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  • The vast majority of the problem for wildlife is feral cat populations rather than people letting pets outdoors. Just make sure they are sterilized and vaccinated and it's minimal impact.

  • It's not the best writing, but how is that conclusively LLM? Is there anything in the article that is definitively made up?

  • Since it seems to be the sort of game you play with a group of friends, it seems like it might be easier to actually make that happen with a $0 price point since you can ask someone to play without asking them to spend money.

  • That's amazing, simultaneously cute and terrifying

  • The argument they make seems to boil down to, there's various reasons to believe that social media can be a negative influence on teenagers, social media companies are intentionally manipulative and amoral, the idea of this type of social media ban is popular with the public in polls, and the Trump administration opposes social media regulation. So yeah, not all that comprehensive. Notably lacking is a case that a youth ban is actually the right solution and wouldn't cause its own harms, an explanation of why teenagers and adults are so different here and what that implies, or an acknowledgement of the cases against such a ban (for instance they make an uncritically positive reference to last year's ban by Australia which is extremely controversial and has a lot of good arguments against it, like the privacy disaster of making everyone prove their identity to post online). To be fair the whole thing seems like mostly a really brief summary of The Anxious Generation, maybe that book makes a stronger point.

    It has to be acknowledged that much of what makes up human culture and society is online now, and will continue to be going forward. The real question should be, what do we want that society to look like, and how do we move in that direction? Probably there is a lot more to it than passing laws that ban things. Calling social media digital crack and demanding teenagers to go live in a past that doesn't exist anymore seems like a very head-in-sand attitude to me.

  • Convenient indexed search was the only real improvement Windows made since XP and now they've ruined it. Windows XP is once again superior.

  • Is email really visible, I thought that wasn't displayed publicly. I don't see your email

  • strong privacy laws regarding how that data can be used

    In practice this just isn't going to work, because the whole infrastructure is aligned against effective privacy such that you can't just pass a simple law to ensure it. What I've heard from someone working in local government is that right now there is an overwhelming push to move all computer systems to the cloud (private company servers and software), and most of them are there already, which means that the actual people, practices, and physical hardware managing data are at multiple levels of remove from democratic scrutiny and influence. Also consider the high profile recent events regarding collection and misuse of existing data by the US federal government regardless of laws prohibiting it. None of the information collected and stored by the government (or corporations for that matter) is safe, and the task of making it safe becomes more impractical all the time.

    Of course these are also problems that would be good to address, but I think you can't count on them being resolved because they probably will not be. Which isn't to say good laws on what data isn't safe to be collected to begin with, or what decisions affecting people's lives aren't safe to be made by computers, are likely either, but that at least seems like a more realistic approach to me than trying to build a Panopticon that somehow doesn't get abused.

  • Running water is a technology that tends to solve bigger problems than it causes. You can always count on politics to break sometimes, but when it happens with running water, even if people are getting sick because of lead pipes and sewage is backing up into peoples homes because of organizational dysfunction (happened to me, the city just failed to connect the pipes from my apartment to the sewer and pretended they had), it's still better than the public health catastrophe that is an absence of running water.

    On the other hand, for the entire class of technology where the benefit is more automation of law enforcement, I'd argue it's completely the other way around; huge inherent political risk, minimal potential improvement.

  • Well I dislike them mainly because they further enable scalable mass surveillance. There should be more barriers to having records of where everyone is. As for automated enforcement, the way it works is often a blatant scam. I once had a commute where I passed by an intersection that ticketed people turning left, the amount of time it allowed was noticeably shorter than normal, and you could see the flash indicating they were ticketing someone basically every time the light changed, for multiple cars, because it activated if you were in the intersection at all after the light turned red. There was always a long line to turn left at that intersection. I mostly avoided getting ticketed but I did get one once, it was through a private company and I just ignored it and nothing happened. I really think most of those get set up because of corrupt relationships between people in government and the people running those companies that handle the tickets.

  • Electronic plate readers are an illegitimate anti-privacy technology and should be banned imo. License plates are already too hard to remember, I have a hard time remembering my own license plate number let alone one I had a two second glance at.

  • Open source code doesn't mean open API though. Bluesky seems to have made a whole thing out of their technical architecture, and I get the arguments that it's centralized in practice, but wouldn't it mean basically scrapping the whole thing to lock down third party clients? Even if that didn't mean anything I think multiclients could be a good idea anyway, if people were using those and there was a Reddit situation, some portion of users would want to stay with the same clients rather than using whatever proprietary app they try to push.

  • Fair, I use Open WebUI + Ollama personally but it's slightly tricky to set up, wasn't aware there were open source options with a built in model browser and hardware compatibility estimates

  • If we're wishing for things that probably won't happen, how about a government agency for game preservation? Source code gets submitted before release, approval for sale is conditional on them being able to successfully build and deploy it. Then 20 years later it gets automatically published to the public domain. That way even online only games will end up being preserved.

  • One possible reason I've read is that the people moderating it have had their identities leaked, so imagine being the person responsible for banning 4chan users and now also they know who you are, seems like a very unappealing thing to volunteer for.

  • I don't use these so maybe I'm missing something, but why would you have to choose? Bluesky is centralized but it seems like its design is committed enough to open technology that it would take them a long time to walk it back, and in the meantime there shouldn't be barriers to using unified clients that put content from both in the same interface, and possibly override any opinionated content algorithm from the company (not sure if that's feasible or not).

  • Permanently Deleted

    Jump
  • You know, you probably know this phrase, "Do not obey in advance." That's Tim Snyder, who's a historian of authoritarianism. We now are in techno-authoritarianism. We have to learn how to digitally disobey. That can be as simple as the dropdown box. Don't accept the cookies, don't give your real name, download Signal

    ... post on Lemmy?

  • A bubbling noise coming from the toilet

  • “There is no formal relationship between the platforms and the workers. If the tasks disappear, they are simply no longer called,” he said.

    Fuentes and 19 other Venezuelan taskers have a WhatsApp group where they take turns to alert members when a task becomes available. “If someone has insomnia, they say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out tonight,’” she said.

    I used to do online gig work like this. The good part is you don't really have to directly interact with anyone, the bad part is this stuff, garbage pay, and the platforms not giving a fuck about whether clients scam you or falsely tank your approval rating. To even obtain decent tasks you basically have to do what these people did with an active group chat, or cheat and use scripts to automatically snipe them and notify you.

    The most memorable ones were stuff like, transcribing videos of maintenance people describing what they were doing, and watching video feeds of surgery robots and rating the skills of their operators.

    Despite all the shitty aspects of it, I think it sucks this kind of work is going away, because it is really convenient to have as an option and used to be an effective way to avoid getting a traditional job if you were really dead set on that. And I guess a good option in general for people in countries with very low cost of living.