FJW
@FJW@discuss.tchncs.de
German Cryptographer in Dutch exile
- Comment on Men Harassed A Woman In A Driverless Waymo, Trapping Her In Traffic 1 month ago:
I saw “driverless waymo” in the title.
Also: Prejudice against people wearing fedoras is still prejudice and thus not really a great thing to have. One of my best friends also likes to wear a hat at times (not sure if it counts as a fedora, I know very little about heads) and is one of the sweetest people I know.
- Comment on Men Harassed A Woman In A Driverless Waymo, Trapping Her In Traffic 1 month ago:
Okay, this really seems more like a case of sexual harassment, rather than harassment of Waymo customers, which was my first suspicion. Had it been the latter as part of a politically motivated action against the company I might have had a lot more sympathy, but this is disgusting…
- Comment on Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text 1 month ago:
That “m” should be a “b”. For a company that size, there is truly no excuse!
- Comment on If Bethesda released Skyrim today, they would have made it woke 1 month ago:
Even worse, imagine how woke the books of Karl May (not to be confused with Karl Marx) the most successful German author of all time that were originally published in book form in the 1890s [sic] would be if they came out today:
The foreword to the main trilogy would be so spicy that no modern English translation would include it. Like: He would call out the genocide of the native Americans as such and explicitly assign the full guilt for the decline of their cultures to the whites.
He would have the self-insert heroes telling people that the N-word that “Once they scrape you into the ground, your white-skinned body will become straight and exactly as much a stinking carcass as a negro corpse. You will admit that, and now have the goodness to list your other merits!”
He would have trans coded characters being presented in an unambigously positive light.
And so many more incredibly woke things, like trash talking Christians that don’t respect all other humans and do evil shit…
- Comment on Musk’s plan to axe X's block button is a real win for stalkers and abusers. 1 month ago:
I’m not advocating against a seatbelt, I’m advocating against not wearing it, “because I am confident that I can hold on to something in case of a collision” or similar stupid reasons. Expecting that blocking does anything to hide public posts that you can simply open in another browser (or in the same browser in private browsing mode) is not a seatbelt, it is the equivalent of a slightly stronger handle on top of the car window that is being advertized as a feature to protect you in case of an accident.
This change first and foremost makes it clear that that handle does nothing meaningful and that you should wear an actual seatbelt (follower-only posts, ideally with restricted followers) instead, if you are worried about a collision. Twitter is a public forum. You can’t tell people to leave you alone, shout with a megaphone across the marketplace and then be annoyed when they hear you. If you don’t want them to hear you, don’t use a megaphone.
- Comment on Musk’s plan to axe X's block button is a real win for stalkers and abusers. 1 month ago:
The argument here is literally about stalkers. Not about random uninterested people that don’t care.
- Comment on Musk’s plan to axe X's block button is a real win for stalkers and abusers. 1 month ago:
Please read again what he changed and then try to figure out why your rationale is clearly not what this is about.
- Comment on Musk’s plan to axe X's block button is a real win for stalkers and abusers. 1 month ago:
Twitter massively reduced visibility for logged-out users,
I know, but it still didn’t fully remove it.
Not sure that being “more honest” is worth the price
The thing is that there really is no price, nor was there ever one. Your suggestion that you think there is demonstrates that the way blocking worked gave people dangerously wrong ideas. It’s about being clear to people what they can and cannot expect. Anything else is ACTUALLY dangerous.
- Comment on Musk’s plan to axe X's block button is a real win for stalkers and abusers. 1 month ago:
As much as I despise Musk and Twitter and hope that both die a painful death, what is actually proposed here is honestly a change for the better: It’s not about preventing people from blocking users, it’s about blocked users being able to see public posts, which they could also see by just logging out. This is being honest about what a block does and avoids giving people a wrong sense of privacy that they simply don’t have on the platform. From what I’ve heard there is a possibility to post for followers-only which in combination with requiring approval to follow and that isn’t going away here either…
- Comment on Research shows more than 80% of AI projects fail, wasting billions of dollars in capital and resources: Report 2 months ago:
AI not, but I’d be less certain about LLMs.
- Comment on Research shows more than 80% of AI projects fail, wasting billions of dollars in capital and resources: Report 2 months ago:
The hype-cycle is the exception, not the norm. Very commonly stuff just ends up dying.
- Comment on Cords 2 months ago:
The backup-generator seems to be the one semi-legit use-case that keeps coming up where few people have been able to present a significantly better alternative.
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 5 months ago:
I’m not saying vandalism is illegal. I’m say that it borders on immoral and that there is a better, more radical (and thus effective) alternative that one might expect to be illegal but in fact isn’t.
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 5 months ago:
You can when it comes to copyright. That’s EU-law and anything else would be such a horrible idea that no country would ever set up a law saying otherwise.
If you could simply revoke copyright licenses you would completely kill any practicality of selling your copyrighted works and it would fully undermine any purpose it served in the first place.
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 5 months ago:
Frankly, the solution here isn’t vandalism, it’s setting up a competing side and copying the content over. The license of stackoverflow makes that explicitly legal. Anything else is just playing around and hoping that a company acts against its own interests, which has rarely ever worked before.
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 5 months ago:
it is legally still your copyright, since you produced the content. Pretty sure in EU they cannot prevent you from deleting your content.
They absolutely can, you gave them an explicit (under most circumstances irrevocable) permission to do so. That’s how contracts work.
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 5 months ago:
Frankly I don’t see any way whatsoever that this would fly, and that’s a good thing!
Imagine what it would mean for software-development if one angry dev could request the deletion of all their contributions at a moments notice by pointing to a right to be forgotten. Documentation is really not meaningfully different from that.
- Comment on Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets 6 months ago:
I’ve had issue with very worn out 3.5mm adapters before! Like: I was on an intercontinental flight earlier this week and my cable barely held in the worn out port of the plane. I agree that there are fewer issues with software refusing to work, but the hardware-connection can be quite sucky on them too.
- Comment on Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets 6 months ago:
I hated that too at the time, but I have to admit, that in practice this has not really turned into an issue basically ever: My headphones and earbuds are bluetooth anyways and I did get a usb-c to headphone adapter that I store with my earphone’s backup audio cable for the very rare case that I need it (I can count on one hand the instances for when that happened). And in those very few cases I wasn’t about to charge my phone anyways, which is the one argument for why you might want both.
So, I don’t know, maybe it really is time to move on. I will defnitely say that I’m not a big fan of analog cables, so maybe a more general move to USB-C for audio might be the right way to go in the first place?
- Comment on Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets 6 months ago:
Those were the first earbuds they offered, which were just OEM-ones where they main point of attention was on getting the workers a living wage (which is fair enough, they are called “fairphone”, not “repairablephone”), just like the Fairphone 1 where they apparently wanted to collect some experience in the space first.
I have them because I bought my fairphone 4 like one week before they had a free pair with every purchase on offer and wrote to their support, who graciously gave me a voucher as well. I don’t use them a lot, because I do have pretty good over-ear headphones, but they do come in handy on occasion, as they fit into my handbag, which means I am more likely to actually have them with me.
- Comment on They use to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia. Now we know. Wikipedia is the only website you can trust. 1 year ago:
Well it’s the old fact that reality has a left-wing bias, as someone once put it.