mobyduck648

Very well said! Privacy protects the innocent far more than it protects the guilty, and no false positive rate other than zero is acceptable when ‘van bursts in to take your career away over an AI detecting wrongdoing’ in my view.

If a false positive rate of zero is not possible then not building it is the only ethical option.

You’ve managed to nerd snipe me with the colourblind friendly Pride flag, the second one somehow looks really good!

Why is stirring up conflict here beneficial though? I’m intensely critical of the current US government but me and the average American still have more in common with each-other than either of us have with our respective ruling elites in terms of material interest and daily life.

Yes their crowing about being the most democratic country on Earth is a bit silly but that doesn’t mean they deserve to become an outright plutocracy, nobody deserves that. You can object to Washington’s lofty perch in the global pecking order and to Americentrism in general without wishing ill on a whole nationality the vast majority of whom have done nothing to wrong you personally. The only thing I wish for the Americans is for them to fix their backsliding democratic institutions and to adopt a more realistic view of their country’s place in the geopolitical landscape; I don’t doubt these are goals many Americans support at this point.

I was really looking forward to my luxury German nuclear-powered car as well >:(

Not played those games but to be fair in a nuclear wasteland you would expect fresh meat and vegetables to be more radioactive than the general environment. Animals and plants can accumulate radioactive fallout, if it’s diffuse in the soil it can be more concentrated in whatever lives off that soil. Radioactive contamination often consists of caesium-137 which behaves like potassium, and strontium-90 which behaves like calcium, so you’re getting screwed by conventional biochemistry as much as nuclear physics.

This is a concern in the Chernobyl exclusion zone even now, there’s mushrooms and other forage that must be avoided for this reason.

Dylan has more good advice here, when it comes to bubbles you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!

I’m usually a rationalist but nothing can convince me that Sod’s Law isn’t somehow baked into the structure of the universe.

To be fair there was infrastructure then that doesn’t exist now. Most phone boxes are basically just public urinals now for example, I mean they always were but you could usually expect a phone to be in there too. People were also used to remembering numbers, but the only numbers I remember these days are my own and various landlines from my childhood which have been disconnected for over a decade as people did away with traditional landlines, then the VoIP bridge replacements which just became a way to receive international tech support scam calls more efficiently.

I personally want to see smartphones curtailed more generally; if I had absolutist power a lot of the adtech sector (at least surveillance-based behavioural recommendation algorithms) would be legislated out of existence on public health and democratic integrity grounds for example. I’d like to see e-ink smartphones become a wider market segment too, as these inherently break a lot of ‘dark patterns’ and also make short form video content less viable in favour of text content. I don’t think we can just take smartphones off kids and dump them at eighteen into the psychological manipulation engine that is the modern adtech sector without wider structural reforms to our relationship with smartphones and the internet.

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Yeah this is one thing enshittification apologists never seem to understand, they’ll claim ‘well if you don’t like ads just pay for the non-ad version, I want cheaper prices’ but the reality is no matter how much you pay there’s a mandatory side dish of enshittification.

Yeah it depends on the sub but for the bigger ones it’s absolutely infested, if you go to one of the subs which takes removing bots transparently like the Tumblr ones you can get a sense of the scale.

Isn’t the ‘dead’ part more that nobody speaks it as a mother tongue any more, so it doesn’t really evolve like a living language would even though it’s still spoken in specific contexts? I think it contrasts with an extinct language which nobody speaks for any reason.