AmbitiousProcess

@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm curious.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That depends on how you interpret people as either being or not being ignorant.

  If you judge it solely based on how much time is spent consuming digital media, then people would be less ignorant considering that number has more than doubled since 2008. (doesn't take into account things like print media, but I doubt people were spending at least 3 hours reading print media every single day, then switched a whole at least 3 hours of that over to digital media)

  If you base it on the amount of social relationships they have with diverse groups of people that could lead them to be less ignorant about the world around themselves, then we've trended towards being more ignorant in that regard, because while people are more likely to have at least 4 close friends now, they're less likely to have a wide network (10+) by nearly 3X less.

  There's also the fact that ignorance doesn't necessarily mean "bliss" in all circumstances.

  For example, people are more likely to feel satisfied waiting for a bus (or anything, really) if they're provided an predictable, but longer estimated arrival time, compared to an unpredictable, but shorter arrival time (to an extent). In that case, the ignorance actually makes people less happy with the experience, even if it still resulted in a faster travel time than the known alternative.

  The saying "ignorance is bliss" primarily applies to ignorance of problems within one's life or society as a whole. If someone's not aware of the atrocities committed by their government overseas, they'll feel less stress or anger when voting or thinking of what the future might hold. If you were told you would die in exactly 24 hours, you'd probably spend more of that 24 hours worrying than simply living normally, and would be comparably less happy at the end as a result.

  It's hard to pin down any one reason in particular, but if we want to know why people are so unhappy, maybe we should reassess how ignorant people are in the first place, and what exactly they are ignorant about.

  See, there's a trend we can see with overall dissatisfaction, and it's heavily tied to economic factors. The more wealth and economic disparity there is in a nation, the less happy the people there seem to be. (See: the World Happiness Report)

  Coincidentally, places like the US are some of the most unhappy in the developed world, and also have high levels of wealth inequality

  The same WHR report even shows that the density of social connections helps a lot with making people happier. (pg. 142-144) Remember the figure I brought up before about people having smaller social networks?

  I can't even begin to break down every single possible factor that's making people unhappy, but from reports like the WHR, I think it's clear that a lot of the things that affect people's happiness are things that are hard to be ignorant of.

  You can probably count up about how many friends you have, know about how wealthy you are, and feel dissatisfied, even if you're the type of person that doesn't care about politics, which is one of the largest drivers of dissatisfaction in people who are actually aware.

  Remember that people are now consuming much more politics-related media nowadays, and you've got a lot of people who are:
  - keenly aware of their own personal problems that they simply can't be ignorant of
  - tuned in to conflicts and political drama that may not even affect them, or anyone if it's entirely political posturing
  - severely economically disadvantaged, while being repeatedly shown the lives of those with substantially more than them as a goal to aspire to (think hustle culture)

  And don't even get me started on how much the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to be alone and confront their own internal problems that they were previously ignorant of.

  To boil this all down to something a bit more coherent: (apologies for the long rambling)

  People aren't necessarily ignorant of the things that can cause dissatisfaction, EVEN IF they're ignorant of larger, important issues with the world, or even smaller issues that could still impact them. We are now more connected, economically unequal, and isolated than we have been in the past, and that will take its toll no matter how ignorant you are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anubis is awesome! Stopping (AI)crawlbots⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Could you elaborate on how it's ableist?

  As far as I'm aware, not only are they making a version that doesn't even require JS, but the JS is only needed for the challenge itself, and the browser can then view the page(s) afterwards entirely without JS being necessary to parse the content in any way. Things like screen readers should still do perfectly fine at parsing content after the browser solves the challenge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anubis is awesome! Stopping (AI)crawlbots⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Because the easiest solution for them is a simple web scraper. If they don't give a shit about ethics, then something that just crawls every page it can find is loads easier for them to set up than a custom implementation to get torrent downloads for wikipedia, making lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed instances for the fediverse, using rss feeds and checking if they have full or only partial articles, implementing proper checks to prevent double (or more) downloading of the same content, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was thinking this too! Gait recognition can completely bypass facial coverings as a means of identification, but I also don't think it'll be much help here.

  Gait recognition can be bypassed by things as simple as putting a rock in your shoe so you walk differently, so when you think about how much extra heavy gear, different shoes, and different overall movement patterns ICE agents will possibly be engaging in, it might not hold up well at tracking them down, especially since to recognize someone by gait, you'd need footage of them that you can already identify them in, to then train the model on.

  In the case of fucklapd.com, this was easy because they could just get public record data for headshot photos, but there isn't a comparable database with names directly tied to it for gait. I will say though, a lot of these undercover agents might be easier to track by gait since they'll still generally be wearing more normal attire, and it might be more possible to associate them with who they are outside of work since it's easier to slip up when you're just wearing normal clothes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit will help advertisers turn ‘positive’ posts into ads⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This wouldn't be an issue if Reddit always attached relevant posts, including negative ones even if those were the minority, to actually help people make a more informed judgement about an ad based on community sentiment, but I think we all know that won't be the way this goes.

  Posts will inevitably only be linked if they are positive, or at the very least neutral about the product being advertised, because that's what would allow Reddit to sell advertisers on their higher ROI. The bandwagon effect is a real psychological effect, and Reddit knows it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Google about to destroy the web?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough. SEO was definitely one of the many large steps Google has taken to slowly crippling the open web, but I never truly expected it to get this bad. At least with SEO, there was still some incentive left to create quality sites, and it didn't necessarily kill monetizability for sites.

  This feels like an exponentially larger threat, and I truly hope I'm proven wrong about its potential effects, because if it does come true, we'll be in a much worse situation than we already are now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Google about to destroy the web?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not to mention the fact that the remaining sites that can still hold on, but would just have to cut costs, will just start using language models like Google's to generate content on their website, which will only worsen the quality of Google's own answers over time, which will then generate even worse articles, etc etc.

  It doesn't just create a monetization death spiral, it also makes it harder and harder for answers to be sourced reliably, making Google's own service worse while all the sites hanging on rely on their worse service to exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Google about to destroy the web?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is fundamentally worse than a lot of what we've seen already though, is it not?

  AI overviews are parasitic to traffic itself. If AI overviews are where people begin to go for information, websites get zero ad revenue, subscription revenue, or even traffic that can change their ranking in search.

  Previous changes just did things like pulling a little better context previews from sites, which only somewhat decreased traffic, and adding more ads, which just made the experience of browsing worse, but this eliminates the entire business model of every website completely if Google continues pushing down this path.

  It centralizes all actual traffic solely into Google, yet Google would still be relying on the sites it's eliminating the traffic of for its information. Those sites cut costs by replacing human writers with more and more AI models, search quality gets infinitely worse, sourcing from articles that themselves were sourced from nothing, then most websites which are no longer receiving enough traffic to be profitable collapse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Google about to destroy the web?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if you want AI answers, you can use DuckDuckGo. They have an AI assistant too, and even it does better than Google's at not hallucinating as much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My VPN's perfectly fine. To be fair, it's not a free plan of a VPN that's heavily throttled, but I can even play multiplayer FPS games with only a few milliseconds of additional delay, and my overall max upload and download speed is almost exactly identical to when I have my VPN off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Condé Nast Parent Company is a Major Owner of Reddit, You Should Avoid their Publications (Wired, Ars Technica, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue,...etc) as Much as Possible.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. 404Media has been extremely good at covering anything from random niche communities to major data leaks. The only thing stopping me from becoming a paying member of their work is the (in my opinion, high) $100/yr price tag.

  I'd also recommend following independent journalists like Ken Klippenstein. He does good work, and frequently releases documents that the rest of the media refuses to publish more than snippets of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists in Japan develop plastic that dissolves in seawater within hours⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This seems like it could be a viable replacement for many plastics, but it isn't he silver bullet I feel that the article is acting as if it is.

  From the linked article in the post:

  the new material is as strong as petroleum-based plastics but breaks down into its original components when exposed to salt.

  Those components can then be further processed by naturally occurring bacteria, thereby avoiding generating microplastics

  The plastic is non-toxic, non-flammable, and does not emit carbon dioxide, he added.

  This is great. Good stuff. Wonderful.

  From another article (this shows that this isn't as recent, too. This news was from many months ago)

  the team was able to generate plastics that had varying hardnesses and tensile strengths, all comparable or better than conventional plastics.

  Plastics like these can be used in 3D printing as well as medical or health-related applications.

  Wide applications and uses, much better than a lot of other proposed solutions. Still good so far.

  After dissolving the initial new plastic in salt water, they were able to recover 91% of the hexametaphosphate and 82% of the guanidinium as powders, indicating that recycling is easy and efficient.

  Easy to recycle and reclaim material from. Great! Not perfect, but still pretty damn good.

  In soil, sheets of the new plastic degraded completely over the course of 10 days, supplying the soil with phosphorous and nitrogen similar to a fertilizer.

  You could compost these in your backyard. Who needs the local recycling pickup for plastics when you can just chuck it in a bin in the back? Still looking good.

  using polysaccharides that form cross-linked salt bridges with guanidinium monomers.

  Polysaccharides are literally carbohydrates found in food.

  This is really good. Commonly found compound, easy to actually re-integrate back into the environment. But now the problems start. They don't specify much about the guanidinium monomers in their research in terms of which specific ones are used, so it's hard to say the exact implications, but...

  ...they appear to often be toxic, sometimes especially to marine life, soil quality, and plant growth, and have been used in medicine with mixed results as to their effectiveness and safety.

  I'm a bit disappointed they didn't talk about this more in the articles, to be honest. It seems this would definitely be better than traditional plastic* in terms of its ecological effects, but still *much worse than not dumping it in the ocean at all. In my opinion, in practice it looks like this would simply make the recycling process much more efficient (as mentioned before, a 91% and 82% recovery rate for plastics is much better than the current average of less than 10%) while reducing the overall harm from plastic being dumped in the ocean, even if it's still not good enough to eliminate the harm altogether.