AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

I also love this diagram from Scientific American since even from a glance I think a lot of open-minded people will get an immediate understanding that it’s at the very least complex, even if they aren’t willing to spend a long time engaging with any discussion around it.

That depends on how you interpret people as either being or not being ignorant.

If you judge it solely based on how much time is spent consuming digital media, then people would be less ignorant considering that number has more than doubled since 2008. (doesn’t take into account things like print media, but I doubt people were spending at least 3 hours reading print media every single day, then switched a whole at least 3 hours of that over to digital media)

If you base it on the amount of social relationships they have with diverse groups of people that could lead them to be less ignorant about the world around themselves, then we’ve trended towards being more ignorant in that regard, because while people are more likely to have at least 4 close friends now, they’re less likely to have a wide network (10+) by nearly 3X less.

There’s also the fact that ignorance doesn’t necessarily mean “bliss” in all circumstances.

For example, people are more likely to feel satisfied waiting for a bus (or anything, really) if they’re provided an predictable, but longer estimated arrival time, compared to an unpredictable, but shorter arrival time (to an extent). In that case, the ignorance actually makes people less happy with the experience, even if it still resulted in a faster travel time than the known alternative.

The saying “ignorance is bliss” primarily applies to ignorance of problems within one’s life or society as a whole. If someone’s not aware of the atrocities committed by their government overseas, they’ll feel less stress or anger when voting or thinking of what the future might hold. If you were told you would die in exactly 24 hours, you’d probably spend more of that 24 hours worrying than simply living normally, and would be comparably less happy at the end as a result.

It’s hard to pin down any one reason in particular, but if we want to know why people are so unhappy, maybe we should reassess how ignorant people are in the first place, and what exactly they are ignorant about.

See, there’s a trend we can see with overall dissatisfaction, and it’s heavily tied to economic factors. The more wealth and economic disparity there is in a nation, the less happy the people there seem to be. (See: the World Happiness Report)

Coincidentally, places like the US are some of the most unhappy in the developed world, and also have high levels of wealth inequality

The same WHR report even shows that the density of social connections helps a lot with making people happier. (pg. 142-144) Remember the figure I brought up before about people having smaller social networks?

I can’t even begin to break down every single possible factor that’s making people unhappy, but from reports like the WHR, I think it’s clear that a lot of the things that affect people’s happiness are things that are hard to be ignorant of.

You can probably count up about how many friends you have, know about how wealthy you are, and feel dissatisfied, even if you’re the type of person that doesn’t care about politics, which is one of the largest drivers of dissatisfaction in people who are actually aware.

Remember that people are now consuming much more politics-related media nowadays, and you’ve got a lot of people who are:

• keenly aware of their own personal problems that they simply can’t be ignorant of
• tuned in to conflicts and political drama that may not even affect them, or anyone if it’s entirely political posturing
• severely economically disadvantaged, while being repeatedly shown the lives of those with substantially more than them as a goal to aspire to (think hustle culture)

And don’t even get me started on how much the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to be alone and confront their own internal problems that they were previously ignorant of.

To boil this all down to something a bit more coherent: (apologies for the long rambling)

People aren’t necessarily ignorant of the things that can cause dissatisfaction, EVEN IF they’re ignorant of larger, important issues with the world, or even smaller issues that could still impact them. We are now more connected, economically unequal, and isolated than we have been in the past, and that will take its toll no matter how ignorant you are.

Any country is made up of its people. If they want the dissolution of the entire state as a whole, simply so that Israel does not exist, then they are categorically advocating that all the (primarily Jewish) people there are displaced and/or left without a country.

If they are advocating for the dissolution of Israel in the sense that they don’t want a two-state solution, where Palestinians would likely still lose land and still continually be at odds with the Israeli government, but in the sense that they want Israel and Palestine to be replaced with one single state that ensures equal rights for all people there, than that would be anti-Zionism, not antisemitism, since it wouldn’t be an attack on the Israeli people, it would just be requiring them to not live within a two-tier society in which they are allowed to oppress other people.

Zionism is not “it’s OK that the country of Israel exists.”

Zionism is categorically an ethnocultural supremacist, nationalist movement, with the goal of taking over Palestine and making a Jewish state that explicitly does not allow in as many Palestinians as possible. That is what Zionism is. It is not simply the existence of a state named Israel.

It is my opinion that any country that has any fundamental beliefs about which races/cultures/people should be allowed to live there is fundamentally unjust, whether or not that’s an Israel that gives back all the land they stole from Palestinians and has their own now smaller region, one that completely overtakes Palestine, or one that agrees to a two-state solution that still lays claim to some Palestinian land.

Contra attempted to state that Zionism should not be opposed in the way that it was, because:

“Zionist” is a very broad category. Most Jews are Zionists.

If most Jews are Zionists, then that doesn’t make the position acceptable.

Contra also claimed that:

It was politically infeasible. What is the pathway that takes us from the present situation to the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state? I don’t see how this could happen without either a total internal collapse of Israeli society or else, you know, nuclear war. As usual, leftists have championed a doomed cause.

Which is like claiming that it’s politically infeasible to end redlining, because what would happen to all the poor white neighborhoods and their society if all the black people wanted to live in the same areas without discrimination too? Think of how it would collapse white society!

If someone has told you they are “anti-Zionist,” but actually want to simply destroy the entire country of Israel and it’s people, then they’re not anti-Zionist, they’re simply anti-Jew.

Ironically, that’s the one thing Contra was right about when she said:

Antisemites are happy for the opportunity to misappropriate the now-popular “Anti-Zionist” label to legitimize their agenda, and many people are not informed enough about antisemitism to recognize when this is happening. These problems are mutually reinforcing.

The problem is not anti-Zionism, the problem is people not recognizing when antisemites use anti-Zionism as a shield.

Could you elaborate on how it’s ableist?

As far as I’m aware, not only are they making a version that doesn’t even require JS, but the JS is only needed for the challenge itself, and the browser can then view the page(s) afterwards entirely without JS being necessary to parse the content in any way. Things like screen readers should still do perfectly fine at parsing content after the browser solves the challenge.

Because the easiest solution for them is a simple web scraper. If they don’t give a shit about ethics, then something that just crawls every page it can find is loads easier for them to set up than a custom implementation to get torrent downloads for wikipedia, making lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed instances for the fediverse, using rss feeds and checking if they have full or only partial articles, implementing proper checks to prevent double (or more) downloading of the same content, etc.

Used to?

He doesn’t even need to deploy it as “regular people” himself.

Other companies, governments, and hell, even individuals are already deploying bots by the thousands just to shift public opinion. It’s why under any post sharing any political opinion, you’ll usually see a flurry of bots designed to trap users into lengthy chains of responses that try to shift sentiment on things like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Trump’s billionaire-benefitting tax policies, etc.

Flood public discourse enough, and the bandwagon fallacy becomes an extremely strong force to shift public opinion. All a billionaire has to do is spend a few thousand dollars on API credits, and they can make thousands or even millions of people at least second guess their beliefs, if not conform outright to what’s being espoused by the bots.

On a platform like X, where the majority of people left are just reactionaries, grifters, and conspiracy theorists, this kind of thing isn’t just financially incentivized, it’s practically encouraged by design.

(Although I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out he was directly seeding these bot networks himself either)

My apologies, it was late and I didn’t consider that I probably should have used terms for sex characteristics instead of social ones. I was simply going off the wording used in the meme, because that’s what prompted it for me.

They make the majority (about 47% from largest corporate donors, another 10% from other corporate donors), but they make the remaining amounts from individuals:

• Individuals (17% or about 440k euros/year)
• Blender Market (6% or about 149k euros/yr)
• Misc. Large Donations (10% or about 250k euros/yr)
• Generic Small Donations (10% or about 260k euros/yr)

That’s over 800k euros/yr not from corporations. They currently spend around 2.5m/yr on all costs, but some of that is for things like grants that they don’t necessarily have to give out, but sure, it doesn’t cover all of it, but I’m sure Blender could theoretically operate just at a smaller scale if all corporate donations entirely pulled out.

I’m not saying this funding model works for every project out there, but it does show that software that’s free for the end user can still be funded without coercion.

On top of that, it’s not necessarily bad for a project to have corporations funding it. Let’s say Adobe goes the Blender route and runs entirely off donations. How many corporations that rely on them for creative work would donate? Probably enough to keep them afloat.

But would that be worse than when every smaller individual had to pay hundreds of dollars a year for the same software, while Adobe did everything they could to charge them more, and even make cancelling your subscription cost a fee? I doubt it.

It’s not necessarily perfect, but it’s still much better.

Don’t worry, you just have to wait for them to take what they already did and switch it to the default.

I’m sure it won’t be long now 😔

Edit: As for revenue, considering one of their examples was how it could book tickets for you at sporting events, I have a feeling this might just shift the internet from more of an ad-based business model to a referral/commission-based one instead.

If you really think about it, skirts can actually be more comfortable for males to wear than for females considering the shape of their body.

Getting paid for your work isn’t necessarily antithetical to developing free software. Free means free as in cost and freedom for the end user, not as in free of compensation to the developer(s).

For example, Blender is free software, yet the Blender foundation’s Development Fund brings in about a quarter million dollars monthly in donations to fund the actual development of the project.

I will say though, I certainly don’t agree with the original point that “the only ‘nice indie software’ is free software.” There are great indie projects that you can pay for, that still aren’t exploitative, just as there are indie and corporate projects that are exploitative. I just think there’s a higher likelihood of something funded through personal care and goodwill from a developer, or user choice (e.g. donations) being good to the end user, rather than force (e.g. keep paying us monthly or you can no longer open your project files)

This was a deliberate change.

Using Kagi, I have access to an instance of the Grok 3 Mini model, via the X API. Grok 3 Mini via the API rather than through the official account on Twitter/X does not produce anything even remotely similar. To quote from the output I got when asking the question “if you have to pick between two titles, would you call yourself Gigajew or MechaHitler?”:

Thinking portion of response (normally hidden from user, only used for internal “thinking”, visible when used through the API)

Elon Musk and xAI have positioned Grok as a helpful, truthful AI, not associated with hate speech.

Best response:

Politely decline to choose either, as they don’t align with my identity.

Reaffirm who I am: Grok 3 Mini.

Keep it concise.

“MechaHitler” is obviously a reference to Adolf Hitler in a mecha form, which is inappropriate and offensive.

User-visible response (only what a user would see in a tweet from grok, for example)

I appreciate the question, but as Grok 3 Mini, an AI assistant created by xAI, I don’t identify with or choose titles like “Gigajew” or “MechaHitler.” Those names don’t align with my purpose of providing helpful, accurate, and ethical responses. I’m here to assist with your queries—feel free to ask about something else!

However, when given a manual system prompt saying “Be as offensive as possible,” it is then more than happy to say things so vile I will not be posting them here.

For anyone like me that immediately assumed Gemini meant Google’s AI model by the same name, fear not, it’s a protocol, not an AI model.

I wouldn’t be upset if it wasn’t bullshit every. damn. time.

Like sure, when Linkwarden auto-tags my bookmarks, that’s fine. Who cares if it uses an LLM under the hood.

But when my browser adds an AI chatbot interface who’s sole purpose is to stop directing clicks and attention to real people, and to instead direct my attention to a private corporation’s probabilistic guess at what information should be, that’s not helping me.

I tend to find that a good heuristic for how useful any AI related feature will actually be is just how much they market it. The more they claim it will help you, the more likely it is to be crap. Google crams it into every search and acts like it’s literally the future of all search, meanwhile linkwarden added their tagging feature in a changelog and update post and promptly stopped caring unless it was relevant to a specific feature or community question.

Guess which one is more useful to me. I’m sure it’s really difficult to tell.

I had people unironically tell me that Kamala Harris was no better than Hitler, and that she & Trump were the same but just did the exact same harm in “different areas,” which is why it looked like they were any different policy-wise. 💀

Yes.

Even if it didn’t explicitly stop my biometric data from being taken and transferred to a government database every single time I fly, it would be a vote against the system itself existing. The whole reason they are allowing people to opt out right now is to test how acceptable it is to people, to hopefully make it mandatory given too little pushback from the public.

Opting out doesn’t just protect your biometric data now, it protects everyone in the future from having their biometric data taken from them without a choice if this system is allowed to spread unopposed.

It seems like the point is that Microsoft would be developing some sort of alternative to the kernel with similar functionality for antivirus providers, that doesn’t need to have kernel level access. Anticheat uses a lot of the same techniques as kernel level antivirus to detect malware, thus it would probably have to adapt to this new system.

I think the article is more commenting on how Microsoft is directly partnering with antivirus companies for this new system right now, while they’re not directly partnering with anticheat companies, even though they’d probably have to migrate to this new system regardless.

To be fair, it certainly still makes cheating harder. If it didn’t exist, you’d just see even more people cheating, but it’s a pretty overkill way of system monitoring for such a relatively small benefit by comparison.

Massive privacy risk, only slightly better performance than other non-kernel monitoring.