AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

“No no guys you don’t understand, robots.txt actually means just search engines, it totally doesn’t imply all automated systems!!!”

Tech bros will always choose the most overcomplicated option over the simplest, most effective ones.

Why build a battery and just install some more solar panels to charge it during the day when you could have a mirror in orbit beam down a tiny fraction of the light required to generate power anywhere near regular daytime capacity, for only a small portion of the night before the satellite is out of range, in only a small area, in a manner that can only work for one single client per satellite at a time, meaning it gets less cost effective at scale?

Yeah, though I feel like it’s hard to do anything too crazy with a calendar app.

I’d expect larger changes for apps related to music, tools like photo editing ones, photo galleries, etc, since they have a lot more subjectivity as to how they can be designed without it feeling confusing to use.

I have a feeling there’s a reason they picked the calendar app first, and it’s precisely because the changes weren’t hard for them to do comparatively.

Apple stock did, and unfortunately it even makes sense why. Considering how self-centered Trump is, and how easily swayed he can be by a literal shiny rock being given to him, this was probably a legitimately good trade for Apple.

They spend some money on a gold brick with some laser-cut glass, and the president of the entire country either gives them preferential treatment, or simply doesn’t take any more extreme actions he was planning to take against them.

If it was “easy to police now with AI,” then companies wouldn’t still regularly have issues with all kinds of code injection on their websites, since literally any security vendor would have implemented bulletproof AI protection for it already.

An AI model designed for moderation could probably block some things, but it would be no better than traditional mechanisms employed by large organizations who’s job it is to keep things secure, that still regularly fall victim to these kinds of vulnerabilities. Many of these organizations already use AI-powered tools to police their systems, and they know they’re not anywhere close to even being a full replacement, let alone foolproof.

I don’t live in Australia, but if their situation is even remotely close to how it is in the USA, I figure they’re probably not getting paid what they’re truly worth for how much value they bring to society, let alone all the individual kids they teach and care for on a daily basis.

I always love seeing teachers finally standing up and striking, because it wakes a lot of people up to how much of an impact they actually have. Even some cursory searches gave me a number of 600,000 students impacted by this. If that doesn’t make the government realize they need to pay them more, I have no clue what will.

Don’t forget racist, too!

They don’t delete your content, they just redact your username and disassociate each individual comment from your larger profile so nobody could, for example, click on the deleted user who posted a comment in r/abc and see they also posted a particular comment in r/xyz.

The reason tools like Redact (many of them all use this same name lol) have taken off in popularity is because they delete, or redact the contents of your posts before you delete the account, thus making even that vestigial data worthless.

Give BuyNothing a shot if you haven’t already!

They have an app and facebook groups depending on where people are willing to use it, but instead of it being a marketplace, everything on it is free. (though you can offer to pay shipping from a local provider)

Lots of people offer up furniture, especially older/antique stuff on there all the time, as well as tons of other stuff. Also a great way to get rid of things you don’t personally want anymore but don’t want anyone to end up paying out of pocket for.

Actual downloadable software or just a website?

I’ve heard of Soundiiz before for migrating playlists to something like YouTube, though it’s paid for larger playlists, and after that yt-dlp will work well for the now non-DRM protected playlists on sites like YouTube Music, but not on DRM-protected ones like Spotify, or ones that only show samples by default like Deezer.

If you ever find that an artist on other platforms isn’t on Bandcamp, you’ll usually find them on Qobuz’s Download Store since that’s a common place that they also tend to publish.

It’s a little less convenient than Bandcamp, and is often a little more randomly priced across artists and even individual songs from an artist, but if your goal is to compensate them and get a high quality audio download, it’ll be another option.

They also have a streaming offering with way better payout rates for artists at what tends to be around $0.01873 per stream as of last year, in case you’re not ready to ditch streaming, though I can’t speak to how good it is as I haven’t tried it myself.

To be fair, the SEC has only really gone after cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, which is the only major blockchain that uses the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work. The things the SEC was trying to regulate, that it considered securities, are almost entirely running on Proof-of-Stake networks, which have negligible relative energy consumption.

This will almost certainly have a lot of other negative impacts, but I doubt it will have that much on the climate.

This is very true.

I was part of the OpenAssistant project, voluntarily submitting my personal writing to train open-source LLMs without having to steal data, in the hopes it would stop these companies from stealing people’s work and make “AI” less of a black box.

After thousands of people submitting millions of prompt-response pairs, and after some researchers said it was the highest quality natural language dataset they’d seen in a while, the base model was almost always incoherent. You only got a functioning model if you just used the data to fine-tune an existing larger model, Llama at the time.

To me, it reads like they’re just extrapolating the statements from the loudest group of people who tend to yell online about the male loneliness epidemic (incels that blame women for their celibacy) out and assuming that’s the majority opinion, which actually tends to be more referencing actual loneliness in general. Either that, or they just worded it a little badly.

I do agree that the rhetoric can be a bit detrimental though.

The key point here, however, is that exploiting insecurities through insults is not the only thing that Andrew Tate does.

He simultaneously messages to young men that they are weak/poor/unhealthy/cucks/betas/etc, but also that they deserve more, that it’s not entirely their fault that they’re not getting rich/women/success/etc, and that if they do xyz, they’ll fix themselves. Solely insulting them isn’t what makes the messaging effective, it’s the putting down of their current position in life while simultaneously promising a solution through notions of them having things like sex or money “taken” from them.

It’s certainly okay to mock or insult ideologies that are harmful, and to do a bit of that to the people that promote them, but only doing that will only radicalize them away from you. Think about these 2 scenarios:

Scenario A: “You’re worthless, you’ll never be anything, you’re poor, a virgin, and will die alone”

Scenario B: “You’re worthless, you’re poor, a virgin, and you’ll never be anything unless you follow these x steps to become a better man”

Scenario B is what Andrew Tate uses on young men. Scenario A is pure harassment that doesn’t motivate anybody on its own, Scenario B motivates action.

If you just ridicule a friend that has negative beliefs and don’t present any alternative, they will stop being your friend. If you deride them for sharing a harmful belief, then explain the alternative and how it would make them better off, you’re more likely to get them to actually change. (though this is, of course, not universal, and I’m sure a small subset of people could be motivated to change purely off insults and nothing more)

I hope I explained that well, I’m quite prone to rambling 😅

Fair enough, though I do think this can still help with any broader approach to changing their overall mentality.

A moment of consensus on its own might not be enough to sway someone, but if they hear someone try and contradict what they had recently agreed on, it can then make them feel more cognitive dissonance, and potentially make them at the bare minimum just stop and think for a second.

If someone else is later trying to sway them in some way, it’s going to be easier when that person says something, and they can think “I remember saying something similar” rather than “this is the opposite of what I already believe.”

Plus, there’s also just the sort of “exposure therapy” factor to it, as well. A lot of people are radicalized to believe that the “opposing side” is pure, limitless evil, and that they hate you and want you dead, so just interacting with them can be enough to help slowly deradicalize them.

For example, this Pew Research article states, regarding the likelihood of people to support trans people’s existence:

“Though Republicans who know a trans person are more likely than Republicans who don’t to say gender can be different from sex assigned at birth, more than eight-in-ten in both groups (83% and 88%, respectively) say gender is determined by sex at birth. Meanwhile, there are large differences between Democrats who do and do not know a transgender person. A majority of Democrats who do know a trans person (72%) say someone can be a man or a woman even if that differs from their sex assigned at birth, while those who don’t know anyone who is transgender are about evenly split (48% say gender is determined by sex assigned at birth while 51% say it can be different).”

But of course, that isn’t just limited to acceptance of people by gender. It also applies to race, social and economic status, recipients and non-recipients of welfare programs, people working in different industries, etc.

Again, not saying it’s at all some magic universal way to change someone’s mind, or that on its own it’s necessarily a factor that can override their overarching condition, (hell, that quote from before shows that it had a much smaller impact on republicans than democrats even given the same exposure) but the more and more this happens, the stronger and stronger an effect it has overall, and I’d say that alone makes it worth doing.

I’ve seen this type of tactic really well displayed in this video by SquidTips.

This man talked to a fucking Proud Boy wearing a rainbow shirt that said in large letters “GAY” on it with a button that had the hammer and sickle in trans colors, mentioned his partner was trans, and got the guy to agree with him on the fact that he should be focusing on the class war rather than the culture war.

Even Proud Boys and people on the far, far right still think that what they’re doing is good for society. You don’t have to convince them to “stop being evil, switch to being good” you just have to convince them that “this is a more effective method at making society better than what you currently believe is the best.”

Will it work for everyone? Of course not. Some people are just going to be too far gone for you to reach, but there’s a lot more people than you might think that could be swayed, despite what the flood of media coverage of the extremes of society can make you believe.

Relevant xkcd:

Most places will only accept metal items if they’re a certain size, which most allen keys almost certainly won’t meet.

For example, it looks like Seattle, (which has some of the best recycling system rates and practices in America) will only accept metal tools or scrap metal larger than 3 inches. Anything smaller than that can damage the machines they use for recycling, get diverted into the landfill stream because it can’t be sorted out, and/or slow down or stop the recycling process for other materials because it needs to be filtered out before it can make its way into the machinery that can’t handle small parts.

However, they do have drop-off options, which can take scrap of any size. So the choice is either throw it in the recycling bin and potentially damage or slow down the recycling machinery, or stash them away until you have enough to justify going to a drop-off.

Not that I’m aware of, just because studies haven’t even been considered for long enough to have lasted any entire lifetime, to my knowledge.

However, a many have been going for decades at this point, and there’s some great summaries of the findings over these expansive timeframes from the Stanford Basic Income Lab where they have a map and many other resources.

The conclusions seem to remain consistent, across studies lasting anywhere from one-time payments, to months, years, or decades, and I think that the conclusions, while not set in stone, seem to be quite comprehensively backed up to the point that if they were deployed at a larger scale, it would probably show similar outcomes.