I installed uBlock for someone recently. They complained about all the empty space where the ads used to be. So I removed the empty space by blocking that element with uBlock, which increased the width of the main body of the website, and they then complained that the website was too wide…
Some people are beyond help.
I think the case would be more on the supplier that provides the cups to Cinemark though
That’s a matter for Cinemark and their supplier to sort out (either through discussion or another lawsuit). This man had a contract with the vendor (Cinemark) which is why he’s suing them.
If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer.
There’s potential for a very dystopian future where we see people assassinated, not via car bomb but via the their cars being hacked to remove braking functionality (or something similar). And then a constant game of security whack-a-mole like we see with anti-virus software. And then some brilliant entrepreneur will start selling firewalls for cars. And then it’ll be passed into law that it’s illegal to use a vehicle that doesn’t have an active firewall/anti-virus subscription.
It almost feels like the obvious path things will go down. Yay, capitalism…
I’m not totally opposed to software being used in cars (as long as it’s tested and can be trusted to the degree mechanical components are) but yeah, OTA updates just seem like a terrible idea just for a little convenience. I’d rather see updates delivered via plugging the car in (and not via the charging port - it would need to be a specific data transfer port for security reasons). Alert people when there’s an update, and even allow the car to “refuse to boot” if it detects it’s not on the latest version. But updates should absolutely be done manually and securely.
It’s the length of the combined total working lives of an entire football stadium full of people.
The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations.
I do think “global warming” struggles to convince some more simple people anyway, unfortunately. Because while the average temperature of the globe is increasing and causing the changes in climate that we’re seeing, I’ve come across far too many comments from people saying things like “global warming must be a myth because it snows more than it used to” and things themselves smarter than all climate scientists combined for that observation.
Of course, those same people probably think global warming is good because they like their summer holidays so perhaps their opinions shouldn’t matter much either way!
“It’s absurd that we live in a society where people feel the urge to tell me to greet them with ‘sallam alleykum’”.
There’s already a huge difference between what happened and your example here. Your example is “people saying you must do X” . What happens when it comes to gender is people asking, “please do not do X”.
They’re not saying you must refer to them as, for instance, she/her, but rather asking that you do not refer to them as he/him/they/them/whatever. You’re free to just not use pronouns to refer to them at all if that suits you better - you can refer to them by name instead. You’re left with plenty of options and only a handful of restrictions.
Your example, on the other hand, is completely restrictive; you must take this single course of action, and there are no alternatives.
For what it’s worth, I do think we’re in a fairly transitional stage (ha) of how we as society deal with transgenderism. I think people being made to change their pronouns in order to feel comfortable is silly. Not because those people are silly - they’re just doing what they can to feel comfortable with the restrictions society has placed on them - but because society and language are silly.
Why do we refer to people by gender at times when it’s completely irrelevant? Someone having a penis, or male hormones, or whatever other “masculine qualities”, is irrelevant 99% of the time when I refer to them as he/him. If I say, “Donald Trump? Yeah, he’s a corrupt idiot,” then why does him having a penis have any bearing on the language I use there?
And why do we have such gendered roles in society? Why can’t men just wear dresses and make-up and link the colour pink and still identify as men? Why can’t women cut their hair short and wear baggy clothes and like engineering projects and lifting weights at the gym and still identify as women? I guarantee that if we could remove all those kinds of gender associations, you’d see a lot less trans people.
People transition because who they are and what they like, and what society says they have to be (based on their gender) are at odds with each other, and it’s literally easier for them to change gender in order to be allowed to be themselves than to change society. Being trans isn’t some kind of personal failing; it’s a failure of society to accommodate people who deviate even slightly from its rigid roles and expectations.
The ideal future, such as I see it, is for there to be no trans people because no-one feels a need to transition - they can just feel comfortable and accepted as they are. But until then, you need to recognise that there’s a societal issue and stop being a part of it. It takes such a small amount of effort on your part to use the pronouns someone requests, or to avoid using pronouns at all, and it makes such a huge difference to them to be gendered properly. So just be a decent, respectful person and accommodate their wishes and stop making their life worse.
So as per @Kierunkowy74’s reply to me, limiting (basically what I described) is a feature on Mastodon already. It basically just sets things to follower-only mode on a per-instance basis. I’m not sure how well that would translate to the threadiverse, but I do think some level of opt-in integration would be best.
To go on a slight tangent: I’ve never used Imgur as anything other than a image hosting site, but I’m aware it has people that use it as a social network in its own right. Whenever I’ve hosted anything on Imgur in the past - even images that don’t need any context - I’ve noticed it always ended up downvoted and sometimes with some negative comments, while the reception on reddit was generally far better. It doesn’t bother me - like I said, I just used it as an image host - but it’s clear Imgur has its own culture. Threads could be the same, and trying to merge its culture with ours could prove difficult.
I don’t know what full-on federation with Threads would look like, but federating vote counts could definitely lead to Threads culture overwhelming threadiverse culture. But I assume that’s also something that can be done on a per-instance basis; I know kbin (which I use) already doesn’t federate downvotes from other instances, for example.
I’m not sure I have a fully-formed opinion on it all yet, unfortunately. I don’t like the idea of cutting Threads off completely unless they do something to earn defederation. I think finding a way to smoothly federate with Threads could give the fediverse a boost in users that could be significant for more niche communities that haven’t managed to find a large enough audience yet (because yes, I’m still missing some of the smaller communities from reddit). But I do also think there are very valid concerns about both the long-term and immediate impacts Threads could have on the fediverse.
That sounds like a good solution. I don’t want to need an account on a different platform to see Threads, but I also don’t want the feeds to just be overrun by Threads users, and that seems to achieve that.
I guess the ideal situation as far as I’m concerned would be for users to be able to choose that setting on an individual basis. Obviously anyone can set up their own instance and achieve that, but being able to do it without being an instance admin would be the best.
Personally, I would like to be able to follow individual Threads users if I so desire but not have Threads content showing up in my All feed. I don’t know if that’s possible with how federation/individual blocking currently works, but it would be the ideal, I think.
Sweet?!
So I just had a look into it and apparently American tomato ketchup is one third sugar (corn syrup, obviously…). Ketchup is supposed to be savory, America; why do you do this?
“He who controls the spice(y content) controls the universe” - Baron Harkonnen in Frank Herbert’s Dune
Ahh, that’s the same path Facebook went down a decade ago then. Yay, capitalism…
What’s changed about Instagram? I’m not familiar enough to know, but I don’t feel like I’ve heard anything all that controversial about it outside of Meta’s general “pay to remove ads” thing. I certainly haven’t heard anything about systemic enshittification like I have with Twitter, Reddit and TikTok; have I missed anything?
And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.
And it obviously doesn’t help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.
Yes, as long as they’re also white and middle/upper class!
I’m kind of surprised Apple is willing to fragment things so much just to avoid these consumer-friendly rulings as much as they can. Obviously it’s profit-driven - I get that - but it seems to go against their branding a little, where the Apple ecosystem is typically very simple to use and has parity across devices.
I don’t think all adverts are propaganda. For instance, someone in my village has a sign outside their house that says “EGGS FOR SALE” - that is 100% an advert, but I’m not sure you could convince me it’s propaganda.
I agree that there’s a lot of overlap between advertising and corporate propaganda, but they’re definitely different things.
You’re right about osu! Although it’s probably one of the few competitive games where there’s no gameplay interaction between players - if another player is cheating, it hurts the overall competitiveness, of course, but it doesn’t directly affect your gameplay experience.
It’s not like playing a shooter where someone has an aimbot and wallhacks, or a racing game where someone can ram you off the track without slowing themselves down - those things directly ruin your gameplay experience as well as obviously hurting the competitive integrity. I don’t think those kinds of games would work at all if they were open-source and without anti-cheat unless there was strict moderation and likely whitelisting in place for servers.
Is open-source compatible with competitive games? As much as I love open-source in general, I feel like cheating would be a serious problem if the source code is available for everyone. That’s not really an issue in single-player or co-operative games (outside of cheating leaderboard positions) but it would absolutely cause problems in a PvP game.
Yep. LLMs are great for bouncing ideas off, and for getting “soft answers”, but no-one should ever be looking for factual answers from them.