Headlines are being headlines, I get it, but Fry was repeating a joke:

“I heard a very good joke yesterday,” the QI host, 67, told Stig Abell on Times Radio on Thursday.

“Someone said, ‘Musk is not a Nazi… Nazis made really good cars,’” he went on, before bursting out laughing.

Maybe we should read it.

(I have and it’s short, simple, empowering and to the point, would recommend)

Firefox is the best browser

It’s only real competitors, in my eyes, are Firefox forks.

JPEG-XL (someone already mentioned it as .jxl below) image files.

• competitive with AVIF compression levels
• not recycling video compression, so you get benefits like progressive loading
• JPEG transcoding - can take existing JPEG files (so much of the existing images online) and shrink their size by ~20% with literally no change to the presented image, and this is easily reverable. The amount of data this would shrink without risk of altering the data is HUGE.

There are a ton of other benefits but those are the three I’m most excited about.

Lots of the people involved in CSAM are stupider than you might think, surprisingly bad at privacy/security given that almost everyone including governments hates them.

Yep, deportations and plans for deportations, including the Madagascar Plan.

Neo-Nazis often lie (yes, knowingly lie) and say they just want a group deported ‘back to their own land’. It’s a much easier pill to swallow for the group of racists and nationalists who think genocide is a step too far, and it acts to sanewash them, but at the end of the day it’s cheaper and simpler to exterminate like the Nazi Regime did. Plus, there are groups who don’t have an external indigenous land, like the trade unionists, gays, trans, communists, liberals, people with disabilities, […] and so it’s clear that they can’t just deport and imprison all the ones they don’t like. It always ends the same way with fascism.

It is always morally acceptable?

Morality is, literally, subjective. There is no universal answer to that question.

I personally consider anything being sold by a distributor to be fair game, no questions asked. If I pay for mainstream music, films or games, most of the time, zero of that money goes to the workers who created those artworks. It just makes rich owners richer, because they legally own rights. I would go as far as to say it’s morally wrong to pay for those things, it’s not neutral, it’s supporting a cycle of abuse at your own expense. So that’s my perspective on your ‘giant corporations’ question.

Digital copying isn’t stealing, unfortunately, because those giant companies deserve to have their hoard of capital expropriated.

[src]

Best hiring pitch I’ve seen yet.

Spice/spiced could work. But it’s still an allusion, not sure if that defeats the point.

For example, 4chan forcibly invented the use of the ok hand for “white power”, as a collective prank

Which, outside of specific contexts where you’re already confident someone is a WN, was quickly forgotten and never really took off. It’s not a great example of a social shift.

It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.

This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.

wow the /c/greentext community has posts that remind you of 4chan

:0

Maybe I can grift a nice bounty developing AR glasses which patch out all the brands on clothes and places in real-time.

If someone’s take on 9/11 doesn’t go back to at least the early 1980s, it’s probably not worth taking too seriously. It didn’t start on 9/11, that’s just the date millions of people were forced into hearing about the messy and complex conflicts. A witness on ground zero doesn’t become a 9/11 expert.

The 4th season of the podcast Blowback does an excellent job of covering the background, both within and beyond the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I highly recommend it.

It’s disingenuous to assume the Soviet Union is representative of communism or even the Western communist movement at the time or afterwards. It would be similar to pointing to the unique horrors of the United States history and claiming therefore all those supporting capitalism are disturbing.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.

An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.

Ah, that sucks to hear about.

I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:

• They’re filtered by the investor demands to censor.
• They’re filtered by advertising demands to censor.
• They’re vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
• They’re vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.