I wish the US had spent its efforts and resources towards completely eliminating the Taliban as an institution and ideology rather than kind of shoveling money around to opportunists with no skills for organizing people or maintaining loyalty. I think what happened instead was that the US was afraid of sparking a new movement that would eventually operate outside of its control so it funded what it thought it could control: rich assholes.

And now the religious fascists are back in charge. Wheee.

Just because they’re conservative doesn’t mean they’re publishing falsehoods. Just be on the lookout for bias, which you should for all media.

For example, the oppression of women in Afghanistan is probably being reported on more by conservative sources not because they are against the oppression of women, but because they’re hawks who disagreed with leaving Afghanistan, and there’s probably some anti-muslim sentiment motivating it as well. Likewise liberal media sources are probably ignoring it because leaving Afghanistan the way America did was largely considered to be a disaster which was finalized under a Democratic administration, and for all their talk of caring about women they did basically abandon half the population of an entire nation. It would probably not help their side of the current election cycle to shine light on the catastrophic fallout of one of Biden’s major international policy decisions.

I hate Twitter, but I’m getting to the point where I want it to get better because if bluesky gets many more members we’re just gonna have Twitter again.

One thing I liked about the Muskification of Twitter was the scattering.

I’m pretty sure I’ve lived on less than this in inflation adjusted dollars.

Oh I don’t think it’s a problem for Discord, but when it comes to software projects specifically I find the reliance on Discord frustrating because of its non-public orientation. If I’m having an issue I’d far rather search for a solution on a public wiki, bug report system, or forum than sign up for one more Discord server.

Far more than should tbh. Too many little game mods will have a Discord for questions and reporting issues rather than using their GitHub or a forum.

I think you’re giving the guy too much credit. Sometimes things are as they seen. He just didn’t like the moderation scheme on Twitter, made a gesture buying it, fumbled a little bit and overbid, then after having been forced to acquire it tried to turn it into something closer to what he wanted it to be.

Masnick’s post is well put, but also a disturbing reminder of how much power nation-states can exert over the Internet.

Because they’re also rich. Laws are for the poors.

Public micro blogging overall is a bane, so yes.

The difference between clearly documenting features, and hiding or removing them.

First time I saw a Zoomer do that it hurt my soul.

This is actually a good take. Kids aren’t miniature adults, they’re kids. They’re not helpless or useless, but neither are they fully morally and emotionally developed. They need guidance. Plenty of adults can’t responsibly handle internet access. I survived early onilne porn and gore and social media, but it’s not like any of it benefited me in a meaningful way.

Some folks have an attitude that’s like “I touched hot stoves and I learned better”, but that’s far from ideal.

To be fair, at least as of this moment his prior post says Google is “manufacturing consent for”, not “actively supporting”. I believe that the former can be the latter, but is not necessarily the latter.

UBlock asks that you give to the blocklist maintainers.

I’m actually for the idea of emojis for protocols. Not Bitcoin specifically because I don’t think it has long term potential as a deflationary virual asset, but block chain? Sure.

The hero we need rn tbh

There are probably safeguards in place to prevent the creation of CSAM, just like there are for other illegal and offensive things, but determined people work around them.

the AI has to be trained on something first. It has to somehow know what a naked minor looks like. And to do that, well… You need to feed it CSAM.

First of all, not every image of a naked child is CSAM. This is actually been kind of a problem with automated CSAM detection systems triggering false positives on non-sexual images, and getting innocent people into trouble.

But also, AI systems can blend multiple elements together. They don’t need CSAM training material to create CSAM, just the individual elements crafted into a prompt sufficient to create the image while avoiding any safeguards.

It would not need to be trained on CP. It would just need to know what human bodies can look like and what sex is.

AIs usually try not to allow certain content to be produced, but it seems people are always finding ways to work around those safeguards.