“this is a big Butt”

Nice.

Yeah, it scares me too. Though it does give me some comfort to exist in communities like this, where people are well informed of the kind of fuckery done by big tech and other asshole corporations, and thus are not surprised by this kind of news. Although it’s pretty grim that we all recognise how fucked things are, it’s within communities like this that I often find my will to live be bolstered.

Maybe it’s to do with the average political inclination of folks here, or maybe it’s just that Lemmy has a high concentration of creative, nerdy people who find joy in making or sharing cool stuff. Or maybe I’m just so burnt out that I’m desperate to construct and/or clutch onto anything remotely meaningful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Regardless I find it reassuring to see so many people trying their damnedest to forge something good — not in ignorance of the world being on fire, but precisely because we need good reasons to live now more than ever.

Sometimes I find myself thinking that I wish I could put my head in the sand and find some bliss in the ignorance of it all. I don’t really want that though. Real hope is built on a comprehensive understanding of the problems we face, with a hearty dash of some potentially irrational defiance.

Good start

Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she’s not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)

Despite this, I have no doubt that we’d see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.

The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors

I get that the official body probably didn’t have the resources to be able to clean it up, but imagine if there had been a compromise solution in which volunteers could have done this work but with the guidance of a professional, sanctioned by that official body. That seems like it could have been the best of both worlds. It’s a shame that this ended up as it did

Yay, teamwork!

Good kitty

None of us are free until all of us are free. AI is nothing new, just more of the same forces trying to crush more of us into a permanent lower class.

There have been some wins from GDPR, but it’s woefully under enforced. I became very familiar with the GDPR when I did an internship in the regulatory risk department of a big bank when everyone was frantically trying to rebuild shit to ensure compliance. I think it’s a damn good piece of legislation, and it’s a shame to see it doing so much less than it could be.

I really like the automatic cruise control on my fairly new Honda Jazz. I’ve found that it has a net positive effect on my attention to the road, because I become less fatigued from the small, brief slowdowns that I might encounter on a motorway. There was actually an instance where I narrowly avoided a crash while using this system because of how quickly I acted when a potentially dangerous situation developed into an active crash; I felt like I was more alert than I would’ve otherwise been after a day of driving

However, I do not like the lane-keeping system, especially combined with the automatic cruise control. I remember testing it when I was on a clear but fairly curved section of the motorway, with my hands completely off the wheel (but hovering over the wheel, ready to take control again if necessary). I was horrified by how effectively it took me round the bend — effectively enough to be dangerous. There is a warning beep if you spend too long without your hands on the wheel at all for a while, but this was just something I did while testing it. I’ve not used it since, because I was confident that, unlike the automatic cruise control used on its own, this would diminish my attention and leave me unable to properly respond to an exceptional circumstances.

“I mean, we’ll have to handle it, we won’t have a choice.”

A lot of people won’t handle it though. I’m too disabled to work, so even if I had been old enough to be working during the dot-com era and the '08 crash, I still wouldn’t have had a job to lose.

However, I have had my benefits temporarily removed due to various bureaucratic bullshit, and there have been multiple points where things got bad enough that I’m honestly surprised I’m still here to write this comment. And it sucks to know that for all the trauma and disadvantage I face, I am one of the lucky ones.

That’s what’s so grim people being pushed to their limit — when we don’t have the luxury of choices, then it’s easy to get drawn towards choosing “the bad ending” so to speak. Even during difficult times where I’ve not been at risk of making that particular choice myself, I nonetheless found it comforting to fantasise about, as the escape lever that no-one could take away from me.

On one of the BlueSky threads going over over the test code, one of the things they uncovered was some stuff running as root which in no world should be necessary. He may not have just prompted Claude to “convert test suite to python”, but there’s a lot there that seem like clear red flags in terms of AI slop code.

Which is no surprise, really, given that properly proof-reading AI code is often much more labour intensive than just writing the code oneself. It’s easy for things like this to slip through the cracks, even if you are trying to check the AI output

It’d probably still count as littering, which would be fineable, I imagine

Not only are cashews healthy for them, they also go nuts for them (pun not intended, but I am delighted to have made an accidental pun). I forgot to mention “unsalted” in my comment, so I’m glad you mentioned it

I once had a crow friend who would knock on my window if I was late coming out to give them their seeds. It was just the one crow that was bold enough to do this. Sometimes he’d do it way earlier than usual, and I am 100% confident that he wasn’t mistaken, just being a cheeky asshole and trying his luck. I miss that asshole bird.

Seconding the crow effigy idea (well, I didn’t do it with an effigy, I just left them a couple of shiny stuff).

For me, what I did was sit on my doorstep for a while, to get them used to the sight of me. And then I made sure they saw me leaving the shiny thing. I wasn’t forbidden from feeding them, so I also let them see me putting out some seeds.

Although feeding them is prohibited, the crow effigy idea person said to have a few cashews or similar in the little nesty thing, and I agree that this would be likely be necessary to draw them over at first.

If you’re okay with bending the rules a tad, if the sitting outside thing works and you’re able to not scare them away, then leaving behind just a cashew or two in your wake (if the crows are nearby) could help them to begin to associate you with good stuff.

Though if they’re dive bombing you, it might be challenging to come back from that

A white supremacist who has a disproportionate amount of influence in the company

I read a fair bit of it, and I was surprised to see so many of the talking points I hear from some of the techy/sciencey people I most respect, just with a religious coat of paint. He’s clearly got some pretty clued up people advising him, and is wise enough to listen

The catch is that it took threatening a strike to get to this concession, and even after they were projected to lose (I think) more than a billion a day. This isn’t a free gift out of nowhere, but a hard fought victory for the union

Yes but the problem is that people keep submitting the same bug again and again and again. Some bugs exist because they haven’t been spotted, but there’s a heckton of bugs that are known about, but no-one has been able to put forward a fix for them yet. Overloading people with duplicate reports just means that they have less time and brainspace available to spend on fixing bugs.

Duplicates don’t add anything to the conversation