Do people still post things on Facebook? I don't know because I haven't used it, ever, but I've heard that Meta has turned it into a platform mostly for passively consuming algorithmically-driven content instead of sharing your day on your News Feed.
Online identity verification is the obvious solution, the only problem is that we would lose the last bits of privacy we have on the internet. I guess if everyone was forced to post under our real name and identity, we might treat each other with better etiquette, but...
> There’s also a social contract: when we create an account in an online community, we do it with the expectation that people we are going to interact with are primarily people. Oh, there will be shills, and bots, and advertisers, but the agreement between the users and the community provider is that they are going to try to defend us from that, and that in exchange we will provide our engagement and content. This is why the recent experiments from Meta with AI generated users are both ridiculous and sickening. When you might be interacting with something masquerading as a human, providing at best, tepid garbage, the value of human interaction via the internet is lost.
It is a disaster. I have no idea how to solve this issue, I can't see a future where artificially generated slop doesn't eventually overwhelm every part of the internet and make it unusable. The UGC era of the internet is probably over.
I've never used a McDonalds kiosk for the reason you gave. Actually, I think no matter how much you streamlined it with cutting edge AI assistants it would still be faster and more natural to just say "A big mac and a diet coke please" to the cashier. I don't see any end-user benefit to these assistants, the only ones who benefit are the bean counters and executives who will use them to do more layoffs and keep the money that saves to themselves.
A big part of Elon's brand is making it look like he's a kind of autistic, nerd-prodigy. Same aesthetic that Sam Bankman-Fried played on with his cargo shorts and gaming habit. Many normies think that Elon "invented" electric vehicles or SpaceX's rockets and isn't simply a financier with a large inheritance.
They were asking about bombs and invasions in the literal sense, not metaphorical. I'm sure if you asked someone in Gaza or Iraq if they would rather be subjected to more of America's bombing and war crimes, or China's abstract, metaphorical "economic colonialism" they would pick China in a heartbeat.
How much capacity does solar and wind add compared to nuclear, per square foot of land used? Also I thought the new administration was placing a ban on new renewable installations.
Technically the Apple Music app will play local files, but only MP3, AAC and ALAC. No FLAC, ogg, opus, etc. Plus it advertises at you to subscribe to their music service.
The Plague of Justinian was also the first recorded major outbreak of bubonic plague. Black death seems to be the pivot-point at a lot of important moments in history.
FiiO is a great recommendation! I used to have one of their players but the firmware was buggy and I resold it. These players look like they have high quality construction though.
I remember Links, the text-based browser that runs in your terminal, had a framebuffer mode that you could use to get rudimentary graphical web browsing on a system with no X11 installed.
I would argue that Telegram is a much, much larger security threat to the average individual American than Tiktok. Except they comply with government search warrants and don't enable E2E encryption by default so they are useful to the American National Security Establishment and get to stay.
Do you have any proof that the Chinese government played a role in his campaign? Because the 2016 United States election was possibly influenced by disinformation campaigns on Facebook, yet there is no ban and Zuck is taking an even more lax approach to moderation than Tiktok.
This is very common and I would even say a necessary part of using algorithmic social media now, basically awareness of the algorithm and interacting with content in a way that keeps your algorithm tuned to what you want. For example I avoid clicking anything political on YouTube because as soon as I do, my suggestions become full of political ragebait.
The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia, trying to tie anything Chinese to scary, nefarious communists. I doubt that they were thinking of Mao at all when making the app, Xiaohongshu is an app tailored for young, wealthy, cosmopolitan Chinese as an alternative to Douyin which is more for the masses, I wouldn't call that very Maoist.
The Panic of 1873 and the Long Depression seem to directly contradict you on that. The crashes were maybe not as large but that's because the economy of 1873 was an order of magnitude smaller than the economy of 1929.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was with Outlook. They replaced the regular desktop Outlook app with "New Outlook", which is just a wrapper around Outlook.com, which is horrible and slow and buggy and even shows ads to the user. I guess they think it's a waste of money to develop a proper mail client app.
Indeed, switching Windows PCs is like pulling teeth because of having to re-discover all of the little programs you had downloaded previously. I was a supporter of the "Windows Store" they added in Windows 8 and 10 for this reason, it let me try to keep as much of my software in one place. MS also used to have a "digital locker" service for this kind of thing but that's long gone from the Vista days.
I'm done with Microsoft. Switched to Ubuntu last week after a long break from daily driving Linux desktop (not since about 2013) and not looking back. It's much better here.
My understanding is that it's meant to push the gold standard/anti-fiat currency, judging by the quote at the end of the website + link to Bitcoin whitepaper.
Great, so we have TikTok where we can access information that's being censored by the West, and Facebook to access information that's being censored by the East. What's the problem? Information wants to be free.
> Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't)
Posting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook will get your account terminated for "supporting terrorism". The pro-western censorship regime on FB is extremely strong. US lawmakers specifically cited the amount of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok as why they were banning the app.