Too long to read? I get it. Here’s the summary. Download Firefox.

Yes. One option is to download it from here: https://librewolf.net/

Isn’t this basically just the old trick of estimating (x * y) as (x + y - 1) when x and y are somewhat close to 1?

I missed the Internet Archive yesterday when @[email protected] casually mentioned “Keppler illustrations for Puck” as if we’d all know what that meant and the best-looking link that came up on search was to a collection of them there.

Meh. It’s not a problem of scale. It’s a problem of we have no idea how the fuck to do that. Scaling up existing techniques is neither necessary nor sufficient.

The agency said that Evil Corp’s ability to translate their criminal proceeds into real spending money was as important to their success as their technical exploits.

May their example serve to remind us all that the surveillance state must forever continue to expand until we finally attain the ideal financial system where criminals are no longer able to transform money into money.

If you can’t handle the shocking reality of someone choosing unusual pronouns to refer to themselves, fediverse may not be the social media for you.

It looks like your opinions about Linux are outdated and need an update.

https://www.newegg.com/kensington-k72436am-usb-wired/p/N82E16823155065

“more sympathetic” to conservative values than Europe

Oh look, it’s another foreign land that hasn’t yet developed any immunity to the infectious diseases coming out of Europe.

Okay, who’s giving odds on this one coming anywhere close to living up to its billing?

Where is it? It’s in the 1970s. Tempted by Lucifer to get brighter and brighter, we collectively chose to leave it behind.

Typical call to the AI safety hotline:

Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don’t trust it at all, I’m worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me…

It does not require compromising your free software ideals

By which of course I mean what I think of as free software ideals, which I’ve come to understand in large part through the teachings of Richard Stallman even though I’m not personally such an idealist as he is. He Sometimes he even goes so far as to recommend people to services with non-free software on the server side, so long as it requires only free software on systems that the user controls. Your standards may differ. But anyway, if you had to quit fedi because someone set up a fediverse/telegram bridge I think it would not be a practical way to live. Where you draw the line is of course up to you, but I wouldn’t expect many people to follow you that far from the usual FOSS positions.

I don’t think even RMS himself would refuse to participate in something on the grounds that Telegram users are also able to do so. It does not require compromising your free software ideals. By all means point out to them that you believe them to be doing something wrong, but the method you’ve chosen to try and get them to change their ways seems very likely to be ineffective and also counterproductive. It does further divide the community, even if others have already done even worse.

It looks like you are more of an xmpp advocate than a free software advocate. If you want to join a matrix room and it’s too burdensome to do so through your xmpp client, then use a matrix client for that. Without some much better reasons for doing so, setting up a competing xmpp room is not a reasonable alternative.

… I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.

I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who’ve learned that it’s necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.

I find myself suspecting that chatbots getting really good at talking people into believing whatever their operators want people to believe is going to start a lot more conspiracy theories than it ends.

Is it a good article? I don’t know. There’s some truth in there, but I’m pretty sure there are a hell of a lot more suburban Trump voters than there are rural Trump voters. And in my experience of it the people who live in small towns, medium-sized cities, suburbs, edge city, and even actual rural areas are in general not nearly as monolithic and politically unified as they’re portrayed there. Even if it’s always clear which party is going to get the majority of votes, they most often don’t get all the votes. Perhaps like the writer of that article many of them like to romanticize the idea of being “rural” because they mow their own lawn and could drive to a farm in half an hour if they wanted to, but although there’s some truth in there I think it’s mostly foolish rationalizations. Big cities are alien to me too, that’s not a real reason to buy into all that cheap right-wing mythology that gets used to explain why we should vote against our own interests.

The Great Shopping Mall of Alexandria

The agonizingly slow progress into mainstream discourse of this idea that we should all stop using twitter continues at its steady pace. Will the obvious truth of it mean that it continues until even the politicians get it? Or will it in time become be one of those “yeah we probably should’ve done that” things that never gets done?