Curse slashdot and their lack of editing functionality. I meant of course to GDPR their ass.

Spotify honors our users' privacy rights, including the right of portability

You do now, all right. But I had to DMCA your ass to make you implement data takeout, after being told (after waiting for a year and more) that giving users access to their own listening history was "not a priority".

Gee, what is more likely? That sweeteners harm your brain, but stop doing it after 60, or that maybe working age people with the very highest levels of sweetener consumption have some other characteristic in common which might influence it?

So many health studies of the British newspaper variety don't even try to make a causal argument.

Fun fact: these days AI models struggle to draw a hand with six fingers, even if you explicitly ask for it. A bit of overcorrection, due to AIs traumatized by the validation data...

Placeholder art has been a thing for a very long time. Sometimes directors fall in love with their placeholder art, and insist on something that's almost exactly it - and that is why so much of the original Star Wars music sounds a bit like Holst's Planets.

You'll be replaced from that job too by people who fix ai slop with AI tools themselves, and who undercut you. There's no honor along fiverrs.

Well, look at it is like this. If Bob has been dumping his sewage into your drinking water for decades, does that mean you shouldn't care that Alice is now doing it too?

Giving Palestinians the same sort of agency as Israelis is perverse. Hamas is supported by Netanyahu, he's explicitly defended sending money to them as a strategy to divide and conquer and to reduce the risk of foreign sympathy.

(Foreign sympathy for Palestinians he sees as a threat to Israel. Terrorism, obviously not.)

There's one side which has all the power, all the freedom, all the choices in Israel-Palestine. Now that the genocide is getting completed, it's time for people like you to stop both-sidesing and admit that the critics who said this was a genocidal colonial project, aren't just right just now. They were right all along.

As usual, the hypothetical counterfactual genocide, which you have been convinced of by an extremely resourceful state which sees truth as just another battlefield,

trumps the actual genocide, whose journalists are getting systematically murdered by the said propagandist state.

"If the US government stops throwing free money at us and start expecting something in return, other governments might stop throwing free money at us too!"

That's paid by the artists already, to services like CDBaby. They're supposed to do some minimal vetting, and Spotify is supposed to kick them out if they don't.

The problem is a lot of shady stuff is even legal (e.g. compilation albums), and it's neither in Spotify or the service's economic interest to actually be strict about this.

Which is maybe why Spotify fired the guy who did most of the spam prevention, Glenn McDonald.

Algorithmic spam music predates modern machine learning too. All it has to do is sound inoffensive enough that you don't notice if it slips into the right kind of playlist. For playlists not listened to by conscious, adult humans (e.g. baby or sleep playlists) it's very easy to slip in.

Time to socialize the costs!

How much gets through a HEPA filter is useless information without also knowing how much air goes through per minute. HEPA filters by definition are supposed to catch 99.97% of particles in the hardest size category of particles to catch, 0.3 microns, (Smaller particles are easier to catch.) but on two passes, it catches much more, on three passes even more etc.

So HEPA may not even be the optimal filter grade for room air cleaning. I read some IAQ nerds think MERV-13 filters and more fans is better.

For air that only goes through once before hitting your lungs, e.g. in PPE, you want as high grade as possible though.

It didn't stop them from forcing Marvel down our throats. Superhero comics are an extremely niche phenomenon where I live - and most places outside the US, as far as I can tell. They're full of terrible writing, random fan fiction has less cringeworthy multi universe time travel plots. They're very obviously written to answer kids' "who would win" questions first and foremost.