which makes no sense from user perspective
I’d say it does have some merit from a security perspective though.
I agree it should be something that’s at least more clear for users to enable/disable on setup, but I personally don’t think having it enabled by default is ideal, considering how insecure SMS is.
Does it though?
I’d say so, yeah, but it does depend on your social circumstance, and of course broader cultures have different norms and linguistic styles too, so that can definitely impact it somewhat.
For example, if you’re referring to someone, you pretty much have to use their pronouns. That’s just how our language works, and it’s not exactly something you can easily avoid.
The broader argument around gender abolition typically doesn’t focus on the fact that society has to use the assorted gendered terms and traits though, I just thought it would be interesting to point out.
Generally speaking, it boils down to the second part of my previous point, which was that gender isn’t inherently that special compared to many of the other ways we interpret and express our own identities, and the category can theoretically expand to levels so broad that it simply doesn’t create much of a practical utility around consistently creating, using, and assigning sub-labels and further slicing up what we consider to be distinct categories into smaller and smaller pieces.
Additionally, gender abolitionists tend to just believe that by creating categories, you end up restricting what people are comfortable doing, and impose assumptions that could otherwise be more freeing to simply not have.
Anyone who currently uses any label, big or small, could still express themselves in a society that doesn’t choose to use labels, but anyone feeling restricted by the labels we use today would no longer have that pressure facing them, and could thus develop more independently and freely as themselves, rather than what any societal categories impose on them.
This is actually something I think is becoming more and more pertinent as the acceptance of trans individuals grows, because as I’m sure you’ve probably seen, a lot of trans people feel that they have to meet certain goals to simply be accepted as who they are, to the point that they can feel pressured by society into doing things like buying certain clothes they otherwise may not have picked, spending more time worrying about the way their face looks, etc, just to be accepted.
And with sub-labels, you end up running into the same problem, but at a different scale, where small communities, or even sole individuals, can end up locking themselves into choices about their looks/mannerisms/activities/etc because after defining something, it becomes easier to conform to it even if you change over time outside of that label.
Obviously I don’t speak for everyone here, and this is just my opinion, but I personally believe that a world with no labels, and much less limited avenues for free expression by every individual would be preferable to a world where it’s expected that you label yourself and put yourself in a box, a category that people can define you as, that may not fully represent you as a person.
While true, it doesn’t keep you safe from sleeper agent attacks.
These can essentially allow the creator of your model to inject (seamlessly, undetectably until the desired response is triggered) behaviors into a model that will only trigger when given a specific prompt, or when a certain condition is met. (such as a date in time having passed)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05566
It’s obviously not as likely as a company simply tweaking their models when they feel like it, and it prevents them from changing anything on the fly after the training is complete and the model is distributed, (although I could see a model designed to pull from the internet being given a vulnerability where it queries a specific URL on the company’s servers that can then be updated with any given additional payload) but I personally think we’ll see vulnerabilities like this become evident over time, as I have no doubts it will become a target, especially for nation state actors, to simply slip some faulty data into training datasets or fine-tuning processes that get picked up by many models.
I think the broader argument tends to boil down to the fact that unlike music, which people can simply not engage in describing on a regular basis, gender expression is something that requires much more active participation by all members of a society, and that gender is not inherently separate from the rest of the human experience.
It’s already hard enough for some people to remember names, now imagine having to remember which of any number of thousands of neopronouns each individual person you know uses, for example.
Contrast that with their “we’ll all just be people” stance, which seems to just be a different wording of gender abolition, and you have a world where people simply express themselves as they are without having to increasingly sublabel.
It’s like how while people can have long hair and short hair, wear dark clothes and light clothes, have blue/brown/green/gray/etc eyes, be introverted or extroverted, have a large or small social battery, or experience and display any number of different characteristics, while not having to actually label those characteristics in general conversation or identification.
They’re simply traits within the human experience, but not traits that we have to outwardly label and display on a very frequent basis, unlike the way we usually talk about gender. This is especially important considering how every single human being experiences things even a little differently from one another, thus meaning that the number of sublabels is theoretically as large, if not larger than the current population of the earth.
I don’t deny that the labels can still exist, and be useful to people, but I think gender is often treated as if it has to be some sort of mythical separate part of the brain, independent from all the other variations in human experience, and thus it must have a separate label at all times, even while we don’t particularly care to label and identify with other characteristics that are also within the human experience, some of which have historically flowed between being considered very gendered or less/not gendered, such as assorted personality traits, length of hair, preferred social activities and groups, certain clothing, etc.
“Suggesting that the Holocaust did not happen will become a punishable offence”
Nothing here about literally anything other than “did this historical event happen?”
And the worst part is, I’m not even sure if they believe it, or if they’re just lying to try and pump the value of the coins they’re investing in that claim to be capable of doing that in the future.
And honestly, I don’t know which I dislike more. Deliberate ignorance, or actual stupidity.
Not that long ago. Many still do, although you’ll primarily find them in more niche spaces within the overarching crypto community.
In fact, just a few years back, I used to be one of them. Of course, later on I became disillusioned with the promises of crypto after learning more about socialism, thinking more closely about how the system fundamentally worked, and realizing that it was effectively just a slightly more distributed variant of capitalism that would inevitably fall to the same structural failings, that being capital accumulation.
To clarify the reasoning that was often used, including by myself, the reason people specifically thought blockchains would make microtransactions better is because they thought that it would lead to more user freedom, and open markets. If you can buy a skin now, then sell it later when you’re done with it, then the effective cost of the skin is lower than in a game where you are unable to sell, for instance.
Obviously the concept of selling in-game items isn’t novel in any way, but the main selling point was that it could be tradeable on any marketplace (or peer-to-peer with no marketplace at all), meaning low to no fees, and they items could be given native revenue-share splits, where the publisher of a game would get a set % of every sale, leading to a way for them to generate revenue that didn’t have to be releasing new but low quality things at a quick pace, and could then allow them to focus on making higher quality items with a slower release schedule.
Of course, looking back retrospectively:
There are a small subset of people who legitimately just don’t understand game development fundamentals though, and they actually believe that things would just be fully interchangeable. As in, you buy a skin in Fortnite, and you can then open up Roblox and set it as your player model.
Those ones are especially not the brightest.
You’ll never easily get through to those people. They hold idealism over material reality in many cases.
The best way I’ve found to get even some of them to at least stop and think for a minute is to ask if preventing people from doing things like:
…is justified. If they say yes, then maybe unlimited free speech isn’t perfect, and restricting Nazis could be justified. If they say no, then you’ll know they’re a lost cause.
To be fair, I do believe their research was based on how convincing it was compared to other Reddit commenters, rather than say, an actual person you’d normally see doing the work for a government propaganda arm, with the training and skillset to effectively distribute propaganda.
Their assessment of how “convincing” it was seems to also have been based on upvotes, which if I know anything about how people use social media, and especially Reddit, are often given when a comment is only slightly read through, and people are often scrolling past without having read the whole thing. The bots may not have necessarily optimized for convincing people, but rather, just making the first part of the comment feel upvote-able over others, while the latter part of the comment was mostly ignored. I’d want to see more research on this, of course, since this seems like a major flaw in how they assessed outcomes.
This, of course, doesn’t discount the fact that AI models are often much cheaper to run than the salaries of human beings.
Yes, unless that service is the kind of thing you think you might pick up later.
For instance, you might use LinkedIn to find a job, but that can still be something you might need in the future, because it’s unlikely you’ll hold that one job forever, and intermittently posting during your existing job could actually help your future prospects.
By contrast, if you used a random site to create a fancier resume, yeah, that account can go straight in the digital wastebasket when you’re done with it. You can always make a new account if you need to make a new resume, and it probably won’t rely on your old account’s data to get that job done.
Ah yes, the “mistake” of deliberately stealing an entire family’s belongings. Easy mistake to make.
Sorry, I wasn’t referencing textbooks specifically. I was moreso referencing the reading materials a lot of kids would want for things like ELA classes in middle/high school, many of which are often lent by larger libraries, since many schools can’t afford to maintain 30+ copies of individual books for each class, especially if that class is reading multiple books per semester, and changing books entirely every year.
Most schools now rely on digital interfaces for their local library like Libby, but of course, when physical branches are shutting down, you end up shifting all physical demand to digital demand as well, which exceeded most libraries’ capacities, since they could only afford to buy (on a subscription basis only) some of the ebook licenses that publishers sell in the quantities required.
I believe textbooks may have been implicated, but I don’t believe it was the bulk of the books that the Archive made available.
You mean as in everyone who owns a book could digitize it and contribute it to the library to be lent out one at a time?
Technically that’s possible, but the real argument being made by rightsholders (such as the publishers suing the Internet Archive) is that they don’t have the right to digitize it and lend it out, because that would be them replicating the work, and thus not just lending out the same copy, even if it’s identical in practice in terms of how many people can access it, and what its content is.
Under current copyright law, you’re going to be sued into oblivion if you try that.
Though to be fair, the main case being made in court that really holds water is that the Internet Archive lent out unlimited copies of digitized copyrighted works during the pandemic when many libraries where physically shut down and unable to offer books. Practically speaking, they did the morally correct thing by providing access to materials that would otherwise have been available, barring the extreme circumstances of the pandemic, but since the publishers thought they deserved to profit from that by selling every student who needed reading material in closed libraries a fresh copy of the book for $20, the Archive is now facing legal consequences, because that’s technically still illegal.
However, if you want a communal library, you kind of get that with things like Little Free Libraries, where you can contribute any book, and books regularly cycle through the neighborhood over time, groups like BuyNothing, where you can very easily have people request and hand off things they no longer want themselves, including books, and you can always technically just start a local group that gets books and lends them like a traditional library would, although some libraries just accept donations of your used books and can lend them out without any additional administrative effort or separate entity set up in your community. That depends on your local library though, if you have one at all.
It does seem to get weird backing up from my phone, as if it’s trying to backup items it’s backed up before.
That’s odd. I haven’t had that before, but I also don’t use the phone backup feature often. I’ve seen a lot of issues with it that seem to just be random occurrences that aren’t widespread, and sort of just pop out of nowhere only on a small set of devices, so I’m wondering if they just have to improve application stability a bit.
One thing that does drive me nuts though is timestamp shenanigans. Like I’ll have some photos taken on the same day at different times, and at a certain point it’ll just decide to label some of them in the timeline view as having occurred a day earlier or later than they actually did, even though when you view the image properties, it has the correct date.
Chrome is relatively limited in scope compared to, say, a user on an instance of degoogled chromium just using the same Google services along with all the other browsing they do. The extra data that’s gathered is generally going to be things like a little more DNS query information, (assuming your device isn’t already set to default to Google’s DNS server) links you visit that don’t already have Google’s trackers on them (very few) and some general information like when you’re turning on your computer and Chrome is opening up.
The real difference is in how Chrome doesn’t protect you like other browsers do, and it thus makes more of the collection that Google’s services do indirectly, possible.
Perplexity is still being pretty vague here, but if I had to guess, it would essentially just be taking all the stuff that Google would usually get from tracking pixels and ad cookies, and baking that directly in to the browser instead of it relying on individual sites using it.
To me, it seems like she was going to only say “capability of holding eggs,” then thought about it and actually realized it would exclude some cis women, so she added “intention” as if it meant “would usually be capable of” but just used a bad word to imply that. I could be reading into it a bit much though.
Of course, that wouldn’t work either, since that could then include or exclude people with various assortments of chromosomes in which it’s undetermined as to if they would or would not typically have eggs, and would also just open a whole meta argument about how early in the developmental process there would or wouldn’t be “intention” for that to happen, which is entirely subjective.
I didn’t know it was possible for everyone to simply intend for their body to engage or not engage in such a bodily function. Interesting. /s
The fact that we ever allowed kids to scroll instead of paying attention in class is absurd.
I’ve never actually seen a classroom where this was the case. (aside from after work was completed, sort of as a reward for finishing their assignments on time) Most teachers will immediately tell students to put the phone away and will confiscate it if they keep trying to use it.
When they’re talking about phone bans, they’re usually meaning things like taking phones away at the front and returning them at the end of the day, or requiring students to leave them in lockers/locked pouches.
It’s not just party policies and their direct actions that their position in power influences though, correct?
The party in power also influences how individuals can make changes the government is unwilling to. For example, the Trump administration wants to revoke the nonprofit status of certain charities, especially those working on the climate, and social justice issues.
If Democrats were in power, this threat wouldn’t likely exist, and thus these nonprofits wouldn’t have to fear their funding being put in jeopardy. These nonprofits often do substantially more work than the government on many issues, and even though the party isn’t directly implementing policy that supports their goals, it likely wouldn’t do anything to actively hinder their goals directly. Whereas in this case, we’re seeing Trump pursue just that.
While yes, I do think that if you have a party that’s more sympathetic to your cause, no matter how little, you stand a much greater chance at changing the party’s policies overall, I also think you have to look at the wider picture of how their policy impacts the ability of other groups and individuals to make personal changes too.
We’re at the point where either Democrats need to be forced to radically change their platform, or the party needs to be destroyed so we can get at least one decent option.
I doubt destruction is a viable option, simply because a one-party system is somewhat an inevitability of how our voting system works if you allow the consolidation and persistence we’ve seen down to 2 parties continue into just 1. If we got to the point of only one party due to the Democrats being erased, I don’t believe it would pave the way for a better new party, I think it would just entrench the Republicans.
That said, I do think a radical change within the Democratic party is possible if enough people demand it, but the problem is that without the Democrats even having a proper seat in office, how are they supposed to even pass any policy, no matter how leftward they go on the political spectrum? And if the left continues fracturing and refusing to vote for them because “both sides are the same,” then all that happens is they keep shifting more and more right to try and capture Republican voters, which is exactly what they did this election, and many elections before it.
You don’t make the Democratic party platform more progressive by limiting the voters they can rely on to those increasingly more and more on the right. You do so by voting for them, getting them into power, then demanding change that the Republicans would never even consider allowing you to call for, let alone actually implement.
It’s not a guarantee, but at least it gives you a chance.
True, as is the case with almost any messaging service. But the benefits of RCS do include:
It’s purely an improvement over SMS in terms of security and privacy, and personally, I don’t think users should be defaulted into having their phone downgrade to insecure protocols. It should always be an opt-in decision they have to make. (although they could definitely make it clearer that someone could enable it if their messages are failing to send with RCS)