No fucking roots shall hold.

A classic!

I think this is something most people rarely talk about but it strikes home to many of us. As a parent, I have a responsibility to defend my children against this persistent cognitive manipulation and experimentation. Just as I would not want a random stranger at the corner have exclusive attention of my kid and sell them insurance or grammarly or mesothelioma, I would also never want them to have that unfiltered access to my kids online. One can then say AdBlocks are a parental obligation.

Luddites were not as opposed to new technology as you say it here. They were mainly concerned about what technology would do to whom.

A helpful history right here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/?lens=little-brown

We demonstrate that political orientation can be predicted from neutral facial images by both humans and algorithms, even when factors like age, gender, and ethnicity are accounted for. This indicates a connection between political leanings and inherent facial characteristics, which are largely beyond an individual’s control. Our findings underscore the urgency for scholars, the public, and policymakers to recognize and address the potential risks of facial recognition technology to personal privacy.

“peer-reviewed” bullshit.

Findroid/Finamp? Quite robust.

Link: https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp

Swahili. If you want to translate “she/he went to the river”, you say “Alienda mtoni” which collapses she/he into the subject A- (Alienda) to mean “the person”. You always need context to use a gendered word (like mwanamke for woman) otherwise general conversation does not foreground it. There is literally no word for he/she in Swahili, as far as I know.

Same here. My native langauge is not gendered and I rarely associate “man” in academic spaces with “gender” category. I usually need more info to tilt to gender in discussions.

indistinct chatter

The unsang heroes who brought in wisdom and competency! 🤟

Dess should tell us why Valentines. Probably a missed date and vented out on AGPL-3 legendary code. If true, long live heartbreaks!

Avafind.

Searching for almost anything was so much easy. Such a powerful tool that disappeared. Its performance 20 years ago was better than Finder is today. At least from my experience.

Used to be the first thing we installed on phones and PCs. Opera was blazing fast on basic phones as far back as 2008sh.

Sadly, yes. One would hope the more core sectors use it, the more the general population would use such tools. But alas!

Cold plain metrics can easily hide social complexity.

Assume 10 investigative journalists use modded privacy-friendly Firefox for year long investigation. Then their report is read by 10 million average news reader on stock browsers like Chrome. Network logics tell us that Firefox browser has asymmetrical value in the ecosystem than plain usage metrics can ever reveal.

The obsession with numbers (the more the better) is a major blinding effect in societies driven by hierarchical cultures.

My kind of hopes.

What is the obsession with numbers? Centralization mentality is the problem. The idea that unless 5 Billion people are on a network will it be “successful” denies the joys of effective and sustainable networks. I really honestly wouldn’t want to see a fediverse server with more than 100K daily active users. I would rather have 10 instances of 10K active users.

Meta and those billionaire centrists can go fuck themselves.

Your use case matters here. Perhaps there are other specialized tools for what you want to achieve.

Why is LibreOffice “meh”? I have used it for the last 10 years and would like to know what it is you find off with it.

Yes. The linked article points to Apple’s release notes.

CVE-2023-41064: The Citizen Lab at The University of Torontoʼs Munk School

The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an “alternative” tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can’t just not be spied on.