The latest poll by Quinnipiac University had some grim numbers across the board for President Donald Trump, shocking CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten, who described it as "definitely one of Trump's worst polls."
Cults break down, a good example is something like Sinnanon where up until the authoritarian tendencies kicked in it managed to maintain a pretty decent size. Then they went full authoritarian and the cult started to bleed numbers.
Personally my bet is that Trump can go as low as 20 percent approval, though it'll require some specialized circumstances or shit just getting worse all around.
The historical benchmark I use is this: Nixon was at 31% when he resigned. I think GWB also hit a similar number, but he never was facing articles of impeachment.
Republican congressthings clearly have the same data on their internal polls, which is why they felt it safe to kill the dumpster-fire bill Trump tried to ram through.
On a totally unrelated note, I'm pretty sure he's going to a theatre to see a play at some point soon. Maybe tonight? I don't think it's a comedy, but there's an opportunity for somebody to do the funniest thing possible. Double funny if their name is Mario.
Maybe someone should write a play that is all about Christopher Columbus and Confederate generals who go hunting for fun at Maralago. Like a reverse Most Dangerous Game. Start a rumor that there's a nude scene of Ivanka Trump.
It is relevant. Congress is mostly going along with him because they are afraid of being primaried. If he dips much lower we might suddenly see unexpected people speaking truth to power.
"With Medicaid's future as a healthcare safety net for millions suddenly uncertain, voters make it clear they want the 60-year-old program for those in need to be handled with care," said Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy.
"I'm the most bigly popular King! Frankly, many people are saying I'm the greatest man who ever lived. And my parade will have YUGE ratings! Better than Barack Hussein's boring, very low energy speeches! Many men, many big tough men have said to me, with literal tears, they say 'Sir, Sir, please spend more of our money on bigly parades and tax cuts for billionaires, who are just born better than we are!' No one honors Trump like Trump, believe me."
But his disapproval rating is thru the roof! No, really he tossed the rating up there when he saw it. Yeah, it doesn't weight that much. Like a kid could through it higher.
Forty percent of voters have a favorable opinion of President Trump, while 53 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him, and 4 percent haven't heard enough about him.
WHO are these people that haven't heard enough about him? And WHY isn't there "I have heard way too much about him" option in the poll?
“Queer people know what it means to struggle against the government, know what it means to struggle against the status quo. And, most importantly, we're not as easily controlled…”
I'm more convinced that they're just taking all of the databases and putting them in an ai bot and asking it to construct a pro trump narrative and then immediately turning it all over to Palantir to fulfill more of their master searchable file on every single bit of information on everybody. For what reason? Who knows? Only Peter Thiel and the other vampires in charge.
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,\ Seven for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,\ Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,\ One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,\ In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.\ One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,\ One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them\ In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
A lawsuit disputing the results of the 2024 election has moved forward after it was revealed that former Vice President Kamala Harris received no votes a New York county.
As President Donald Trump viciously attacked his perceived political foes, he whipped up boos from the gathered troops directed at California leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom.
I'm genuinely curious to what extend the societal divide extends into the armed forces. How can can there be trust among soldiers in combat situations if they are diametrically opposed on fundamental things like this.
Hey it could be worse, you could be the jackass who named an area Mentone "beach" here in San Bernardino, fun fact it's not a fucken beach. Forest falls is more of a beach.
Opposite statements. Either they follow orders or they are loyal to the constitution. Can't do both right now.
I can't fathom the industrial amounts of pure propagandium that Americans must have been huffing to think the military will ever be on their side. Blind and unconditional obedience is literally the only way militaries can function properly and everything about them is organized to promote that.
US military apologists (even before Trump) will say "but soldiers are legally obligated to follow the constitution first and must refuse unlawful orders" like Abu Ghraib didn't happen in my lifetime. We all know that 90 % of soldiers will wipe themselves with the original copy of the declaration of independence if Trump orders them to. And those that refuse will be dishonorably discharged, or worse.
The divide absolutely exists. There is a lot of conditioning for following orders and working as a team. That doesn't erase conflicting ideologies, beliefs, or even personality conflict. At the extreme the military will remove outliers from the military, but at the individual level you learn who you trust and who you can rely on. Then you do what you can to mitigate those who you don't trust.
Militaries all over the world also have a long history of killing their own people for not fitting whatever the group around them wants. Sometimes for justifiable reasons, like incompetent leaders likely to get their subordinates killed. Other times for things like someone being uncomfortable with blatant war crimes.
There is nothing magical or special about the military. They just have more weapons. So the solutions are violent more often than the average office job.
I am more than mildly surprised at the amount of brown people in the above article's picture. I can almost understand a certain type of white person cheering for him, deluded as they may me.
However I can not fathom why a non white person would even think about it. They are not only traitors to their country, but also to their race AND to what their race has had to fight for for generations. It boggles the mind.
I watched some bit of this earlier in horror and while I was playing a hard game of "spot the differences between this and nazi speeches" I heard Trump mistaking WW1 for WW2. This is the lunatic in charge of the world's biggest army. We are so cooked...
There sure are fucking truck loads of them in that picture.
I remember when the French helped us beat some tyranny away from our borders, and although I wouldn't ask them to get their hands dirty when we start wrestling ourselves, I sure wish we could channel some of their energy into the people who "oppose" things like this.... From their couch.
I long to see French level of protesting here in the states.
Quite a stretch to call cheering the President traitorous, person could almost say that's the opposite of traitorous, cause, yknow, a non politician actually doing something about the president is one of the real definitions of traitor.
Cheering for a traitor is traitorous. The traitor in question being the president doesn't mitigate that in the slightest - to the contrary, that's the most damaging traitor we could be cursed with.
Their allegiance is supposed to be to The Constitution of the United States of America, not to a tyrant who is ineligible to be president and wipes his ass with The US Constitution. The military is also supposed to be above politics.
But you dont understand one protestor littered , meaning that it is now an illegal gathering and that the thousands of people gathered are a violent mob.
Having seen a couple of vids from folks on the ground it seemed akin to a proper French riot. Folks lobbing bricks, makeshift barricades, vehicles burning etc.
Yeah folks may feel justified an upset but it isn't exactly surprising when authorities crack down to restore order in such a situation.
How do you mean? Most authoritarian regimes are maintained with fear and violence. Even in democratic states that don't primarily rule through fear the government generally has a monopoly on using violence to enforce the law.
I mean that as we've seen cops are easy to start using pellets and gas, and when people respond throwing rocks, suddenly it's a 'violent insurrection'; that's why I said it's important to see who started it.
Just seven of 50 surveyed GOP lawmakers are planning to actually attend the president’s birthday festivities over the weekend, reported Politico. [...] Those sticking around include some of Trump’s most stalwart MAGA supporters: Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (who told Politico “of course” she’d be there), Byron Donalds, and Elise Stefanik are all planning to celebrate. Representatives Cory Mills, Rich McCormick, John McGuire, and Lisa McClain are also expected to be in attendance.
They could be busy with shit in their states, they could not want photos/videos/records of them attending the events to exist in the future.
When your opponents say you are trying to become a police state and trample peoples rights, you probably don't want to be featured standing next to a tank on civilian streets.
In 1-3 years when they believe they will be running for office during an election that will potentially have far more people fleeing the MAGA agenda as people see the results, they will want to distance themselves and appear to have maybe been a more "moderate" Republican candidate. Hard to do standing next to a military vehicle resembling those that you rolled into metropolitan cities and whatever ensued occured because of it.
I dunno, I think attending someone's party for themselves is pretty fucking cringe. They've already kissed the ring, I can't imagine it's fun for them to grovel. They just do it when they have to satisfy the crown and virtue signal to their base since they didn't vote for them as much as they did for a Trump green light. Nobody is twisting their arm in this case.
I don't know mate. Standing in front of a tank and shutting down down Fat Boy Hitler's farcical thuper duper birthday parade would be one for the history books. There's not a farts chance in a hurricane that this doesn't go down as a comical clusterfuck.
This whole parade is getting shut down, I promise you.
Major news outlets will not cover the protests. They will happily film the parade though. They will put forth an air of cautious optimism to endear dear leader to their outlet. The only way this gets any MAJOR public attention is if people stop the parade. It will be stopped, there will be a LOT of police action, which will prompt riots, which will prompt more attention. Trump may use it to enact martial law, but he'll do so at his own detriment. It will not look well at all, but the cancellation of his parade, plus the chaos that will be martial law will only spark more civil discourse throughout the nation.
Well that would be nice if everyone was on board. But even if the people that hate him don't turn up, the people that love him will. That would be enough for him.
Not so fun fact: Trump is actually a fan of the way China handled that. Here's the quote:
"Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength.That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak... as being spit on by the rest of the world."
"We'll rise together and say: We reject political violence. We reject fear as governance. We reject the myth that only some deserve freedom," wrote the coalition behind "No Kings" rallies planned for June 14.
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The Maghreb Resilience Convoy’s 300-vehicle caravan departed from Tunis on Monday morning, before crossing the Libyan border on Tuesday. It is expected to enter Egypt on Thursday and reach Rafah a few days later.
According to participating groups, “doctors, students, lawyers, and everyday people” are in the convoy, part of the Global March to Gaza scheduled for June 15, during which 2,500 activists from over 50 countries plan to march from El-Arish in Egypt to Rafah in Gaza.
The defense minister called the pro-Palestinians “jihadists,” saying they would also endanger the stability of the governing Egyptian regime and other moderate Arab governments in the region.
The State Department is preparing to order the departure of all nonessential personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad due to the potential for regional unrest
The State Department is preparing to order the departure of all nonessential personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad due to the potential for regional unrest, two U.S. officials said Wednesday.
The Baghdad embassy has already been on limited staffing, and the order will not affect a large number of personnel, but the department also is authorizing the departure of nonessential personnel and family members from Bahrain and Kuwait.
Note that we don't have diplomatic relations with Iran, so in the event of a military conflict with Iran, there wouldn't be anyone to evacuate there, just in nearby countries.
I created a secondary Pixelfed account to test the share functionality, but none of the posts I've shared from my main account are showing up in the new account’s feed.
Try again after following the account that post. Having someone from your instance following a remote user is the best way to insure proper federation of content in the fediverse.
if your two accounts are on a different instance, federation takes a while, your follow signals to your instance to synchronize the content from the other account, and it's not instantaneous, it's queued along the requests of everyone else on your instance.
Fediforum happened this week, porting your social graph cross-protocol with Bounce, Bonfire gets closer to release, a prominent Lemmy server shuts down, and much more.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!
FediForum and related announcements
The FediForum unconference was this week, with three days of sessions, keynotes and demos. The event was originally scheduled for April, but got cancelled at the last minute due to drama around transphobic statements made by one of the co-organisers. The individual in question left FediForum, and instead FediForum set up an advisory board with a number of community members. This edition of FediForum had keynotes for the first time, by ActivityPub co-creator Christine Lemmer-Webber, author Cory Doctorow, and Ian Forrester, who lead a Mastodon instance at the BBC. There were also a large number of demos (list here) and unconference sessions about a wide variety of subjects. I’ll write more about both the demos and the keynotes once the videos of them will become available online, likely next week.
Bounce is a newly-announced tool that allows people to migrate their social graph across protocols. It is made by A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed. The ability to port a social graph from AT Protocol to ActivityPub reshapes what is possible within the Open Social Web. For that reason, I think Bounce is a meaningful release, with its power mainly being in altering the shape of these networks. I wrote an essay on that this week that goes into the philosophical side of Bounce. For more practical information I can recommend this coverage by TechCrunch and The Verge. Meanwhile, A New Social’s CTO Ryan Barrett has shared all the updates and new features that have happened to Bridgy Fed over the recent months.
Music sharing platform Bandwagon shared more information during Fediforum on their development work, and how they are working on integrating album sales. A dev blog by Bandwagon recently shared their plans on adding a premium subscription, and how album sales work. During a Fediforum session, developer Ben Pate shared some screenshots on what this looks like. WeDistribute has a deep dive into Bandwagon and the current state of development based on the latest FediForum session.
Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform that has slowly been reaching the end of the line for development, and they announced the release candidate version of Bonfire 1.0. It is a framework and platform for building communities on the fediverse, and has a large variety of features and extensibility. One of the standout features is circles and boundaries. Circles allow users to define lists of accounts, and boundaries allows users to determine on a per-post basis to what circles each post gets shared. This creates a significant amount of flexibility on how to handle private posts, something which is in huge demand within the open social web. Bonfire also gives users a large amount of control over how they see and filter their feed. For more of a philosophical take on that, I recently wrote about how Bonfire’s approach on custom feeds compares to Bluesky’s approach. The developers are inviting people to install their own instance and experiment with the new features. It is unknown when Bonfire will be ready for a full 1.0 release. For another look at Bonfire, TechCrunch also covered the story.
Filmmaker and fediverse evangelist Elena Rossini has released her fediverse promotion video, which was highly anticipated by the community. The video can be viewed here, and tells the story of why the fediverse matters for a lay audience. The video is worth paying attention to for two reasons: first of all, it is a well-produced promo video for the fediverse that explains some of the core ideas in an accessible manner. Secondly, the video has gotten a huge amount of support from within the fediverse community, with a large number of prominent people within the community supporting Rossini’s work. One of the challenges of analysing a decentralised community is that there is no singular decentralised community, there are a wide variety of different groups and cultures. However, by seeing how and who responded positively to the video, it becomes clear that Rossini’s video does represent a dominant and popular understanding of what the fediverse is, and why it matters. In that way, analysing the video does provide good insight into the one of the more dominant and popular cultures of the fediverse.
Shutdown of Lemmy and opportunity for PieFed
Lemm.ee, one of the biggest Lemmy servers, is shutting down at the end of June. The team says: “The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.” This has some significant impact on the wider Threadiverse community, as the lemm.ee hosted a significant number of popular communities. This makes server shutdowns on Threadiverse platforms signficantly more impactful, as they also impact people who do not have an account on the platform. Community migration is challenging, and there are no specific tools to help with a community with migrating to a different server.
The shutdown of the Lemm.ee server provides an opportunity for PieFed, a link-aggregator platform similar to Lemmy. PieFed is over a year old, that has seen significant development and new features beyond Lemmy, but has not managed to gain traction yet, with growth of users being slow. However, now that communities on the lemm.ee. server need to find a new place, PieFed is emerging as one of the main destinations. In turn, this is giving PieFed some much need promotion and awareness within the Threadiverse community, with PieFed doubling the number of accounts within a week. Lemmy clients are also starting to add support for PieFed, with the Lemmy client Interstellar already supporting PieFed. PieFed also uploaded two PeerTube video walking through all the moderation and administration features the platform has.
Platform updates
Ghost’s work on implementing ActivityPub is getting close to an official release. In their latest update, Ghost said that their ActivityPub integration will be part of the Ghost 6.0 release, which will come in ‘a few weeks’. The team has been working on ActivityPub for over a year, and have grown from 3 people to 8 people now working on their social web integration. For Ghost, the ActivityPub integration is more than just another connector, describing it as ‘a statement that the open web still matters’.
Mastodon is planning to release a new update, version 4.4, with the first beta now available. Some of the new features include the ability to set more feature content on user profiles, more list and follow management tools. For admins, there are better tools for setting legal frameworks, moderation tweaks and more. The biggest feature of the patch is that it will display quoted posts. The highly requested feature will only be fully available in version 4.5, which will include the ability for users to create quoted posts. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput says that he expects version 4.4 to be released at the end of June, with version 4.5 scheduled a few months later in September of October. The organisation also shared their monthly engineering update for May.
PeerTube released their latest version, 7.2, with a new design for video management and publication pages. PeerTube also now has more features for handling sensitive content. Creators can now add an explanation of why the content is marked as sensitive. Users also have more flexibility with how they want sensitive content to be handled, with various different configurations between hiding, blurring or warning about a video with sensitive content. PeerTube is also running a crowdfunding campaign for the mobile app, which has now crossed the halfway mark at 35k EUR. This milestone is for video management from the mobile app, with the next milestone being for livestream support in-app. The PeerTube app developer also shared a blog post with his thoughts on the technical framework considerations for building the app.
Hollo is a single-user microblogging platform, and their latest release has a significant number of new features, including better OAuth and various upgrades to the UX. Developer Hong Minhee also announced that independent fediverse developer Emelia Smith will join as a co-maintainer for Hollo.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:
In this case that's exactly what we need, someone with more money than god that can set precedents to protect the authors and artists that need it the most.
It doesn’t matter it was the evil empire getting that result
It does if it only benefits evil empires. The open source tools can't afford the price which only leaves the big AI companies that can and Disney who holds the data.
All this will do is add a fat price tag and censorship. Artists will not get paid and AI will not go away, the jobs will still be lost. It's the worst of both worlds.
when disney wins there will be nothing left to sue, with the result that now the entertainment industry, which has the available training data, will also have the AI technology, and the only one who profits is disney - because in this situation all open source GenAI is fucked.
I dunno, we've seen corporations come at each other many times before.
Most of you people won't understand this, but copyright and patent laws aren't going to be around forever. They don't help the working class and it's only a matter of time before new generations rise above our tunnel vision and indoctrination.
I mean, just look at this case a prime example. Who is the one suing? Disney. Who stands to benefit? Disney.
Are the random joe's suing? No, they can't afford it. The laws do not exist to protect them. It's another reason why we never see big corporations challenge copyright and patent laws. They know they make more money with them.
I don't see the irony. They perceive AI as a loop hole and need to squash it to keep their grip on things. If anybody can just prompt a movie in ten years, their business is dead. If a small group of indie animators can make a fully fledged movie, their business is dead.
They made it fucked up in their favor, this lawsuit is a continuation of that.
Disney isn't fighting for the little guy. They will still agressively use it to cull their own workforce. They want to control who can use it and don't want to compete against an indie animation scene.
Show me where I can download Midjourneys full model to run it locally and then we can agree to call it "open weights". Unless their base model and training data is also available, it's not open source.
I'd say do it more... generate more star wars media until Disney gives it up as a golden goose to milk. Doesn't matter if it's ai or whatever fuck disney...
The Google-owned site has provided moderators with new guidelines and training on how to deal with inflammatory content that breaks YouTube's code of conduct, writes The New...
Well yes. You obviously still can’t say “le dollar bean” without getting nuked from orbit. YouTube is a goodly Christian corporation after all, can’t have such content.
Are you implying you don't use YT at all? Or you use it and choose to be unhappy with it?
Just curious, I often get mad because they need to censor words, but not to the degrees to say 'fuck this place" and move to the other (unborn) alternative.
Yes they are, some from the very conception of YouTube perhaps, but they are not real alternatives a real alternative would be one where all your subscriptions also upload the same content there, it is totally not YT based and you get the same or similar ecosystem Google provides, I don't think too many channels fit this.
I mean, if your requirement for a youtube alternative is that it's as big as YouTube, you're just guaranteeing that there will never be a YouTube alternative...
Yeah perhaps, we are here on Lemmy after all, which I consider a Reddit alternative, but with YouTube the thing is different because we follow individuals, and here we follow subjects, hopefully somebody can truly stand out against Google in the video field, a movement big enough to motivate content creators to check it out, the last thing I hear was about Odysee, which I think is a step in the right direction.
almost all the right wing contents get pushed to the front. there are some that are also rw that is buried by the algorithim, because they are loud mouths, i wonder if this will change for them too.,
Good. I don't really care about youtube, but less censorship is always a good thing.
How can you people say you respect science when you support silencing any criticism of it? That's not science. That's religion.
That said, this criteria clearly only exists to protect "influencers" who make youtube a proportional amount of money. If you have a channel with very little traffic and you say something controversial, you'd better believe your "freedom of expression value" will not be high enough to outweigh the corporation's perceived "harm risk."
youtube shadowbanning, demonitization and censorship is the most retarded shit that's ever happened to the internet. the whole website is videos and comments of people who cater to kids and commercial advertisers and cant say shit.
We will (still) allow children's cartoon characters to be mutilated and put into explicit situations and then push them as child friendly, but how dare you use a swear in the first 15 seconds of a video or say the work kill.
Intention: YouTubers can stop with the whole self censoring shit.
Example: Unaliving; PDF file; grape; etc.
Reality: Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and other right wing grifters receive zero censorship while YouTubers still have to self censor to receive monetization.
How long before Google locks YT down only to Chrome on Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, or Android, and blocks it from loading at all on non-Chrome browsers and on Linux or iOS, blocks it from loading at all if ad blockers, including hardware-based ad blockers ala PiHole, are implemented, and enforces hardware security measures ala TPM2 for authentication, and ensures that no one can download and re-upload YT vids, with DRM?
Basically, I wouldn't put it above them to ensure their video platform only runs on their browser, on hardware and OS platforms they deem worthy of running it, even down to somehow implementing a Vanguard-style rootkit.
A peaceful protest is underway against mega corporations attempting to impose DRM on the web, aiming to gain control over all content possible and making our lives worse.
They won't ever say it out loud but they have always removed videos for mentioning alternative frontends or other technology they view as direct threats to their revenue stream.
See the issue here is Google/Youtube still get to be the ones to decide what "may outweigh the harm risk". And the answer I bet will usually be whichever one serves their financial interests.
Which on one hand sure, it is their platform after all. But don't do me dry and claim you used lube.
I still wouldn't trust Google not to nuke my channel on a whim even in spite of those relaxed moderation rules. What's stopping a little bribe from the right company or political party from causing them to backpedal or even tighten their grip further?
This is why one should at least mirror their content to PeerTube or a similar alternative platform like that even if they're not going to just outright post future content to said alternative and give up on YT altogether.
I agree. We've seen enough times in the past where a creator would get a strike from a video several years old because the rules changes. Anyone legit should be careful.
Moderators were previously told to remove videos if one-quarter or more of the content violated YouTube policies. Now, that limit has been increased to half.
This seems like alien speak to me. They announce that shit, someone read it, and then repeated it in an article. But what does it mean?
Can you have 6 contents and make 2 really crazy? Can you tell people to commit violence for 5 minutes and then review a game for 6 minutes? Is there a dude with tvtropes open going through and marking the contents of content?
Great, now that 50% of a video can be a direct call for genocide, does that at LEAST mean I can use ONE instance of a "bad" word or speak of "icky" things like death and drug abuse without being demonized?
I like freedom of speech but it seems like it would be pretty difficult to weigh those things against one another. what is the metric that they have in common? I don't know that there is one
This morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on inflation confirming what many of us have felt at the register: grocery prices are rising again.
‘Wildly underprepared’: National Guard troops sent by President Trump to Los Angeles amid immigration protests are seen sleeping on floors in exclusive photos
The protestors really need to get the CANG to switch sides and face off against the police. Low key convinced that’s a real possibility if orangeboi or Hesgeth tries to order them to do something really beyond the pale.
I empathize with the hope that the national guard would side with protesters in violation of their orders, but is there any historical precedent for that?
On the other hand, there have been plenty of historical confrontations where the national guard has engaged in violence against demonstrators.
Maybe it can be different this time, but I don't know.
Looking at the US descent into full on fascism is horrifying and frustrating at the same time. Like a car crash in slow motion: it's clear what the result will be, but it's taking its time.
Hi everyone, I just created a PeerTube account on makertube.net/ and wanted to subscribe to a channel on a different instance. I click subscribe and get the pop-up that I have subscribed, however when I reload the page it's gone again, and nothing shows up in my subscriptions. It does the same thing for different channels on different instances. What's going on?
While that's a reasonable take, I think you could selectively render domains in non-latin scripts while blacklisting those greek/cyrillic letters that match latin ones, falling back to the "xn--xxx.com" formatting. Though I guess that would be a lot harder.
The first step toward meaningful change begins with us. We must abandon our craving for glossy (and therefore glassy) devices, and instead embrace hardware that may not be as immediately pleasing to the eye (as it is the case with e.g. Fairphones or the PinePhone), but is built to be slightly more durable, somewhat repairable, and capable of outlasting even today’s limited commitments to software updates.
Fairphone and PinePhone being only mentioned anecdotally for being too pretty, and I guess not as sturdy as the author wants, is quite weird for an article about reducing fragility and improving repairability.
I mean phone durability has become a lot better. I use my iPhone 14 Pro without a case, and I have dropped it a few times and more than once it has flown across the room. Just last Saturday it fell on concrete from like 4 feet high. It’s good as new.
It is also the consumer who is mostly at fault anyways. There are many durable phones out there, none of them sell like the shiny sleek phone. Do people really want devices that are more durable? If so, why aren’t they buying them?
The article is disappointing. It appears author of that article only has one narrow view and assumes the rest of the world has the same.
They buy the most fragile and aesthetically pleasing phones, and complain they are fragile. They advocate for manufacturers to stop making fragile aesthetically pleasing phones, and only make rugged or repairable phones instead. They make an inference that phones should be repairable like cars with accessible parts and non-proprietary tools, but they appear to not know that today's cars have difficulty getting replacement parts and absolutely contain mechanical and electronic proprietary tools to repair the cars.
Mr/Ms author, if you want a phone that doesn't break so easily when dropped, you can buy such a thing right now. Something like CAT phones:
... or other ruggedized Android phones.
I think the last time I dropped a phone an broke the screen on it was maybe 2007. I don't even use phone cases. If your particular use case has you dropping your phone more, buy one that exists and is designed to take those kind of conditions. There's no shame in that, but don't advocate for an entire industry shift because of just your own use case.
Smartphones/technology are still incredibly young in the grand scheme of things. Each of the new generation of devices that comes out adds more functionality for features that people want. Until that stops, it doesn't make sense to try to switch everyone to a "buy it for life" approach. My Commodore 64 computer still works, and is very easy to service, however I wouldn't have wanted technology to stop back then just because its a sturdy built machine. Today I have the paper thin laptops with 8 hours of battery and high speed CPUs are not as rugged or repairable as my venerable C64, but I'm quite glad to have the fragile laptop instead.
Theres this pervasive mentality in online spaces that completely disregards the consumer’s role in all of the design choices of products. They completely ignore that it is the consumer who signaled they wanted this and continue to signal they want this by buying more of the same. Corporations cannot create desires, they only fulfill them. Consumers have demonstrated they want sleek devices that are easy to operate and last only as long as they are not outclassed by next thing. The alternative of course is coming to the realization that consumers prefer convenience and novelty than durability above anything else but once you realize that you become elitist and that’s a big no no. So it must be the corporations fault!
You also ignore the role marketing has to play in convincing people that they need those things. Most people don't need an SUV, let alone a truck, yet I see plenty of people driving these, and even thinking they're safer than sedans. But they cost more money, which means more profit, and why would it be surprising that people who sell something with a relatively inelastic market want to maximize profit dollars per sale?
Smartphones are fragile without a case. They should have one, and maybe manufacturers should make that clearer, but a world where removable cases didn't exist would just mean that the case you get is the one that the manufacturer chooses for you and permanently attaches to the smartphone. Less options for you.
Just get a case.
I am also more than willing to carry a slightly thicker device if it means greater durability and easier repairability.
Me too. It's why I have a case.
And I am certain many others would gladly trade their bulky, overpriced cases and bumpers for a sturdier device that inherently provides the protection we now have to purchase separately.
If you want a built-in case, you can get them. There is a whole collection of "ruggedized" smartphones from various manufacturers in China that are large, usually have a hefty battery, and have shielding built into the device.
Personally, I think that the built-in case isn't very interesting relative to a removable case, but the large battery might be, depending upon your needs.
EDIT: A number of manufacturers will even make official cases for their phones, if you can tolerate a removable case and just want something endorsed by the manufacturer.
They don't have to be fragile, though. I have several old, cheap smartphones that didn't need a case and weren't bulky by the standards of the day. Even now all they would need is a new battery (easily replaceable btw) and they would work as good as new.
It’s not a compromise, it’s a reflection of the fact that most people don’t care about these durable devices so they don’t sell well and thus they can’t be supported very well or for very long. This is just a reality of the market.
The global smartphone screen protectors market size was estimated at USD 49.73 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.9% from 2023 to 2030
It makes total sense to me. A phone case is just a cheap piece of plastic that's made using cheap mold-manufacturing, and cases last for the entire life of the phone, sometimes even living on through a couple of phone lifetimes.
But screen protectors have to be more rigorously designed, - making sure that the material works well between finger and each particular touchscreen, and it's made using relatively much more expensive manufacturing processes like curved glass cutting, and people have to replace them every once in awhile because the purpose of a screen protector is to take all the damage that otherwise would've happened to your screen.
Most "50 MP" cameras are actually quad Bayer sensors (effectively worse resolution) and are usually binned 2x to approx 12 MP.
The lens on your phone likely isn't sharp enough to capture 50 MP of detail on a small sensor anyway, so the megapixel number ends up being more of a gimmick than anything.
That doesn't match my experience with phone hardware. Everyone i know has a bunch of old phones that've been handed down to kids and even more sitting in junk drawers, because they all still work. Yes a couple of them have cracked screens, but even with those the only reason why the screen wasn't repaired is because people wanted or already had a newer phone.
Software is a totally different matter though. The OS and apps stop getting updates at some point even though the hardware is still totally capable of doing what most people want their phone to do. And even worse, many companies don't allow a phone to revert to an older OS version, so the company pushes out an update that slows the phone down and then there's no way to fix that.
The HARDWARE isn't designed to fail, because the SOFTWARE is designed to let the company force the device to fail at whatever exact moment the company later decides on.
The hardware was certainly designed to be less repairable and phones less upgradable. Gone are the days with user-replaceable batteries and MicroSD card slots.
A 20 minute video on how to replace your battery with batteries that are glued down and you need a pry tool to remove them and hopefully not puncture them is not exactly what I would call user-replaceable batteries:
I'm talking about ones like the Samsung Galaxy S3, Nintendo DSi and Nintendo 3DS, etc had where you could just open the cover, take the battery out, and then put the new one in.
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My favourite argument for these things is always: but it has to be water tight. It has to be aesthetic and thin. Okay cool, then make phones for people who use them as a fashion statement or throw them into the water and make one that you can just crack open. I know it's something completely different but my first phone was an alcatel where you could take out the battery and throw in 4 AA's in case you ran out of juice.
I have had few phones over the years, few of them I damaged by using them in bad conditions, mainly on construction sites.
As far I can remember I have never cracked the screen. Phones are and always were fragile, its a piece of condensed technology, with large glass screen. What do people expect from glass dropped from 1m? Just take care of your shit.
It always amazes me how can people cary their phones in back pocket or just throw it in the bag with keys or other sharp objects.
The main issue is the lack of software support. They keep making each new Android version more bloated so you can't update more than once or maybe twice. If it wasn't for that, you could keep using the same 5G phone until they shut down the 5G network as long as the battery is replaceable.
I wish Android was more like Debian where it's lightweight, uses stable versions of software and runs well on old hardware.
The newer Android versions aren't that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably especially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management over the years and I have an experience of newer Android versions running better than the older ones. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.
When we get to the manufacturer's custom Android skins... Well that's a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove manufacturer's bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.
Samsung used to have rugged mainline Galaxy phones. Guess what? They didn’t sell well so they don’t make them anymore.
Mass market doesn’t want this, is that simple. The people who want it are over represented online. It’s a similar case with people who want small phones, why do you think they don’t make them anymore? Because hardly anyone buys them.
I think this highlight the problem with this approach. $500 MSRP would likely not be cost effective for a phone manufacturer to invest in the design, construction, inventory of replacement parts, and multi-year long support of the rugged and long lasting phone. An important part of the premise of the author is that the phone lasts a long time, and your stated desire for long software support.
This is likely a money loser for a phone manufacturer from day one. My guess is that this phone would likely have to cost $2000 to $3000 for a chance to be economically viable. The biggest expenses are going to be on the human labor parts of a staff to provide the regular software updates, maintaining humans that run the manufacturing lines for the replacement parts, and the repair staff to effect the repairs over time for customers. Considering the only time the phone manufacturer gets money is from the initial sale of the phone, they have to price it high enough to cover many years of these support operations.
At the higher, more realistic, phone sale price it likely drops the number of potential customers so low to not even pay for the initial design and tooling to be created.
This is likely why no manufacturer makes this theoretical phone.
It’s stuck on iOS 16. Once iOS 26 releases, companies will quickly pivot to iOS 17 as the minimum supported version and slowly you will find important apps no longer work on the phone.
I've recently learned that the device Sun first made Java for was, well, almost a smartphone in idea. So those Java phones and now Android are not a perversion of the initial intent.
I also think that, if you only compare various places in reality and various casinos by the amount of endorphine per minute spent, you'll choose casinos (OK, maybe brothels).
The reason you don't choose a casino is because you know that in average the casino always wins. That's a knowledge of how casinos work.
The reason you don't choose a brothel is because you know that many people working there are disadvantaged, and because you can control your impulses. That's also a knowledge of how brothels work.
This means, that if we make an analogy between casinos, brothels and the computer industry, including smartphones and the web, the user has to know how it works to make the right decisions.
So the commonly repeated point about grandmas and casual users is simply wrong. There's no way they don't get deceived by the other side profiting from their ignorance, other than learning how things work.
So - I think we need a global social network. We have siloed services because it doesn't bring profits to make such a global service, and the one Sun, Netscape, Macromedia (yes) and many universities made in the 90s has gone obsolete. The Internet itself allows to make a global Facebook. But instead of solving the problems of technical debt and adoption for that, it's simpler to use a centralized service which was relatively easy to launch initially.
From Facebook (or others) you ultimately need 1) search of 1.a) contacts, 1.b) groups and 1.c) posts, 2) storage of 2.a) contacts, 2.b) groups and 2.c) posts, 3) universal forward identifiers of 3.a) contacts, 3.b) groups and 3.c) posts.
With cryptography and #3 you can use untrusted services for #1 and #2.
If they can be untrusted, services for #1 (indexer crawling the network and answering search requests in a standardized way, similar to RSS, maybe just with RSS ; the crawler service and the search result storage can be separated too) and #2 can be contributed to their respective pools like with SETI@home or other projects.
There is the question of a financial incentive to providing such a service. That can be done with using, say, (maybe number 4), a pool of billing services. A user makes a payment and before requesting a search service or a storage service, requests a billing service on which they are registered, providing it with the identifier of a resource they are going to use, that billing service and that resource interact in the sense of payment in background, giving the user a token with which they request the service itself. To pay for used storage or a heavy search request (or a request above a threshold).
Well, that looks ugly, maybe some other way is possible.
Those search results from search services and objects fetched from storage services are presented in a native application similar to Facebook, perhaps.
Contacts would be just PKI certificates or something, with a valid certificate for a registrar domain someplace in chain.
So you'd request in DNS (or someplace else, I dunno) pool.search.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform indexer services, pool.store.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform storage services (if we don't have a paid service saved, probably even encrypted on some available storage service), pool.relay.nihilsoc.org of a bunch of notification servers similar to IRC (except not used for chat directly, or maybe even that), pool.billing.nihilsoc.org to pay for services requiring it. It wouldn't matter much which ones you'd hit, because every post, contact and group identifiers would be global, containing parent identifiers and such.
It would supposedly be seamless for the user. You search for a group on a few indexers, you get a few lists of results showing on which storage services it's present and how much of it, you deduplicate those and you ask those directly by global identifiers, check signatures yadda-yadda.
Seems very archaic, I dunno why nobody is doing this, probably because things seeming simple are complex.
###
OK, about smartphones and casinos - just like the way to fight gambling lies in knowing that the casino always wins and there's no luck, the way to fight enshittification lies in users caring what they use. Yep, technologies and systems involved are complex, then maybe those should be made simpler for users to understand. Simpler inside, like OpenBSD, not simpler outside, like ChatGPT.
Software side too: Linux's deliberate choice to not have a stable driver interface is detrimental to atomic distros with the usually shitty proprietary vendor drivers. Causing you to get no updates after a few years or get a new device.
Which is why i think BSD would have been a better fit for Android.
TL;DR: what you'd expect. Boring gangster disputes. A gangster laid the blame on him partially for killing an associate of the gangster, with little to no evidence. So they killed him publically to maintain street cred.
Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal (TK) has ruled that European Union energy and climate regulations are incompatible with the Polish constitution and breach national sovereignty in determining energy policy.
The Tribunal found that EU institutions, including the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), had exceeded their competences by interpreting EU treaties in a way that significantly impacts Poland’s ability to choose its energy sources independently.
Interpretations of EU law “cannot mean that Poland loses control over the scope of its delegated competences, and thus that there are areas in which its sovereignty (here: energy) is not protected”, the court said in a statement announcing its decision.
However, the ruling is unlikely to have any real effect for now given that the current government, a coalition led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, does not recognise the TK’s legitimacy due to it containing judges unlawfully appointed by the former Law and Justice (PiS) administration.
The case was brought by a group of opposition lawmakers led by Sebastian Kaleta, a PiS MP and former deputy justice minister. The motion challenged the compatibility of EU climate rules – including Directive 2003/87/EC, which created the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) – with the Polish constitution.
The MPs argued that, although Poland had transferred some powers to Brussels, it should retain sovereignty over critical energy decisions. They claimed that mandatory participation in the EU ETS restricts economic freedom and undermines the state’s ability to ensure energy security.
They also warned that EU decision-making processes, which do not require unanimity in the European Council on issues affecting Poland’s energy mix, might breach the limits of competence conferred on the EU and undermine the primacy of the Polish constitution.
In its ruling, the TK agreed with the motion’s core arguments. It held that the CJEU had extended the interpretation of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union beyond the conferred competences, infringing on national sovereignty.
“Competences not conferred on the European Union belong to the member states themselves, and the EU can only act on the basis of the principle of subsidiarity, subject to the scrutiny of national parliaments at all times,” the court said.
Consequently, the TK found this interpretation of EU law to be incompatible with the Polish constitution, emphasising that Poland cannot lose control over the scope of delegated powers, especially in such a key area as energy sovereignty.
The TK, however, discontinued proceedings relating specifically to the ETS “due to the incomplete, from a formal point of view, definition of the object under verification”.
The TK concluded its statement by stating that it was now up to the Polish legislature and executive to take “appropriate public law measures” to implement the decision, which enters into force upon its publication.
However, it is the government that is responsible for publishing TK rulings, and it refuses to do so due to given that some of the tribunal’s judges were illegitimately appointed under PiS.
The ruling could still reverberate in Polish politics, however. The PiS-aligned president-elect, Karol Nawrocki, who takes office in August, said last month that the TK’s decision on this case could be a way to lower the electricity prices by 33% – one of his campaign promises.
He also pledged to hold a referendum on withdrawing from the EU’s Green Deal – a set of policies aimed at reaching climate neutrality by 2050 – and reaffirmed his support for coal, which remains Poland’s main source of electricity generation and is also widely used for heating homes.
PiS politicians welcomed the verdict, insisting that it means that Poland does not have to implement the Green Deal.
“The EU has not been given the competence to decide without the consent of Poland which energy sources we can use and what fiscal burdens may be imposed on individual sources,” Kaleta wrote on X. “This opens the path for a radical reduction in electricity and heating prices now.”
The former justice minister in the PiS government, Zbigniew Ziobro, meanwhile, challenged Tusk, asking if he would “break the law again and hide the verdict to drive Poles into poverty” or “will you behave as you should?”
The government has so far not commented on the TK’s ruling.
Its always so short sighted. Get a couple votes with issues like this, but in the lifetime of everyone who voted in favor of this, climate change will cause huge issues.
Thing is the TK is not an institution supported by the current government. Its judges were illegally appointed by PiS (the previous government) and now only serve to politically posture.
Thr German Constitutional Court ruled something like this as well (regarding EU financial policies, EU bonds). The consequences? Well you have to change your national law, push the EU to change the policies, or eventually face consequences. This conflict is not resolved yet afaik, but otherwise it's business as usual
Police in northwestern China are cracking down on writers of online erotic fiction across the country, including many college students, according to RFA sources and media reports, amid concern that officers are punishing people outside their jurisdiction.
Police in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, have been summoning writers who don’t even live there. A report from Caixin media group said some have been referred to police for prosecution, and anecdotal evidence indicates writers are facing substantial fines.
A source who spoke to Radio Free Asia on condition of anonymity for safety reasons said the crackdown could involve 200-300 writers.
Their cases have also sparked a legal debate over the definition of “obscene materials” and renewed public discussion on the boundaries of creative freedom. Known as “Danmei,” the genre features romantic relationships between male characters. It originated in Japan and has become popular in China.
Amid tightened restrictions in China, many writers have turned to Haitang Culture, a Taiwanese-based adult fiction website established in 2015 to publish their work. The website on the democratic island doesn’t force censorship and allows explicit written content. Most readers are females.
Authorities in China have reacted. Last year, two China-based distributors affiliated with Haitang Culture were arrested for “assisting in information network criminal activities,” according to Shuiping Jiyuan, a news portal on the WeChat social media platform.
The recent police crackdown in Lanzhou followed similar moves in the eastern province of Anhui in June 2024, where authorities began arresting writers of online erotic fiction under the charge of “producing and distributing obscene materials for profit,” resulting in heavy fines and even prison sentences.
Police are seeking out writers even when they leave outside their jurisdiction - a practice that critics call “offshore fishing,” implying the motive of police is financial or political, rather than strictly legal.
“I don’t understand what they’re trying to do—are they pushing political correctness, or are they just desperate for money?” said Liu Yang, a veteran media professional in Lanzhou, told Radio Free Asia. “The police are short on funds, and now even arrests have become a way to make money.”
I don't think saying state-funded media is untrustworthy as a reply to a comment saying state-funded media is untrustworthy is the gotcha you think it is.
L’ostinato verme geometride avanza, avanza con possenza sotto l’irto zoccolo di pietra. Facendo uso di una testa dove tutto è un disco diamantato e i denti rotativi non cagionano ragioni o procurano alcun senso di riposo agli osservatori.
There is a direct powerlaw relationship between CO2 & Earth's stabilization-temperature..
There's a gotcha, though:
Methane is about 82.5x as potent as CO2, at the 20y scale, & it's up, too..
Remember that scientific-paper which was held-back/suppressed until sooo many had vetted the math, that then it was allowed to be, but was attacked by many, yet-still?
It stated simply that methane lost through leaky shipping ( of methane ), etc, was sooo harmful, that there wasn't any way of justifying continued methane-usage..
The current planetary-equalization-temperature, given the chemical composition of the atmosphere, is over +8C.
All the models which contradict that, & which simultaneously contradict the actual MEASURED temperatures in the still-accelerating punctuation-between-temperate-planet-and-hot-planet-equlibrium-climates, are wrong, no matter how "politically established" they are.
Feynman was right: "the exception proves the model/rule/theory IS WRONG."
At +4C, India becomes mostly-uninhabitable. China has ZERO problem with that.
California, & Texas, & Saudi Arabia also become nearly-entirely uninhabitable ( think 50+C temperatures, throughout most, in the hottest summer days ).
+9C is where we're currently anchoring onto, and at this point it's just nihilism ruling the world, lording the final "days" over the subjects-of-the-"titanic" regime, narcissistic authority-over-others, consuming all they can, while crashing the world-"ship"..
Saudi Arabia, obviously, will simply take whatever other-territory it needs: it is a kingdom, not a civil-rights regime.
Who will Texas war against, to take territory permanently from them, when Texas is becoming uninhabitable?
Somebody, certainly..
Whom will the US of A take/destroy/possess, when climate-punctuation is forcing them from their established location? Canada.
Do you see part of why Trump is committed to butchering Canada from Canadians, now? It's actually a SURVIVAL OF THE US strategy, though that isn't his personal motivation: he just wants to be ruler of a continental-empire, then butcher the hated woke-EU, with Putin, so they can rule the entire West, unfettered..
Criminally-negligent own-species-icide, is what humankind's doing.. for sake of .. distractions, ideologies, & other "political" drugs/delusions..
===
Here is the paper which ignores the methane, including only the CO2 ( of the part that I read, of it, at least.. )
Adding-in the methane puts planetary-equlibrium-temperature, on the numbers I ran a year or 2 ago, between +8 & +9C.
Now, of course, the numbers are worse..
===
.. shruggeth ..
EITHER a portion of humankind is going to evolve, fast, relentlessly, drivenly, for most of this century,
XOR The Great Filter will force-extinguish this world's human-category kind from Universe.
I believe that that same species-"puberty", aka The Great Filter, controls ALL such populated-worlds, forcing maturation-or-extinguishment on every last one. Given the ratio ( who WON'T tolerate change/growing-up, and if it means killing the world, then they're going to at-least be the rulers of the destruction-of-our-world, breaking evolution from having its transforming our world, .. vs .. all who honestly-will evolve, no matter what it costs us ) on this world, I'd be surprised if more than a small percentage of worlds which reach the Industrial Revolutions survives the subsequent Great Filter..
when .. when adult-technology combines with animal/tribal/political population who now utterly-dominates their own ecology:
in the previous condition, nature always recovered, this unconscious-assumption is sooo ingrained, that unconscious-mind WON'T ALLOW that consequences/accountability COULD EVER touch it, .. & it's willing to kill the entire world, to prove that it "doesn't have to" grow-up/change: unconscious-ego, is "god", in its own "reality"..
===
If nothing-else, it certainly is educational to be caught in a world that is devoutly deranged, ideological, rejecting empiricism for "religious" ( political ) reasons, even to the point of everybody must die..
good motivation to break the reincarnation-prison that "life" is, the perpetual cycle of getting-caught-in-messes, life after life after life..
Not compatible with the New Age religions, that view, obviously..
but when you're on a bus being driven by a murderous gang of drunks, & you can't break their control of the vehicle, then crashing is inevitable..
one becomes tired of reincarnation, after it has abused one enough..
The Nature paper's the single most-important document in the whole climate-issue: powerlaws rule nature, & discovering what the powerlaw is that relates atmospheric-CO2 to planetary-equilibrium-temperature discards all the bullshit-models ( seriously: leaving-out Greenland ice-melt until the 2020's, & wondering why there's "The Cold Blob" all around Greenland, & why the oceanic-predictions don't work right.. that isn't science, that is politics! ),
but until the methane also is included, even this paper/model is mis-assessing, significantly.
The more people who get the underlying-powerlaw, who get the law ruling this planet's punctuation-between-temperate-to-hot-climate, which has only begun, the better.
The stuff about reincarnation, .. it was reincarnation-memories which broke all the Abrahamic-religions, for me: evidence broke the ideology of those religions, falsifying them all.
Took years to adapt-to, so-great a worldview-change.. but changing one's worldview when evidence falsified it, that is Science.
I'm only leaving the re-incarnation stuff in, because among White culture, such truth isn't usually spoken, & if anyone needs that perspective, to break the assumptions/ideology of Western habitual belief, then maybe just seeing a different perspective will give them some leverage, so they can then do their own learning, on their own, through the meditation-experiments, the inner-yoga experiments, the deepening-of-one's-Self, until ego is dissolving, & Soul/Continuum is awakening..
I get your point, but calling it a war zone is exactly what right wing media wants everyone to hear. It's a protest, we've had one every single weekend since 1/20, in nearly every state, and nobody needed to call the NG.
Let it not go unsaid: fuck waymo, I'm happy to see those death traps burn.
Sure, this wasn't that dangerous, but knowing that you gotta call Customer Service to get the car to stop in case of emergency is pretty bad design, safety wise.
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Doesn't sound too death trappy. Driverless vehicles hold the potential to save many thousands of lives. We should demand the best in the process of transition, and there's no reason to be corporate schills, but fear mongering this technology only slows progress.
A driverless car without an emergency stop button IS a death trap. Arguing that this is not so is just really dumb, sorry. All big machinery have emergency stops for a reason, and the laws for those reasons usually are written in blood.
A driverless car without an emergency stop is a disaster in the making
Have you been in one of these vehicles? There is an emergency stop. It's just not a brake. Are you assuming that people can better predict when it's safe to stop emergently? I've never seen data that shows that. If you are in a panic situation the emergency stop pulls over and stops as soon as it can do so safely. You can't break a bus or a train or a taxi. As a passenger you can request any of those to stop when safe to do so. Cars are death traps. People are dying in cars all the time. Driverless vehicles are a safer option and saying otherwise is either ignorance or pushing a luddite agenda.
I agree that it would be safer eventually, but also, testing in vitae might not be the good way to do it. Sure, testing in prod is fast, but there is a reason we don't do it.
Closed course testing has been near perfect. At some point it needs to be real world tested. It's arguably already far safer than human performance. That seems like a reasonable threshold for prod testing. If this were a vaccine it would likely be on schedule already.
Assuming that what you say is true about closed course testing (and that they truly made an effort to replicate the dynamism of a city), why do they gotta test this snack dab in the middle of cities (where we should rather invest in public transportations anyway) instead of, I don't know, some trails in the woods, where there would also be a bunch of unknowns?
All this reeks of "gotta go to market ASAP to please the investors / shareholders above the rest of humanity" to me.
I work in an area adjacent to autonomous vehicles, and the primary reason has to do with data availability and stability of terrain. In the woods you're naturally going to have worse coverage of typical behaviors just because the set of observations is much wider ("anomalies" are more common). The terrain being less maintained also makes planning and perception much more critical. So in some sense, cities are ideal.
Some companies are specifically targeting offs road AVs, but as you can guess the primary use cases are going to be military.
Safety is not the main concern. Congestion is one, among many. Highly recommended to watch video on the subject, as it really opened my eyes. There are already reports of Teslas circling the block in residential neighborhoods in Austin for hours.
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Seeing so many disingenuous conservatives clutching their pearls about this, while being completely fine with unspeakably cruel shit they're doing to immigrants (including green card holders, and others who are here legally) is infuriating. Fucking shameful.
Property damage to insured vehicles owned by a corporation vs. actual human beings
Yeah, let's fix a faulty unreliable system with a faulty unpredictable technology that is also a programmable black box. And we will reach zero accountability for any errors that will likely happen.
Just like the UK, it always has been. It really screws with the narrative of billionaires trying not to pay for the health, infrastructure and welfare that allows them to extract their wealth.
The first rule of colonisation is to make the colonised pay for their colonisation. It's just that we all, collectively, forget that our governments colonise at home too.
The basic screen design is pathetic. When I do a search I want to see search results. The whole right half of the screen is taken by related searches (your example differs from mine where it puts that Wikipedia summary in the upper right). Then half of the left side is taken up by a "people also ask" block. That leaves a quarter of the screen for search results, which with their inefficient spacing, fits 2 whole results before needing to scroll! If I scroll down I get 7 more before needing to use paging.
When they first rolled it out, they asked for feedback. Good luck trying to find where to submit that.
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I love that we continue to fact check his speeches. He is just saying shit to people that will only believe him. If they are reading the fact check then they are already against him.
A person in this thread above here was talking about being politically unaware of Greta Thunberg. It is valuable to continue fact checking, both so we don’t normalize the lies and to catch any unaware people
In his deeply partisan speech at Fort Bragg, Trump made the baseless claim that the protests against immigration raids in LA are being led by paid “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion”.
And he's using this wording very intentionally; he's going to use this "foreign invasion" to justify martial law.
You know, if you happen to burn the white house down again, we'll just look the other way. This bag of money? Ohh, it's not a payment or a bribe. It's a thank you gift. Giving people money/gifts after the fact is OK according to this administration.
It's happening too quickly, actually, these bozos do not have the patience nor the discipline, they are following the dictator playbook quite closely, but even putin took decades. If they keep pressing this hard, they are not going to get their fascist takeover, they are going to get a civil war, which is probably more useful to China and russia and will probably drag them and allies in.
Putin took decades, but Hitler only took a few months. By the time German lawmakers realized what was happening, the reichstag fire was already done, and the night of the long knives was happening. They’re not playing by Putin’s example. A lot of what Trump and Musk were doing was pulled straight out of Hitler’s playbook.
Frankly, the thing that scares me the most is that you can hear the soldiers in the audience loudly booing at residents of LA on behalf of Trump, when prompted by Trump. That’s disgusting behavior, and should get them all reprimanded or discharged.
While I don’t necessarily have the default unchallenged respect/reverence for the military that most people do, at the very least I expect them to act professionally and respectfully in their own country (since we know that’s often way too much to ask when they’re sent abroad). Fuck any solider who openly acts on their political views, and fuck every soldier that doesn’t refuse an illegal order. You volunteered to do this, so you better do it right.
The weird thing with Jared Leto is that I've never felt he's been very successful, yet he's always had bunch of people hyping him. I can't think of him being a leading actor in anything I've ever seen. He's always been lower down the bill. You look at all his award nominations on IMDb and 90% of them are "supporting actor".
So why is he a name? I always put it down to him being involved with the "right" people in Hollywood. Those people obviously being very wrong.
Jared Leto. Actor: Dallas Buyers Club. Jared Leto is a very familiar face in recent film history. Although he has always been the lead vocals, rhythm guitar, and songwriter for American band Thirty Seconds to Mars, Leto is an accomplished actor merit…
I mean... he's had plenty of starring roles, and his acting has won him both awards and acclaim. Requiem for a Dream, Mr. Nobody, Dallas Buyers Club, House of Gucci, The Little Things - and that's not including his clunkers. He's still an in-demand actor with 30 years of work behind him. Not everyone makes a career that good in Hollywood.
I think he's an asshole. But he's a talented asshole.
I suppose you're right there - I was conflating Starring with Leading, which is different. He has a lot of starring roles, but only a few leading roles.
But its not like leading roles are the hallmarks of success, either. There are plenty of successful and iconic supporting/character actors out there who are absolutely successes and have raving fans. Its not a mark against his talent.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
I've been thinking recently about whether Oz would have been better as a PA senator, hindsight is a bitch. Fetterman is getting rightfully lit up in the news over basically everything recently. Has he made a difference for good on any policy versus what we could reasonably predict Oz would have done as senator?
I’ve been thinking recently about whether Oz would have been better as a PA senator, hindsight is a bitch.
He's probably doing more damage as head of Medicare and Medicaid then he would have as a senator. Maybe both would have happened, but there was more opportunity for him to fall out of Trump's graces if he had been in government for a few years.
Despite Fetterman’s turncoating, he has still voted with democrats most of the time. Oz would have voted MAGA on every bill. Fetterman sucks but Oz would have been worse.
There’s 2 things that annoy me about that. Well. 3.
The first is that even if his district isn’t filled with suites, they still would put on a suit or best they got for formal affairs and maybe do business casual.
They certainly would clean their clothes. Most days he looks like a slob with food stains and whatever else.
The third thing is it’s entirely possible to get suited tailored to your size. And it’s not that expensive, and we know he should be able to afford it on his salary.
If that’s a recent development, I’d give him a little grace because of the stroke (it doesn’t excuse turning fascist, but it does excuse messy eating). If not, he’s just a slob.
Haha, big funny, but literally downplaying and distracting from the real situation.
The place is called Butterworth's and it's where a lot of the top magas meet people outside official channels. They sit around in suits eating caviar and planning how they're going to break the world. A photojournalist could literally camp outside and basically show the world who is conspiring and lay out who is setting things up to fall. But they don't, and that should be pretty telling to people, if they knew.
On top of that the resturant is part owned by Nigel Farage, a racist brexit politician. You can just sit there and see different ambassadors walk in to chat up some of the most vile people in politics, and then not long after something horrendus is announced.
It's basically forecast for who will be involved in bad things to come. Articles like this are trying to point this out. And you making joke about it is literally helping them to get people not to look further into the situation.
The democrats should purge the party of these republicans dressed up (and not even convincingly) as democrats, but instead democrats welcome such characters with open arms and will promote them over progressives. If they want to stop people from thinking both parties are the same, they should really do something about this.
The Democrats want Fetterman and Friends to be in power. They want to enable the Fascists. This is intentionally and by design. The Democrats represent the same oligarchies interests like the Republicans.
They will not do anything about this, unless forced to. This is why it is crucial to build up an actually progressive third party and apply proper pressure from within the Democrats too, instead of all this "vote blue no matter who" bootlicking we have seen over the past years.
Forget the Democrats, the system as a whole needs to be rethought. Your elected representative should have to serve your wants and needs within a relatively narrow guardrail.
Elated to be wrong. You see, that is how being an adult works. Sometimes you are wrong, and when you are wrong about something with a positive outcome, you are happy that you were wrong.
but also, spending energy on prevention (the publicity) and then when the thing doesn’t occur saying “i guess we were wrong” is the wrong take i think
same thing with Y2K and plenty of engineering things: people were saying “it was no big deal! yall were saying planes were going to fall out of the sky! we wasted so much time and money!”… yeah; it was a huge and expensive effort that’s why the bad things didn’t happen
When the UN doesn’t stop the Israeli’s from declaring it a conflict zone. It’s technically not kidnapping. Just like how the US abducted people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
No. They never entered anywhere Israel is legally allowed to exclude even in war It being full of aid and verifiable non combatants.
It's kidnapping.
Just like how the US abducted people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Your example is also kidnapping but even excluding that bit of nuance the key word is "in" they never entered territorial waters and thus were never "in" Israel or Palestine. Israel can declare 1500mi of the coast of Somalia an exclusion zone then kidnap people there and that would make just as much sense in a legal view.
Gaza is under a declared blockade, Maritime Law (the oldest of international law) allows detaining any ship bound for a blockaded port. It's really cut and dry, they very publicly declared they were bound for a blockaded port. It's not like Israel boarded a ship that just happened to be in the area, these freedom flotilla yahoos very publicly declared they were bound for Gaza, which under Maritime Law permits Israel to board it.
International law is an agreement between nations and doesn't actually restrict nations from doing things that will hurt your feelings. You're going down the sovcit path when you pretend international law is whatever you want it to be.
It's not like Israel boarded a ship that just happened to be in the area,
That's exactly what happened, blockade borders have to be announced and ships have to be allowed time to leave the area. Israel left their blockade and kidnapped people aboard a ship they did not allow to leave an area they weren't in.
these freedom flotilla yahoos very publicly declared they were bound for Gaza, which under Maritime Law permits Israel to board it.
Once they breach the blockade yes arguably though with only aid that gets more complex. Essentially aid entry is allowed so long as you agree to security arrangements that are both reasonable and lawful. That could mean Israel could board and search, or doesn't mean they can blockade all aid to starve a population which is specifically and in multiple very very illegal.
Their sources section is awash with good relevant information and specifically findings on the last Israeli famous Israeli blockade and subsequent boarding (and death of iirc 9) which was found to be a legal blockade so long as the purpose was not starvation and aid could enter with security arrangements.
An operation involving naval and air forces by which a belligerent completely prevents movement by sea from or to a port or coast belonging to or occupied by an enemy belligerent. To be mandatory, that is, for third States to be obliged to respect it, the blockade must be effective. This means that it must be maintained by a force sufficient to prevent all access to the enemy coast.
So... according to the link you've provided Israel is actually required to board the ship or they can no longer prevent shipments of weapons coming from Iran?
Essentially aid entry is allowed so long as you agree to security arrangements that are both reasonable and lawful.
Has there been any indication these flotilla activists attempted to make such security arrangements with Israel?
Correct to an extent, the accepted meaning is that they must agree to security measures to pass through. It is not and never has been a way to willfully prevent aid and aide staff into combat zones.
They weren't in a blockaded zone as far as I'm aware, Israel only says they were approaching and providing intented destination as you must when attempting to pass through a blockade.
Even ignoring that they must be allowed to leave even if they enter the blockaded area without permission, it isn't a seize your property and imprison your crew for being in the general area openly providing intent kinda thing.
Correct, they hadn't entered the area yet though so they technically heeded their warning.
Stolen, if you take something from someone and dispense it as your own you're guilty of theft and conversion something they say Hamas does with aid. And moreover delivering aid doesn't negate the whole unlawful boarding, seizure and forcible human trafficking thing.
Outside the blockade area and on the high seas,34 belligerents relied on the practice of "visit and search"3s to stop vessels suspected of carrying "con-traband" to the enemy.36 A belligerent warship sailing on the high seas had the right to visit and search all merchant vessels. Merchants found carrying enemy contraband were captured and escorted to the belligerent's nearest home port. The belligerent nation's prize court then determined the fate of the captured ship and cargo.37 In cases where merchants resisted either capture or visit and search, the blockading force was entitled to pursue and, if neces-sary, damage or destroy the vessel to force the ship to submit.
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belligerents today continue to enforce blockades from long distance or through blockade zones. They do so because of three twentieth-century developments in maritime warfare: first, the growing importance to belligerents of conducting economic warfare in conjunction with armed con-flict;s3 second, the introduction of a large array of new weapons to the maritime battlefield; and third, the proliferation of modern weapons to less powerful nations incapable of conducting traditional blockade. In combination, these three developments have forced states to replace traditional blockade form with long-distance blockade or blockade zones.
they very publicly declared they were bound for a blockaded port.
Not illegal.
which under Maritime Law permits Israel to board it.
Not detain and seize, maritime law is very specific in that a blockade cannot block aid unreasonably. A super famous ship you've searched that's filled solely with celebrities and aid is something you shouldn't turn away so long as they accept security arrangements like boarding and searching. This isn't star wars nor are they the trade union and total blockades like your implying are very illegal as defined by the law you're sourcing.
Something like that but the important thing is Israel is not claiming they entered the exclusion zone and similarly they even if they did the result is supposed to be being forcibly turned away not kidnapping and property theft.
The flotilla was told several times to turn around or be detained. They decided to not turn around and continued on their intended course to breach the naval blockade.
According to international maritime law Israel can intercept and detain before they enter.
Notice you never said they did breach the blockade which btw by international law they have to be given time and allowed to leave even if they enter without permission which they didn't do nor is Israel claiming they did.
Intercept and detain yes, board, seizur, deport and treat as their own... No because duh.
Yeah it's real typical for kidnappings to be publicly known, announced in advance and then the victim safetly returned promptly, entirely unharmed. Im sure you can fram it as a kidnapping with some backflips, but you just look like a whiny child. She was captured and held unlawfully sure, but if it was actually for humanitarian aid and not self publicity, i might have some sympathy.
I mean, honestly it worked for privateers. Hold up a ship, steal their gold and liquor, leave a month's rations, and sail on. Come to think of it, old school pirates probably had more empathy than Israeli leaders...
Can't really agree with you on this one. I would welcome and fight for more people doing the right thing for personal benefit. Seems a lot better than the current circumstances.
Yes. The only tatoo idea I have for myself involves dice, chains, and the words "Let's tempt Fate." While I would prefer an ideal situation, it's taking too long. I will support any act that brings aid, supplies, or more notoriety to the plight of Gaza. Even Al-Capone had a soup kitchen for the hungry Chicagans of the Great Depression.
If you want this conflict to end the last thing you want to give it is more noteriety. The only reason this is still happening is because of outside influences.
Can you please elaborate on that connection from your perspective. I imagine there must be some context I am overlooking.
Willful ignorance of atrocities does not have any chance of stopping or slowing them. Source: Russian Gulags, North Korea, US native women murders/trafficking, Auschwitz.
All the shouting and "notoriety" just makes it worse. Turns it into a spectacle instead of actually fixing anything. Sometimes, less outside noise is exactly what's needed for people to sort their own mess out. Wayne Dyer said, "Conflict cannot survive without your participation."
Ahh yes, because that solves the bystander effect which is why Kitty Genovese did not die from being stabbed in 1964. Also why the Uvalde police are heros for not participating in that school shooting. /s
You still haven't explained any of your reasoning, so I will assume it is in bad faith.
Finally, your quote is about interpersonal conflict, not violence and murder. Mr. Dyer was a therapist.
You saying “In bad faith” = ~~i cant~~ I am not trying to meaningfully disagree with you
You can prove it's in good faith by explaining your resoning. i.e. How is it worse, specifically? How will they possibly "sort their own mess out"?
If you don't want to, that's fine. Spouting empty platitudes is all I've read the past two responses. Any more will be met with shitposts by me to match your energy.
Israel does not feel a need to hide their crimes because they believe any action they take is righteous because they are doing it and any action their enemies take is evil because they are doing it
What would you call intercepting someone in international waters and taking them back to your country without their consent? If Somali pirates did that you'd have no qualms using the word 'kidnapped'.
The blockade is illegal and israel didn't do it job to allow enough food and aid to enter which is an obligation. They are even shooting people seeking aid
She’s defintely an adult. But yeah apprehended in international waters, taken to a country that she didn’t chose to enter willingly, and then deported.
Yeah obviously they were there to enter they said it over and over… how else would aid get in if actually getting in wasn’t the plan? Even if they weren’t there to enter, for some reason, the fact that they said they were going to enter so many times would be considered credible
Adalah, an Israel-based non-governmental legal organization that is representing some of the activists, said that those who remain are being held in Givon Prison in Ramleh, central Israel.
So grab the passengers of a boat in international wares and jail them in Israel. 😒
In a statement to CNN, Israel said that it “is preventing the entry of all vessels into the Gaza Strip, in accordance with international law.”
Is there a charitable interpretation that could make this statement true?
International law doesn't put up any of those restrictions. As an illegal occupying force Israel is not allowed to dictate what the "proper" channels are.
The ship was nowhere near Gaza. They were off the coast of Egypt in International waters. Israel just kidnapped a bunch of people. Also they only released Greta? What about the other people?
Greta is one of four activists that have been sent home. According to Israel only those four signed the papers neededfor it and the rest are expected to be sent home after a court have ruled they can. Basically the remaining 8 activists reportedly chose not to give Israel the easy way of getting rid of them. I don’t have any English news sources though, as I read it in a newspaper in my native language.
Palestine is not a recognized country in most of the western world, which in itself is a travesty, but you can probably infer a lot of bs from that.
That's not even true.
As of March 2025, the State of Palestine is recognized as a sovereign state by 147 of the 193 member states of the United Nations, or just over 75% of all UN members. It has been a non-member observer state of the United Nations General Assembly since November 2012.
75% of the world recognizes Palestine as a sovereign state.
To be fair, they specified “western world”. If you look at the map of countries that recognize Palestine, it’s pretty glaring that a good chunk of Europe, Canada/US, and Australia/NZ don’t officially recognize it.
What is her job? Going around the world with seemingly unlimited funds and giving some interviews? Just sounds like a Kardashian with extra steps.
Yes, she did. She provided mutual aid. She might not have saved the entire world, but no one ever does. She helped a few, and that is more than anyone could say about you.
Did she ever accomplish anything other than going to places getting arrested and changing absolutely nothing?
It's got you here talking about it with your terrible opinions, hasn't it?
Take a look at this image and tell me if you think these guys accomplished anything other than going to a lunch counter and getting arrested and changing "absolutely nothing"?
What's your job? Whining and bitching about someone doing something that takes more courage than your dumb ass will cumulatively muster over the entirety of your life?
It's actually gotten worse. The management of CNN changed recentlyish and has been pushing CNN more to the right. I think it was to increase viewership, but ultimately just means the quality (not that it was very high to begin with) has dropped.
Intercepting a ship that intends to run a blockade in international waters is legal according to international law. The flotilla had stated its intention repeatedly and were warned several times before being intercepted and finally boarded.
That assumes the blockade is legal though? Has an international court that is recognized by the ship’s flag country declared the legality of the blockade?
I honestly didn't expect her to survive this one. She made it publicly known what she was doing so Israel couldn't say it was a normal bombing of transport ships. But I figured they would use her as an example and destroy the ship.
I dunno. If you can get away with murdering civilians, children, aid workers and journalists. Maybe you want to start testing if you can get away with murdering celebrities.
Canadian authorities have returned more than 1,600 asylum seekers to the United States in 2025 without hearing their case for refugee protection, according to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). Many have landed in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
The removals are a product of the longstanding Safe Third Country Agreement, which requires anyone seeking refugee protection in Canada or the U.S. to claim asylum in the first of the two countries they reach.
I understand why they've had that agreement. However, it should've been obvious for some time now that maybe that's an agreement they should bin? It's blatantly obvious the us don't treat refugees/asylum seekers the way they deserve at the moment
Yep. Politicians and the kind of people that hang out with politicians seem to be behind the curve on understanding what's happening, but even they must know this by now. The trick is that rolling it back could provoke Trump, and they're trying to keep that to a minimum at the moment.
That being said, if Carney doesn't fix the rules within the next year I'm going to be very disappointed. The courts will probably strike it down eventually regardless.
Folks have been suing the gov about the Safe Third a country agreement since 2005 - opposition isn't new. And yes, the courts did strike it down but the gov appealed, and it's still under review.
This page has historical information about the Safe Third Country Agreement. More the main page about Safe Third Country, with current information, see ccrweb.ca/en/safe-third-country.
I mean, in 2005 the US was a lot closer to Canada on multiple fronts when it comes to human rights. I'm kind of surprised that the court sided with the challengers - and not at all surprised the decision was successfully appealed in 2009, which you probably should mention.
It was successfully appealed in 2008, if we're being picky.
The appeal was based in the fact that the judge found that the basis upon which a regulation was made (i.e. the position that the states is a safe country) does not have to be absolutely correct, so long as the gov considered if it might be true.
[57] Understanding precisely what is in issue in a judicial review application is important when it comes time to determine the standard of review as well as the scope of the review that can be conducted by the Court. An attack aimed at the vires of a regulation involves the narrow question of whether the conditions precedent set out by Parliament for the exercise of the delegated authority are present at the time of the promulgation, an issue that invariably calls for a standard of correctness.
...
[60] Despite this language, the matter raised by the application is a pure vires issue (see the relevant part of the application for judicial review quoted at paragraph 15 above).
...
[78] Subsection 101(2) does not refer to “actual” compliance or compliance “in absolute terms” nor does it otherwise specify the type and extent of compliance contemplated. However, Parliament has specified the four factors to be considered in determining whether a country can be designated. These factors are general in nature and are indicative of Parliament’s intent that the matter of compliance be assessed on the basis of an appreciation by the GIC of the country’s policies, practices and human rights record. Once it is accepted, as it must be in this case, that the GIC has given due consideration to these four factors, and formed the opinion that the candidate country is compliant with the relevant Articles of the Conventions, there is nothing left to be reviewed judicially. I stress that there is no suggestion in this case that the GIC acted in bad faith or for an improper purpose.
I mentioned it was challenged back then to demonstrate that it's been known to be problematic since the beginning.
If we want to follow along with the details there have been further challenges, started in 2017, which were on the basis that it violated the charter. The courts agreed in 2020, but again it was appealed and the court gave it's ruling in 2023: decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/s…
I remember watching Trudeau respond to this in 2020, when he was doing his daily appearances from the governor generals cottage.
I'm not trying to shame anyone for not knowing, I get that there is a lot going on in the world and people are struggling in an individual basis too. But it really shocks me when are surprised that it's not all sunshine and rainbows and open arms. I actually learned about it in 2017, when the PM was on TV saying canada would welcome people. Not if they are being deported from the US, I guess 🤷🏻♀️
Web Experience Toolkit (WET) includes reusable components for building and maintaining innovative Web sites that are accessible, usable, and interoperable.
What's that look like? We don't vote Red* because we like all the policies, but because the only alternative capable of pulling even a minority would be Trump levels of disastrous for us all.
So, would "disappointment" just be a harder grimace while continuing to vote to block the blue*?
*Note that in my country the blues are like Republicans and reds are the business-friendly investment/consolidated socialist-adjacents at centre of our spectrum.
Which is such a shortsighted move because as soon as all the news portals close shop Google's scraper will have nothing relevant to summarize and is gonna be shit.
In the context of my original comment, social media companies like Meta and Reddit have fought tooth and nail to not be considered news networks or news outlets specifically because they don't want to be beholden to the laws that regulate news outlets/networks. Jeopardizing their ineligibility to be sued for what users post (in the US) by going all in on AI LLM's scrapers when those scrapers rely pretty heavily on news networks and other media to stay useful means they'll starve themselves of AI scraped content, and that they'll potentially forfeit what protections against lawsuits they have. It's a no win situation for them to continue to bet on AI which has already largely reached the limit of what it's capable of in current iterations because of the lack of clean organic training data.
I do respect your optimism, but realistically, I doubt they're forfeiting anything. Fox News broadcasts blatant lies daily. All they had to do was a behind the scenes rebranding.
It's a huge disaster in the making. There's probably a game theory model that explains what's happening but damned if i know it. AI is a trap.
At the beginning of LLMs as a consumer tech phase, the big tech companies believed that they would soon generate synthetic data without human labor costs. But synthetic data caused model collapse when used as training data. So they still need humans.
But now their competitors are using scrapers and summarizers and those are expensive so they have to extract more value from search traffic and that means fewer referrals to sites. Fewer referrals to sites reduces original content and leadabto less traffic and training data for their models.
The only two ways out are to create an international regulatory body ornto break up facebook, microspft, and google.
google search has been trash even before llms, i believe its one of the reasons chatgpt got so much traction. first 2 pages are just generic slop with paywalled or ad-infested content.
i switched to kagi 2 years ago and its has relevant results on page 1 that i won’t get in google even after 10s of pages. plus i don’t bombed with ads for that term for weeks.
Yeah, asking an LLM simple stuff that Google used to just give you at the top of the search before the AI Overview was a thing, like how old is X celebrity or for a high level example of code, or as a stupidly complex spell checker it is pretty good.
Usually I would be digging through some old forums for examples from 10 years ago. Or searching stack exchange. Personally, my usage is scripting and programming sites has totally deminish.
I still find it weird that people don’t use Kagi for search. At least start page or ddg. Google hasn’t been useful for five ish years and admitted in court that they damaged results to prop up ads.
I used Kagi for a few months when other engines failed. It did come through a few times. But paying $5 a month to get one extra good search result per month was a hard sell for me. If they offered a much much smaller package of lime 20-50 searches per month or just pay as you go, I'd definitely be in.
No, making money is not a legal obligation. CEO at my last job told the board, two years in a row, that intended to lose money so we could invest in our people and tech. They cheered him.
there are many ways to fulfil this “obligation”… i’d argue that he’s increasing alphabet stock price in the short term but long term what the fuck is going to happen when the sources all go out of business?
… oh right they’re going to become a news monopoly… cool cool cool
regardless, i think there’s an argument to be made with all this “we are evil because it’s our legal duty to shareholders” that evil is a bad long-term choice. i think boeing is the prime example: if they weren’t “too big to fail” they’d be fucked because of their short term thinking
The sad part is this is actually his job description and Alphabet could get sued by shareholders if he didn‘t do exactly that. The stock market needs to be criminalized, not glorified as the one truth like it‘s treated right now.
Ad supported articles is a dead industry, Google realizes this better than anyone. People don't go to the source anymore to answer curiosities, why would you read a whole article to answer a simple question when AI gives you the answer directly?
I'm about as anti-corporation a person as you'll find, but I don't think we should be cheering the death of the Free Press. I know it's edgy to say "it's already here", but that's just not accurate. When true journalists are gone, the only thing left will be propaganda.
Did I say I support billionaire owned press? "Free press", or the 4th pillar of democracy is a concept. When done correctly, it keeps authorities in check by openly and honestly reporting what is happening with real facts and information.
One of the problems that the major news outlets have is that they repeat each other. It's not merely an issue of AI compiling news stories, but that on top of the fact that all of these newspapers are doing hardly any research. For example, if you live in a town that's not too large, there might only be one local paper, and they might send out reporters to local events. Obviously you would then go to that newspaper if you wanted to learn about local events, because they are adding explicit value.
But if you're trying to read about national politics, a lot of the information is going to be the same in a lot of the newspapers. Which means nobody cares about the newspaper itself. And this is a creation of the newspaper's own decision making over the past few decades.
I'd say their decision making was mostly forced by their drop in ad revenue and subscriptions forced by the internet.
Though I do wish that someone would make a Spotify for news so that I could pay once and get access to all of them and at least give them 10 cents per article or something, because I will never pay the subscription cost any are asking.
As much as I'd like to support them, the price to utility ratio is way the fuck off at the prices they ask now.
I'm okay except for the walled garden part. I get referred to articles in many ways, none of them in Apple News. If I can ever log into the actual publications sites with my Apple ID and get the article, then I'm on.
That's not an experience I'm willing to pay for in its current form. But I could definitely see a path for it to become one, thanks for putting it on my radar.
yeah for sure… i get it with apple one because i actively use music, drive, and tv+… certainly wouldn’t subscribe to it on its own, because you’re absolutely right: it’s too much of a hassle
The government broke up standard oil right? The current government has no beef with AI, in fact, it seems to be poring money into it. I am talking about Google vs the news sites.
Most news sites ask me to consent to google tracking or pay, neither of which am I prepared to do in almost all cases. I am sure I am not alone in this. Their decision to align with google in this way is more than a turn off, it is an indication of their untrustworthiness.
I shouldn't need to explain why I do everything I can to avoid being tracked by the likes of google. The idea that I will pay to be subject to propaganda died with the 20th century. If news outlets want my eyes on their pages they need to come up with a way to make it worth my time.
We need new search. Really we need a new web.
Blockchain's immutability might serve a public record of 'news', even moreso if combined with certificate verified identity on information disseminating 'social' media. The blockchain could actually be useful in this case. You don't have to link your irl identity to your internet identity everywhere, but it might not be a bad idea in the areas of information disseminating social media. These are just idle thoughts.
Edit - I saw a post today purporting to be a twitter screen grab of a James Woods post with a reply. The James Woods post was a screengrab of a video, supposedly of the current LA riots, with a comment along the lines of: Democrats can't talk about peaceful protest and support this. Following this was a reply saying 'this video is from 2020'.
I have no idea if either or both of these tweets happened, if the video was from 2020, or if either person were who they said they were! With the blockchain's immutability you could verify all of this automatically, and algorithmically reduce the reach of repeat offenders' posts.
There is a lot of value in this in terms of public discourse.
Similar processes could happen with both scientific/academic papers and government policy v. outcomes.
With what passes for news these days at most outlets I can't say I feel too bad for them that someone else beat them at their own game of feeding the masses surface level doom scrolling slop for engagement and ad impressions.
Hell, a large chunk of the junk being put out by these same outlets is trash written by the AI solutions they are paying for. Probably solutions from the likes of Google that is giving it to them at both ends.
Once the snake finishes eating its own tail maybe the good reporters will still have somewhere that pays them for the good work they do.
A tech and online culture publication by Taylor Lorenz, featuring original reporting on how the internet is reshaping politics, business, media, and culture.
Cruxifux
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givesomefucks
in reply to Cruxifux • • •Which is still a big deal.
Like abhorrent it's that high. But I remember people swearing 40% was the floor and due to the cult it could never go lower.
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vaultdweller013
in reply to givesomefucks • • •Cults break down, a good example is something like Sinnanon where up until the authoritarian tendencies kicked in it managed to maintain a pretty decent size. Then they went full authoritarian and the cult started to bleed numbers.
Personally my bet is that Trump can go as low as 20 percent approval, though it'll require some specialized circumstances or shit just getting worse all around.
mkwt
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in reply to Boomer Humor Doomergod • • •He pre-dates ALL CAPS. For him, that means it’s a new paragraph in a legal document or he forgot to turn off caps lock.
He’ll underline it instead.
Optional
in reply to CaptDust • • •miss_demeanour
in reply to Tolookah • • •cabron_offsets
in reply to CaptDust • • •criss_cross
in reply to CaptDust • • •This is where he goes “see! Now we wait till the midterms before attempting anything “
Spineless fucks
SnarkoPolo
in reply to CaptDust • • •Baron Von J
in reply to SnarkoPolo • • •chilicheeselies
in reply to CaptDust • • •henfredemars
in reply to Redditsux • • •like this
RandomStickman e KaRunChiy like this.
MrVilliam
in reply to henfredemars • • •like this
KaRunChiy likes this.
𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍
in reply to MrVilliam • • •Maybe someone should write a play that is all about Christopher Columbus and Confederate generals who go hunting for fun at Maralago. Like a reverse Most Dangerous Game. Start a rumor that there's a nude scene of Ivanka Trump.
He will 100% go to that
altphoto
in reply to 𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍 • • •Optional
in reply to henfredemars • • •SnarkoPolo
in reply to henfredemars • • •jrs100000
in reply to henfredemars • • •brucethemoose
in reply to Redditsux • • •Sorry, but… why link mediaite instead of the original source?
poll.qu.edu/poll-release?relea…
It’s title/writing is more grounded, and it’s the source of the poll.
Majority Of Voters Oppose GOP Budget Bill, With Just 67% Of Republicans In Support, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Trump Job Approval: 38%, His Handling Of Russia - Ukraine War Lowest Among List Of Issues | Quinnipiac University Poll
poll.qu.edulike this
doc, KaRunChiy e dcpDarkMatter like this.
LupusBlackfur
in reply to Redditsux • • •Usually one of Mafia Don "TACO" Mangolini's "better" performing polls... If "better" means "favorable".
😂 🤣 🤡 🖕 💩
like this
dcpDarkMatter likes this.
SnarkoPolo
in reply to Redditsux • • •dinren
in reply to SnarkoPolo • • •Well, no one stops him so he must not be that unpopular.
(Unfortunately)
altphoto
in reply to Redditsux • • •manxu
in reply to Redditsux • • •WHO are these people that haven't heard enough about him? And WHY isn't there "I have heard way too much about him" option in the poll?
Diplomjodler
in reply to manxu • • •Mad__vegan
in reply to Diplomjodler • • •Diplomjodler
in reply to Mad__vegan • • •prole
in reply to manxu • • •DragonTypeWyvern
in reply to prole • • •That accounts for 10% of them.
30% of humanity just doesn't count as sentient.
prole
in reply to Redditsux • • •tehn00bi
in reply to prole • • •ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ
in reply to Redditsux • • •