schnurrito

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Hard to miss the articles about that. I realize that and don't think it's an actively good thing, but ultimately this is a matter of market forces. I don't find that an especially good argument, they're buying water and energy like all other participants on the market.

schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

I dislike the "business world" in general. Nothing special about AI.

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schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

Is it not possible to have a more nuanced opinion than to either "love" or "hate" AI?

I don't do either. AI is technological progress that has the potential to be useful to humanity, there is no point in attempting to stop technological progress. I don't think AI can or will or should replace most jobs, though maybe it can replace some human labor, which (if true) is a good thing, a lot of technological progress before AI replaced some human labor and that was a good thing in retrospect!

But there are some genuinely horrible things that AI is actually being used for. Why would anyone ever think that customer support is a good use for AI, for example?

I'm in favor of AI being developed further as long as there is economic interest in it; I am not in favor of governments doing anything to either support or hinder its further development. Of course I think AI, like all software, should be free and open source, but somehow that is hardly ever discussed.

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schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

Other countries: mostly liberalizing drug laws.

UK: passing new drug laws for drugs that have been legal for decades.

schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

I was already posting on web forums (also wikis) before Facebook or Twitter became popular, when the Internet was not yet very established and posting things on it oneself was something only few people thought of doing.

I was outright excited when I saw "social media" becoming more mainstream. I thought at the time, at least more people are using the Internet, even if it's "just" Facebook or Twitter (which I didn't and still don't see much value in), at least it's the Internet, that's a good thing because the Internet is a great and exciting thing for society and a wonderful source of entertainment!

Now we live in a world where the general public mostly only knows how to operate social media apps, otherwise has no tech proficiency at all, doesn't even know what else is out there on the Internet, and doesn't know or care how the social media apps they're using are designed to manipulate them. And politicians are busy working to make it harder for good idealistic people to solve those problems. :(

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schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

From some things maybe. Plenty of recent "online safety" style laws around the world have no exceptions based on platform size.

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schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

This is precisely the point of literally all the recent new laws regulating online platforms, including this.

To kill smaller ones that can't comply with those laws, so that only large ones remain (if at all) and it is easier to censor and surveil the users there.

I just hope that at some point, people will figure out how wrong politicians of the 2020s were to do all of this, and a new free and open Internet will rise from the ashes as long as any remain.

schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

Mainly that I can clearly distinguish Il1 and 0O. I like DejaVu Sans Mono because it does that; if I'm limited to fonts preinstalled on Windows, Lucida Console works too.

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schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

At the time vi was originally developed, such keyboards did exist (on terminals). That's the reason it works the way it does.

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schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

since interface has been designed to be as unfriendly as possible

No, it hasn't.

It (well, vi, which vim is a clone of) has been designed to be a possible interface on a keyboard that doesn't have arrow keys or other modifier keys than shift. There aren't that many ways to program a visual text editor when those are your constraints.

That it's more productive once you know it is a side-effect.

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schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

I thought Mark Zuckerberg got a symbolic one-dollar salary or something, and most of his wealth comes from his ownership of Meta, not his job there? I may be misremembering this.

schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

Does this apply only to Chrome or all other browsers (e.g. Firefox) too?

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schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

Except for the fact that that would be completely ineffective; OpenStreetMap dumps are available from many sources.

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schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

anyone remember 2013 which is when I first learned that government shutdowns were a thing that existed and when they were an extraordinary occurrence? :'D

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schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

The regulatory gap has created uncertainty for big tech companies, because while scanning for harms on their platforms is now illegal, they still remain liable to remove any illegal content hosted on their platforms under a different law, the Digital Services Act.

That is plainly false. The DSA only requires that they remove illegal content when they become aware of it and specifically disallows general monitoring obligations. They do not scan means they aren't aware of it means they aren't liable to remove anything.

schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de 5mo ago

France: wants to switch to open source software

also France: wants to ban social media for young people

Do they, in all seriousness, not see exactly how fundamentally contradictory those things are? Open source software development depends on it being possible and relatively easy to host websites that allow the general public to participate so that they can collaborate on open source software development on such websites. Banning "social media" (not endorsing that term) for young people means requiring such websites to implement age verification systems, making it much more difficult and expensive to start such websites and make it possible to collaborate on open source software development. I cannot believe that this is so hard to understand for politicians.