hogwasher

There's enough high quality video and audio news that it's fully possible to be an engaged and informed person even if you can't read for shit. Plus, text-to-speech is very good now. You can listen to written articles as well, even if you can't read them. You still need to evaluate sources and fact check, but that's a separate skill (albeit one most literate people also fail at).

I don't believe the literacy rate is a measure of intelligence, when the "three cueing" educational calamity is right there as an obvious explanation. That and Americans just being overworked and exhausted and sick all the time.

I actually love that it doesn't do this, because the sites that do are a headache (and sometimes entirely unusable) if using a VPN.

And since you can bookmark it with your location setting, automatic IP location could only make the first visit marginally faster for non-VPN users, anyway

toxoplasmosis doesn't actually do that to mice. It makes them less scared, but iirc, not even so much that they don't flee.

it's one of those studies that got blown up into a worldwide news story sensation even though the actual paper didn't say what headlines claimed it did. I don't know if it was ever proven replicable or not, either.

why are so many people so comfortable making this assumption, based on writing style or a checklist of supposed tells or notoriously unreliable detectors, and making kneejerk accusations like they can do no harm and are already settled fact? It's one thing to feel suspicious or disregard the article yourself, but being so incautious about making public accusations without solid evidence is another.

At best, you've identified LLM use. At worst, you've insulted a human writer. Either way, you've derailed the conversation away from the topic at hand.

"So buzz off" (whether a direcy quote or not) seems like a sign they accept the consequence of some people buzzing off.

If they didn't do this, they'd have to accept the consequences of those people not buzzing off, or potentially a different segment of people buzzing off.

Doing nothing isn't an apolitical option either. That's a choice too.

That's disregarding that the people in power routinely make it as difficult as possible to have a choice. If you buy the cheapest foods, maybe it's because you want to eat and pay rent, and spending any more than that would render you homeless. Becoming homeless will not save the poor in another country, even if your purchases to avoid becoming homeless would have contributed a vanishingly tiny, indirect amount to their plight.

I agree that everything is political, and it's good to make choices as ethically as you can, but sometimes it simply isn't possible to be perfect. You can't even know about all the problems without studying them like a full time job. Ain't got time for that. Gotta eat.

The "agonize over every purchase and vote with your dollar" paradigm gives the most votes to billionaires.

Should people think about ethics when buying stuff: yes.

Does failing to recycle a bottle properly, or buying a cheap chocolate bar that may have involved underpaid or even slave labor somewhere in its supply chain, mean someone is evil? Nope.

I wish people would spend less time agonizing or moralizing over what individuals do (even though an individual is easier to influence quickly) and more time going after the broken systems, stupid laws, and malignant CEOs that actually lie at the root of the problems.

Yeah. It's like everybody's forgetting that github also bans things, such as certain projects that receive DMCA takedown requests.

And github pushing its LLM garbage into Visual Studio. If banning crypto or LLM's is political, so too must be pushing them on people who don't want them and very loudly object.

It's only 'political' when someone is trying to divert from the actual, specific subject of a discussion. It's a thought-stopping tactic, not actual substantive criticism.

I'd rather companies actually care (or even just care about seeming to care) about ethics, rather than only caring what makes the line go up the fastest, yes.

A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too.

Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely everybody. Companies just have to look past the ends of their own noses to see the immediate, quick payout of not giving a fuck about it is like accepting payment to dig their own graves.

Also, this is probably, in part, about all the cryto scams everywhere. Companies don't like legal trouble.

Anyway, anybody who's sane backs up their source code. If a company burns you, and it's not a monopoly, you leave it. It's not a problem.

those bots are extremely effective at manipulating LLM results via comments and faking entire reddit threads.

at least if you go to reddit, you know the answer came from reddit, and can be accordingly cautious.

ublock origin (not to be confused with the lite version) can also do this, and is more flexible. But it's easy to miss this functionality because you have to know about and read some documentation to learn how to turn ublock's "medium" mode on and how the controls work.

with the very AI "For example"??????????????????

Yes. LineageOS, GrapheneOS, Arch, Sailfish, various other open distros, Windows Phone, and a surprising number of random proprietary options (these are sometimes based on Android, and have some social media apps, but can't run regular Android apps that weren't specifically designed or altered for it) including for modern dumbphones. There are always more over time, too.

There's also old versions of iOS and Android. We don't want to end up in a situation where people are locked into one of only two vendors and can be forced to keep buying the newest model to use an ID app that only supports the most recent software. That'd be even worse for the environment than the current disposable smartphone culture.

Everything to do with the age verification push is corrupt and stupid to begin with. There isn't even a legitimate cause behind all this for forcing ANY app, even if it didn't also force people to buy a specific, expensive, privacy-invading American product.

I've seen that a lot more often lately because of AI botnets. Supposedly the bots come (or appear to) from some countries more than others, and sometimes websites are just banning a whole country because the load from bots is so bad they it outweighs a small number of real human visits.

Could also be an "instead of implementing legally mandated ID verification, we will simply block all traffic from any country that requires it" thing.