Wage theft as only “not paid what was owed according to current law” is already the biggest form of theft and the least prosecuted.

Please don’t help perpetuate capitalist exploitation by blurring it with the “value theft” inherent to capitalism

A bit late to the party, but… well…

If a streaming service has an ad-free tier, the ads shown aren’t really there to sell the things they advertise. Oh, sure, the buyer of the ad wants your money, but they didn’t pay a bunch to show you that ad and the revenue from the ad buy just has be “slightly higher than spam” to be worthwhile.

"Ad-Supported’ tiers exist to differentiate the higher cost points. Which is why the ads frequently aren’t aligned with natural break points in the video. And why in some cases it’s the same two or three ads shown for every artificial and clumsy break.

The ads you are seeing exist primarily as an advertisement for the ad-free tier.

That’s why bsky’s pseudo-federation isn’t as big a deal as some ActivityPub boosters claim.

As I understand it, if lemmy.world shuts down or starts demanding cash my only resource would be the same as if Facebook decides I’m too critical of billionaires – start all over elsewhere with a new account. Sure, I could get close to the same experience with a different node, but I’d be a brand new account with no history. I might as well go someplace else entirely.

Bsky’s “portable user” idea fixes that. There are accounts my bsky account follows who switched to blacksky, and if they hadn’t said they’d changed I wouldn’t have noticed. The essential identity of their account shifted almost seamlessly, and they “federate” with everyone else, aside that their appview shows accounts that bsky’s ordinary moderation hides.

I don’t have any illusions about how altruistic the cryptobro VC’s are. But the entirely of their value proposition is that “leaving bsky” should be about as painless as porting your number from Verizon to AT&T.

The claimed reason for that is to highlight “referrer” links for the sites people go to from bsky.

My understanding is that if you click like https://www.themarysue.com/ the website operators would see a “feddit.org” or “lemmy.world” referer if you’re using a web browser and don’t have a defeating option enabled, but not if your browser is locked down or you use an app. The immediate redirects, however, do consistently show in the web site’s access logs.

It’s possible bsky could fuck around with this in the future, but doing so risks just sending users to a pseudo-fork like blacksky.

You’re right about the effect (lawsuits and the threat of the same are more common in America than Canada or the UK) but not at all about the cause.

The USA has had a decades-long choice to have our industry regulated primarily not through government bureaucracy but instead judicial liability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_through_litigation

“Actual coverage is less than what’s theoretically possible” is a hell of a way of saying "these things aren’t good enough (yet) to actually replace real people ".

1984 is an anti-tyranny dystopia that has more bad readings than any other work I can think of.

The essential problem isn’t new-speak, the five minute hate, constant war, one-party rule, rat-based psychotorture, or even ubiquitous surveillance. Rather, it’s the abandonment of truth. It’s not nearly so bad if Big Brother is Watching, except that Big Brother lies.

(And Orwell wasn’t even inventing the danger out of whole cloth: both the German Nazi and Russian Communist tyrannies had well trod the path of internal propaganda and historical revisionism)

((AND you don’t have to squint all that hard to argure that 1984’s Britian was most plausibly a pariah state that didn’t actually have any power beyond its aquatic border…))

Like nearly all science fiction, 1984 wasn’t so much written about its future as it was written about the past.

The DSM isn’t a scientific document, but rather a medical and legal one. It is meant to help doctors correlate patients to find potential treatments, and provides language useful for billing and legal purposes.

Schizophrenia may not be an entirely accurate term, but if its use leads to patients who need medicine getting medicine and those not responsible for their actions not being held responsible then it’s hardly useless. But it does make it a good candidate for revision in the next DSM.

Which is beside the point, though. Somebody whose historical notability is half “thing contained in $BOOK is wrong” should not be presumed to be unbiased if they write a “$BOOK is bad” article.

Worth knowing:

Article’s byline is “Jim Van Os” , and the Wikipedia article for someone of the same name is a Dutch psychologist who has a ten-year history of arguing that “schizophrenia” isnt a useful label.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_van_Os

(Of course, as far as I know they may not be the same guy, and I don’t have any reason to doubt the sincerity of his argument.)

You’re the first account I’ve seen endorse OpenOffice, and I’ve been casually looking for a better alternative to word since the copilot bullshit last year.

Do you have a good example of something they added since LibreOffice forked off that’s worth considering if choosing an alternative?

Any work that wouldn’t be done if we had a UBI should either be automated away or sufficiently well-paid that it would find workers even without the threat of poverty.

We don’t need to ritually kill a homeless person just so someone will pick up our trash any more than we need to do so for someone to tended to our elders dying of cancer.

*Tell me you’ve never encountered a real courtroom without telling me never encountered a real courtroom… *

Our legal systems have long required things like “chain of custody” and “corroborating evidence” for essentially any claim. Because in essentially any instance where the opposing sides dispute a question of fact they need to convince a mildly annoyed rando that things happened a certain way while the other team is arguing that it’s all a hoax.

They generally skip all that in courtroom dramas and even broadcasted courtrooms, because the very first phase of any trial is discovery where both sides show some or all of their cards to try and convince the other team to fold.

AI slop is hardly the first time someone invented a new tool for faking evidence. Heck, we had a whole industry based on faking video evidence before the first surveilance camera was ever installed.

(There’s a huge possibility for slander and fraud that the general public should wise up to, but starting with an assumption that evidence is fake unless proven otherwise is kinda how things go.)

(And, yes, the big hole here is that “best avaliable” evidence is often nonsense. ACAB and all that. My point is just that fake evidence isn’t a dangerous new invention courts have never seen before.)

Causality is just determinists starting with “time travel is impossible” and finding a fancy name for it.

I don’t want to say they’re wrong, just that asserting casualty in a discussion about time travel being impossible is kinda like asserting Godwin’s Law in a discussion about whether or not Trump’s a nazi.

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When the USA was civilized we required every food sold to the public to list its nutritional information.

https://calories-info.com/mustard-vs-ketchup/

100g of ketchup or mustard both have about 100 calories, with ketchup getting more of those calories from carbohydrates and much less from fat.

Even if you make your own ketchup or buy a no-sugar added brand, it still has a fair amount of carbohydrates. And a substantial amount of salt.

https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/2594364/100g/1

Both are worth including if you’re calorie counting. (And don’t necessarily trust the per-serving size label, since if they set that low enough they can round down and claim a 100% fat cooking spray is 0 calories. We only used to be civilized.)

A better question is what sort of legislation should apply to every website on the planet, without exception.

Off the top of my head:

• Do not store user information in an unsecure or identifiable mechanism.
• Be transparent as to what parts of the page are ads and which aren’t.
• Follow best-practices for accessibility.
• Give @DomeGuy a lollipop if he asks.

Just because they are a distasteful company, doesn’t give us free reign to spread lies about them.

To be pedantic, I’m spreading alarmist rumors at worst. In English a “lie” has to be something the speaker doesn’t actually believe. And I honestly believe that users of WhatsApp should assume that Meta can read their messages.

The signal protocol and encryption explicitly prevents the transit server decrypting messages. That a theoretical hidden third person … in the chat doesn’t change that is e2e encrypted.

You’re splitting a hair that’s not even worth curling.

If I ship you a locked box via courier, and the courier can get a copy of the key without talking to either of us, we should presume that the courier may have looked inside and take appropriate measures. Like, inventorying the contents of said box before and after, and not shipping things we don’t want the courier to know about.

It doesn’t matter if the courier keeps the box locks, doesn’t habitually carry a key, or even promises that they won’t get a key. We don’t even have to assume that they actually looked in the box, or use a slower or more-expensive courier.

If there’s a plausible way they can open the box, we should start with the presumption that they did and then go from there.

Websites that break in Firefox are websites that should not be used.

Words don’t have meanings. Meanings have words.

Amazon the internet megastore allows non-employees of Amazon to add content to their store. Both as supposed vendors offering goods for services and as customers giving reviews and ratings to such store listings. And Amazon chooses what listings to show to users through opaque algorithms.

Can you give an example of the sort of regulation a social media site should need to follow which Amazon should be exempt from? Or the sort of rule that should bind reddit and Facebook but not Amazon?

If you don’t like meta any more than I do, why are you arguing so strongly that they deserve the benefit of the doubt?

And, more interestingly, what precisely do you mean that Meta including themselves as a recipient in every WhatsApp chat would not render their E2E encryption equivalent to HTTPS?

AFAIK both are in-transit encryption that prevents casual monitoring by other entries along the network path between you and the person you’re chatting with, but expose you to undetectable monitoring on the part of the service provider.