Some of us remember the coed bathroom featured on the hit 90s show Ally McBeal. It seemed like a progressive but not so far fetched idea at the time. So WTF are we doing still arguing about this 25 years later? These bathroom nazis need to get a grip.

Washington Post won’t be endorsing a candidate (which was without any doubt going to be Kamala) this election because the paper’s new owner (Jeff Bezos) said not to.

I had just given Putin tree fiddy the week before

I daresay this is the outcome he hoped for. Suddenly there are a bunch of open editorial author seats to fill. Taking bets on those seats being filled by people who don’t lean quite so far to the left.

And a significant loss in subscribers? That’s just the principled people fleeing who weren’t gonna buy his nonsense either way. The people who stick around are the ones who are okay with billionaire interference in their news source, and those are the people Bezos wants as subscribers.

Hate to break it to you, but you are not Google’s customer. Don’t believe me? How much did you pay for Chrome?

This move is in fact being made with their actual customers in mind.

Probably the closest thing you can get to in terms of a “privacy” credit card. Everything about a credit card is tied to you by their very nature. So it depends on what or who you want privacy from.

Someone else mentioned privacy.com which I also use - it’s good if you want to hide your transaction from the credit card company, or if you want to hide your identity from the merchant. But Privacy.com is more like a virtual debit card that connects to your bank account. Privacy.com still knows who you are.

There’s a reason scam artists target the elderly. If a box on the computer screen says “put payment info here” then who are they to argue with the box?

I mean… It’s Las Vegas. You don’t go to Vegas expecting a vacation experience free from the perverse corruption of money.

The only difference is who pays you to do it 😁

It’s not as easy as moderating individual posts. Remember, Lemmy is decentralized. If you start your own Lemmy server and I federated with it, I’ll get all the stuff you post on my instance too (intentionally oversimplified).

Its up to you to moderate communities on your instance the way you see fit, and up to me to moderate mine. Even though our instances are federated, I can’t moderate on your behalf. It just isn’t feasible both in terms of the technology and in terms of the sheer volume of content you would have to try to moderate.

If you have a community that posts a mix of things I agree with and things I don’t, I really only have a couple options on my end. Basically I can block that community on my instance or block your instance altogether.

The reason why someone might block a community may be more about the legal risk than any moral justification. Depending on where you are, it might be illegal to even host that information. And since Lemmy instances cache posts from other instances, it could be argued that because that community is federated with your instance, you’re responsible for the content posted there.

That said, if I wanted to spam the Fediverse, I’d just spin up my own instance of Lemmy or Mastodon.

Its actually smarter for spammers to infiltrate populated servers. Admins aren’t going to have a problem defederating from a pure spam instance. They’ll think twice about defederating from an instance with lots of legit users.

I saw a little of it. Then I saw the offending instances quickly banned. Then I saw a comment from the admin that they didn’t like having to implement bans of entire instances, but it became a necessity until admin of those offending instances took action.

I dunno, seems like it is working exactly as intended to me.

And it’s far better than a monolithic tech giant. Pointing at Mastodon and calling out spam is utterly silly when compared to the amount of spam on large services. This article reads like a hit piece sponsored by Xitter.

i’m the bestest browser guys, i swear. source: trust me bro.

Microsoft Edge has entered the chat

You know what? Okay! I’m in.

“Students who have completed Archery, Fencing, Pistol (Air Pistol or Rifle) and Sailing should send an email to…”

When a university education becomes a fantasy story meme. At least if you’re attending MIT, you’re probably multiclassed into some kind of technomancer.

You mean the always-on GPS-enabled internet-connected microphone and camera which is also likely Bluetooth and NFC beaconing and contains all of my most personal data including my name, contacts, unencrypted chats facilitated by major cell phone carriers, photos, emails, and other personal files which are also likely synced with a cloud service operated by major multi-national corporations, and also stores biometric data such as facial recognition, fingerprints, time spent sleeping, and even heart rate and number of steps taken assuming you have “fitness” features enabled?

With those last couple items, these massive companies that regularly share data with law enforcement are literally tracking your every step and nearly every beat of your heart.

Well don’t worry about that, I’ve got Express VPN.

Curious about something, maybe you know since you work at a theater. I seem to remember hearing that a theater has to pay royalties each time they show a movie and that newer technology can track and report this automatically. Does the latest technology automatically track this as I recall? And if so, would playing a movie as a test count as a showing?

And realistically, there’s nothing stopping them from setting up a bunch of nondescript shell instances to gather data anyway.

They were always going to. As long as Xitter has a user base with money to spend, the large corporations do not care. Anything they do like withdrawing advertising is all for show.

And after all, are you going to cancel your Netflix subscription over this? I actually probably would personally but my partner uses it quite a lot, so we’re sticking around. Some people will cancel no doubt but nowhere near a critical mass that will affect their bottom line and they know it.

While you make a valid point here, mine was simply that once something is out there, it’s nearly impossible to remove. At a certain point, the nature of the internet is that you no longer control the data that you put out there. Not that you no longer own it and not that you shouldn’t have a say. Even though you initially consented, you can’t guarantee that any site will fulfill a request to delete.

Should authors and artists be fairly compensated for their work? Yes, absolutely. And yes, these AI generators should be built upon properly licensed works. But there’s something really tricky about these AI systems. The training data isn’t discrete once the model is built. You can’t just remove bits and pieces. The data is abstracted. The company would have to (and probably should have to) build a whole new model with only propeely licensed works. And they’d have to rebuild it every time a license agreement changed.

That technological design makes it all the more difficult both in terms of proving that unlicensed data was used and in terms of responding to requests to remove said data. You might be able to get a language model to reveal something solid that indicates where it got it’s information, but it isn’t simple or easy. And it’s even more difficult with visual works.

There’s an opportunity for the industry to legitimize here by creating a method to manage data within a model but they won’t do it without incentive like millions of dollars in copyright lawsuits.