The Dutch and Irish levers this writer envisions sound like paper straws to me. It would be in everyone’s interest to make Ireland less friendly to the tech giants. But Irish butter is not going to make up the losses if they sour the tech milk. It’s also unlikely that The Netherlands would be willing to take one for the team here without a price tag. One whose amount will be shrinking fast as Chinese companies backwards engineer their chip making techniques by hiring former engineers from that company. Don’t hold your breath that the EU will get the needle out. The US may have to go it alone.

Use the same country for the VPN as you’re in. Same or neighboring state in the US. And then stay on that server. There is always a risk. I decided I would bail on the account if they ever wanted more from me. 2y in and knocking on wood.

Pixelfed is really a lean back experience so engagement will be lower. You can just go for a Mastodon account and you’ll be able to promote it on Pixelfed; they will just miss out on all text only posts for the time being.

I have started running an Instagram account for a niche thing that after the heat death of Twitter shifted its attention to Insta. I was one of those insufferable Facebook leavers in the mid teens and had deleted my own FB and Insta accounts. So I created a new one. But I’ve never accessed it without a VPN. To get all the functions I’m running the app on an old phone under permanent, dead man switch VPN connection. And crucially it’s a phone that never had Insta installed on it before when I was using it under my main driver account.

And I’m using it because the interaction is there. In the decade I wasn’t on Insta it has turned to shit. And it’s no longer the app to share pictures. If you want people who appreciate just good pictures, maybe try Pixelfed instead.

The web doesn’t allow you to do all the things you can do on the app.

I’m sure they love you for having that opinion. I only read their stuff when it pops up here. Maybe they also do actual journalism. This piece here is a biased, yet eloquently written retelling of like three moments that happened in a podcast. The news value is hardly detectable.

Man, of inexplicable fame, with strange opinions is temporarily caught out. Hold the press!

Maybe we should stop looking at what futurism is writing about because it seems to me that they are just writing tabloid stories for people who don’t like so-called AI. I think this is the third time I clicked through on a link and am left with regret to have added to their page views.

I don’t think there was an -ism that fits this bill. Feudalism’s end boss was enlightenment thinking and it had to play the level for a century before it could say it had beat it, at least feudalism in a traditional sense.

That would have to be transitional though. With most people gone, there would be nobody to control the power plants and networks and data centers. The internet would slowly die. The chatbot would have to be on the person’s private device that they need to power themselves.

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

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

I find none of these arguments convincing. You have the right to vote. Unless you’re in Australia that means you can just not go vote also. That’s your choice.

Voter turnout has an influence on the vote share the extremes of the political spectrum get. If you’re on the extreme, you tend to go vote for your cause because you found your calling. So if enough people in the middle choose not to participate, you’ll end up with difficult majorities and/or more extreme governments. The latter is also true if either extreme is convincing many of the people in the middle. And that’s where tactical voting comes in. That’s why I would personally lean towards a “go vote and vote for the best of the worst if nothing fits well” approach. But I wouldn’t elevate this to the level of an ‘electoral imperative’ because it is a personal choice.

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

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

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

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

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

The solution is education, teaching media savvyness. Maybe a few restrictions in the market and introducing oversight and costly liability. The political angle is secondary. Both extreme right and extreme left may lean towards not educating people to keep them servile. But that’s just using slop for their own ends.

If this is news to you: most obituaries are written and produced during the subject’s lifetime. Unless they leave life at a statistically unlikely age, the biggest chunks are in the can or pre-written so you can get a single person to do the voiceover over it all. Writers often start writing obits in the press. It lessens the burden of fact checking when the person actually punches their ticket.

So the Bidden footage was probably pre-produced. A similar package exists for the orange one as well. And Rob Reiner’s would have been done as well. Although certainly nobody would have anticipated the way he died.

At this point in time you must suspect so-called AI to have its tendrils lodged in a lot of this stuff. I would suspect this less at media companies that still have more than a handful of actual humans employed. So the networks are probably okay. On clickbait dot news I’d be more suspicious.

I think you’re onto something here. It may have to do with containing RAM.

I wouldn’t know. I ad block everything;)

Yes, I have. I have no issues with JPGs or PNGs but any other format is a gamble. If you have a recent post you can get to to check, maybe you can add what format that image was (or add the link to the post with the image if you’re okay with that)?

This is a dumb article. Something got 800 likes on Facebook? Wow. Something happened on X? WGAF?

The idea that this would be a partisan use case is BS. And yes, we’ll have a solid base of slop naïveté within the general population that will distribute more or less evenly along the political spectrum. But more often than not people question shit that seems to be too good to be true. They just don’t use Facebook any more because they have common sense. Turning this into the MAGAs vs. The Libs is utterly pointless and clickbaity and I regret having followed through on this link.