This is Zuck’s characterisation. No direct quotes. No attachments (that I’ve seen). He calls it pressure. He says they wanted to censor “satire & humor.” In fact this BS letter is what the original article quoted.
This is Zuck’s characterisation. No direct quotes. No attachments (that I’ve seen). He calls it pressure. He says they wanted to censor “satire & humor.” In fact this BS letter is what the original article quoted.
If Mastodon wins out in the long run the only reason will be persistence.
All these other “like Twitter but ______” micro blogging or whatever sites only stay viable while they’re profitable.
If Bluesky or Threads become (net) unprofitable, they’ll die. Mastodon is already unprofitable, so that can’t kill it.
I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.
For #2 some person or group needs to develop a Mastodon app (FOSS obviously) that has a “just do this part for me” option, probably automatically enabled.
#3 is on us. We have to do what we can to make Mastodon (and Lemmy) more open and accepting without falling pretty to the paradox of tolerance.
#4 is hard… Although I think if Mastodon follows or tries to replicate the “early” Facebook user experience where most or all of the content people got was from people they follow, that could be better. The only challenge is that algorithms tickle our anger/hate/disgust impulses to drive and maintain engagement. That’s some very strong “lizard brain” stuff.
So… let’s get going y’all! :)
I love how he just uncritically and with absolute credulity accepts excerpts from a letter written by Zuck with no supporting evidence, no examples of what “pressure” looked like, etc.
I can’t believe these people are still so butt hurt about the perfectly reasonable actions taken by the US and State governments and governments worldwide in response to a once in a century global respiratory DEADLY pandemic that killed millions and millions of humans.
And as far as FB (and other social media) goes, fuck em. And fuck the users. Types of speech can be illegal. Defamation (lying about someone) and false advertising (lying about a product or service) can be illegal even though it’s definitely speech. These have “lying” in common, which to me implies there must be something about lying (specifically misrepresenting reality) that weakens typical 1st Amendment protections.
But it’s clear what this guy is most sad about is the traffic he got while his article about Woodstock going on during a lull in the comparatively mild pandemic that was “active” at the time (no meaningful H3N2 activity in the US at the time) went away when FB rightly changed the algorithm to not boost his stupid irrelevant “analysis.”
But people like the writer of this article are either too addled by conspiracy galaxy brain or too committed to lying for money to care that they could really hurt people with their bullshit.
This guy needs to go to something less harmful like selling homeopathic tinctures or lying about the moon landing or flat earth or something.
Someone should tell this guy that hot dogs exist.
I’ll let others address the “enshittification” angle but I thought I’d point out that “shareholder value uber allies” is a relatively recent … “innovation” … in economic theory, brought about by failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Milton Friedman in the last half of last century:
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-made-chicago-school-so-influential-antitrust-policy
The rethinking of what the boards of companies are supposed to do (from maximize stakeholder value to maximize shareholder value) and how they can operate (from requiring justification to approve mergers to requiring justification to block mergers) really took off with them, and exploded when former union boss Ronald Reagan found “religion” (because Nancy’s pussy was just that good) and ruined the economy for workers.
Lots of other people contributed, including Clinton after he “won” the 1992 election with 40% of the vote due to Perot splitting the Republican vote. His campaign of fiscal conservatism but without less bigotry became the model for the Democratic Party for the next two decades.
Anyway, Biden’s FTC is finally working to help workers again, which might even release the death grip of the Chicago School from our economy. We’ll see after November I guess.
This genie is probably impossible to get back in the bottle.
People are going to just direct the imitative so called AI program to make the face just different enough to have plausible deniability that it’s a fake of this person or that person. Or use existing tech to age them to 18+ (or 30+ or whatever). Or darken or lighten their skin or change their eye or hair color. Or add tattoos or piercings or scars…
I’m not saying we should be happy about it, but it is here and I don’t think it’s going anywhere. Like, if you tell your so called AI to give you a completely fictional nude image or animation of someone that looks similar to Taylor Swift but isn’t Taylor Swift, what’s the privacy (or other) violation, exactly?
Does Taylor Swift own every likeness that looks somewhat like hers?
The best approach to “free” things is to understand that it’s never sustainable. Eventually it will have to become a paid subscription or ad supported or both.
And regardless, you’re going to end up being the product if they can discern anything marketable about you from your use of the “free” product.
But just be ready to jump to the next free product.
(Obviously it’s possible for there to be FOSS but that comes with some challenges as well.)
Do you mean “behind” like responsible for or in favor of?
“Noooo it’s our algorithm we can’t be held liable for the program we made specifically to discover what people find a little interesting and keep feeding it to them!”
Is the advice something along the lines of once you have a couple years of relevant experience start looking for a new job that needs that experience?
Because that’s how you get good increases in income at least in your early career.
Later on you’ll hit a plateau of sorts where changing employers to get a raise is trickier because they’re concerned about paying too much for you to come on board, so your job search will take a bit longer. But someone will probably hire you eventually for a good sized increase.
The to level comment here is correct that it’s more dangerous on average for a woman being abused by a man than the other way around, but you’re correct her that Google should just suggest domestic violence help for anyone.
Also these days there are quite a few men out there with husbands…
I went through my comment history and changed all my comments with 100+ karma to a bunch of nonsense I found on the Internet, mostly from bots posting YouTube comments. It’s mostly English words so it shouldn’t get discarded for being gibberish. But they didn’t make coherent information. I was sad to see some of my posts go away but I don’t want to feed the imitative AI.
Also did the first 6 pages of my “controversial” comments.
I know they have backups, but that’s why I didn’t simply delete them. Hopefully these edited versions get into the training set and fuck it up, even if only a little.
It’s be funny if someone could come up with a “drop table” post that would maybe make it into the set…
If we can’t really define “understand” in a way that meaningfully captures the concept of consciousness (also undefined), we definitely can’t say a chat bot “understands.”
They can parse a chat and come up with a likely response that humans find applicable.
I can imagine living in a world where this is the top point of conflict across the globe. No wars, no famine, no climate change, no oppression… Just, “can you believe this twat saying we should put salt in tea!?!”
It’s the hand these lawyers have been dealt to try to make this argument fly. They are duty bound to provide the best representation they can for their client, and if somehow this completely bonkers argument wins the day, I think that’s pretty much it for American democracy.
Or Biden has all this on standby just in case…
I dunno the front page seems way lower quality than it was before we left. Like not just a little.
I basically only go there for the two stupid flash games I play on my phone and sometimes a Google search ends up with reddit as the best answer. Otherwise I don’t go. I used to go there dozens of times per day.
Wait… do capitalists genuinely think workers derive positive feelings of some sort from the idea that we’re increasing shareholder value?
I mean, I definitely think in terms of increasing shareholder value, but only because that’s what keeps me employed and sometimes gets me bonuses and raises. I know that if I stop increasing shareholder value long enough I’ll get canned.
But at no point have I ever looked at the stock price of my multinational, gigantic corporate employer and felt happy or proud or whatever this schmuck must think we (used to? should?) feel.
For QWERTY users this is a problem
I feel like “lie” implies intent, and these imitative large language models don’t have the ability to have intent.
They’re imitating us. Or more specifically, they’re imitating the database(s) they were fed. When chat GPT “lies” to “cover it up,” all it’s actually doing is demonstrating that a human in the same circumstance would probably lie to cover it up.
Hmmm maybe we should ignore #1 and focus on #5 then