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The 'bias machine': Undecided voters in the US who turn to Google may see dramatically different views of the world – even when they're asking the exact same question
  • Type in "Is Kamala Harris a good Democratic candidate

    ...and any good search engine will find results containing keywords such as "Kamala Harris", "Democratic", "candidate", and "good".

    [...] you might ask if she's a "bad" Democratic candidate instead

    In that case, of course the search engine will find results containing keywords such as "Kamala Harris", "Democratic", "candidate", and "bad".

    So the whole premise that, "Fundamentally, that's an identical question" is just bullshit when it comes to searching. Obviously, when you put in the keyword "good", you'll find articles containing "good", and if you put in the keyword "bad", you'll find articles containing "bad" instead.

    Google will find things that match the keywords that you put in. So does DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Yahoo, whatever. That is what a good search engine is supposed to do.

    I can assure you, when search engines stop doing that, and instead try to give "balanced" results, according to whatever opaque criteria for "balanced" their company comes up with, that will be the real problem.

    I don't like Google, and only use google when other search engines fail. But this article is BS.

  • The Fediverse is getting its own TikTok competitor called Loops
  • In TikTok or instagram reels, you don’t follow people you like. You just watch stuff happening.

    That's actually the whole point of TikTok, what made it different when it started. An app for short videos where you follow people you like is more of a Snapchat competitor, not TikTok.

  • Phoronix: Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia
  • I'm sure removing these maintainers would be of great help to the Ukrainian war effort...

    More seriously: We need to help Ukraine more. But this doesn't do that. It just hurts a bunch of people (both the maintainers, and the people using their code) for no benefit whatsoever.

  • British travel bloggers ‘sugarcoating’ China’s Uyghur problem to the delight of Beijing: Influencers claim to be exposing 'Western lies' about Xinjiang, claiming they have not seen human rights abuses
  • Actually, much of that description, perpetuated by dystopian novels, is pretty far off the mark - and it's the kind of mischaracterization that makes it harder to fight back against authoritarian governments.

    The fact is, the vast majority of people in authoritarian states live ordinary lives, just like everywhere else. That's part of what makes these governments so resilient. If everyone in there lived a nightmare, they wouldn't last for decades, they'd collapse at the first sign of instability. After all, there are a lot more people than government officials.

    For example, a canny authoritarian government won't disappear anyone who steps out of line. Instead, they'd provide a "safe, legitimate" way to step out of line, that's well regulated and doesn't pose a threat to the government, but serves as an outlet. And most people will be satisfied with it. That's both more subtle, and more effective, that instilling fear in everyone's heart.

  • Help me decide if I can switch to Linux, I have some questions
  • To add about the distro framgentation, and particularly:

    If I run into a software I need and it specifically indicates it’s for another flavor of Linux than the one I run, how likely is it that I can get it to work on another distro without any real trouble?

    You might have. Some software is distributed as a portable binary and can run on any distro. However, many installers are distro-specific (or distro family-specific, since they're made for a specific package manager). For example, a software packaged for Ubuntu as a .deb file would install fine on Ubuntu or Mint, and probably install fine on Debian, but if you want to install it on Fedora or Arch you'll have to manually re-package it.

    Most distro-specific software usually ships debian or ubuntu package - so you might go with that for that reason. Or Arch/Endeavor: while you'll rarely see an official Arch package, most often someone will have already re-packaged it and put it on the AUR.

    That said, for the major distros, the desktop environment makes much more difference than the distro.

  • How would you enforce a pay-it-forward scheme?
  • Technically, "enforced pay it forward" is called credit. Your debt would then be "the amount you still have to pay forward".

    Of course, this defeats both the spirit and the purpose of a pay it forward scheme.

  • How can we make Linux more appealing as "just works"?
  • "Just works" is not a mentality imposed by Microsoft, and has nothing to do with loss of control. It's simply (a consequence of) the idea that things which can be automated, should be. It is about good defaults, not lack of options.

  • LLMs have a strong bias against use of African American English
  • It's not an article about LLMs not using dialects. In fact, they have learned said dialects and will use them if asked.

    What they did was, ask the LLM to suggest adjectives associated with sentences - and it would associate more aggressive or negative adjectives with African dialect.

    Seems like not a bias by AI models themselves, rather a reflection of the source material.

    All (racial) bias in AI models is actually a reflection of the training data, not of the modelling.

  • Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
  • It's certainly good, I'm not arguing that. My point is, if the wine team is interested, they can fork the unmaintained project, and work on that. Eventually, people will switch over to the active fork. What Microsoft is doing, is helping the process along, and making it easier. So it's good, and helpful - but not really a "donation" to winehq.

  • Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
  • I guess it's simply the framing: It was a not very actively maintained open source project. So they've decided to turn it over to a new maintainer. Calling that 'donation' is a bit pushing it

  • How does L4sBot choose which articles to post?

    This is a meta-question about the community - but seeing how many posts here are made by L4sBot, I think it's important to know how it chooses the articles to post.

    I've tried to find information about it, but I couldn't find much.

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