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kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

That's not quite how I learned it...

99 bugs in the code that I wrote,
99 bugs in the code;
do one real quick, mark it as fixed,
100 bugs in the code that I wrote.

What is a term to describe expressing one's opinions with links and memes instead of words?

My views on things often differ from those in my social circle. I am often bombarded with article links and videos from people with no words of their own attached. It is very easy to send a link. It takes a bit of effort to form a coherent paragraph expressing a single thought....

kbal, (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Illiteracy. People are addled by the constant barrage of propaganda, most of it in the form of advertising, its characteristic obsessions with superficial appearances, its constant reliance on lazy stereotypes, its overestimation of the worth of stupid jokes dressed up with a clever veneer, and its insipid pandering to the lowest common prejudices. Intellectual laziness and sloppy thinking based on learned heuristics rather than any kind of logic hace come to dominate our politics, our workplaces, our social lives, our whole culture. It has begun to sink in at an unconscious level and undermines the foundations of our socially constructed worldviews. It is the final victory of the Spectacle, the complete divorce of humanity's understanding of its own situation from the reality of it.

On the other hand, I like memes. They're funny.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Perhaps we need some more specific word than "privacy" for the right to freedom from automated mass surveillance in public spaces.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar
kbal, (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Whether or not they have it in the back of their greasy little minds somewhere that they'd like to kill of every alternative that can't be bought out instead, this is also facebook desperately trying to stay relevant. If they don't federate, it's all or nothing: Unless they become completely dominant in the field of mastodon-like social media services their product will be quickly forgotten. If they do federate, they have some chance to survive if only by being known as the one, alone among the current billion-user contenders, that does actually federate.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

The idea that "a computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human" was already obsolete 50 years ago with ELIZA. Clever though it was, examining the source code made it clear that it did not deserve to be called intelligent any more than does today's average toaster.

And then more recently, the ever-evolving chatbots have made it increasingly difficult to administer a meaningful Turing test over the past 30 years as well. It requires care and expertise. It can't be automated, and it can't be done by the average person who hasn't been specifically trained in it. They're much better at fooling people who've never talked to one before, but I think someone with lots of practice identifying the bots of 2013 would still have not much trouble catching out those of today.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

I have no interest in interacting with Threads myself, but I suppose it's good news for people who want to be on the fediverse but just can't manage going without being able to follow @burgerking or whatever.

kbal, (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Donatello, lay in a course for Rigel II. Warp 5. Cowabunga.

enzoesco, to fediverse Italian

Are you curious about Mastodon? Mammoth, the Google-funded app*, could be the app that will use all of you to destroy the Fediverse

I would like to know what you think of this post published here in Italian: is it exaggerated or is there a grain of truth?

@fediverse

Are you curious about Mastodon? Mammoth, the Google-funded app, could be the app that will use all of you to destroy the Fediverse*

Dear friends of decentralization, welcome to the end of the world!

One of the most serious limitations of Mastodon (not to mention other obscene software, such as the cumbersome Friendica or the toy Misskey) is that... it sucks!

No it's not true, it doesn't suck, in fact it has improved the ergonomics a lot, but compared to commercial social networks it still seems to be several years behind.

At the moment only Bluesky seems to do worse, but in that case we are actually talking about a dead fetus kept artificially alive by American journalists, so it's a bit out of competition...

** Did you want to know why I titled it “funded by Google”?*

The app is definitely well made and has some interesting new features.

The updated app will introduce a number of features designed to appeal to former X users, including personalized suggestions of accounts to follow, to help you rebuild your network on Mastodon, as well as curated “smart lists” that help you find interesting conversations that take place on Mastodon.

Mammoth will also integrate with the editorial staff of Flipboard, the social magazine app for curating news on topics from across the web through accounts such as News , Tech , Culture and Science. And it is a partner with Newsmast , another curator of news and communities on Mastodon, as well as Press.coop, which imports feeds from popular news websites into Mastodon. These integrations allow Mammoth 2 to create a number of other “smart lists,” including those for News, World News, Business, Tech, Environment, and Nature.

From Sarah Perez's article published December 7 on TechCrunch

In short, to use Mastodon more easily, users will give up the most important aspect offered by Mastodon: decentralization!

That's how: following other people's lists, integrating rubbish like Newsmast (one of the projects most oriented towards the Anglospheric centralization of news which is starting to have some singers even in the Italian Fediverse), everything we always wanted to avoid by migrating from Twitter to Mastodon!

I won't hide from you that seeing Mammoth become so popular in some way in the last few days is truly disheartening: a campaign of a few thousand dollars is enough to infest the entire Fediverse with the editorials of a small US company.

By the way, many of Mammoth's features had already been implemented by IceCubes . Not to mention, IceCubes has always been free and open source!

Mammoth has also become open source. But when you launch it, the first thing it does (how horrible!) is make you automatically follow their account (I got visual messages on the new features screen, but I wasn't able to stop the following on that screen) and they a very shitty icon similar to that of Threads.

Most concerning though is their SmartLists feature: send your handle to their official moth.social instance, which uses a Mastodon fork that serves the “Smart Lists” feature. One can reasonably see how this undermines decentralization…

In the photo, Hänsel and Gretel appreciating the ergonomics of the apps financed by BigTech

A final bitter consideration? It's not true that we always want to ruin the beautiful things we have. But unfortunately it is true that we always have this overwhelming desire to help anyone who wants to ruin what we have. As long as he is rich, beautiful and powerful…

cc @aral @Gargron @pluralistic @fediverse

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

welcome to the end of the world!

Assuming that the translation is accurate, the whole thing is so absurdly exaggerated that I wonder if it's meant to serve as advertising for the thing it purports itself to be attacking.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Personally I think the moment when Bethesda lost their way was somewhere between Skyrim and the DLC for Skyrim. Maybe its unprecedented commercial success went to their corporate heads.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

As people have said in some of the many, many other threads on this subject, if they really wanted to copy someone else's style of full-screen error message they'd have done much better to go with "Guru Meditation"

kbal, (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Remind your friends that end-to-end encrypted messaging is a thing that exists.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

The only way to avoid having disagreements about which choice of distro is best would be to avoid having any choices.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

By the mid 23rd century most cats had chosen to return to their home planet.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

There seems to have been some mistake. I was expecting the Bajoran inquisition.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

So what? The Fediverse will already be available in Taiwan, Kenya, Peru, and Afghanistan by then.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Parliament firmly rejected rules which would force companies to scan huge volumes of people’s private messages – instead now requiring there to be reasonable suspicion

One of the main concerns was that end-to-end encryption would be effectively prohibited, not just "undermined." With respect to that, there is no difference between mass scanning of people's private messages and selective scanning of people's private messages based on suspicion. If you have strong end-to-end encryption both are equally impossible.

That this is so often misunderstood or neglected in statements like this one is worrying. According to Patrick Breyer's comments though, "End-to-end encrypted messengers are exempted."

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

That 17% are actual EVs, not hybrids, seems like the bigger news. Glad to hear it.

Of course it does mean that 83% of new car sales are still powered by fossil fuels and the number of them on the roads is still growing.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

I am one of those crazy extremists you might have heard of who actually believe that it would be a good idea to stop burning fossil fuels.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

On the other hand, I have seen strong anecdotal evidence suggestive of a link between poor mental health and the habit of regularly posting angry obscentiy-filled rants to social media.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

If too successful, the digital euro project could give people a risk-free place to hold their money, policymakers worry

Are we really supposed to believe that people who say things like that have any chance of getting it right when they design a digital currency?

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Now that's a landship! I wonder what kind of fuel economy you'd get in that thing. Not great in the city probably.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Yes but what did Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Ben Shapiro have to say about it? What about David Duke? Was he unavailable for comment? You can't just go to Elon all the time, let's get some diversity of opinion in there.

kbal, (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Well, I'm an enjoyer of occasionally pausing to contemplate the effects our actions today might have as their untraceable implications reverbrate through the collective unconscious a thousand years from now.

For one thing it means I experience strong feelings of hostility when something like the currently circulating drivel about "longtermism" comes to my attention.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Does anyone have a better source of info about this? I've found "good news" in the names of things to be a reliable indicator of people who seem to believe they're trying to make the world better while polluting the information environment as much as any other fake news site. I'd rate the article as slightly less credible than a press release from the company itself.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Don't want to be subjected to random loud noises from your phone? Just turn off the alerts! All you need to do is figure out how to get root access, drop into a shell, explore the file system to learn enough to know where to look for things, figure out which application is responsible for this stuff, and find a way to disable it without breaking anything else.

I swear this whole system is some kind of government program to turn more Canadians into computer hackers.

kbal, (edited )
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

You would presumably not opt out then. I know many people who would not, even if it were easy. Some of us would, and a few of us feel all the more compelled to do so because it was made unreasonably difficult.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Hm, good to know. I've heard there are also some stock android roms that let you mute them as well, but not the version of lineageos I've got.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

It's remarkable that Tibetan culture has been so tenacious that there's anything left of it today. If the government of 50 years ago had been able to exert the kind of control over its people that they do today, it's hard to imagine that it wouldn't have been fully eradicated by now.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

I love it, but it was pretty messy a lot of the time in various different ways. My impressions were:

Season 1: Brilliant, really good science fiction
Season 2: Fun episodic comedy sci fi
Season 3: Sometimes weird, sometimes gruesomely tedious
Season 4: Trying to be more like a normal comedy TV show, results mixed

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Why'd he want to spoil it after making such a memorable exit?

Am I running the risk of getting my Google account banned for logging into the Aurora Store or a custom rom like GrapheneOS?

I guess there is no need to introduce what a Degoogled phone is (or a custom ROM without google services, like GrapheneOS is) and the Aurora Store is basically said in a crude way the Google Playstore but without the need to log in to your Google account, quite useful in my opinion....

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Nobody will be able to give you a definitive answer. Google's ways are unknowable. You are running the risk of losing your Google account by having a Google account.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

The sight of so many people around the world who had always been unequivocal supporters of anything and everything Israel did slowly changing their minds as the horrific scope of the violence inflicted on Gaza continues to escalate has been an impressive one. The remaining people who refuse to change their views at all are impressive in a different way.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Apparently some doctors are of the opinion that keeping your mouth shut can also be helpful in severe cases of Rick Berman disease.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

It seems that google translate doesn't handle Turkish very well. IBTimes has the story in english.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

It is very easy to find other sources making the same claim, such as this one which includes an image of allegedly posted json including passwords.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Nice timing. I don't see how warning you that your email passwords will be kept remotely by Microsoft would be "redundant." Many people will assume from that message that it would only send them all your mail, and the even more carelessly optimistic among us might guess that it would be end-to-end encrypted as it obviously should be.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

That is not what "end-to-end" means in this context. In fact, finding out yesterday that Outlook sync is not end-to-end encypted prompted me to look up OneDrive to see if it at least has that feature. It does not, and someone who doesn't know a thing or two about how cryptography works would have a hard time finding out that it does not, because the search results are polluted with people misunderstanding the concept exactly as you do.

Microsoft's own web site goes to great lengths to explain how all your data is encrypted in transit, and encrypted at rest. Their internal security and access control systems are elaborated on in impressive style. You'd think that if they're going to go to all that trouble, and want people to trust them, they would indeed provide end-to-end encryption where it's appropriate. But no, they carefully avoid mentioning the concept. They are unwilling to acknowledge that it might be a thing people expect these days, but they do not go out of their way to correct people who imagine that they already have it.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

My comment on the topic was removed from c/lemmyshitpost. Too genuine a shitpost for them, I guess.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

With Apple's new iBits™ the 0s are so much rounder and the 1s are so smooth and shiny that they're worth at least twice as much as regular bits.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Ah right, there was a book I've been meaning to download. Thanks for the reminder, FBI!

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

The world would be a substantially better place if Signal would 1) Not require phone numbers, and 2) Allow 3rd-party clients. While they're at it maybe they could also add a volume control to the desktop client and then not push so many damn updates.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

Using literally anything other than gmail is fine.

kbal,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

I look forward to browsing by "games most often marked private".

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