So… aren’t these wannabe twitter competitors going about the whole thing bass-ackwards?
I saw a broadly similar article the other day about some sort of shakeup in the Mastodon board of directors.
It’s as if they think the way do do an internet startup is to first appoint a board of directors and hire a raft of executives, then… um… you know… um… do some business… kinda… stuff…
Nicely clarified.
Yes - the way I said it leaves the possibility that they have to pay at minimum their profit, and no - that should not be the case. They should have to pay at minimum their total revenue.
This shouldn’t be an exception - it should be the rule.
At the very least, companies should be fined every single cent that they made off of something criminal, and really, they should be fined much more than they made.
If they’re fined less than they made off of it, it’s not even really a fine. It’s just the government taking a cut of the action.
Sort of.
More it’s just the way I’ve pretty much always been. Before I was even really aware of it, I apparently figured out that I couldn’t control the outside world but I could control how I reacted to it, so that was what I focused on. One could sort of say that I did it simply because it made sense to me, but even that makes it sound more conscious than it was. It’s more that it just never occurred to me to do things any other way.
It was only much later that I discovered that there was a philosophy called “stoicism” that advocated that.
“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” - Marcus Aurelius
I recognize that the universe is so vast that it’s likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that’s the extent of it.
I’ve seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don’t “believe” that they do.
Really, I don’t “believe” in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don’t even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It’s not a conscious choice or anything - it’s just appears that there’s a set of requirements that must be met before the position of “belief” is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of “believing” just isn’t triggered, and it’s not as if I can somehow force it, so that’s that.
As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it’s near certain that somebody would’ve blabbed something by now.
Beyond that though, I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they’re that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don’t see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else’s interests. That’s our delusion - not theirs.
What “entitlement?”
I don’t expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.
I’m just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that’s self-evident bullshit.
If anybody’s acting"entitled" in that scenario, it’s the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.
I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.
I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I’ve turned around, for the past thirty years now, I’ve seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.
Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.
When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I’ll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.
This behaviour makes you and by extension mbin seem like a bunch of unhinged petty drama queens.
Personally, there’s already absolutely no way I’m ever going to use mbin, no matter what, just because these people nauseate me.
I deliberately avoided having kids and I don’t have any particular existential dread, so I’m just sort of sitting back and bemusedly watching it all play out. I just read the latest bit about one or another obscenely wealthy and/or powerful blatant psychopath doing or saying something gibberingly insane and I marvel yet again at the fact that the world is run by literal lunatics and nobody seems to even notice.
And when it stops being cynically amusing, I shut it off and go do something else.
Money wins, every time.
And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.
The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that’s it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.
I never started in the first place.
It always seemed like snake oil to me.
Megamind
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Not Another Teen Movie
It’s like a 15 year old got ahold of his mom’s credit card and bought a social media corporation, and now he’s up in his room, all juiced up on Doritos and Mountain Dew, banging away at his keyboard and giggling to himself.
For all the times I’ve seen people complain about this, I still don’t see what the supposed problem is.
Yeah - it’s just a tiny bit more effort to subscribe to three communities instead of one, but then that’s it. It doesn’t matter in the slightest from that point on, since all three of them are going to come up just the same in my feed.
I honestly think that there really isn’t a problem - that really, there’s no notable way in which anyone is actually negatively affected. It’s just that it’s different, and different is bad.
I find google works fine if I’m just looking for general information on a simple topic, because it will dependably return a link to the wikipedia entry and a few of the most popular sites.
And I find that it’s pretty much useless for specific information about narrow topics, because it’s still just going to return the same general shit.
I’m not sure exactly how the change worked, but some time back (it’s been a year or two now, and maybe more - it’s just something that I sort of slowly realized had happened), they shifted to a system that made Google Fu essentially useless.
It used to be the case that you could define the importance of search terms by the order in which you listed them and make some effectively required by putting quotation marks around them.
But starting a couple of years back, it’s been generally ignoring search term order and quotation marks, and instead giving priority to specific common (and certainly not coincidentally common marketing) terms.
To anthropomorphize, it’s as if it’s developed a cripplingly narrow focus. So if, for instance, you’re looking for the title of some specific movie, it doesn’t matter how many other search terms you include or what order you list the terms in - if you include the term “movie,” that’s what it’s going to focus on. So if you’re lucky, you might get the actual movie you’re looking for, but it’s absolutely guaranteed that you’re going to get streaming services and “18 movies with real blood” style clickbait.
Cowboy, no contest.
Samurai’s lives belong to their masters. I couldn’t live that way.
Pirates live by killing and stealing. I couldn’t live that way.
That leaves cowboys. Certainly not the glorious and romantic life Hollywood makes it out to be, but generally honest work toward specific goals and freedom otherwise, which’d be fine.
Your activity on this thread implies you have a vested interest in downplaying Facebook’s bias. I’m not sure why…
Anyway - of course there are bigots on every platform, and of every stripe for that matter. The internet has enabled bigotry on a scale never before imagined, and the steady slide of much of modern civilization, and the US and UK (and lately Canada) in particular, toward overtly corrupt overt plutocracy has left more people than ever desperate for some way to assure themselves that everything wrong with the world is somebody else’s fault, which makes bigotry a growing enterprise.
But while bigotry is ever-present, each individual site has its own expressed bias for the particular forms it’s more or less likely to at least tolerate, if not actively encourage.
And Facebook’s expressed bias is toward white supremacism and Christian nationalism.
That’s what I expected from the start.
I guess I just assumed that that was commonly understood, As soon as I saw that it was going to be run according to Facebook’s moderation standards, I took that to mean that it was going to be tailored to suit white supremacists and Christian nationalists, like Facebook.
Axiomatically, no, since it isn’t even AI in any meaningful sense of the term, so it fails to live up to its hype right out the gate.