Recovering skooma addict.
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It looks like your opinions about Linux are outdated and need an update.
Where is it? It’s in the 1970s. Tempted by Lucifer to get brighter and brighter, we collectively chose to leave it behind.
Horse experts: “Realism and Practicality”
Skyrim: 
Typical call to the AI safety hotline:
Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don’t trust it at all, I’m worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me…
… I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.
I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who’ve learned that it’s necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.
I find myself suspecting that chatbots getting really good at talking people into believing whatever their operators want people to believe is going to start a lot more conspiracy theories than it ends.
I checked the local classified ads and their prices don’t seem too far out of line with what people are asking. I guess there’s still demand even though 2020 seems like a long time ago in computer years. Not from me though, I think the PS3 will be my last. There’s no need for a newer console now that games can run on linux.
The Great Shopping Mall of Alexandria
Depends on the argument I guess. Don’t bring a sweet roll to the kind where you need a war axe.
The agonizingly slow progress into mainstream discourse of this idea that we should all stop using twitter continues at its steady pace. Will the obvious truth of it mean that it continues until even the politicians get it? Or will it in time become be one of those “yeah we probably should’ve done that” things that never gets done?
Limited discoverability, complicated and controversial moderation, constantly changing interoperability problems, large instance users off in their own silo — it’s all part of the fedi charm, really.
That’s not the original trilogy. The first Prince of Persia was 1989. But all I can tell you is that Sands of Time was awesome on the PS2. I don’t imagine it would’ve felt as satisfying without a controller if you didn’t have one on the PC back in the day. The combat mechanics seemed made for it.
That was true for a little while around 2016 I think. If it’s temporarily true again now I don’t expect it’ll last very far into the lifetime of a civ game.
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.