pessimizer

That's the same way I avoid bad movies. I watch them first, before I watch them, just to make sure they're good.

It's also for government warrants on 4th Amendment grounds. It does not cover the government simply purchasing (or asking nicely for) the information from a willing Google, perhaps also in ex…

There have been virtually no restraints on the Executive Branch for nearly 25 years now. The way we elect Congresspeople now exclusively produces ones who have no interest in the risks that come from …

> already is being tested by some internet providers I would say to never use a wireless router given to you by your ISP, and to install Openwrt on the one you do use, but the government is absolut…

This is one of those fake stats, where if among people not taking it you would see 4 out of 100 get dementia within 5 years of when you started measuring, if they were taking it you'd instead see…

It's because of American law. If it were sane, everyone could share. Instead, if there are 25 copies of a book in existence, 25 different AI companies could buy them and pulp them. Woe be it if s…

Was it? Are you just saying throwing manure, or do you think that children were regularly buying cigarettes in stores until just a decade ago? Do you think that pornographers and social networks are d…

> Who decides what makes an algorithm engagement maximizing instead of you know, user satisfaction maximizing (because satisfied users stay around for longer, right?) Let the user decide. The evil …

It's literally a job title. One that many people have spent a lot of time and effort to create. It's weird to pretend that you've never heard of it, or the people involved in it.

> the bbc's natural bias against any anything right of soft left Or left of soft left. Anybody who will change anything politically is an enemy of the BBC. They have a bias towards backroom de…

I suggest that the passage that you read begins with a claim that seems unreasonable ("but I've bought a $2 dress from Temu!"), and then explains its thesis in order to make you view th…

I can't believe I got this in one. I guessed a math PhD interested in steganography could come up with a good method in a week, and an idiot like me figured it out in 5 minutes.

Personally, I find it creepy as hell. I don't want McDonald's to know if I've ever eaten at McDonald's. Call me crazy, but I don't want every person with a profit motive in th…

Yes, I should give up my country and the rule of law to preserve firefox, Google's little bodyguard.

Maybe try to have a reason to read a book? There are an enormous number of books that have been written, but there are even more reasons than books. Reading bestsellers or books off of an awards list …

Always been true. Physical proximity to wealthy people is the key to success. The reason to send your kid to a good college (or to a terrible "small private liberal arts college on the East Coast…

Zoomers don't know the difference. They don't know much (because we destroyed the schools and the media right before whey were born.) They have no idea if there's any difference between…

I agree (in a way), but I don't think that people who went to Bluesky were trying to recreate twitter, they were trying to silence twitter. The past they are pining for was a past when people t…

I don't know what you're seeing in those stats. Bluesky has been shedding users since the inauguration. Mastodon is virtually a hobby project consisting of private servers that could run ind…

Bluesky's active user base has never not been shrinking, no matter what they were focusing on. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats The surest thing in tech for the past couple of years …

I assume she'll go wherever Nick Clegg is working. Is Tony Blair hiring?

It's funny, but Scientologists were innovators on this front. They use the word "ethics" a lot, but they've specifically redefined it to mean productivity at work (people who aren&…

Meanwhile, the US cut out a special exception to the do-no-call list for political text spam, leading to me personally for about a year getting about 10-15 text messages a day from Democratic scam PAC…

I've been thinking that they have to be doing this. It seems like a fun problem, actually - all you're trying to encode is a 1-bit message within a text with the least amount of necessary ch…

It has infected the comments. Our patrons are fighting a good fight, but good slop is mostly indistinguishable from a worthless karma-farming comment. Mods are probably just cheating because there are…

I think they understood it pretty well. What in it was worth any other reaction? edit: I might add that anna's archive and sci-hub are good alternatives to the slopweb.

I've been using Zotero for that, although it gets slow as hell eventually because it is a whole-ass firefox instance. They're real references so I might as well treat them like real referenc…