Or, to be more blunt; shut the fuck up with this anti-semitic bullshit.

If a person is active lobbying for Israel, or working as on behalf of that or any other terror state, that’s legitimate points of criticism. Pointing towards someone being Jewish as some ground of suspicion in its own right is dangerous bullshit of historical proportions. There’s no reason we should tolerate this shit.

The whole world loves a good National Day and so do we. Our motto is simple, and we hope you adopt it too:

Seize the day by making it a National Day!™

Maybe they shouldn’t have trademarked it if they wanted others to adopt it.

“workers admitted to sabotaging their company’s AI by […] intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it”

Lol. Sounds an awful lot like the company is sabotaging itself in this case.

Because I thought you were obviously wrong about the 7000 years thing, here’s a history of trademarks by some guy named Olivier Pierre:

Since ancient times, merchants have been using signs or marks in trade to distinguish their products. Registrations came much later, in the 18th century with the establishment of Intellectual Property Offices.

[…]

The use of trademarks dates back thousands of years, however we can’t date their origins with precision. Some of the earliest forms of identification of marks date from Prehistory. For instance, the Lascaux cave paintings in France show bulls drawings with marks on them. Experts believe that people were using personal marks to claim ownership of livestock, long before literate societies. That was about 15.000 years ago.

The Egyptian masonry from some 6,000 years ago shows distinguishable quarry marks and stonecutters signs, to identify the source of the stone and the laborer who carried out the work to claim their wages. There were creative entrepreneurs who marketed their goods beyond their localities and sometimes over long distances. Wine amphorae marked with seals were found inside the Tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun who reigned between 1336 a.c. to 1327 a.c. over ancient Egypt.

I’ve gotten so used to think of trademarks as registered trademarks, but it makes sense that it has existed much longer in the literal sense. The earliest known law however dates back little more than 4000 years, and there’s nothing about trademarks there, so I think it’s fair to say trademark law is a lot more modern. :)

Sorry for being entirely off-topic.

I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.

On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.

Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.

I guess they had the opposite development of Twitter, banning hateful content and trying to keep their house clean. Compared to Zuck and Musk whoever runs Reddit can probably be argued to be a great humanist.

Not saying it’s a good platform. It’s still a cesspool in my experience, and their approach to moderation produces a wild amount of false positives while bots are roaming free. It seems to me very far from a place for genuine human connection.

Nevertheless, for someone who sees social media as being Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Reddit, and Snapchat, I can see how Reddit stands out as the better option.

It’s too bad Cohn didn’t get to talk more about Mastodon.

If you have a reading mode in your browser it works well on that site. :)

“I don’t want residents to think we’re giving a stamp of approval to Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and all their oligarch owners,” said City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler at Monday’s meeting. “There’s no ethical social media companies under capitalism,” he said. “We can try to use the ones that are the least bad and reach the most Cambridge residents.”

Somebody tell this guy about Mastodon.

Also worth noting that this article is about the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Cambridge, England nor the University of Cambridge. They still apparently thrive in the gutter.

I like the idea of keeping track of my hikes using GPS to be able to remember exactly where I’ve been, but I don’t trust the kind of data gathered by a smart watch with any company out there, and I don’t want to drain my phone by keeping the GPS on constantly. If this has good battery life it sounds interesting to me.

I’m generally sceptical of introducing another screen into my life though. Something about smart watches just seems inherently intrusive even if the software itself isn’t spyware.

Isn’t a bit of the challenge with the software to write something that supports the very modest hardware?

First they murdered him, then they killed him again by building his memorials. Give him a memorial in DC and a day in his honour, but god forbid anyone finds out he was a socialist. The whitewashed narrative of MLK is a way of erasing him.

And even those who are not technically spies are funded by Russian money for saying the stupidest shit, and they know the money stops if they start acting like human beings. I’m sure there are many Russian operatives who are not even aware they are on a Russian payroll. They’re just too stupid and willfully ignorant to understand what they are doing.

No need to act weird about it, just put the link straight in the post and write like a normal person. :)

404media had an interesting inteview with a Kenyan “data labeller”. He talks about his jobs working with AI companies, and how he had to pretend being all kinds of things. He’d work at least 18 hours a day, constantly switching between roleplaying different characters of different genders to people who thought they were talking to AI.

So even people who think they are talking to robots might be sexting some underpaid guy in Kenya.

Yeah, it’s tricky. I donated to Mozilla in the past, will look into making some donations to Servo moving forwards as I really think that’s the way things are headed for me. I keep trying to use GNOME Web which is WebKit based and it keeps getting better, but it’s not quite there yet for me. So for now Mozilla is my best bet in spite of everything.

A lot to unpack here.

She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.

I feel like this summarizes the time we’re living in. Some poor bastard somewhere sitting on his computer chatting with some lady he believes he is paying for attention, but in fact he is just being pitied by some unnamed underpaid worker in the Philippines. Meanwhile they’re both filling the accounts of an online influencer and some onlyfans tech bro, both of whom are surely completely miserable in their own right.

Yeah, I returned to FireFox after the latest release because of the kill switch. Still I’m uncomfortable with using software that’s full of stuff that I hate, even if it’s disabled. This is not really rational I guess, just me being weird.

I was thinking the same thing when I read this:

A small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack. Positioning Digg as simply an alternative to incumbents wasn’t imaginative enough. That’s a race we were never going to win. What comes next needs to be genuinely different.

Small team, completely reimagined, not simply an alternative, genuinely different… They are describing a federated instance.

Oooh, neat community! Joined!

I guess that’s one benefit of a smaller site - if you put down the effort in it, it stands out more. But community discovery is absolutely a challenge.

You’d think this was a safe prediction, yet here we are.