Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

mke

@mke@lemmy.world

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

mke ,

Darn, today I learned that Mr. Rogers was ready for war.

mke ,

We would be happy to connect with your technical team to help them make sure your paywalled content isn’t served to people using Poe.

What a joke, Quora needs to reevaluate whose responsibility that is.

Basic reasoning time: was it an accident?

  • If not, then it was at least immoral.
  • If so, then it was incompetence.

What a surprise, both possibilities seem to point towards the project being a pile of crap.

Q: “Are we doomed?” A: “We would be, if not for the amazing developments in renewable energy.” (powering-the-planet.ghost.io)

I wasn't aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.

mke , (edited )

We need to get our politicians to do a lot more, a lot faster.

So we're still doomed, then? I'm sorry, I'm sure lots of this is meant to be incredibly uplifting, but it reads an awful lot like "green is cheaper, trust the market! Numbers go up, up, up!" when you consider that:

  • Climate change is impacting countless people in horrible ways
  • Climate change is still getting worse

The important thing to note here being that, even if a brighter future awaits beyond, the worst is yet to come. I'll get back to this in a moment.

Yes, that the science to save the human race exists is nice. Really nice. There was a period in which I genuinely wondered if there was any chance humans wouldn't extinct themselves. But that was years ago. I've since learned that "saving the human species" is a terrible, disgusting metric. The future of what I consider humanity remains grim.

Now, if the worst is yet to come, and we can't yet even accurately predict how much worse the worst really will be, take a moment to reflect on this: which part of humanity is better prepared to weather the incoming changes, and which part is more likely to be labeled "climate change refugees?"

Humanity isn't only the richest. It's not merely the wealthiest and most developed nations. Humanity is also a lot of people who will suffer, people who I'm unconvinced will receive the aid and support they need and deserve.

Because the root cause of these issues, the systems that govern our society, have led us here and are unlikely to go away anytime soon. Because these systems have shown incredible prowess at protecting select groups of people from certain issues, while failing at completely fixing them, despite not struggling due to a lack of resources and continuous technological advances. If the pattern holds...

Then humans will survive. Many will live well.

Humanity is still pretty screwed.

TL;DR:

"The tools are here, we'll be alright, just need political will!"

Who's we? And if getting politicians to do what's right was that simple, we wouldn't be in this mess.

P.S. I'm not advocating for doom here, I just wish more people understood that Americans buying cheap Chinese electric cars won't save the people living nearby the mine in Africa where the cobalt for those batteries was extracted.

mke ,

"The elephant in the room – and the opportunity – is how to solve for the industry-created problem that people don’t like and don’t trust advertising," said Garcia. "Privacy-enhancing tech doesn’t make creepy and disruptive ads less creepy or disruptive in the eyes of the average user."

Emphasis mine.

Betting on your reputation that users will trust you to adequately handle an issue that really seems like it'd end up with a conflict of interest seems like a fancier manner of saying you're risking taking a dump on your reputation.

No way through but forwards now, eh. Not feeling particularly optimistic, but I'm cheering for them all the same. Their concerns and observations about the direction the industry is headed in are valid.

mke , (edited )

Would you be happier if they ignored the demands and possibly got Firefox banned in Russia? Because if so, it's not that we disagree over our views of the Russian government. Probably neither do Mozilla.

We have different priorities. I want the average Russian to be easily able to use Firefox, even if it takes more work to load some extensions. From where I'm sitting, you seem to want to cut off your nose to spite your face.

I'm genuinely curious why.

mke , (edited )

I stand corrected, I see your argument about the comparative difficulty and effect of banning a browser vs an extension. The discoverability of the extension alone is a big point.

Not sure I agree with how you seemingly downplay the damage banning the browser could cause and fail to consider consider other ways people could organize to distribute extensions (even as you mention various ways to get Firefox, I'm a bit confused on this one). Others have already talked about this in the thread, so I won't repeat it here.

With all that said, it appears we were both fools. Mozilla has returned the extensions already. It was neither about protecting Firefox in Russia, nor a case of "Fuck Mozilla."

Lynn Conway, leading computer scientist and transgender pioneer, dies at 85 (www.latimes.com)

I have mixed feelings on the pronoun use, but having read some of her autobiographical writing I don't think she would have taken much issue with it. This piece is more focused on her work in computer engineering, so I felt it was appropriate to post here.

mke ,

If you're serious, please elaborate on your points. I genuinely don't understand.

Going by Wikipedia here,

She was a huge part

Please define huge part. She was a "key architect" in the starting years of a project that fell short of its goals.

her entire work has to be viewed through that lens

Why? It was, relatively speaking, an almost small part of her career. She didn't stay until the end of the project. You even admit that her contributions to the field were many and meaningful.

is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children

This feels like such a huge leap, that I don't even know where to begin tackling it. Is Tim Berners Lee in every explicit way connected to the modern privacy hellscape that is the modern internet?

Make no mistake, if she really did want to help develop artificial intelligence for the military's sake, fuck her. I can respect someone's achievements while also thinking they're trash as a person.

But I don't think that's the case here, and I'm lost as to what point, exactly, you're trying to make.

mke ,

I won't know if any of the linked resources are any good until I have time to look them over, but if nothing else I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

Re: whitewashing, fair point. I'd already read about the issue, but maybe I still need to rethink how I look at computing history.

mke ,

Wrong Conway.

mke ,

That's unnecessarily dismissive. Unfortunately, even the best extensions have their downsides. Some used a browser that suited their preferences better instead, which is a shame for both Firefox and the user, in my opinion.

Mozilla recognizes this and is finally taking action to integrate highly requested features into Firefox. Many "who really care" are glad for this, because it is a good thing.

mke ,

Don't feel too jelly though, the actual profile manager has been in need of some care for a while, now...

...and it's apparently getting it soon! No way they'll hide the button after they polish it up, right? Happy times to come for all, I hope :⁠^⁠)

mke ,

media file downloaded from a dubious source with an extension you've never seen before

VLC: "Let me play it."

It just works.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • incremental_games
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •