Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user's public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option - ABC News
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    Yes but they only performed the training on the posts and images set to be globally publicly accessible by anyone. In a sense, they took the public permissions as an indicator that they could use that data for more than just providing the bare social media service.

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  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warns anti-Biden Democrats about what comes next if they succeed
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    In my opinion, it's quite similar to Brexit: maybe you can get a majority coalition to disapprove of the status quo, but good luck getting them to actually propose a more popular alternative. Much less proposing an actual procedure for getting that alternative onto ballots.

    Structurally and functionally, our political systems are not set up to run anyone other than the person who won the primary. Changing a presumptive nominee this late in the cycle is fraught with potential complications, but can be done if there's sufficient support for a specific alternative candidate. Realistically, it's Biden or it's Harris. There's no feasible way to get someone else at the top of the ticket.

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  • Lichtman thinks Dems would be slitting their own throats by dumping Biden
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    Why they went into this election season without even attempting to run anybody aside from Biden I'll never know.

    When has either party ever run a credible candidate against their own incumbent?

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  • Biden’s “Democracy” Defense Ignores Un-Democratic Way He Became the Nominee
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    It's not just about pledged delegates

    The leadership of the DNC, DCCC, DSCC, etc., are chosen by election, by members of each committee. State parties send their delegates to participate in these things.

    despite not being an incumbent

    Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. These are processes that longtime party members participate in, and run on, about the structural rules and procedures to follow, and they're open to everyone. Elections often pit "establishment"/"insider" candidates against "insurgent"/"outsider" candidates, and there are examples of each kind (or hybrid candidates) winning the nomination in the modern primary system.

    It's more of a spurious correlation: incumbency doesn't buy the advantage in the nomination race, but reflects that a candidate has the network and resources to have the popular support of their own party. That's why incumbents always win the nomination, and tend to win reelection in the general.

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  • Biden’s “Democracy” Defense Ignores Un-Democratic Way He Became the Nominee
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    Tell me, during an incumbent primary, who controls the DNC?

    Same as during a non-incumbent primary. The person who won the most recent nomination tends to have an outsized voice in the selection of party officials (because it's their pledged delegates who vote on all the other stuff). Yes, that means Biden-affiliated insiders had an inside track in 2020, but that's also true of Clinton allies in 2016, Obama allies in 2012, Obama allies in 2008, and Kerry allies in 2004.

    More than a year ago, the DNC adopted new rules—including a primary calendar that ignored state law in Iowa and New Hampshire and eliminated any primary debates—designed to ensure that Biden’s coronation would proceed untroubled by opposition from any credible Democrat.

    Which of those changes in the rules do you think were designed to benefit Biden specifically? De-emphasizing the role of Iowa and New Hampshire? There's been people clamoring for that for decades, within the party.

    There's basically no set of rules that will ever create a credible challenge to an incumbent who wants to run for reelection. It's a popularity problem, not a structural problem.

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  • Biden’s “Democracy” Defense Ignores Un-Democratic Way He Became the Nominee
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    No one deserves to be a president any more than anyone else, and treating an incumbent as though they do, without having to go through an open, democratic primary process, is to treat them as more deserving of future authority than other citizens.

    There was a primary, and Biden got the most votes/delegates under the rules. Nobody is saying that incumbents should automatically get renomination. Or even that the incumbent should get some sort of rules advantage (like say, the way the defending world champ in chess gets an auto-bid to defend his title against a challenger who has to win a tournament to get there).

    The rules are already set up to where any challenger has an equal structural change of winning the primary. They just won't have the actual popular support. You know, the core principles of democratic elections.

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  • Car prices are cooling, but should you buy new or used? Here are pros and cons.
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    My 4-person household has one car, one electric cargo bike with two kid seats, a regular bicycle, accounts with bikeshare/scooter options around our city, plus mass transit passes, plus the option of Uber/Lyft.

    Bikes might not work as a replacement for a first car, but they can work pretty well as a replacement for a second car, and a tool for reducing total mileage on the car you own.

    Everything depends on where you live, of course, but a substantial number of people live in a place where a bike can reduce the number of miles you drive, even if you never actually give up the car.

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  • [Resource] The 35 Healthiest Foods to Eat Every Day
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    Huh, weird. I believe you, but I don't see it when I load the page (Lemmy sync, Firefox on Android), in either desktop or mobile mode. Maybe the server is doing something with different browsers/environments.

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  • [Resource] The 35 Healthiest Foods to Eat Every Day
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    Just stop using "clean."

    Um, ok, done.

    The article doesn't use the word "clean." Your first comment is the one to introduce the term into the thread.

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  • [Resource] The 35 Healthiest Foods to Eat Every Day
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    I probably shouldn't dunk on a student newspaper opinion piece, but what's the proposal here? For rich people to avoid healthy eating in solidarity?

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  • Supreme Court strikes down Chevron, curtailing power of federal agencies
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    This shifts balance from unelected officials who can be fired by the president (administrative officials) towards unelected officials who can't be (judges). It doesn't actually reduce regulatory power, just puts that regulatory power under the supervision and review of even less accountable officials.

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  • 'Traffic tailspin': Far-right websites seeing as much as 95% decline in visitors since 2020
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    Rage isn't sustainable. Enthusiasm is down across the board, and the question will be whether enthusiasm among left-leaning voters has wanted waned to the same degree as among Trump's base.

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  • It's not just vibes. Americans' perception of the economy has completely changed.
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    Your description of a drink that takes the world by storm, increasing in market share but dropping in quality may be roughly accurate analogy for a lot of consumer goods, but even in this telling the market is improving if that drink is displacing even lower-quality competition.

    In terms of non-alcoholic drinks sold in coolers in convenience stores and grocery stores, we've seen the steady march of improving products as an average across the shelves, even if the same product name might be getting worse. In the 80's, the dominant market share for orange juice in grocery stores was frozen cans to be mixed with water at home. But Tropicana and Florida Natural and a few other brands made a splash with not-from-concentrate orange juice. Old brands like Minute Maid got in on the action, and new brands like Simply rose up, too.

    Now, it might be that these brands have gotten cheap with stuff since dominating market share. But if you look at who they took that market share from, it's unquestionably a lower quality product they've displaced.

    Across the beverage industry as a whole, you've got a whole bunch of newer higher priced drinks, where the unfathomably expensive for 2000 Red Bull is basically the middle of the pack for energy drinks, and where there are so many beverages that cost several times as much as Coca Cola.

    So that's a story of a forward march in higher prices for qualitatively preferred items, over that amount of time. This story I do think applies to processed food and drink, as well as electronics, prepared food, home furnishings, and cars. We expect a lot higher quality every year, as the things get more expensive, and we feel annoyed that any particular brand or model seems to be slipping in quality while we as a consumer market tend to move up the chain.

    We're angry that streaming seems to be slipping back to cable-like quality, when streaming as of 2024 is still a much better value proposition than cable in 2014. The displacement is happening in two directions, for a net benefit to the consumer in a way that doesn't feel like a benefit. Same with music, video games, etc.

    The real story is that housing, education, healthcare, and dependent care (both childcare and elder care) have gone up so much faster than inflation that these things are finally squeezing normal people out of their comfort zones right when the other stuff stopped dropping in price as much as before.

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  • Microsoft in damage-control mode, says it will prioritize security over AI
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    The non-cynical answer is that they're counting contractor/vendor time in this full time equivalent answer. Which would probably be a good thing, because I imagine that the best people in cybersecurity aren't actually employees of Microsoft.

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  • 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    To put it in more simple terms:

    When Alice chats with Bob, Alice can't control whether Bob feeds the conversation into a training data set to set parameters that have the effect of mimicking Alice.

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  • The Paradox of Blackmarket Wired Bluetooth Apple Headphones
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    BarryZuckerkorn
    Now 100%

    Your comment missed the mark entirely.

    Not sure why you're saying that. I wasn't disagreeing with any of your points, but adding to them another angle that answered the parent comment's concerns about whether leaving wifi on for airplane mode drains battery. You addressed the cellular radio side, and I was adding a separate point about the WiFi radio that complements what you were saying.

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  • What's something you love, and love describing or explaining to people who are new to that interest, hobby, or activity?

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    imgflip.com

    I now have a working Linux installation on my laptop. Honestly, I doubted I'd ever be here again. I quit my sysadmin job a little over 10 years ago to pursue a non-technical career (law school, now lawyer), and I just didn't have the mental bandwidth to keep up with all the changes being made in the Linux world: systemd, wayland, the rise of docker and containerization, etc. Eventually, by 2015, I basically gave up on Linux as my daily driver. Still, when I bought a new laptop in 2019, I made sure to pick the Macbook with the best Linux hardware support at the time (the 2017 13" Macbook Pro without the touchbar or any kind of security chip, aka the 14,1). Just in case I ever wanted to give Linux a try again. When the reddit API/mod controversy was brewing this summer, I switched over to lemmy as my primary "forum," and subscribed to a bunch of communities. And because lemmy/kbin seemed to attract a lot of more tech-minded, and a little bit more anti-authoritarian/anti-corporate folks, the discussions in the threads started to normalize the regular use of Linux and other free/open source software as a daily driver. So this week, I put together everything I needed to dual boot Linux and MacOS: boot/installation media for both MacOS and Linux, documentation specific to my Apple hardware, as well as the things that have changed since my last Linux laptop (EFI versus BIOS, systemd-boot versus grub2, iwd versus wpa-supplicant, Wayland versus X, etc.). I made a few mistakes along the way, but I managed to learn from them, fix a few misconfigured things, and now have a working Linux system! I still have a bunch of things to fix on my to-do list: sound doesn't work (but there's a script that purports to fix that), suspend doesn't work (well, more accurately, I can't come back from suspend), text/icon size and scaling aren't 100% consistent on this high DPI screen, network discovery stuff doesn't work (I think I need to install zeroconf but I don't know what it is and intend to understand it before I actually install and configure it), I'd like a pretty bootloader splash screen, still have to configure bash (or another shell? do people still use bash?) the way I like it. But my system works. I have a desktop environment with a working trackpad (including haptic feedback), hardware keys for volume (never mind sound doesn't actually work yet), screen brightness, and keyboard backlight brightness. I have networking. The battery life seems to be OK. Once I get comfortable with this as a daily driver, I might remove MacOS and dive right into a single OS on this device. So thank you! Y'all are the best.

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    Three questions: * What does the language dropdown actually do? * What does the "if you deselect Undetermined" warning banner mean? * Are we able to tag our comments as being in whatever specific language across the board, by default (e.g., English)?

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    Barry Zuckerkorn

    BarryZuckerkorn@ beehaw.org

    He's very good.