I like NoScript exactly for the rabbit hole it opens! Now I'm very aware of what scripts are running on which pages! Actively blocking blatant ad scripts & data scraping scripts makes me feel good.
AI is still very much in its infancy, and seeing the sort of progress that has been made even over the past 12 months, I don't see how anyone can imagine that it will remain a small and discrete slice of the pie, that it doesn't have radical transformative power.
My vision - gen z artists will reflexively use AI to enhance their material as artist and AI become entangled to a point where they're impossible to distinguish. AI art will increase in fidelity, until it exceeds the fidelity that we can create with our tools. It will become immediately responsive to an audience's needs in a way that human art can't. What do you want to see? AI will make it for exactly your tastes, or to maybe confront your tastes and expand your mind, if that's what you'd like. It will virtualize the artistic consciousnesses of Picasso, Goya, Michelangelo, and create new artists with new sensibilities, along with thousands of years of their works, more than a person could hope to view in a lifetime. Pop culture will be cheaper than ever, and have an audience of one - that new x rated final season of Friends you had a passing thought about is waiting for you to watch when you get home from work. Do you want 100 seasons of it? No problem. The whole notion of authorship is radically reformed and dies, drowned in an unfathomable abyss of AI creations. Human creativity becomes like human chess. People still busy themselves with it for fun, knowing full well that it's anachronistic and inferior in every way.
Right, if this sort of browser wall thing happens (which, the doctrine of enshittification seems to dictate that it probably will), and it can't be spoofed or worked around. Alright, I'm seeing the issues here. Thanks for chiming in with your thoughts. This is a huge deal, if it goes in this sort of direction.
The thought here is that, a website could be programmed to, for example, only be accessible to users of chrome (or even an android device), correct? Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing? Is the idea that google is trying to bring users to chrome, by blocking google services on other browsers? That could be really transformative for the web, because then you'd have microsoft doing the same thing with edge, apple doing the same thing with safari, other companies like fb or whatever launching their own bespoke 'browsers' to access their services. Will users actually put up with the degree of fragmentation that this move might bring? Won't it just push users to the 'old internet' where you can simply go to a website and interact with it?
Sorry, I'm kind of talking out loud here trying to wrap my head around this. I see people grousing about DRM and ads, and I'm struggling to connect all the dots.
Then ecommerce sites. “You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything.”
I'm actually not sure about this one. Money is money. If I'm a vendor, and a bunch of bots want to give me money, I say bring it on. Why would any ecommerce vendor add that layer of friction, which could actually prevent a user from buying something from them? What's in it for the vendor?
Seems to me the more likely anti-consumer hell is a points dystopia leveraged by monopolistic companies. Like apple, microsoft, or disney moving to some sort of loyalty points system where you can only buy their products using a currency and credit system that they control. Like, 'stream this movie using your disney points card'. We're not far off from that really.
Can someone shed some light for me? I'm a noob and I'm not sure I understand what is being proposed by google here. From what I can tell, they're proposing a cryptographically signed token that details information about a website user's 'environment', which I take to mean, their device OS and browser information, for the sake of verifying their humanity for website owners and advertisers. Isn't this sort of information already collected when a user visits a webpage, and doesn't google (or whomever) already collect and use this data (and more) for fingerprinting? How is this new proposal different, and something to be specifically concerned about?
I know there are anti-fingerprinting browser privacy addons that spoof this information, or prevent its collection. Is the concern that these tools will become inoperable?
For the record I don't like google or any company collecting any fingerprinting information, but it's already being done widely and in an unregulated manner, isn't it?
I think karma whoring is a real problem for that site. Any post that reaches a popular critical mass gets slammed with people trying to make a quick joke or pun for upvotes, and so even commentary on popular news stories was filled with fluff, memes, or basic circlejerking. The karma system also incentivizes this really shitty dunking culture that is so bad for discourse.
It might come here eventually if lemmy gets popular enough. But even if it does the platform as a whole is just more righteous and worthwhile. It doesn't exist as a commercial entity to drive engagement in order to satisfy advertisers, and that's something really unique and different in our day & age.
If you care to share, what has been your experience?
I have to say I am surprised by your top line assertion, but I'm open to change my mind if you have an argument you can substantiate here about the similarities between Alberta, and Kentucky or Alabama. I also don't think comparing different cultures is necessarily productive if our goal is to deal with the real world effects of racism. I think racism exists in Canada and it's something worth talking about and trying to address in our context.
I'm trying to figure out what you mean by this. Is your experience that Alberta is a particularly racist province, more so than other provinces in Canada?
14 is code for 'the fourteen words', a racist white separatist slogan that I won't reproduce here. 88 is a symbol for nazism - h is the 8th letter of the alphabet, hence, 88=hh, or heil hitler. If you see someone with an 88 tattoo, this is what they are signaling.
I'd be curious to know your experience with that game. Me and some friends have been playing it and the grind is just insane, to the point that I can't really enjoy it because progress feels so glacial. Whenever people speak positively about it I feel like I must be missing something.
I mean, their team is horrifically bad at hockey, so there's that. I wonder if they were higher up in the standings if there would be more light shining on them with regard to the sexual abuse scandal.
Just to provide a counterpoint here - anyone can play hockey, it's not a requirement to be in the sort of physical shape that elite athletes maintain in order to step on the ice.
Lots of people watch sports simply for entertainment, and that's OK. Maybe someone enjoys the strategic aspect of it, or they follow their hometown team, or a team that has an interesting or good build. I find it fun to have a beer and watch a game. I don't personally want to endure the hardships of training, damage from playing and emotions bundled up in a competitive game to pursue it very far. But I'm glad to be a spectator to this sport being played at a high level.
That just seems so crazy as they ramp up to an IPO. Yes, let's alienate users. reduce our overall active users, and throw hissy fits at our mods who are volunteers without whom, this site cannot operate. That should establish confidence in the marketplace. I just don't understand the thinking here.
People will say 'enshittification', well okay, but even on paper, all their moves have been so bad lately, and they don't seem to care. It's weird. Seems to me for example a platform with 100 users and 40% monetization is inherently more valuable than a platform with 40 users and 100% monetization. That's just my stupid opinion though.
I like NoScript exactly for the rabbit hole it opens! Now I'm very aware of what scripts are running on which pages! Actively blocking blatant ad scripts & data scraping scripts makes me feel good.