To me at 51, looking back at my own experiences, I think the things we tell ourselves work in a similar fashion to software; programming our identity.
The first "programmers" are our parents. Classic negative tropes like a parent saying "you'll never amount to anything" run in a loop in our brains for many years until finally that program expires (typically around mid life). In turn a negative identity will effect you in all areas of life, from how you interact with people to even your physical posture.
Perhaps the lowest level of "programming" you can do to yourself is the mantra - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantra - you could see this like assembly language, and humanity has known about this for a very long time.
So yes, giving teenagers labels which they identify with and repeat to their friends has a reinforcing aspect to it. And social media has played a very significant role in providing those labels.
To me an interesting thing about TikTok in particular, compared to Instagram, is I think TikTok users are more concerned with the question "who am I?" vs Instagram which is more about "this is me" (telling the world who you are). That's what's made TikTok more popular as, especially when you're young, trying to figure yourself out is a major pre-occupation.
Ran into this today. From doing comedy for about 7 years now, this basically correct. Although most comedians approach joke writing organically rather than with this approach
> prompt: There’s an article on Hackernews titled “Telegram will now hand over your phone number and IP if you’re a criminal suspect”. Generate a comment in Hackernews style that supports this decision, implies that it’s because they didn’t encrypt the messages and uses Signal as an example of doing it right because “look! They haven’t had problems”
Not surprised. Telegram doesn't encrypt by default, so of course they're handing over phone numbers and IPs. If you don't lock things down like Signal does, you're going to have problems. Signal can’t hand over what they don’t have—encrypted end-to-end, no metadata. Simple as that.
Yes, channels and groups are most likely what makes Telegram a threat where Signal isn't. That's an excellent argument for decentralized social media.
You're probably exasperated that others don't see what to you seems like an obvious truth. Rather than mocking the opposing argument, it's probably still worth rehashing yours when the topic comes up, even if it feels like banging the same drum with nobody listening.
> Platforms like Signal can get away with this because they are properly E2E encrypted, and cannot identify illegal content.
Signal isn't magically protected by proper E2E encryption. When the time comes to take them down legally, all that's needed is evidence from end users phones demonstrating illegal activities occurring over Signal. But - for now - Signal seems to have better friends and or be upsetting less authorities than Telegram.
To me it's pretty clear reason why they've gone after Telegram is the Channels and Groups. Seen from a certain perspective Telegram channels are an alternative to Reddit, and have been popular medium during COVID and the Ukraine war for "alternative news". By now Reddit is properly controlled and subdued but Telegram isn't.
> all that's needed is evidence from end users phones demonstrating illegal activities occurring over Signal
No, that's non sense. It is perfectly legal to operate a E2E encrypted platform in the EU.
What would be illegal is for Signal to refuse to answer when asked for information by the justice system. As long as they are cooperative and provide what they can - even if it's not much - everything is alright.
>To me it's pretty clear reason why they've gone after Telegram is the Channels and Groups. Seen from a certain perspective Telegram channels are an alternative to Reddit, and have been popular medium during COVID and the Ukraine war for "alternative news". By now Reddit is properly controlled and subdued but Telegram isn't.
This is full on speculation. Right now the reality is you can buy underage people, drugs and weapons on telegram. ISIS recruitment channels, etc.
Would it be bad for AI to start moderating / flagging speech? Seems like it could vastly extend the range of human moderators and also spare humans from directly scrutinizing harmful graphic content. Big Robot Brother reminds me of the anime Psycho-Pass.
Speculation is a crucial part of decision-making, especially in geopolitics, where hard data is often scarce. Governments frequently act on leading indicators to preempt potential threats, whether it's about national security or information control. Dismissing this as "pure speculation" overlooks how critical decisions are made in complex, rapidly evolving situations.
> Playing the "free speech" card is disingenuous.
This isn't about free speech; it's about narrative control, especially with the upcoming U.S. election. Controlling platforms like Telegram and TikTok is crucial for influencing public discourse. Recent U.S. regulations targeting TikTok further highlight how critical it is for governments to manage the flow of information as elections approach.
Thanks for this. I just threw your comment on Llama and asked for a userscript that would also be compatible with old reddit. It gave me this https://pastebin.com/0d7mhcBu and it's been working fine. I can now middle/right click an image and open it fully in a new tab instead of that new webpage.
Though, given that I think the solution to this can be generalized, I think it is about time someone made a more general extension that can apply this across a wide variety of sites that misuse the `Accept` header for unwanted behavior.
(Also, since mangling the Accept header is the best way to avoid unwanted WebP/AVIF/HEIC transcodes without fully disabling support for these better image formats, it'd be nice if that was also rolled into such an extension.)
Shame that the extension doesn't seem to be compatible with Firefox on Android, since Reddit's mobile site is borderline unusable for displaying images, doubly so if you want to zoom/scroll them.
This suggests it only works in Nightly, but it also works in Fennec F-Droid, so frankly you should consider switching to that if you can. (I wish Fennec F-Droid could just allow arbitrary extensions and extension side-loading, but I guess it would be non-trivial. Thanks Mozilla!)
Yes, this is exactly what Imgur and Reddit are doing. They're serving you an HTML page that requires JavaScript, riddled with ads, when you intended to link to an image file. This happens because when the user agent navigates to a URL, it prefers text/html over other formats, so it's possible to distinguish it from an <img> fetch. This is a feature, but I do take the stance that it is a misuse of the feature as it is done on Reddit and Imgur, just the same as how abusing the window.open API for popup ads was (and how, in that era, it was relatively promptly taken care of by user agents, back when the word "user" in user agent meant anything.)
I didn't at any point call serving formats I "don't prefer" (I do prefer AVIF) "abuse" of the Accept header. I just don't want images that were JPEGs to be transcoded to even lossier WebP/AVIF/HEIC files when I browse to them. Sure, if it's part of the page layout it's not a big deal, but when I'm viewing the original size image, it should be, ideally, the original image. I don't actually care if the image is WebP/AVIF/HEIC natively, that is not a problem.
This won't work if implemented browser-wide as malicious website will just adjust the URLs for their images to compensate. In general, URL file extension snooping only causes more problems than it solves.
Maybe. It seems sensible to me that if the UA is requesting a path that ends in .jpg (for instance), they're expecting a JPEG and the UA should accept image/jpeg. At least if this escalates the arms race, user-hostile websites won't commit this specific crime, instead they'll serve content that better matches the URL.
> This happens because when the user agent navigates to a URL, it prefers text/html over other formats, so it's possible to distinguish it from an <img> fetch. This is a feature
Is it though? What non user-hostile things does it enable?
I think you're thinking about this slightly backwards. What else would you expect the browser to do, given a URL and no other context? Would it not ... prefer text/html? It's a hypertext browser, it prefers hypertext.
For many, many years, content negotiation was not adversarial, and there was little reason to believe it ever would be. Until it was, of course.
So how do we fix it, telling every page view we'd prefer if it were a JPEG? Probably not. Of course, you could make "Open Image in New Tab" do some magic to ensure that it acts like an image fetch: that sounds like a good idea.
> What non user-hostile things does it enable?
Content negotiation in general is pretty good. In theory, it lets a web server pick the best possible format that is supported by your client. For example, it would be possible for the server to transparently serve you a JPEG XL-compressed JPEG if your browser supports it, or fall back to the original (identical but larger) JPEG image if it does not.
Is there a good reason to prefer text/html? I know this will be unpopular but I believe that "upgrading" GIF links to WebMs in <video> tags is not user hostile in and of itself. GIF89a is a pretty antiquated format and LZW compression of 8bpc frame deltas is not exactly state of the art anymore; the difference between a GIF and a WebM of the same thing is usually multiple megabytes of bandwidth, and that can be extremely annoying, especially on mobile clients. Of course if you make it hard to access the original file, this will reasonably irritate people, but I think broadly the idea behind it is reasonable.
Being able to distinguish a navigation fetch from an <img> fetch is actually good because it would let the server behave in a more user-friendly fashion on the navigation fetch, for example by serving only formats that would be most likely to be useful to the user. Unfortunately, we can't have nice things, so it seems like some day content negotiation will have to be partly gimped.
I honestly did assume it was a sincere question, but I will admit I was rubbed a bit the wrong way about "serving formats you don't prefer" because I was trying to word my original comment carefully enough to avoid that implication.
Internet commenting has definitely taught me many times that it is actually really hard to convey what you're thinking accurately.
For iOS you can most likely just get something working with Redirect Web, which from my understanding this app is effectively doing the same thing of redirecting links.
This is great! Already installed on two laptops. Finder is frustrating, to say the least.
Of course feature request time: some kind of search? Would be really nice to match against folder names (e.g. searching for "images" and filenames e.g. "logo")
I used to be a fan of the Total War games, back from the first Shogun Total War in 2000. The AI was never that great but was good enough to make the game fun to play. The main thing was the battlefield mechanics worked well, rewarding smarter tactics, like flanking manoeuvres, which could allow a smaller force to defeat a much larger one.
The original Rome Total War was probably the most fun and Medieval Total War was enjoyable.
After that it just went downhill, adding pointless features while worsening the battlefield gameplay. The first Warhammer Total War was where I tapped out - the limited size of battlefields meant it basically became a tower defence game, fought in three columns.
Reading this, seems like they became a victim of their own success.
Make sure you have an on-premise option for this type of customer. I've worked at two software companies in Europe with tangentially similar products related to document analysis. On premise is a key requirement.
Even though it's 2024, banks, financial institutions like insurance companies etc. tend to be _very_ cautious with valuable documents involving customers. There are also regional regulations that prevent things like patient data being shared with _any_ 3rd parties. Even one of the big 4 oil companies that I've dealt with as prospective customer - very strict rules requiring on premise solutions.
The good news is many are using things like Kubernetes and OpenShift internally, so it should be possible to port what you do on AWS to on-premise.
On-premise will be a lot more difficult than just launching a few pods in Kubernetes. These AI tools (LLMs / vision models) will require some high powered gpus as well.
> the key insight that the Noah Smiths of the world seem to be missing is that, in today’s world, we artificially elevate labor demand to keep people employed.
To me one learning of COVID and lockdowns is that we're fully capable of meeting all our basic needs with less than 20% of the workforce (which sadly tends also tends to be the lowest paid). In short we don't need everyone to be working for food, shelter, healthcare etc.
Unfortunately, if we take the climate as an example for how we handle a complex and challenging topic like this, we're going to completely fumble UBI and the role work plays in our future culture and society.
It's an incredibly complex problem, simply considering individual vs. national perspectives. And our collective response to the topic is far too reactive and prejudiced to even begin studying it in a sensible way.
We live in a world where businesses have already realised incredible value from the Linux operating system, which was begun by a student living in his mums house, being subsidised by Finnish social security. He then went on to create git, leading to GitHub, which now manages the code for 90% of Fortune 100 companies.
The opportunity is clear but I can't see us being able to untangle this effectively.
That may be the crux of it though, people largely don't know what "enough" means.
People aren't okay with having shelter, food, water, and community. We want the smartphones, huge TVs, ridiculously expensive cars, access to fly anywhere in the world, etc. We absolutely could have all the basics cover, and then some, with 20% of the work we all put in today but few people want that world.
You forgot about all the people making minimum wage working 40+ hours who can't afford the basics like food and shelter
Because you can cover your necessities with 20% of your income doesn't mean everyone else can.
I know several people on SSI who had to take under the table jobs because their checks wont cover their food and shelter. And that's with food stamps. If they get a regular job they lose their SSI.
Ive got a friend who had to take a part time job dashing after work as a supervisor at my factory.
I think about this stuff when I'm working overtime- how lucky I am to be able to rather than have to find a second job.
I make over 6 figures as an electrician/instrumentation technician. I have a surgery coming up in September that's going to cost me 40k+. Instead of feeling it's so much and all the other things I could use that money for, I try to remind myself I'm blessed to be able to afford it without saving for years. I, again, know people who work full time and don't make that in a year.
I was actually thinking about the societal level here rather than any one person's financial situation.
I expect that we could make sure everyone had the basics much more easily if the average person could define what "enough" means for themselves. For one thing, we would be using many fewer resources as a country and would therefore be much better able to make sure the resources we do have would be available. For another, when a person knows what "enough" is for them they may decide to work less when they achieve that goal, leaving those potential paying work hours for the next person that needs the work.
It feels like people go to far the other way as well. People don't just need shelter, food, water, and community. Things like entertainment, art, and learning are also essential to having a good life.
Totally agree here. In my opinion, though, a UBI won't help with those and could actually hurt. We continue to quantify our lives to the point where the government can put a price on the products they deem me to be entitled to.
I'm not totally sold on Iain McGilchrist's specific analogy of the brain hemispheres, but his underlying point is spot on. In his model, we continue to make our world more and more left-brained (analytical) and we're losing the way of seeing the world required for art, community, etc. I expect a UBI would just make that worse, further quantifying our lives and reinforcing the idea that we're all cogs in a machine that can purr like a kitten if we just do as we're told and avoid thinking critically or differently.
Unless you can provide some hard figures, that number is probably not really accurate.
I'd say an insane amount of effort would go into all the things around growing food.
I've grown food and built houses and I can tell you, both things required a LOT of work, and if you want to do it efficiently, you need a LOT of good material and tech. None of that stuff falls out of trees. Ask Russians who are now under sanctions.
We now also have climate change, droughts floods and more thrown into that food growing complexity mix. One major famine could wipe out millions.
I'd argue that the labor required for growing food and building houses is highly dependent on the scale you are trying to achieve.
Raising enough food for a small family is very doable when you don't spend 40+ hours per week working for the paycheck. Building a small house is definitely a big project, but very doable as long as you aren't attempting to wind the clock all the way back and milling your own lumber. It can be done with a surprisingly small set of tools if the house is reasonably sized and designed with your tools and skills in mind from the beginning.
Is the average person going to build their own 2,500 square foot two-story house and grow enough food to feed everyone? Obviously not. But could a person build a 900 sq ft ranch, have a garden feeding their family, and raise animals for their own meat, dairy, and eggs? They absolutely can, I'm doing it today, and if climate change concerns you the reduced impact on the environment is huge.
Well, what I think we learned from COVID is that a bunch of the jobs that we think of as "bullshit" are really important. Yeah, critical-care nurses are important, we saw that, but we found out that grocery store workers are pretty critical, too. And truck drivers.
For that matter, I was at work a bit ago, using the restroom, and this janitor guy came in and started refilling the toilet paper rolls in the stalls. And it struck me that his job was really important. I don't want to do his job, but I absolutely don't want to work somewhere where nobody does it...
The first "programmers" are our parents. Classic negative tropes like a parent saying "you'll never amount to anything" run in a loop in our brains for many years until finally that program expires (typically around mid life). In turn a negative identity will effect you in all areas of life, from how you interact with people to even your physical posture.
Perhaps the lowest level of "programming" you can do to yourself is the mantra - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantra - you could see this like assembly language, and humanity has known about this for a very long time.
So yes, giving teenagers labels which they identify with and repeat to their friends has a reinforcing aspect to it. And social media has played a very significant role in providing those labels.
To me an interesting thing about TikTok in particular, compared to Instagram, is I think TikTok users are more concerned with the question "who am I?" vs Instagram which is more about "this is me" (telling the world who you are). That's what's made TikTok more popular as, especially when you're young, trying to figure yourself out is a major pre-occupation.
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