Mostly, they can’t. Businesses like Walmart have margins of around 3-4% or so. If the cost goes up an extra 10% or more, that’s it.

Besides, I don’t see why they would prop up a guy who’s ruining them, anyway. Even if it didn’t require gifting billions to customers.

Yeah. I looked it up. That’s why I made the post with the credible numbers. The point about the crime rate is one of the criticisms of that Yale study, which I thought was neat.

I can see what she’s doing, but I don’t know off the top of my head if there is anyone actually claiming that figure.

Most estimates of “illegal aliens”, including by the Department of Homeland Security, are around ~11 million; a figure that has been stable since noughties. https://www.statista.com/statistics/646261/unauthorized-immigrant-population-in-the-us/

Based on that figure, undocumented immigrants have a much lower crime rate than average. If the figure was as high as she claims, they would have to be absolute saints.

In war, the economy does not slow down. It is turbocharged.

A nuclear war could counter global warming by triggering a nuclear winter but the actual effects are very uncertain. Basically, for a nuclear winter, a lot of “dust” needs to be lifted into the stratosphere. Those huge, multi-megaton bombs that they had back in the day caused a mushroom cloud that rose all the way to the stratosphere. Today, smaller, more precisely targeted bombs are preferred. It also depends on how combustible the targets are. No one is really quite sure what the climate effect of nuking a city is.

ETA: That was how climatologists saw nuclear winter ~15-20 years ago. No idea if anything has changed, but there probably wasn’t a lot of new data.

A substantial reduction in the human population would largely end the burning of fossil fuels and trigger reforestation; removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Ultimately, I would expect WW3 to greatly mitigate global warming.

Lemmy has various options to sort, eg by active. That surfaces posts that create engagement. It’s stuff that polarizes.

I find interesting stuff either by sorting by new in my subscribed communities. Or by looking for something that causes a stir. The last one creates exactly those problems that are often ascribed to “The Algorithm”.

Fair. It’s certainly an issue that someone like Musk could weaponize Twitter.

Being active on Lemmy, not this one incidence in particular. This is one example showing that the spread of misinformation does not require any sinister force pulling strings.

I have an interest in internet regulation and so read various takes. The spread of mis- and disinformation is a frequent complaint about social media. Often, “The Algorithm” is blamed, rather than human nature. The role of influencers and traditional media tends to be ignored.

The original news was posted twice. Right now these posts have a score of 80 and 456 upvotes.

Being active on Lemmy has pretty much convinced me that claims about some evil algorithm being responsible for all the ills of social media are baseless.

https://lemmy.world/post/31866458

https://lemmy.world/post/31865309

…expecting sex “in return”.

Just a joke. People rarely give away drugs without expecting something in return. Even on Halloween.

People are giving out free drugs to anyone? Oh no! Kudos to this brave person for speaking out with no regard for what that might do to their own business.

For a moment there, I thought the UK was splitting up.

Yes. I’ve already edited the OP.

Oops. I first put in the article link, then decided to upload the image. I didn’t notice that that overrode the original link.

Athletes that are deemed to be male at birth, as evidenced by the presence of Y chromosome genetic material (the SRY gene) or with a difference of sexual development (DSD) where male androgenization occurs, will be eligible to compete in the male category.

Athletes that are deemed to be female at birth, as evidenced by the presence of XX chromosomes or the absence of Y chromosome genetic material (the SRY gene) or with a DSD where male androgenization does not occur, will be eligible to compete in the female category.

Oh wow. What’s social construction? *points*

Most people don’t care about locked-down tech. They don’t have the skills necessary to use anything open, and that’s fine. You have to pick what you do with your limited time.

OTOH, many people want to have control over their data. That means having control over other people’s computers. It’s not just the copyright industry demanding money, or Big Tech building walled gardens. You can see a lot of users on Lemmy demanding that kind of control. That means that computing devices of all kinds must become more locked-down and remote-controllable.

So that’s where I see us going.

You mean legally? Yeah, no problem. It depends on the location, though. In the EU, the rights-holder can opt out. So if you want to do it in the EU you have to pay off Reddit, Meta, and so on. In Japan, it’s fine regardless. In the US, it should turn out similarly, but it’s up to the courts to work out the details, and it’s quite up in the air if you can trust the system to work.

The usual tends to be that the platform can do basically whatever. That shouldn’t really be surprising. But I see your point. If you literally want consent, not just legally licensed material, then you need more than just a clause in the TOS.

You could raise the same issue with permissively licensed material. People who released it may not have foreseen AI training as a use, and might not have wanted to actually allow it.

For images, yes. Most notable is probably Adobe. Their AI, which powers photoshop’s generative fill among other things, is trained on public domain and licensed works.

For text, there’s nothing similar. LLMs get better the more data you have. So, the less training data you use, the less useful they are. I think there are 1 or a few small models for research purposes, but it really doesn’t get you there.

Of course, such open source projects are tricky. When you take these extreme, maximalist views of (intellectual) property, then giving stuff away for free isn’t the obvious first step.