Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.
To be fair, that description of being piled on by angry people who are looking for an excuse to be angry could easily describe a lot of threads I’ve been in on the Fediverse lately. Seems like there’s an unfortunate mood going around right now.
Sounds like a purity spiral may be revving up.
Indeed. There are lots of proposals for perfectly portable decentralized user identities, subscriptions that transcend specific instances, and whatnot, but until those things actually arrive that’s not the Fediverse we’re dealing with. It’s a hassle having to switch instances.
There’s a broad spectrum between reason and murder. You could tackle them, or bonk them with a stick, or distract them with shiny objects.
Yeah. If god’s so powerful why can’t he do it himself?
It says “opt-out” in the title.
Indeed. Firefox already has “sponsored links” and such in the built-in homepage, I simply disable those when I first install it and get on with life.
Big projects like Firefox need big money to support it. If you don’t want it to be beholden to Google it needs to find ways to earn some on its own.
And replace it with what? The only two basic forms of democracy are representative and direct, and direct democracy has its own problems.
I can’t imagine how a representative democracy would operate otherwise. In representative democracies you’re picking some person to make decisions on your behalf, and that person is different from you so some of their decisions are not going be the ones you would have made if you were in their place.
You may be wanting direct democracy, in which you would personally get to vote on the government’s actions. Your “representative” would be perfect in that case because your representative would be you. But since you would only represent yourself, that’s not what would normally be called “representative democracy.”
This is how representative democracy works, none of the presented options are likely to be “perfect” for any given voter.
First thing I’d do when boarding a Federation ship is tell the computer it’s authorized to keep an eye on my vitals.
But now that AI has become advanced enough to get uncomfortably close to us, we need to move the goalposts farther away so everyone can relax again.
It’s true, go ahead and read the ToS. It only grants a license to Reddit to use your content. It explicitly says:
You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
And then goes on to enumerate what you’re licensing them to do with it. There’s also a section titled “Changes to these Terms” about how they can change the ToS going forward.
Same here in Canada.
I’d be curious what the “cutoff” date is for eligibility for this. It could be that they generated the list of accounts they’d be sending this offer to some time ago, and OP deleted his account after that point.
No problem. I’m not a lawyer myself, mind you, but I’ve encountered issues like these enough times over the years that I feel I’ve got a pretty good layman’s grasp. Plus I’ve actually read some of these ToSes and considered them from the perspective of the company running the site, which I suspect most people arguing about this stuff haven’t actually done.
I wish the Fediverse sites running without rigorous ToSes well, of course, but I suspect failing to establish clear rights to use the content people post on them is likely to end up biting them in the long run. At least the bigger ones. Hobby-level websites get away with a lot because they don’t have significant money on the line.
You could ask a lawyer, I suppose. But the basic gist of this is “we don’t know what we might need to do with this data in the future, so we put ‘we can do anything with this data’ into the ToS so that we know that if the need arises we won’t find ourselves unable to do what we need to do with it.” Any website that doesn’t do this could find itself unable to implement new features or comply with new laws they didn’t think of when crafting the original ToS.
At the very minimum a ToS needs to have some way to update and apply retroactively to old data, which ends up being “we can do anything with this data” with extra steps.
Have you not experimented with LLMs? They come up with new things all the time.
A user’s data still belongs to the user when they post it on sites like Reddit and such, too. The ToS doesn’t take ownership away from them, at least not in any case that I’ve seen. It just gives the site the license to use it as well.
If it makes you feel better, the thing that annoys me most is not so much that this is happening but more how everybody is suddenly surprised by it and complaining about it. The data-harvesting itself doesn’t really harm anyone.
I find a ton of uses for quick Python scripts hammered out with Bing Chat to get random stuff done.
It’s also super useful when brainstorming and fleshing out stuff for the tabletop roleplaying games I run. Just bounce ideas off it, have it write monologues, etc.