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Comment Re:Ah yes (Score 1) 191

Sarifs are, in fact, for ease of reading, but point well taken. The justifications are wrong and the people making them are petty assholes.

It's true, seifs are for ease of reading ... but so is Calibri. However, I believe Calibri was created for ease of reading on screens, while this article talks about documents on letterhead. So it's possible the choice of Calibri was misguided to begin with. Furthermore, according to the article, the number of “accessibility-based document remediation cases” – which I take to mean instances where somebody requests a document be reformatted for accessibility reasons – has not declined. So he's saying that, while this is a purely subjective aesthetic choice, the original change to Calibri never helped anything anyway.

Comment Re:I can see the point. (Score 1) 135

So you'd rather wait to fix the bigger social problems first before fixing smaller ones? I don't know, I think it's good to attack the smaller problems first. It makes you feel good about small victories, you gain experience with similar problems, and it prevents analysis paralysis. It also builds momentum, everyone likes a winner.

You also have to remember that minors aren't full people, they are legal dependents and censorship is the wrong word to use in this case. It is absolutely the right and obligation of guardians and governments to make decisions for them about what they can and cannot do on the Internet, among other things. The kids will grow up soon enough, and be free to choose by then.

Comment Re:WTF (Score 1) 16

There is nothing open about any of the "open" AI shops. Every "open" model from them is the equivalent of a free mp4, that runs on a simple player, to whet your appetite and make you want to rent their more powerful models.

A real open project supplies the preferred components for completely rebuilding the software. That means, you should get from such a project all the source documents (not preparsed token datasets) for training and all the training scripts they use themselves and all the specs. If you don't, it's only a pretend open AI project.

Comment Re:enshitification existed long before the word (Score 1) 66

Seems to depend on location. In my home city in Europe, it was 3-4 times a day, even shortly after the war.

But that was before mailmen had to earn $300k in salary and benefits.

Numbers mean nothing once enough inflation is involved. But back in those same days, a mailman could support a family on his salary. Not a luxury life for sure, but enough to rent a place and put food on the table. Women working was still a somewhat new thing.

Comment I can see the point. (Score 4, Insightful) 135

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

Comment Re: Is it just my Alzheimer's? (Score 1) 68

Inflation is not being treated as noise, if it were then we wouldn't index it away, we would just ignore it. The fact we are indexing it away is due to treating it as a real predictable trend.

However, the purpose of indexing it away is to normalize, due to the recognition that it's not the absolute prices that matter, only their relative relationships

Inflation is a flaw in the measuring instrument we're using (fiat currency), kind of like if you have a metallic ruler and you increase the ambient temperature, then the expansion will make the inch markings on the ruler be longer than an actual inch.

Comment Re:Who thought this service was a good idea? (Score 1) 117

Your Streisand Effect definition is too narrow, imho. The issue isn't disclosure against the company's wishes, it's the increased awareness by the public arising from consequences of the company's initial policy choice of halting operations and service to the Russian public.

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