The new platform, W, will require identification and photo validation to ensure that its users are both humans and who they claim to be

Kind of them to get that out of the way in the first sentence. No further reading required.

It’s fucking systemd again isn’t it

Some of them are probably insecure about their own limitations and find pleasure in mocking someone who knows a little less than they do. On the other hand there may also be, among the crowd, those who genuinely found your mistake to be an unusually funny one.

The bill itself was full of maximally authoritarian bullshit, causing all the civil society groups to oppose it as loudly as they did. It remains around in some form, last I heard, still theoretically in the legislative process somewhere, a continuing threat to us all should the Liberals feel confident enough to try and pass any of the worst parts of it into law.

It might’ve been an attempt to appease Trump, or it might’ve been pushed by some Trumpist infiltrator within the party, I don’t know. Optimistically, we can hope that Carney wasn’t really aware of what was in it, and on a topic outside his areas of expertise he was simply misled by people he mistakenly chose to trust. In any case I’m sure he will have learned from the experience.

“Based on your writing style and recent emails we have decided that you are too old to be asking ChatGPT such stupid questions.”

Him I took the time to answer. You I will block.

Read a few more words there and find out. He didn’t write that legislation, but he approved of it, has had the power to stop it all along, and has not renounced it.

I guess it serves as a data point indicating what the percentage of Americans who will agree to the craziest shit available on the opinion poll answers is up to now. Seems to me it was as low as 10% not too many years ago.

They sure do, and they’re randomly flipping bits in your computer’s memory once in a while.

It’s a good speech. He’d be a great prime minister if he weren’t so fond of fossil fuels, military spending (as opposed to actual defence,) and authoritarian bullshit in the name of security as exemplified in the infamous “border security” bill.

I’ll just go with the correct answer: Cosmic rays.

Oh, Doug Ford. Not the Ford Motor Company, which is the Ford I would’ve thought more likely to complain about having a competitor that’s actually capable of selling EVs at reasonable prices.

The main problem is that 49000 is much too small a number given the rate at which Canadians are buying cars.

Somebody, somewhere, is updating their list of all the old pre-fascism movies and TV shows that will need to be erased from the culture.

Social media takes hundreds of different forms (including e.g. Lemmy) and any study pretending that they’re all the same is useless — unless you can simply replace “social media” with “Facebook”, “TikTok”, or whatever they’re actually about.

For example the first of the studies linked above finds that using “Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram” more than they normally would makes people depressed, and the second finds that an unspecified mix of whatever people normally do that they think of as “social media” did not. Those findings do not contradict each other and do not represent a meaningful controversy.

Politically it’s a controversy, or a tangled mess of controversies. Scientifically it’s just a complete mystery that will — at the speed of science — take decades to unravel. With any luck all the findings about fucking Facebook and Twitter will be obsolete much sooner than that because at some point the enshittification will finally get so bad that people come to their senses and stop using them. The free-world versions of social media, such as the fediverse, continue to get better and will win in the long run.

Thinking back to my own youth when the problem was teenagers talking on the phone for hours at a time, I wonder why we didn’t just force the phone company to ban young people from using telephones.

It’s almost as if the “trade deal” isn’t really about trade.

hostile messages posted on the social media network X

If you have a burning hate for Spanish meteorologists, consider joining X.

Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel, Herbert Kickl, Andrej Babiš, Aleksandar Vučić, Javier Milei, Benjamin Netanyahu.

They’re all so eager to make it clear that they’re enemies of humanity.

“Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands have confirmed deployments as part of the same multinational operation” according to Newsweek, citing “multiple outlets.” I’m pretty sure I heard about it on CBC radio news.

I don’t know, but it would be pretty strange for Canada to be left out.

The technology they’ve come up with sort of works, some of the time, and can make for an impressive demo if you ignore its failings. If you suspend all disbelief and assume that because computers have learned this one new trick they’ll soon be smart enough to magically transform themselves into hyperintelligent AGI monsters straight out of science fiction, if you learn to really believe it, you can convince a lot of people that you might be right. Nobody can prove that it won’t happen, therefore it’s inevitable. Therefore it is existentially important for the future of humanity and it only makes sense to bet the entire economy on it right away without hesitation.