientists want to deepen our understanding of things, or just want sensationalism. Maybe a bit of both...
You brought back memories and I got interested. Interesting reading about privacy:
https://www.irchelp.org/security/privacy.html
How much of it is true?
(also @ridethisbike@lemmy.world)
Maybe it is pointless, maybe it is a bad idea. Maybe not. It's difficult to predict what this kind of small-scale actions will have on the big picture and future development. No matter what you choose or not choose to do, it's always a gamble. My way of thinking is that it's good if people say, through this kind of gestures, "I'm vigilant, I won't allow just anything to be done to me. There's a line that shouldn't be crossed".
Of course you're right about supporting and choosing alternative browsers, and similar initiatives. There are many initiatives on that front as well. I've never used Chrome, to be honest; always Firefox. But now I've even uninstalled the Chromium that came pre-installed on my (Ubuntu) machines. Besides that I ditched gmail years ago, and I've also decided to flatly refuse to use Google tools (Google docs and whatnot) with collaborators, as a matter of principle. If that means I'm cut out of projects, so be it.
Regarding WEI, I see your point, but I see dangers in "acknowledging" too much. If you read the "explainer" by the Google engineers, or in general their replies to comments and criticisms, you see that they constantly use deceiving, manipulative, and evasive language. As an example, the "explainer" says a lot "the user needs this", "the user desires that", but when you unfold the real meaning of the sentences it's clear it isn't something done for the user.
This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human
Note the "need for human users", but the sentence actually means "websites need that users prove...". This is just an example. The whole explainer is written in such a deceiving manner.
The replies to criticisms are all evasive. They don't reply the actual questions or issues, they start off a tangent and spout a lot of blah blah with "benefit", "user", and other soothing words – but the actual question or issue never gets addressed. (Well, if this isn't done on purpose, then it means they are mentally impaired, with sub-normal comprehension skills).
I fuc*ing hate this kind of deceiving, politician talk – which is a red flag that they're up to no good – and I know from personal experience that as soon as you "acknowledge" something, they'll drag your into their circular, empty blabber while they do what they please.
More generally, I think we should do something against the current ad-based society and economy. So NO to WEI for me.
Here?: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/about/
Looks like a good project, I didn't know about its existence.
True that! and a change from 2% to 5% may feel much larger than that.
Where does that graph come from? Can you share the source? Cheers!
Thank you! never heard of, it looks very interesting!
Maybe my comment wasn't clear or you misread it. It wasn't meant to be sarcastic. Obviously there's a problem and we want (not just need) to do something about it. But it's also important to be careful about how the problem is presented - and manipulated - and about how fingers are pointed. One can't point a finger at "Mastodon" the same way one could point it at "Twitter". Doing so has some similarities to pointing a finger at the http protocol.
Edit: see for instance the comment by @while1malloc0@beehaw.org to this post.
What's sad and superficial is that these kinds of restrictions and bans just cover a symptom but don't cure the problem. Maybe they even make it worse. We need an overhaul of our cultural foundation and educational system.
From what I understand – which can be wrong! – a couple of different things may cause this:
- People don't know they should check whether a community already exists, before creating it.
- People search to see if the community exists, but it doesn't appear in the search results of the instance/server they live in.
- People see that a community already exists, but they aren't happy with it and create their own.
It's a bit confusing, and unfortunately it causes fragmentation.
I thought it was finished a year ago...
I really want to see what happens. It seems to me these "agents" are still useless in handling tasks like customer inquiries. Hopefully customers will get tired and switch to companies that employ competent humans instead...