any “work” or “antiwork” community would likely be heavily duplicated in scope by the proposed socialism community we might gain in the near future, so i’d defer at least until we know whether those users will be interested in joining the site

i can still make twitter work with tweetdeck and heavily curated lists but i fully anticipate this will eventually be axed and i’ll have to manually check news sites a lot more frequently than i currently do

i’m pretty sure Parler recently folded, actually, because it had been entirely crowded out by the others

just in general, i think we need to strongly consider reductions to copyright term lengths and the scope of what even can be copyrighted. artists being paid shouldn’t come with the downside of “basically all of the human cultural work you grow up with being unable to be substantially remixed or adapted in a new way during your lifetime”. there’s stuff which is older than any living human which is still under copyright, which is absurdist

currently reading The World As We Knew It: Dispatches From a Changing Climate, which should be book #19 for the year. currently 5 books ahead of my pace for the year (35 books), so 40 is definitely looking possible already

the website eating a hundred or so posts over the weekend was an unfortunate start to the week but the vibes are definitely good today

it’s kind of funny a .gif service is even worth enough that you could lose 260 million on selling it. shutterstock is also an interesting company to be acquiring it

it’s the precedent that counts here more than the monetary damages, usually, because you can use the precedent to keep hitting them like this

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which oversees the General Data Protection Regulation, on Monday handed down the fine for Meta, saying that Facebook had violated its rules requiring platforms to ensure data transfers from Europe to the US have appropriate safeguards in place.

Instead, the DPC found that the platform’s EU-US data flows had relied on contractual clauses that “did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms” of users, despite an earlier judgment from the EU’s Court of Justice mandating that it better protect individuals’ information from invasive US surveillance programmes. The record EU fine over privacy violations comes after the Luxembourg regulator levied a €746mn sanction on Amazon in 2021.

According to the DPC, Facebook’s EU operation also has five months to “suspend any future transfer of personal data to the US” and six months to cease the processing — including storage — of any European citizens’ personal information in the US that was previously transferred in violation of GDPR.

it ultimately seems like a problem you have to solve at the source by just taking a wrecking ball to the benefits of pumping out spam. even the existence of SEO as a concept increasingly seems like a huge mistake we need to double back on

i heard of this one years ago when it was first launched and then never again, which seems pretty indicative of the desire for new search engines. i just assumed it quietly folded due to the pandemic honestly, lol

evidently it has not deterred about 100,000 people, which…

this is one of the craziest privacy policies i’ve ever seen. this was verbatim published, yes including the typos and the parenthetical that’s apparently an internal comment

“As noted in the Terms of Use, we do not knowingly collect or solicitPersonal Data about children under 13 years of age; ifyou are a child under the age of 13, please do not attempt to register for orotherwise use the Services or send us any Personal Data. Use of the Servicesmay capture the physical presence of a child under the age of 13, but noPersonal Data about the child is collected. If we learn we have collectedPersonal Data from a child under 13 years of age, we will delete thatinformation as quickly as possible. (I don’t know that this is accurate. Do wehave to say we will delete the information or is there another way aroundthis)? If you believe that a child under 13 years of age may have providedPersonal Data to us, please contact us at…”

actually ridiculous here:

Dr. Jared Mumm, a campus rodeo instructor who also teaches agricultural classes, sent an email on Monday to a group of students informing them that he had submitted grades for their last three essay assignments of the semester. Everyone would be receiving an “X” in the course, Mumm explained, because he had used “Chat GTP” (the OpenAI chatbot is actually called “ChatGPT”) to test whether they’d used the software to write the papers — and the bot claimed to have authored every single one.

“I copy and paste your responses in [ChatGPT] and [it] will tell me if the program generated the content,” he wrote, saying he had tested each paper twice. He offered the class a makeup assignment to avoid the failing grade — which could otherwise, in theory, threaten their graduation status.

I hope this gets lots of publicity and further aggravate these editor’s reputation.

it’s been quite a rallying cry for IA, although unfortunately i’m not sure how much individual people can do besides donate to them

it’s that way on purpose so y’all can ban whoever you want

it is that way on purpose, and it is so we can ban people on an as-needed basis (which i guess in a sense is “whoever [we] want”) but excluding obvious trolls i think we’ve banned literally three people ever on the instance and it’s been extant for a year. using intuition on what’s acceptable and what’s not–and nudging them when they break a boundary–appears to work quite well for our users, so we’re not liable to start writing explicit rules any time soon

Still I wonder if a generic “Videos” community would be a good or bad thing.

possibly; nobody’s really asked for it though and we seem to do fine without one for now. i have a suspicion that it’d be pretty inactive (both in terms of posts but especially in terms of comments) on our current size also, so it might be a community for later on in the instance’s life

i’d put this one in music, but generally you can just use best judgement on wherever you think it fits best

it’s just laughable this guy is taken seriously or considered principled by anybody. beyond obviously being anti-“free speech” this is literally less principled than and a regression from previous Twitter policy, which was generally to take the throttling even if it meant people lost access to the website. i cannot believe there is a world in which i am defending Twitter Jack, but he was at least better on this front than Elon

hardly surprising given elon’s descent into far-right and reactionary politics—bellingcat in particular is a magnet for this sort of selective targeting because its reporting is inconvenient to a lot of political dogmatists.

(ironically, this also means elon has some common cause with a subset of Twitter’s “far-left” and “anticolonialist” cranks, some of whom are vehement defenders of Bashar al-Assad and think bellingcat is some sort of CIA-backed, pro-regime change front for believing chemical weapons were used on Syrian civilians)

it’s becoming increasingly clear CNN’s new leadership both has a right-wing bent and just generally has no idea what it’s talking about. i have no idea how anyone can say with a straight face that the media has “ignored” Trump voters when if anything they’re disproportionately given relevance.

The platform of freedom and free speach is actually a platform of slavery.

as far as i’m aware neither lemmy.ml nor lemmy as a platform claim to be either of these things, and i think it’s safe to say the platform is better for doing that–even if it remains clearly deficient in some technical and social respects. if that’s what you’re looking for i’d probably seek another alternative (or learn to self-host an instance, i suppose)

one can only hope that, with the CEO switchover, this is another of elon’s dumb ideas which is quietly dropped and never spoken of again for being incredibly stupid

evidently they got about double their normal ratings in the slot so i’m sure they consider it a success

going by the Federation’s data, there remains a large gap—but beehaw is definitely one of the most active lemmy instances at this point and is definitely getting some cross-pollination from the main instance. (we’re also the top-recommended instance on join-lemmy, i think)

well for certain in some circumstances–for example in Qatar and other petrostates–there really isn’t a difference between the two. most migrant workers to such states are effectively treated as disposable slave labor and are often coerced there under false pretenses and then held there by force until their contracts finish

it’ll looks like that’ll depend on where the road is. all of the possibilities from over-the-road wires to inductive charging seem to require being hooked up to the power grid–the energy is not being kinetically created here or something like that

i don’t think this is really motivated by “seething about trains” because sweden has one of the largest and most used rail networks in the world and most of that network, although nominally liberalized now, is operated and serviced exclusively by the state

as i recall, they tried this about three years ago and walked it back after massive backlash, so i’m curious if elon has the hubris (and team) to go through with it now. i’m already seeing a ton of backlash again, anecdotally

One of the important differences is that at least some people using GMail must be aware that it would make sense to keep the broader ecosystem — e-mail — healthy, and an important step towards this is having a plurality of e-mail providers.

federation is also broader in this case than email, and has services that can emulate basically all of the major social media platforms of today—presumably it would be advantageous for there to be other active federated platforms, because then people can substitute more of their social media presence out

you are correct, that was Substack. their owner explicitly said they’d be laissez-faire on moderation even when bluntly asked about things like nazis, which looked so bad

as far as i’m aware they’re slowly working through their backlog but the backlog they have is like 2 million users, making it analogous to the number of people who fled to mastodon back when elon took over twitter originally, so…

not a surprise to see movement by groups that Elon has basically thrown to the wolves, although it’s funny that it’s happening to be directed at BlueSky (which was the metaphorical old boss that was hardly any better)

as far as i’m aware it is not, because:

• they use a variant of lemmy which literally doesn’t federate with the rest of lemmy (because it was developed and forked before that was even a thing–they’re a very old instance), and they don’t have the developers to rectify that;
• and separately, there’s not… really? a desire on the part of anybody to federate, either on hexbear’s side or on lemmy’s. it’d be far more beneficial to lemmy than hexbear, anyways

the issue of “too big to block” is an interesting problem for federation that i’ve seen no particularly good answers to yet (probably because it hasn’t really been an issue up until recently). feels like there’s a tightrope act nobody’s mastered yet of balancing the desire to be where everyone is with the need to keep the whole system decentralized, while simultaneously ensuring everything can both interoperate as needed and moderate as needed without tearing the system apart.

luckily, there is movement toward broadening right-to-repair laws–Colorado recently passed right-to-repair for wheelchairs, for example–so i’m cautiously optimistic

Not to mention the cost to get it removed if that’s ever needed.

oh in some cases the possible consequences straight up outweigh benefits, so people will just leave them in and are stuck with them permanently:

Barbara Campbell, who received her implant during the clinical trial of the Argus II, did find the bionic vision system useful. As a New York City resident, she used it outside on the busy sidewalks and while taking a subway or bus. “The more I used it, the benefits increased,” she remembers. “I think I was retraining my brain to see stuff.” But in 2013, after four years of regular use, Campbell’s system shut down in the subway station, and despite some repair attempts by Second Sight, never worked again. While she talked with her doctors about having the implant removed, she ultimately decided that the risks of another surgery weren’t worth it. She still has the defunct technology in her left eye.

sinus infection is doing substantially better now and no longer painful, which is good; i think i’ll be able to get over it by the end of the week optimistically. getting medicine for it has helped tremendously, even after just three doses

factoring in additional costs of surgery it’s actually substantially worse than just 150k, although a lot of it was covered by insurance for the typical getter:

Moreover, implanting the Argus II was just the start of a long, tough journey for patients. Second Sight employed its own vision-rehabilitation specialists to work one-on-one with implantees, often for months or years. One Argus II patient estimated that the total cost of the device, surgery, and rehabilitation was $497,000. Typically, at least 80 percent of the device fee and most of the other costs were covered by insurance.

even so, that’s still a life-ruining amount for some people, especially if the device stops working because the company no longer really exists in the form it did when you got the implant

i previously posted this article about a year ago when this instance was way smaller; the issues, of course, remain the same. the lead example, the Argus II, has now been discontinued for 3 years and i can only assume that entropy has left even more people with implants like this effectively blind again