Olives @olives@qoto.org

Whenever I've tried to use Reddit, their incompetently coded site has crashed my browser. I don't bother.

A rather conservative, and out of touch, Labour MP in the U.K. wants to ban prostitution ads and the like on sites.

As has been learned from other countries though, women had a tendency of turning up dead and going to even less safe conditions on the streets when white knights passed "clever" solutions like this.

Perhaps, it is because allows someone to act independently.

Perhaps, it is because they can better screen clients.

Whatever it is, it is better.

Not that long ago, the British Tory Party wanted a man in the cabinet who had the power to overrule any court decision they didn't like.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.09848
"Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines"
"on average, a mere 51.5% of generated sentences are fully supported by citations and only 74.5% of citations support their associated sentence"

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/06/sexual-orientation-gender-identity-florida-high-school
American Psychological Association approves of College Board's decision not to remove content related to sexual orientations and gender identities from it's psychology curriculum.

Apparently, Florida wanted them to do that.

In my view, this is a bad idea.

Successful platforms, whether perfect or imperfect, are those which open up straight away, build up a userbase, slowly perfect themselves, and eventually take off.

Instead, a group of techbros have parachuted themselves in, are carefully crafting it, and promise that some day they will deliver.

Bluesky isn't even a player currently. It is cordoned off with promises that it will be opened up later.

startrek subreddit has ended up being assimilated by the Huffman borg.

Someone talking about ChatGPT as if it is an interface for doing any sort of security sensitive interaction is straight-up bizarre.

Obviously, that would be a terrible idea, especially as the thing doesn't even work reliably. Is this another symptom of a hype cycle?

Everyone suddenly discovers that Reddit is run by an asshole.

Maybe, I should say "LLM" instead of "AI" because that suggests this thing has anything which remotely resembles intelligence.

An AI chat bubble to replace a blockchain bubble as a miracle tool which can do anything.

https://www.axios.com/local/new-orleans/2023/06/16/louisiana-cyberattack-dmv-moveit If you want an idea of how much you can trust the government to keep your age verification data safe.

YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter appear to be doing the same thing. They all decided to start cutting off third party apps which added value to their platforms.

In a way, the fall of Reddit might breathe more life into the open web, because Reddit itself is a large bottleneck, and the communities are far more severable than in some social network.

Better security means fewer spambots because they can get fewer machines as slaves.

As far as I know, a lot of spammers use botnets. That is a computer infected with a computer virus to follow someone else's command.

I honestly trust Google more than I do the center the E.U. is building for Chat Stasi and their "lists".

If you have trouble with spambots, I have a fair bit of knowledge and experience of spambots, and how to deal with them effectively.

To a large extent, privacy is security and collecting less data means not ending up being humiliated in the same way Adobe once was. It also means not upsetting the more local FTC, if someone is large enough for them to care about a breach.

"GDPR compliance" (minus the cookie parts) is kind of just an extension of what someone should be doing anyway.