WesternInfidels

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I’m concerned in a general way that the federated design of Lemmy / Mastodon etc. is by its nature (arguably even by its intent) likely to lead users to construct isolated media bubbles. But I don’t know how to improve it. I’m not going to subscribe to a (hypothetical as far as I know) fascist community just to “broaden my mind,” that wouldn’t work.

It’s hard to know how much of the division we see and feel is meatspace division facilitated by social media, and how much of it is social media reflecting divisions in meatspace. There’s no reason to suppose the answer would be simple or easy.

…it wasnt a slippery slope. They didnt make laws a little bit invasive … before slowly nudging it further

I disagree.

There was a certain (large) amount of government surveillance and eavesdropping going on before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to massively expand it. There was already inspection and security and traveler record-keeping at airports before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to expand those. CBP had long had the legislative authority to do all kinds of nastiness within 100 miles of a border before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to step their activities up, to legal limits and beyond.

In every case, an initial claim of urgent, exceptional authority was used to create both the physical infrastructure and the cultural permission required to make later, expanded claims of urgent, exceptional authority much easier to implement when an excuse presented itself. That is the slippery slope, we really slid way down it, it’s a real phenomenon. It doesn’t have to be smooth or gradual, it can happen in jerks and waves. It doesn’t have to come as a result of a plot, a plan, a deliberate conspiracy, it can be an accretion of individually opportunistic acts.

“The utility” has never had a way to prevent you from doing something dangerous with your wiring or with the electricity they send you. The best we’ve managed has been to encourage appliance manufacturers to design their products with safety in mind, through the UL program (which is voluntary). This is why the writer talked to the “vice president of engineering at UL Solutions.”

It doesnt make it easier for them down the road, if anything it makes it harder as there’s the ability to say “but we already have that”.

This is perfectly reasonable, but my feeling is that the real world isn’t reasonable in this way.

Consider all the infractions of liberty that have been approved in the name of combating “terrorism.” The no-fly lists. The universal warrant-less searches. All domestic communications recorded and archived for who-knows how long. The pervasive surveillance. The huge extension of CBP power to do things like raid Greyhound busses that aren’t even crossing borders.

None of these steps were prevented with the argument “But we’re already doing something about that issue.” That argument never even came up, to any noteworthy degree, in the public discourse.

Look at it this way: All sorts of websites that aren’t for kids already have banners requiring the visitor to affirm that they’re legal adults. So, we’re there: “We already have that.” But no one is seriously making that argument. Because, of course, those banners do next to nothing: Visitors can just lie. So it will probably be for OS level age verification. Thus, in creating a system that doesn’t work, the excuse for extending the system, to exert more control in the future, is built in from the start.

People who are interested in asserting more control over others are never content with the amount of control they have. They always want more. It is the gaining of more control that motivates them.

Putting a dollar figure on your schadenfreude? Do you want a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude? That’s how you get a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude.

A “pushover” is someone whose mind is easily changed by pressure, not someone who is pushy or who pushes other people around.

The kind of thing only your grandparents would fall for

But evidently not.

Last week I helped someone navigate their bank’s tech support to regain access to an account they’d been locked out of. I believe the bank was having some technical difficulties that they weren’t admitting to (or which the support people weren’t even aware of). Many standard approaches did not work, and we kept getting escalated. The top person we talked to eventually asked for some information that didn’t conform to the usual security question / answer format (“What year what the account opened?” for a ~50 year old account that had been opened many bank mergers ago) and wound up reading us a new password over the phone.

This approach alarmed me, it seemed to violate some security rules of thumb that I thought I understood. But this is what the bank does, sometimes. Given the sort of nonsense that goes on legitimately sometimes, expecting the general public to understand which information flows to be suspicious of – expecting them to think in terms of information flows at all – may be asking too much. We’d all hope journalists would be more savvy, I guess, but “government officials?” Nope. I used to think “Oh, I wouldn’t fall for that” when I read stories like these, but now I’m less sure.

The stated reasoning sounds okay in isolation, but:

1. Why didn’t they start the blackout when the conflict began, as opposed to waiting like this?
2. Why is it just a delay, instead of a real blackout?

Your objection does nothing to address the issue you raised. Where is the line drawn between “information” and “legal advice?”

Wikipedia and the lawmakers themselves present us with static information that is not specific to us personally or to any particular situation we may find ourselves in, and which generally does not include specific recommendations. I think most people would agree that’s just information, not advice.

If an LLM can be coaxed into saying things like “you should,” advocating specific courses of action for your circumstances, is that legal advice? I think many of us would agree that would be unlicesenced legal advice.

Is the wikipedia responsible for you reading an article about a law and then taking that as legal advice?

Is the U.S. House of Representatives [or any equivalent publisher of the law] responsible for you reading the text of a law itself and then taking that as legal advice?

That’s very odd. The translations built in to Firefox run on the local device - like a phone, even a dumpy old phone - and they’re pretty okay.

See this is why I’m sticking with analogue

Okay well that’s great and all but did you ever get to see A Quiet Place?

My college girlfriend claimed to have played a part in getting an IRC server set up on campus network, back when campus networks were brand new. Through that IRC server, I met the person who would later become my wife.

never heard of Amnezia

You said that before though

GPTurfing?

That annoys me as well. They call it “astroturfing” because it’s fake grassroots. I wonder if we should call this “cyberturfing.”

I’ve only skimmed but:

provide an accessible interface at account setup

They don’t even define “account.” They have a definition of “account holder” that makes no sense.

Are all devices required to have user accounts? There was a time when home computers did not have such things.

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