Imagine if they focused on creating tools that could jailbreak iOS devices, John Deere tractors, HP printers, etc. I bet they could sell that as a service. What could the US or American companies do to stop them? They could be Disenshittification Island.

I remember looking at some point, and Gnome had roughly 4x the number of developers that KDE had. If you want the best (most stable, most well tested, most feature full, etc.) programs, you basically have to use some Gnome programs. That was one of the deciding factors that pushed me to go with Gnome. If I was going to have to use Gnome programs anyhow, and they worked best with Gnome, then I thought I should use Gnome. My experience was that Gnome programs don’t really play well with KDE, but that KDE programs generally work OK on Gnome.

I really like the customizability of KDE, but I like many of the defaults of Gnome. Unfortunately, if you don’t like some of Gnome’s defaults, it’s real pain in the ass to change them. Personally, even though I liked a lot of Gnome’s defaults, I absolutely hated some other ones. If it weren’t for extensions there’s no way at all I could use it. Luckily, some of the biggest misfeatures are so widely recognized that there are dozens of extensions to choose from to fix them. OTOH KDE’s customizability led to some issues too. I remember having some weird interactions between things because settings A, B and C don’t necessarily work well together. But, at least those settings are built into the desktop environment, and you’re not relying on some random dude’s hobby project for a critical system setting.

At the moment, I’m pretty happy with Gnome, and most days it just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do. That’s something I never ever got with Windows. It was always a pain in my ass. And, it’s something that was only ever 90% true with OSX. Great defaults, but that last 10% is a real pain in the ass. Gnome’s extensions let me get much closer to 100%. I have to admit though, that I do dread the day that I have to upgrade it and all the extensions break.

Aaaaaaaand let me tell you, I had a sleepless night last night knowing there were no detectors installed.

This seems really weird. Smoke detectors are important, but the odds of a fire any given night are incredibly low. To me, replacing a detector would be a chore I’d get to within a week, and I definitely wouldn’t lose sleep over it.

I’m pretty sure Google’s AI is fed by the same spider that goes out and finds every new or changed web page (or a variant of that).

As soon as someone writes an article about how AI gets something wrong and provides a solution, that solution is now in the AI’s training data.

OTOH, that means it’s probably also ingesting a lot of AI generated slop, which causes its own set of problems.

It’s not literally guessing, because guessing implies it understands there’s a question and is trying to answer that question. It’s not even doing that. It’s just generating words that you could expect to find nearby.

3 in 10 people get this wrong‽‽

Maybe they’re picturing filling up a bucket and bringing it back to the car? Or dropping off keys to the car at the car wash?

It’s also the case that people are mostly consistent.

Take a question like “how long would it take to drive from here to [nearby city]”. You’d expect that someone’s answer to that question would be pretty consistent day-to-day. If you asked someone else, you might get a different answer, but you’d also expect that answer to be pretty consistent. If you asked someone that same question a week later and got a very different answer, you’d strongly suspect that they were making the answer up on the spot but pretending to know so they didn’t look stupid or something.

Part of what bothers me about LLMs is that they give that same sense of bullshitting answers while trying to cover that they don’t know. You know that if you ask the question again, or phrase it slightly differently, you might get a completely different answer.

Too Many Cooks was the best thing to just start watching without any expectations. Even having someone say “hey, you should watch this” sort of ruins it.

Those are 2 exceptions out of how many?

I’m not actually laughing at it.

Sure, but not executive experience.

If you look at most successful candidates for president they were either governors or generals (or lately CEOs). You can guess what the attacks against AOC are going to be. One will certainly be that she doesn’t have the experience, especially as a key decision maker. Personally, I think she’d be a fine president right now. But, to convince enough other people I think she’ll need to prove to them that she knows what she’s doing at the “big desk”.

I think she could do better than that.

And look how that has worked out.

I hope she runs for NY governor or something soon. I’d like to see her as president, but I don’t think her campaign would have much success if her only political experience is as a congresswoman. Historically, it’s hard for a presidential candidate to succeed without first having some experience in an executive role (like governor, or as a general). Plus, imagine how much she and Mandami could get done together if he were running NYC and she were the governor.

What’s interesting is that in the early online days, there was still a lot of misogyny. In the early days of Friendster / Myspace there were a lot more guys online than girls. By the time Facebook started to come around, being online was more of a normal thing, so there were more women and girls online. But, at least at the beginning, the feeds were smaller (mostly just posts from friends) and tended not to be algorithmic. It was a timeline, not a feed.

So, there was a bit of a golden period when all young people were starting to go online, so it wasn’t just a small, male-dominated space any more. There also weren’t algorithmic feeds yet, or influencers, and nowhere near the level of surveillance-based advertising. These days the big social media companies feel that their audience is locked in, and have nowhere to go, so they’re squeezing them, trying to extract as much value as possible.

If you’re a 15-year-old girl your options are really being ostracized by the other teens for not using the apps, or using the apps and dealing with all that shit. I don’t know if being a teen girl has ever been a wonderful experience. But, I sure wouldn’t want to be one right now.

I agree with your sentiment here. Obviously, it’s possible to avoid using Instagram and TikTok, and it’s basically impossible to avoid using the street.

On the other hand, if you’re a teenage girl, it may be nearly impossible to not use these big corporate social media sites. A big part of being a teen is socializing with other teens. A big part of being an adolescent is learning to fit in with other adolescents without constant adult supervision. It’s one of the reason that home schooled kids have a rough time once they hit college, university or work. Many remain deeply strange for a long while after that.

If all the other teens in your social group are using Instagram and TikTok and you’re the one person who isn’t, you’re probably going to be ostracized. Liking and commenting on each-other’s social media posts is an important ritual of friendship at that age.

Sometimes parents ban or restrict social media usage by their kids. To a certain extent that can shield the kid, because it’s no longer their fault, and their friends might accept that. But, still, if the kid isn’t on social media, they’re probably not getting invited to in-person events, they don’t know what the important topics of conversation are, and so-on.

I mean, the nerve of saying “don’t use social media” on a social media site is pretty rich. And, don’t think a 15-year old is going to switch from TikTok to PeerTube or something. You might be able to get them to try it out, but you’re not easily going to migrate her entire friend group. The content is also not there. Plus, fediverse sites are inhabited by deeply strange people. I love you all, but I wouldn’t want you interacting with a 15 year old girl.

I’m not quite 70 years old, but I’ve been around for long enough to laugh at this line from the article: “Sexual equality has ceased to exist online”

Only a 15 year old could think that sexual equality ever existed online. It may be hard to believe, but it’s probably better now than it ever has been. Back in the early days online spaces were so male dominated that people had trouble believing that women were even online at all.

But, many anonymous tips are baseless. That’s why there normally isn’t a press conference when those allegations haven’t yet been investigated and verified.

It was something he mentioned in passing. But, the focus of his press conference was the same as the headline here: “There are allegations”

I’m a huge fan of immutable distros, but I’m not sure they’re mass transit.

Maybe:

It gets you where you want to go, but you don’t have to handle the toil of dealing with traffic.