An interesting factoid buried under three layers of stupidity. The gist of it is that watching video uses electricity.

That’s not ignorance, it’s malice. Elon has made it clear that he’d like nothing better than to require everyone to show their official ID for “age verification” purposes before being allowed to use social media. I’m not sure exactly why. Easier to file lawsuits against anyone who uses it to make fun of him, or perhaps it’s just one small step in some kind of grand totalitarian vision of the future. But he can’t hope to get away with imposing it on Twitter unless competitors are required to do the same.

Someone said jokingly that the tiktok algorithm is so good that it can tell when you’re a researcher looking for evidence that tiktok pushes people towards political extremes, and show you exactly what you’re looking for. I thought it was funny, but it also seems like it might be sort of close to what happened here. Normal people would not just passively watch all that shit without reacting in some way.

Disappointingly, Tiktok could not figure out my desires at all when I tried it. I liked one exceptionally good dance video and then it just kept showing me superficially similar dance videos that weren’t so good no matter what I tried to get it to stop.

Yeah China sure is scary. Centralized social media owned by American billionaires on the other hand can totally be trusted never to interfere in elections.

I think realistic graphics in 3D games got to be good enough that further improvement doesn’t really matter any more in 2011 (Skyrim) but I can see an argument for putting it as late as to 2016 (Witcher 3).

There are currently zero bluesky servers that aren’t fully dependent on bsky.app.

the vast majority—up to 82%—of the links to false information in the dataset originated from conservative news domains.

It really does depend on how many those “many people” are. Too many to dismiss them as irrelevant, it appears to me.

You may be willing to cede the cartoon frog to the Nazis for their exclusive use, but many people aren’t. If you assume that everyone you see using it is one you’ll be vastly overestimating the number of Nazis in the world.

the study suggests that individuals who deviate from their party norms are quickly treated as if they are a political enemy.

Is that “party” as in political party? Because I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in Canada it seems like the main polarization is between the Conservatives who have their shiny new Conservative party on one side, versus everybody else who doesn’t really have an official party they identify with all that much on the other side. It’s not yet like the USA with its seemingly-eternal two-party system. I wonder if it looks like that if you view it through Twitter.

Get yourself a good nicotine vape rig. The kind that has a big tank so it’ll last all day and you can use whichever flavoured vape liquid you like best. Switch to that 100% of the time, right away, no exceptions. Don’t worry about how to quit vaping until you’ve gone without smoking for at least a few months.

It’ll be hard, but not nearly as bad as it is if you try to quit both smoking and nicotine at the same time.

Having apps that do what users want but try to hide it from reviewers really highlights the absurdity of letting Apple decide what software you’re allowed to run.

The Featured Snippet quoted an article from the Mayo Clinic, highlighting the words “Caffeine may cause a short, but dramatic increase in your blood pressure.” But when she looked up “no link between coffee and hypertension”, the Featured Snippet cited a contradictory line from the very same Mayo Clinic article: “Caffeine doesn’t have a long-term effect on blood pressure and is not linked with a higher risk of high blood pressure”.

On the one hand, Google sucks. On the other hand, if people are unable to a) understand how those two snippets are not contradictory, and b) read at least one very short simplified-for-laymen Mayo Clinic article about the topic before thinking they’ve learned anything at all about medicine, it’s hard to see the problem as being primarily due to Google. There is something deeper, and worse, going wrong when people habitually take that kind of extreme shortcut to thinking that they know the right answer about almost anything, and it has little to do with whether any one-sentence snippets they’re given are biased or accurate.

Just think of all the juicy benefits of replacing journalists with machines. They’ll never stumble or cough while presenting the news, they’ll never call in sick, never age, never get mad as hell and decide to not take it any more, never resign from the editorial board in protest no matter what garbage you tell them is the news. Machines are just better suited to the job, it’s inevitable.

Too long to read? I get it. Here’s the summary. Download Firefox.

Yes. One option is to download it from here: https://librewolf.net/

Isn’t this basically just the old trick of estimating (x * y) as (x + y - 1) when x and y are somewhat close to 1?

I missed the Internet Archive yesterday when @pluralistic@mamot.fr casually mentioned “Keppler illustrations for Puck” as if we’d all know what that meant and the best-looking link that came up on search was to a collection of them there.

Meh. It’s not a problem of scale. It’s a problem of we have no idea how the fuck to do that. Scaling up existing techniques is neither necessary nor sufficient.

If you can’t handle the shocking reality of someone choosing unusual pronouns to refer to themselves, fediverse may not be the social media for you.

It looks like your opinions about Linux are outdated and need an update.