Yes, it was quite good. They didn’t really cover all his genocide crimes. I guess it would take a book.

Me too.

Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.

I am so confused.

Ah that explains it. Thanks!

I thought they had already done it. I got the notification months ago.

The top result is already out. Obviously the John Oliver fans got their wish and Pūteketeke won. Thousands of them had to be disqualified for cheating, though.

We are all waiting now to see who is in second. Fingers crossed for the Fairy Tern, New Zealand’s most endangered bird!

I’ve never used twitter in my life, still have a vague interest in what Musk is doing to it though.

That tracks.

Pretty sure Elon Musk railed against bots on twitter despite having been proven to have used bots on twitter to manipulate opinion himself.

Apart from my illness support group, I’m only on fediverse social media now, and only via web browser. It’s a breath of fresh air.

I’m realising there are subtle ways that enshittification constrains and shapes actual conversations between us.

We are “social animals” though. It’s normal for the social animals to attempt to regulate what each other does and how they treat others in the group.

You see this in apes, elephants, whales, etc.

I think Medecines Sans Frontiers is good?

I don’t really understand some of this. Why pair it with a VAT? VAT itself is a known to be a regressive tax because poor people/ households spend a higher percentage of their incomes on consumption (food etc) so the effect of a VAT is to raise their overall tax percentage.

This is definitely what happens in my country, where we have a flat 15% VAT on all goods and services. As someone on disability that means I’m being taxed an extra 15% on most of my income.

Never has the “Just a moment…” snippet view been more apropos.

Yes, it’s a massive level of cringe.

Gmail is convenient, but if it’s about to be filled with 😊 and 👍 then I’ve got to stop using it for any serious communication.

I agree, it is technically true. Sorry if I sounded too nitpicking, I’ve just come back from a week with no internet access /news so for a moment I thought you were talking about all of them doing it during the events of the last few days!

Germany, France and Spain also have killed and kidnapped citizens.

You may wish to rephrase that…

Yes I had a family member in a right wing conspiracy area. It was infuriating because his friends would tell him their nonsense and he would be skeptical and google it, only for google to seemingly support what they were saying.

I couldn’t replicate his results at all and it would take a lot of searching to even find what he was talking about so I could debunk it for him.

When will people realise that google has tailored algorithms and we are not all experiencing the same search results?

The first thing you’ll see if you search Google for “tank man” right now will not be the iconic picture of the unidentified Chinese man who stood in protest in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square, but an entirely fake, AI-generated selfie of that historical event.

No, this is the first thing the author saw. Probably because they are a journalist writing about AI.

When I google tank man I don’t even get the AI image on the first page. The top result is from history.com. If I go to google image search it is the 7th result on the page. The top result is from wikipedia.

This. Last time New Zealand carried out this exercise there were only 3 who didn’t.

Nooo

Thanks, interesting stats in this article.

Just a guess but climate change events (and corresponding headlines) have really ramped up in the last three years.

And as the saying goes, there are no pockets in a shroud.

I was so disillusioned when I found out Americans are giving strippers $1 bills.

I’d always assumed it was a much higher denomination, partly because where I live the smallest denomination is $5 but partly because of the money strippers were making.

So if they also accept payment by card then it’s your choice to carry coins around for them. Sounds like it’s really just street musicians that are keeping you needing coins.

Which is cool.

I’m just pointing out that he doesn’t have any more allegiance to US foriegn policy than any other non-American has.

If you have a problem with people trying to influence election results in other people’s countries, then you should have just as big a problem with the CIA as you have with Assange.

I’m far from being a fan of his but I am a fan of human rights and this whole thing has been a travesty. And something I notice a lot is the sentiment that Assange should have been loyal to US interests.

It scares me how human rights goes out the window when it comes to people who are disliked.

his own personal foreign policy

Assange is an Australian.

Oh hell this just gets worse and worse. I’m concerned for the survivors. 30,000 displaced. I really hope the two factions are able to work together:

The enormous task of providing immediate aid and then rebuilding Derna is complicated by the legacies of a decade of civil conflict, which has left two rival governments ruling eastern and western Libya.

Derna is controlled by the Libyan National Army, run by Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter and based in the eastern city of Tobruk. The rest of the country is run by the Government of National Unity based in the capital, Tripoli, in the west.

This split has hampered reconstructions efforts for years — though aid workers say both sides are now talking to each other.

This part here needs to be shared widely:

Some of Hadden’s former patients, including Yang, called legislators to push for the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that opened a temporary window for victims of abuse to file civil suits against their abusers, even when a statute of limitations has expired. The window will close on Nov. 23.

Because Columbia refuses to notify them, an untold number of Hadden’s patients remain unaware that he has been convicted.

Will look out for it!

Nowadays there are Saints for everything

There have always been local gods for everything.

This is why Catholicism has historically been such a sucessful religion, it’s inherently quite syncretic.

It adapts to local conditions and incorporates aspects, just like capitalism and viruses.

Sounds good! I learned about it from Wikipedia, which is a bit dry.

To understand where she’s coming from it’s also worth reading her very moving article on how Modi handled the covid pandemic ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe.

Yeah the largest biological weapon attack on US soil was a cult.

Ha ha sorry I see now my comment is meaningless without that. I’m just at the very end of Gen X, so called Xennial/Settlers of Catan generation.

So basically I’m saying some of the Gen X people and Boomers in senior roles now seem not to understand the limitations of LLMs and are trying to incorporate them anyway.

Apparently the Afghan army was a lot smaller in real life than it was in the American paperwork.

True. Powerpoint is de rigeur in some contexts.

I think the people who really need a crash course in AI literacy are the people my age and older.

I’ve already heard at least one horror story about someone’s boss trying to include a ChatGPT-sourced, error riddled submission paper in a sensitive bid.

Libre Office is cool.

If you work with other people’s really complex word documents where formatting is important, you kind of do have to use MS word because Libre Office still does not have 100% compatibility (probably Microsoft’s fault).

I’m still a 360 holdout though. I hate the subscription model at the best of times and with Microsoft it just seems egregious.

You seem to know a lot more about ordinance than I do but from what you’re saying, it sounds like tungsten that is not alloyed with thorium would be the way to go!!

I wish there were more international cooperation on this stuff.

My parents’ generation all seem to hate benzene and warn us it’s toxic as hell. That’s the only time it seems to come up, might be to do with napalm now that you mention it. Much shorter life and half life I guess.

For what it’s worth I also think deliberate napalm and white phosphorous use on humans are war crimes as well.

A couple of years ago Indonesia used white phosphorous on some West Papua villages and the results were horrific.

Edit, just realised I forgot to answer your first question. I do not recollect the details about the relative proportions of other causes of birth defects etc in that environment but I would argue that a) DU alone definitely earned its place as an unethical weapon and b) any known risk factor with that high a contribution should be phased out too.

It’s a type of “future eating”.

Well no, the article is about weird happenings in the research into this. You have to read actual research to see the evidence.

I apologize for not providing it here. I’m uncomfortably aware that I sound like one of those annoying trollish people who say Do yOuR oWn ResEarch instead of presenting evidence.

I read a bunch of research papers on depleted uranium years ago and found it very convincing, and that’s what my opinion is based on, but unfortunately I’m finding google and duckduckgo kind of useless these days (any recs welcome), it’s late at night and I’m tired. @Holden_Fartzen@beehaw.org if you have anything handy?