It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.
To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.
Did Ben Carson attempt to do surgery on himself? Otherwise I can’t explain at all how dumb he was. Wow! Thanks for the example.
Jill Stein may be an idiot politician with laughably unrealistic positions and a totally unworkable take on foreign policy (even dining with Putin) but she’s also a physician who practiced internal medicine for decades.
She’s not an idiot in general. I think she’s just unbelievably naive about people and their motivations.
It’s not really a backup X. In any given cell in a woman’s body, one of the X chromosomes has been inactivated into something called a Barr body. The remaining X chromosome is then the active one.
Women carriers of the gene defect for protan (causing protanopia in males) exhibit Schmidt’s Sign, an abnormal insensitivity to long wavelengths (red light). This is due to the highly skewed L:M cone ratio caused by the defective gene.
The whole system seems like a sham to me. If one artist has fans that listen 24/7 and another artist has fans that only listen for one hour a day (but that artist is all they listen to), it should be the same. Each person’s account should have its own “pot” out of the subscription fee that only they can allocate to the artists they listen to. Duration of listening shouldn’t matter at all.
How does that work though? Presumably he’s not paying subscription fees on all of his bot accounts, so they must be free accounts. I don’t use Spotify, so I don’t even know why they would have free accounts.
Unless he’s hacked other people’s accounts, then that would make sense for the seriousness of these charges.
Using AI to provide services or crawlers to scan the internet for pages to add to search evinces is different from what this guy did with bots. Those use cases are not pretending to be a legit user in order to collect money.
What this guy did — using bots to fake listen to music — is in the same category as using bots to click on ads that you put on your own web page: it’s serving no legitimate purpose and only exists to defraud businesses which paid for the ads (or Spotify which is paying the royalties)…
No it’s actually way faster. You can swipe whole words in less than a second. It’s like writing with pen and paper but each letter is actually a whole word.
You skipped a crucial step: first you gotta raise a few hundred million in VC funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs!
This process began long before Reagan. I think it started with the automobile manufacturers, and General Motors in particular, in their war on public transit.
The death of the streetcar brought with it the death of streetcar suburbs and mixed-use zoning, which was the foundation upon which most third places rested (neighbourhood pubs, cafes, and barber shops).
Anyway, definitely watch that video if you have the time. Compare the vast landscapes full of roads and parking lots with the old-fashioned neighbourhood of Riverdale, with its narrow streets and cozy houses huddled together on small lots. It’s easy to see which one is more conducive to community, civic engagement, and good government. The car-dependent landscape looks like some dystopian nightmare by comparison.
That’s because the US is not only deeply polarized by party affiliation, it’s deeply segregated regionally by political stripe. Look at how few “swing states” there are and how all the rest are “solid red” or “solid blue.”
Increasingly, people know and have personal contact with fewer and fewer members of the other side. We’re witnessing the creation of the Morlocks and the Eloi, groups that neither interact with nor understand one another to the point of being separate species.
Maybe if she had access to a professional beforehand things would have turned out differently. We look at the justice system as having failed her but really all of society failed her long before that. We have no sense of community anymore.
Heck, I’ve been learning about all the car-centric urban planning we’ve done over the last century in North America. Look up “stroads” on YouTube and you can see lifeless our society has become because of all the stupidity at city hall.
The justice system is flawed and it’s not a matter of trust. You shouldn’t be trusting people you don’t know in the first place. If you’re looking for something to place your trust in, it’s yourself and your understanding of your own incentives and the incentives of others around you. When those incentives align, things tend to work out better for you than when they’re opposed.
The justice system is a misnomer. It’s not about fundamental justice. It’s the right arm of the state, the monopoly on organized violence. When we celebrate vigilantism and revenge killing, we celebrate the weakening of the state’s monopoly and lean toward anarchy and chaos. If that’s what you want, fine, but now you have a very strong current to swim against.
What happened to this woman was terrible and no one deserves that. But she was no longer under the control of her abuser. She was safe in another town. She could have chosen to get on with her life. Instead she chose to kill the guy. Is she any better off now that he’s dead and she’s in jail? I don’t think so, but you’d have to ask her.
The courts take a very dim view of people taking the law into their own hands. That’s what she did. We can all understand why she did it. But we really don’t want people going around shooting each other for revenge. It creates a spiral of violence that leads to societal breakdown. It’s the whole reason a justice system exists in the first place, going all the way back to the time when the king was the judge.
The knives are out for Patreon. Apple is looking to carve a big chunk out of that revenue. Google and Amazon (owner of Twitch) will not be far behind. Believe me, Google and Twitch are very unhappy that creators skip the platform monetization methods and just tell viewers to go to Patreon to bypass the heavy commissions.
I don’t follow those creators!
The best part of YouTube is the small creators who are just making videos as a hobby. Once they get so big they start shilling products they wouldn’t use themselves I drop them like a hot potato. For the most part that doesn’t happen though because I prefer niche topics and creators that don’t have “sellout” personalities.
I don’t think this difference matters that much in Patreon’s case. Convincing users to sideload an app on Android is likely much harder than just getting them to visit the Patreon website on their phone and subscribe to users that way. Heck, they could probably make the mobile site virtually identical to the app anyway.
I did a search for shoelaces and I got a bunch of stack overflow links as well as Wikipedia. I don’t consider WP to be commercial but SO definitely is. I did not get a result for Ian’s shoelace site, which is what I was hoping to find. Even searching for “Ian’s shoelace site” did not find it, whereas the same query on DDG brought it right up (top of the results).
I do like the site though. Thanks for sharing. I’ll try some other queries on it.
How do I find them though? I would love a search engine that only finds these sites and excludes all the commercial ones and all the ad spam.
They don’t care. If the advertisers pay for that spot then they make money! This has been the story with TV ads for decades.