AmbitiousProcess

I had people unironically tell me that Kamala Harris was no better than Hitler, and that she & Trump were the same but just did the exact same harm in “different areas,” which is why it looked like they were any different policy-wise. 💀

Yes.

Even if it didn’t explicitly stop my biometric data from being taken and transferred to a government database every single time I fly, it would be a vote against the system itself existing. The whole reason they are allowing people to opt out right now is to test how acceptable it is to people, to hopefully make it mandatory given too little pushback from the public.

Opting out doesn’t just protect your biometric data now, it protects everyone in the future from having their biometric data taken from them without a choice if this system is allowed to spread unopposed.

It seems like the point is that Microsoft would be developing some sort of alternative to the kernel with similar functionality for antivirus providers, that doesn’t need to have kernel level access. Anticheat uses a lot of the same techniques as kernel level antivirus to detect malware, thus it would probably have to adapt to this new system.

I think the article is more commenting on how Microsoft is directly partnering with antivirus companies for this new system right now, while they’re not directly partnering with anticheat companies, even though they’d probably have to migrate to this new system regardless.

To be fair, it certainly still makes cheating harder. If it didn’t exist, you’d just see even more people cheating, but it’s a pretty overkill way of system monitoring for such a relatively small benefit by comparison.

Massive privacy risk, only slightly better performance than other non-kernel monitoring.

I was thinking this too! Gait recognition can completely bypass facial coverings as a means of identification, but I also don’t think it’ll be much help here.

Gait recognition can be bypassed by things as simple as putting a rock in your shoe so you walk differently, so when you think about how much extra heavy gear, different shoes, and different overall movement patterns ICE agents will possibly be engaging in, it might not hold up well at tracking them down, especially since to recognize someone by gait, you’d need footage of them that you can already identify them in, to then train the model on.

In the case of fucklapd.com, this was easy because they could just get public record data for headshot photos, but there isn’t a comparable database with names directly tied to it for gait. I will say though, a lot of these undercover agents might be easier to track by gait since they’ll still generally be wearing more normal attire, and it might be more possible to associate them with who they are outside of work since it’s easier to slip up when you’re just wearing normal clothes.

Communicating on a platform you don’t own and can’t control seems very shortsighted.

I feel like this would be a much more realistic take if social media more broadly was all federated, and anyone’s independent instance could still communicate with the others, but that’s unfortunately not the case.

For a politician, which is better for their campaign? Starting an independent platform they entirely own and control, but with no local users to start out with, or having an account on an existing platform with millions and millions of users?

Obviously, even though in the first example they would have 100% control over their infrastructure, they wouldn’t exactly be spreading their message very far. They could always publish simultaneously on both platforms, but that still doesn’t mean much if the second platform has no users. However, the platform that has many millions of users can instantly grant them reach, which is kind of the point of them being on social media in the first place.

On your point about a bot, I’m assuming you mean more like a bridge mechanism that cross-posts from one platform to another. You could correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe AOC at least posts a lot of similar messaging on both Twitter and Bluesky, rather than staying isolated to one or the other. It’s not exactly the same thing, but it has a similar effect.

In an ideal world, everyone could easily host their own Mastodon server and just communicate with others without being tied to a platform, but unfortunately we still live in a world where the network effect is keeping people trapped in corporate social media silos, and there’s only so much an individual politician can do to change that without harming their own ability to message to the public.

Nobody left on that platform is going to be convinced of anything anymore.

I’d beg to differ. Although it’s true that the ratio of neo-Nazis and generally just far right freaks has far surpassed the number of everyday people, that doesn’t mean those people don’t exist anymore.

I always bring this up in conversations about leaving social networks, because if you don’t understand it, it will warp your entire perspective of why people stay on shitty platforms in the first place. The Network Effect is what keeps people hooked on these platforms, even when the owner becomes a literal neo-Nazi.

The people who have already left are the ones that are capable of and willing to sacrifice the scale, reach, and history that Twitter has, in the hopes that whatever platform they move to will treat them better. Leaving Twitter means deleting your digital history, erasing every connection you’ve made on the platform, and entirely cutting all of your messaging off from anyone who hasn’t yet left.

AOC is already on alternative platforms like Bluesky, so people who are willing and able to move, that would otherwise have stayed solely because she was still on Twitter have already done so. The people that remain do not remain because of her, they remain because of everybody else.

Yes, there are still quite a few neo-Nazis outnumbering the average person on there, but there are still quite a few average people that are still on Twitter. Don’t forget that the average person doesn’t seem to care when the companies they buy products from exploit child labor, fund wars that keep oil prices low, and suppress the wages of the workers in their own communities. The average person simply does not have the will to sacrifice what they must give up by leaving a large platform like Twitter, so they remain there.

If AOC didn’t benefit politically from being on Twitter, then she would have entirely left and deleted her account a while ago.

As a politician trying to reach members of the public, including those who could possibly be swayed by you, the last thing you want to do is entirely remove yourself from a platform with a very large reach.

Wanting people to leave Twitter is all well and good, but you can’t discount the fact that so many people are still on there, and refuse to spend the time setting up new profiles on entirely different sites with smaller userbases. For politicians, reach is key, and Twitter still has the users.

All I could find myself was a TikTok video making the same joke. It definitely seems like any story of it actually happening is made up, but I do hope some people take… inspiration from it.

If you have any family members who still play the “I still think Trump is doing what’s right” card because the media they consume has managed to spin every possible event as positive somehow, ask them how allowing a known cancer-causing chemical that directly financially benefits Russian corporate interests is beneficial to this country.

If the media can find a way to convincingly spin this as a good thing, I’d be shocked. Not that shocked, but shocked nonetheless.

This wouldn’t be an issue if Reddit always attached relevant posts, including negative ones even if those were the minority, to actually help people make a more informed judgement about an ad based on community sentiment, but I think we all know that won’t be the way this goes.

Posts will inevitably only be linked if they are positive, or at the very least neutral about the product being advertised, because that’s what would allow Reddit to sell advertisers on their higher ROI. The bandwagon effect is a real psychological effect, and Reddit knows it.

You mean the phone that originally sold for $250, that now sells for only about $170, that has been reviewed as having poor camera quality and limited 5G network speeds?

The one Trump Mobile is charging $500 for?

What a deal! /s

Fair enough. SEO was definitely one of the many large steps Google has taken to slowly crippling the open web, but I never truly expected it to get this bad. At least with SEO, there was still some incentive left to create quality sites, and it didn’t necessarily kill monetizability for sites.

This feels like an exponentially larger threat, and I truly hope I’m proven wrong about its potential effects, because if it does come true, we’ll be in a much worse situation than we already are now.

Not to mention the fact that the remaining sites that can still hold on, but would just have to cut costs, will just start using language models like Google’s to generate content on their website, which will only worsen the quality of Google’s own answers over time, which will then generate even worse articles, etc etc.

It doesn’t just create a monetization death spiral, it also makes it harder and harder for answers to be sourced reliably, making Google’s own service worse while all the sites hanging on rely on their worse service to exist.

This is fundamentally worse than a lot of what we’ve seen already though, is it not?

AI overviews are parasitic to traffic itself. If AI overviews are where people begin to go for information, websites get zero ad revenue, subscription revenue, or even traffic that can change their ranking in search.

Previous changes just did things like pulling a little better context previews from sites, which only somewhat decreased traffic, and adding more ads, which just made the experience of browsing worse, but this eliminates the entire business model of every website completely if Google continues pushing down this path.

It centralizes all actual traffic solely into Google, yet Google would still be relying on the sites it’s eliminating the traffic of for its information. Those sites cut costs by replacing human writers with more and more AI models, search quality gets infinitely worse, sourcing from articles that themselves were sourced from nothing, then most websites which are no longer receiving enough traffic to be profitable collapse.

Even if you want AI answers, you can use DuckDuckGo. They have an AI assistant too, and even it does better than Google’s at not hallucinating as much.

The military is also very good at propagandizing to the youth.

They primarily target young men who don’t know what they’re going to do with their life, then send them marketing materials (and even officers to their school) trying to tell them how much freedom and travel they’ll get if they join, and how it’ll build them into big strong well-respected men.

So even for the people who I wouldn’t say are dumb or even economically struggling, they can get roped in with false promises of things like the ability to get stronger and do work to help their community be safe, then in actuality just get deployed later on to fight the same people in their community when they protest.

For anyone curious, there are likely going to be no/few bleachers. This seems to be mostly a standing event.

So this won’t lead to “empty seats” in the sense that there are a bunch of actually reserved spots that nobody shows up to, but rather that they’ll probably just over-count the number of expected guests, and maybe leave a bit more of a gap behind the barriers than they otherwise would have, which could just make the crowd look sparser compared to their predictions.

Google Voice works.

Other services like TextNow will also give you a virtual number.

This is one of the best reasons to socially stigmatize wealth hoarding, even if you can’t change the fundamentals of the capitalist system that causes it in the first place.

If enough people make people who hoard money feel lesser than, to the point that having less is a preferable alternative, then they’re more likely to give away their wealth and become at least a little bit less shitty people.

This is also, coincidentally, why rich people isolate themselves within bubbles of similarly rich individuals, who won’t look down on them for being so greedy and narcissistic.