Funny - are there any other known instances in the history of software where you have to pay extra to remove actual features?

Also, don’t use Brave.

Or, to be more blunt; shut the fuck up with this anti-semitic bullshit.

If a person is active lobbying for Israel, or working as on behalf of that or any other terror state, that’s legitimate points of criticism. Pointing towards someone being Jewish as some ground of suspicion in its own right is dangerous bullshit of historical proportions. There’s no reason we should tolerate this shit.

ImageMagick is amazing for command line image manipulation, but the use case is of course different. It’s great if you need to do the exact same operation to a bunch of pictures, such as rotating or rescaling.

Or Hacker, which is a surprisingly legit name.

The whole world loves a good National Day and so do we. Our motto is simple, and we hope you adopt it too:

Seize the day by making it a National Day!™

Maybe they shouldn’t have trademarked it if they wanted others to adopt it.

“workers admitted to sabotaging their company’s AI by […] intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it”

Lol. Sounds an awful lot like the company is sabotaging itself in this case.

My intrusive thoughts usually revolve around yeeting my phone off a bridge or a boat. I’ve managed to contain myself so far.

As for storm drains, I lost my keys down a deep one a few months back. Went to the hardware store and bought strong magnets and a wire and got them out after a lengthy fishing expedition.

To find jobs in Norway, try searching for the word “jobbportal”. At least some of these sites allow you to sort for English language jobs.

If we can have fewer nazis at the price of a slight inconvenience for users who were born in 1988 and for some reason want to have their birth year in their user name…

Yeah, I’ll take fewer nazis, please.

I’m fine others may disagree, but let’s at least be honest what we talk about when we talk about “controversial moderation”.

It seems Ernest recovered, and just decided to step away after his health got better!

Unfortunately, due to personal circumstances, I had to step away from actively working on Kbin and leave its further development to the community. Nevertheless, I am happy to see the project thriving, with a dedicated group of users and contributors who continue to push its vision forward.

Open-source has always been important to me, and while I am no longer involved with Kbin, I still believe in the power of community and the potential of open technologies to shape the future of the internet.

Again, what exactly are you talking about?

Which computer software is ever not implemented on a “code level”?

The lead developer recently started a thread in the Piefed meta community specifically to open for people to ask questions about these things. In full:

I have received word that there are people combing through the PieFed code looking for anything that might be harmful. This is excellent and can only make PieFed better and less harmful.
  We appreciate their interest in PieFed and look forward to answering any questions and showing people around the code. Please join us at https://chat.piefed.social/ or https://matrix.to/#/#piefed-developers:matrix.org.

There’s no need to listen to rumors and amateur speculation when we’re right here and happy to help. Come on in, the water’s fine!

Nobody in the thread managed to come up with an even remotely critical question. I’m not in the chat so I’m not sure if there were any interesting discussions there, but it’s safe to say it’s hard to find the weird conspiracies floating around reflected in the actual development.

If you have an issue, ask in !piefed_meta@piefed.social. If the community agrees your concern is valid I can guarantee you it’ll be addressed.

There’s also the question of what exactly would constitute controversial moderation. If we could hard code out fascists, stalinists, and misogynists, I would be entirely in favour. There’s no need to supply these people with tools for their nonsense. My only issue with it is that it’s not realistic without generating false positives. I don’t speak for Piefed here though, just my personal opinion.

Also multi-communities is a pretty central feature. A list of differences with Lemmy is maintained here.

Piefed is Lemmy with cross-posts collapsed to one thread, and controversial developers (moderation defaults)

Would love to hear which moderation defaults of PieFed are so controversial. Your phrasing seems to indicate that Lemmy developers’ support for Putin and Xi Jinping is no more controversial than Piefed developers’ preference to silence trolls and fascists.

The rules for Piefed.social are available here. The software Piefed ships with some default moderation options enabled, which can be disabled should the server admin choose to do so. I think having stricter moderation enabled by default when people set up a new server that they may or may not know how to manage effectively is obviously a better choice than to set the default to “anything goes”.

Yes, absolutely. They are digging their grave with their transition to being an AI company and it will absolutely catch up with them eventually.

This is not being ignored my Microsoft

My impression is that Microsoft won’t care all that much. They are primarily a cloud service provider at this point, and while they will try to squeeze Windows users for as much money and information as possible before it goes down for good they have no real interest in keeping on developing Windows. It’s just not where the real money is at.

It doesn’t make sense outside the world of capitalism, but we see again and again that big tech companies are happy to kill even profitable services if they are not their most profitable services. Microsoft’s revenue these days comes from selling cloud office solutions to (seemingly) every company on the planet. Even their own cloud runs on Linux, meaning that Microsoft themselves makes more money off Linux than Windows these days.

Windows is now in the extraction phase of enshittification, and Microsoft will profit as much as they can from it while they still have market power while spending minimal resources developing the product. Windows has effectively been declared dead already, and remains as a sofware zombie just like Facebook. Windows 12 is not going to be an improvement upon 11; it’ll be another fuck you to the customers, and the beatings will continue until customers leave for good and Microsoft are finally relieved of their side gig of making an operative system.

I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.

On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.

Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.

I guess they had the opposite development of Twitter, banning hateful content and trying to keep their house clean. Compared to Zuck and Musk whoever runs Reddit can probably be argued to be a great humanist.

Not saying it’s a good platform. It’s still a cesspool in my experience, and their approach to moderation produces a wild amount of false positives while bots are roaming free. It seems to me very far from a place for genuine human connection.

Nevertheless, for someone who sees social media as being Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Reddit, and Snapchat, I can see how Reddit stands out as the better option.

It’s too bad Cohn didn’t get to talk more about Mastodon.

I paid for the lower plan for a while. It didn’t have nearly enough searches included for my use, and the higher plan was too expensive. Especially since I just wanted search, none of the other products they were busy developing.

Search results were good. Recently I’m using Qwant and I’m happy with that as well, so right now I don’t miss having access to Kagi at all. With the limited number of searches it was more of an inconvenience than a benefit the period I was using it.

There are some questionable things about Kagi. A few years ago the CEO reeked out this tweet showcasing how their AI could call out the BBC for being too mean to Elon Musk, which is honestly enough of a red flag for me to steer clear.

If you have a reading mode in your browser it works well on that site. :)

“I don’t want residents to think we’re giving a stamp of approval to Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and all their oligarch owners,” said City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler at Monday’s meeting. “There’s no ethical social media companies under capitalism,” he said. “We can try to use the ones that are the least bad and reach the most Cambridge residents.”

Somebody tell this guy about Mastodon.

Also worth noting that this article is about the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Cambridge, England nor the University of Cambridge. They still apparently thrive in the gutter.