Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • All of these things would have been possible to restrict on good old Google searches. And they are enforced to varying degrees around the world to differing legal situations. You shouldn’t be able to search for child porn anywhere, swastika merch in Austria, insults of the king in Thailand, etc.

    Search on Google mainly got worse because of Google. They made their results more shit to get you to click on follow ups, the dreaded page 2 of results for instance, where they could sell more ads.

    I do agree that so-called AI search is more of a black box. Although the Googles and the Bings want you logged in to personalize the results, you can find a way to test their otherwise mostly obscured algorithms in a neutral setting. The models may not allow that and/or testing their metal may have yet to be invented. But they will replace search as we knew it.

    The growing faith people have in whatever LLMs spit out (over old school searches) is very concerning. It’s like LLMs are the new Facebook conspiracies. Schools need to teach media literacy as its own subject. All people under 70 today should have to get a media drivers license.

    Edit: And I didn’t even mention the “right to be forgotten.” That also exists in the EU.






  • It’s gossamer thin, admittedly. But there is a shred of a justification for striking Iran that is covered by international law. I’m not saying it is a proven case yet that a preemptive strike against their nuclear program was called for, against a state whose raison d’être is to destroy Israel. But if the circumstances were just right, the Israeli-US allies could get away with it. (And if no good proof materializes, I suspect they will get away with it anyway. Remember Colin Powell’s PowerPoint? Did that have consequences other than killing people next door? I suspect that’s why they’ve crossed this bridge.)

    There is not even a hint of a justification for what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Not in international law. And any possible moral high horse has already been shot long ago. It’s just imperial ambitions.

    So we should not equate these two special military operations just yet. We may in the future and then we can throw all our rotten tomatoes at DC. But right now one probably should reserve judgment and refer to them as “alleged orcs” if one is given to name calling.




  • You are judging work by somebody who doesn’t feel compelled to follow guidelines made by other people with those very same guidelines. Those other people looked much more closely at flags for geographical entities, not movements, to come up with their guidelines. No one is required to follow them or retroactively abide by them. They are a great style guide but not the law.

    Every flag serves a purpose. This flag’s purpose is to show representation by color and design for everyone in the community. It’s was the point to be busy.

    Why don’t they just stick with the rainbow flag? Because the idea of the rainbow encompassing everyone was made at a time when gay and lesbians came out with pride but many of the letters that abbreviate that community today were still marginalized more harshly, maybe even within homosexual circles. They weren’t all suddenly anthropists and free from discriminatory points of view. Development of ideas and communities takes time. And that’s why an artist took ideas from many different flags that were created over time and combined them into one. It is eye catchy and instantly recognizable, even at a medium distance still.

    I don’t find the result aesthetically pleasing either. But I recognize a) that wasn’t the point of it and b) I’m not a member of the LGBTQ+ community. If from within that community a movement rises to change the flag into something else, by all means. Other than that my design opinions - and I suspect many other ones in this thread - are largely academic and frankly irrelevant.

    Good flag bad flag is not the gospel. Take it as a starting point for new designs but don’t scrutinize all existing flags by it.






  • If you’re only looking at the tools everybody can get a hold of, I agree. I think if you look a bit further, you will find medical diagnostics that can hopefully top human detection scores and that’s worth pursuing as well.

    I don’t see any good reason why the general public needs to have access to most of the models today. Most people just play around with it - and I don’t see the value there. When we get the final tally, we will have made the climate crisis worse and caused droughts with all the thirsty data center consumption. All so Alexa can remember what you said two queries ago and you can animate your childhood teddy in the Ghibli style.


  • I agree that women are still being objectified and that’s bad. I don’t agree with workers being dehumanized by being referred to as such. “Workers of the world, unite!” was a big rallying cry. For some people, it’s an identity-establishing part of life that they’re using manual labor and not fart into a desk chair all day. They take pride in being working class.

    If by referring to a group of working folks is dehumanizing then we cannot talk about people like housekeepers, street sweepers, nurses, or engineers either. They’re people too. And I don’t see “people with job X” catching on in the language either.





  • I think both Apple and fictitious closed Android would be way more interchangeable and data from within would be more portable. Developers would get more of a cut. The saving grace for Google in the real world is that they can do Apple shenanigans while pointing at the open-source availability of Android and not get dumped in hotter antitrust water. If we only had two OSs and both were closed especially regulators in Europe would hit both of them much harder. And like tougher environmental restrictions on cars became the de facto US standard for everyone, the forced equal playing field (the EU guys LOVE an equal playing field) would over time make shit better for all users everywhere.

    If there was no Android I think we would have a long list of failed attempts to build one that all fail because every company wanted to build their own walled gardens, and didn’t get enough traction. iOS probably would have succeeded thanks to Apple marketing budgets and their somewhat cultish follower base. But I suspect it would have followed more the initial Steve Jobs idea of doing most stuff in browser; the app revolution wouldn’t have happened. So there would be a big iOS share and then the lower 30% or so would be fractured into other walled gardens for poor people. One result of that would be an earlier agreement on a RCS-like texting solution and not just in the States but everywhere. Because more players would have a stake in seamless communication because stuff like WhatsApp (a reaction to high texting rates, mostly in Europe) and blue/green bubblr iMessage did not happen.