Amazing how Johnson’s government managed to combine this callous indifference to the fates of its people with one of the most cruel and restrictive “lockdown” regimes in the world, arresting people for going out to walk their dogs and so on. Boris really had a talent for ineptitude that was exceptional even among prime ministers.

More evidence that all political leaders need someone whose job it is to sneak up on them and whisper “remember, you too will die” whenever they seem in danger of forgetting it.

What’s the difference? They both speak Swahili, right?

My time was wasted by LLM-generated nonsense just yesterday. I wanted to know when whistling tea kettles similar to the classic design we know today first became popular. The first search result I got was a 3000-word essay all about the history of kettles, so I started reading. You’ll know you’ve found the same one I did if at various points it claims that the kettle was invented “ca. 8000 BC”, “4000 years ago”, “around 3000 BC”, “15,000 years ago”, and “approximately 906-1127 AD”.

There are various other inconsistencies and things that make no sense at all by human standards, but it’s written in an authoritative tone, looks pretty nice, and was the first result on my searx instance, appearing in the results from several well-known search engines. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that it’s all bullshit, and there’s probably at least some truth mixed in there somewhere.

It’s not exactly something to panic over I’d say, but it sure is annoying.

I thought the plan was immediate violent revenge? Gaza has been under siege since 2007 and if it ever seemed likely that it was all part of a grand strategy that could some day end in peace, that time is long past.

vastly expands the pool of potential victims

I’m not brave enough at the moment to say it isn’t some kind of crime, but creating such images (as opposed to spamming them everywhere, using them for blackmail, or whatever) doesn’t seem to be a crime that involves any victims.

Not sure if it’s from an alternate universe or from our own future, but somewhere there is a version of this article that’s like “Today, the market for Mastodon alternatives is a crowded one to say the least. There are numerous services for consumers to try, including the open-source based Misskey, smaller startups like Pleroma, plus the Elon Musk-based product formerly known as Twitter.”

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13% may not sound like a lot, but it includes almost all of the 10% who weren’t complete idiots.

It seems like a coordinated effort

It’s nice to see this getting noticed for once in mainstream mass media.

the proposed text would mandate the implementation of surveillance bugs

And they call it 2.0? I’ve never seen such a blatant example of version number inflation. It should be called 0.2a, as it’s nowhere near ready for release and full of bugs.

It is if you redefine AGI to mean the thing that’s already here, although to get away with that it helps if at the same time you overestimate what LLMs are capable of doing.

It took them a couple of days to come up with this statement about the horrific attacks from Hamas. Maybe they just need a little more time to come up with their statement concerning the even more destructive responses from Israel.

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You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month

I’d say it’s more likely to be the most wealthy users who will pay the $14, and it seems plausible that the most devoted facebook users might care less about avoiding the ads than people who are there only reluctantly. So maybe slightly closer to the middle of that 11% to 342% range.

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Mass media has held a great deal of power over us since its inception. Its full development is more recent in Russia and its exploitation more ruthless in some ways, but television has been shaping our realities since well before my childhood filled with American TV. It’s difficult to believe that all the cop shows didn’t constitute an important part of a system of positive feedback that contributed to developing the police violence problem that exists in America today for example. Not to mention the anti-drug messages covertly inserted into TV sitcoms by actual government propagandists, or the transformation of the TV news into pure entertainment after the demise of the fairness doctrine and the various shenanigans made possible by that.

Given how powerful all that was (and still is) it’s difficult to imagine what it’s like when the state puts some serious effort into taking control of such a system and relying on it to convince people of things that make even less sense than did late 20th-century America. But given the adaptability of the Spectacle, seeing mass media “completely deprived of power” seems further off than is hinted at in the final paragraph there.

Yeah I’ve been back there a few times to check, and the reddit I knew is most certainly dead. Its corpse will stumble around for a while animated by venture capital necromancy, but it’s not really a threat any more and will stop moving soon enough. Youtube still has much enshittification to go before it gets to that point.

Ending fossil fuel use by the year 2030 is as “right now” as it is possible to get. It would require big changes starting immediately. No more petrol cars being sold, as of right now. Massive investment in freight transport by electrified rail, start building as soon as possible. Huge transformation of agriculture, you’ve got to replace or adapt every single fossil-fuel powered thing. Aviation, you won’t have time to save much of it if the goal is 2030, so you’re going do a lot less flying. The military is going to need a complete overhaul. Commercial and recreational watercraft will all urgently need to find new ways to operate. France goes through something like 40 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year for a variety of residential, commercial, and industrial uses all of which will need to find new energy sources or be discontinued.

Doing it in less than ten years starting from the very little that’s been done so far would be a world-changing accomplishment if they managed it.

The aim, he added, was to reduce this dependence from 60% to 40% by 2030.

Oh right, apparently they’re only looking to reduce its market share by a third, not “end” it. That is… somewhat less impressive.

A good review but from what I remember of the game I would add that the “quick-time events” can be annoying. Do not play if you can’t handle scenes of gratuitous button mashing.