My guy Zo

No one deserves anything in the state of nature, everything just is what it is.

Desert regards The Social Contract. The contract says we mutually agree to behave respectfully towards eachother, to honor eachother’s right to exist and persist in the world. When a person fails to abide by the contract, they aren’t covered by it either. A person who hoards resources beyond what they can possibly use is not covered by the contract and deserves no protection under it.

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

Some days all I do is watch the sky

The research on it is pretty murky because marketing firms frequently fund research studies but if you poke around at some of the many meta-analysis papers out there I think it’s hard to conclude that advertising is a net profit for big companies, at least in a dollars in dollars out sense. Freakonomics did an interesting episode on the topic in 2020.

For a new brand with zero visibility I’m sure ads gain new customers, but established brands (which make up most of the advertising I see) probably aren’t making much of an impact on their sales with their incessant campaigns.

Ads make me especially mad because there’s reasonable evidence to suggest they aren’t effective at increasing sales so the whole thing feels like a scam to waste everyone’s time and money

Learning to make workplace smalltalk will make work easier and more pleasant. You can learn to deflect away from topics that are super boring to you and you can develop an “I’m super busy” persona for times when you need to focus.

That’s really inspiring

“The pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best.”

What is it that you do best though? What do you sell?

Moving 1000 engineers to a “data labeling team” and calling it applied AI basically seems like demoting 1000 engineers to non-engineering roles, I’d be insulted but people working for Meta in 2026 probably don’t have a lot of pride to lose. Seems like most AI companies outsource the labelling stuff so I wonder how Meta is justifying paying people engineering salaries to do it.

AFAIK most clients don’t automatically tag posts as any language, so almost everything is lumped under undetermined. When I post from voyager I don’t have an option to select the language.

Some former software like kbin automatically tagged language and added hashtags automatically to make posts discoverable by microblog fedi communities. Maybe mbin or piefed are currently using that capability?

But I think the short answer is that the language feature isn’t very practically useful right now, but might be in the future as features are built out/expanded.

I looked at it and the study is only considering cities. I wonder why whoever made the chart omitted Mexico since it is included in the original study?

The researchers for this study put together a neat data explorer at citiesmoving.com

I remember when the new york times participated in the genocide by platforming accusations of rape (and beheadings) against hamas that didn’t even meet their own journalistic standards for sources and verification, but they only let the well documented rape of numerous palestinians be published as opinion pieces.

Things like good public education make society more pleasant to live in for everyone including greedy opportunists and their families.

Same with balancing resource extraction against environmental stability.

What billionaires are doing seems totally illogical and self destructive even from a greed perspective.

Even if we assume they’re thinking they can escape on a space ark it makes no sense to want to live in the cold, harsh, hostile environment of a space instead of on the one planet that we can naturally breathe on that also happens to grow delicious things and stuff.

From no perspectives can this be a smart move, I refuse to believe it!

We are pretty small and I haven’t seen any real conflict play out within the community in my time here. The admins are anarchist and I think we agree on the things that matter most. The community isn’t explicitly anarchist (we want to be a good landing pad for all solarpunks). I haven’t seen misplaced hatred or bigotry coming out of our community. I’m a pretty happy camper.

All the subtle techniques eventually produce enough evidence to sum up one’s observations into a really big and gross elephant. Standing right there.

That’s such a great description, you somehow start being able to see through the mist if you pay attention to a topic for long enough and the details coalesce into a clear picture of the situation.

I’m sure the wool is still over my eyes on some important things but my bullshit detector is constantly improving.

Also, agreed, let’s put the elephants in charge.

Nah you’re completely right it merits an angrier tone, it’s just so exhausting!

Agreed on the lack of legitimate publications. Pretty much every mainstream news source is compromised. You just have to piece together the truth from independent sources and read between the lines.

They make their agenda kind of transparent just in what they do choose to cover (like Bezos’ papers hyping billionaires and AI) vs what they choose not to cover (perpetual and well documented rape murder and other war crimes by Israel).

I guess I felt like the evidence spoke for itself, my aim was to communicate that Guardian was acting in bad faith in their reporting of this. “Grain of salt” was just colloquial language. I hadn’t read the paper so I couldn’t speak to the actual contents.

I’m also disappointed that Stanford, Upenn, and Duke would be okay with this (there are rules for putting your university affiliation on illegitimate research to make it seem legitimate). I would kind of expect it from Stanford (who also sponsored the research) tbh but not Duke or Upenn.

No wonder people are losing faith in the scientific establishment. If anyone reading this goes to one of those universities you should email the VPR/OPR office to complain. This is eroding your legitimacy too.

This whole thing is an excellent example of how corporations wield their ‘soft power’ to try to make their policies seem reasonable.

Edit: And U. Michigan! Good lord.

I think we agree! I was the original commenter in this comment thread and posted the screenshot of the sponsorship issue

Typically when a news article mentions a “study” it’s a peer reviewed research article. If it’s a white paper or a working paper that is typically pointed out. Leaving that detail out is notable and probably a purposeful decision by my reckoning.

Generally they don’t mention conflicts of interest even if they’re listed so that bit isn’t especially atypical here to me.

I had seen the LLC thing and raised my eyebrows at the projects listed on their wiki, but didn’t see the META board thing, good catch. Everything is both awful and exactly as expected.

Interesting that Guardian didn’t see fit to mention it was a white paper unless I missed something.