a buddy asked me to install valorant once, valorant in turn prompted me to install some anticheat, which i did, and the anticheat in turn asked me to change some of my bios or uefi settings, can't remember, but it was a hilarous moment: instant uninstall, blacklist developer forever, next. buddy, let's play something else ...

social media has existed for 2 decades now. if social media is really a driving factor in the current political debacle it has a damn slow effect.

maybe those "farmers and truckers" simply got fed up by real troubles, and were sick and tired of voting the establishment to no avail. so they voted for the first guy that claimed to be non-, or even anti-, establishment. dumb decision? you bet, but what you are really seeing here is the decadence of the establishment and its increasing disconnect from the people.

social media is ofc a propaganda instrument, no doubt. as are tv or the press, have been since forever. is propaganda getting more sophisticated? for sure. is a disconnected and disgruntled society more vulnerable to it? reasonable assumption. but what really distinguishes social media from other media is that it is the hardest vector for the establishment to control, and not for lack of trying. for now, at least, and imo that's what this is about. you might not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater ...

btw, fun fact: a llm tells me that "farmers and truckers" are around 3% of actual us voters.

yeah, that's the point. as ceo he could have changed the direction of firefox for the better. he arguably had merits and a trajectory to suggest that. he could also have gone on a homophobic rampage and fired all gays? i very much doubt so.

not that beard was that bad, mind, he also had a technical background and actually focused very much on technical improvement. and he delivered, but it wasn't enough, and he also broke some toys. alas none of several "new image" strategies since has worked (quite the contrary) and i'm skeptical that subscriptions and ai integration will. it's really sad, i would have given eich a chance, regardless of his personal opinions (which he mostly kept to himself) and political correctness.

true, but the donation was made in 2008 and was reported in 2012 to apparently no remarkable effect. however two years later, literally the next day after the appointment it was resurfaced and widely circulated to great scandal ... that suggests to me that the problem wasn't really his opinions but him becoming the ceo. unlike a cto, a ceo can actually manage a corporation and change direction in fundamental ways. we'll never know how that would have gone.

i would like to invite you to revisit/challenge/update that preconditioned view watching this: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F... because it is just plain wrong. (it's a bit dated but still very valid, worth a watch and entertaining. the book and a bit of tinkering would be way better)

or ... you could just give mr eich's browser a try? hey, what's that look? X'D

it's not even a fact, firefox never surpassed around 30%. the 80% figure refers to a subset of linux distributions which had firefox as default browser.

well, he actually co-founded mozilla and served as technology leader for over a decade. besides creating javascript, that is. probably one of the most salient and influential contributors that mozilla will have ever had in its history. after being canceled for his ideology (actually, for donating $3k for a cause of his choosing, which i would assume is everyone's right in a free democracy (cough)) he left and went on his own to create which is arguably one of the best browsers regarding efficiency and privacy available today, while mozilla (and firefox in particular) have become a laughing stock. make of it what you will.

you are statistically likely to use the same source of information that chatbots are built with. a really small part of that information is critical thinking, rational analysis and, in the end, objective information. guess what will be more represented in the wheights? most of it is made up of collective narratives that not only do not represent the truth, but shift the relevance of topics and views around thus skewing the very frame of reference. it's not what they say, it's also their choice of what to talk about, and what not. it's a long chain with many links and quirks and at the end of the day much of it is misinformation, or rooted in it.

logically, chatbots must necessarily be contributing to increase the spread of misinformation at some degree, but that's a discussion about degree or scale. funnily, simply saying "chatbots are spreading misinformation" is not even a lie, but it (probably deliberately) skews and obfuscates the conversation about misinformation to begin with. misinfromation starts with the framing.

chatbots are just the latest twist in the spread of the same crap that most people routinely have been consuming and acritically assimilating anyway for ages by many other means, from "history books" to movies to "mass media" to "influencers" to "social media", etc, etc ... not the least through regular human-to-human conversations framed in and around those same narratives and sources.

the only way to "mitigate" misinformation in our societies is in the method of approaching information from whatever the source: skepticism, critical thinking, reflection and intellectual honesty. the truth of matters will never be given to you, you have to actively seek it, time and again, and it's a mess because the whole circus is stockfull of shit.

- unchecked ai mistake
- deliberate targeting now brushed under the rug of unchecked mistake

those girls killed were mostly daughters of irgc officials. it seems reckless and counterproductive, which it is, but if you want to deal a devastating blow to crush any opposition and believe that it will work, it becomes a plausible decision. it's right there in line with killing a head of state who is at the same time the revered leader of an entire major religion, along with a good part of his family and entourage, threatening officials with killing their whole families if they don't defect, not to mention routine bombing of hospitals, refugee camps, double tapping and deliberate killing of first responders, medical staff, journalists, civil servants, police, starving populations to death or blowing up entire city blocks for a single assasination target.

i am still on the fence. not that it matters, though, whether it was deliberate or not the danger of automating these kinds of operations is pretty obvious. it should not be a valid excuse or exonerating in any way. then again ... i don't think that really matters to people for who such war crimes are business as usual, and routinely get away with it.

and you either do or don't understand the sentence:

i get that emotional keyboard warriors can sometimes read too fast, skip words and miss nuances in text in the heat of getting triggered (see this thread), but your pompous and elaborate virtue signaling discourse is something else entirely. not only did you miss the point, you seem to feel entitled to judge who is apt or not to participate in your imagined select club or be even worthy of your arguments and wisdom. that would be a quite embarassing attitude even if slashdot were indeed (still) such a select club, which it hasn't been for a very long while (in case you missed that too), but in any event i wonder how any person, enticed by tinkering or not, would want to be around someone like that.

agreed very much, and valid points, except your faith in brussels is ... surprising? i'm guessing you're thinking about the likes of afd and rn, and there's some legitimate concern there. however ... is an opaque supranational institution ruled by a banking cartel any better? if they can't supress it (and they're trying hard) in no time they will own any "right wing menace" coming up anywhere just the same, so i don't think national political alternatives will mean much except some initial noise, new faces and the new old. except social polarization will be real and that will give the cartel even more leverage, and we all know (or should know by now) where all that is headed. eu's totalitarian ugly face is already starting to show without any extremes yet "in charge", this regulation being just a mild point in case. it's kind of moot.

choices, choices ....

regardez un grand revolutionnaire! vive la liberte, avec son ps5 et tele lg pourrie ...

that kinda makes sense. but imo it would be smarter not to support such hardware to begin with. if you're going to run linux on it why not buy a pc?

which was implicit (or maybe even rather explicit) in the first 9 words of my commentm, but for some reason you chose to deliberately missed the point.

then buy the appropriate hardware?

that's not an apt comparison but, in fact, my opinion is the same.

get yourself a regular monitor. they come in many sizes and have none of that crap. or don't, but realize that digital television is a proprietary system by definition. you get what you pay for.