alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 261 Posts
  • 150 Comments
Joined 2Y ago
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Cake day: Jan 28, 2022

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Facebook parent Meta sues the FTC claiming 'unconstitutional authority' in child privacy case
> MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — The parent company of Instagram and Facebook has sued the Federal Trade Commission in an attempt to stop the agency from reopening a 2020 privacy settlement with the company that would prohibit it from profiting from data it collects on users under 18. > > In a lawsuit filed late Wednesday in federal court in Washington, D.C., Meta Platforms Inc. said it is challenging “the structurally unconstitutional authority exercised by the FTC” in reopening the privacy agreement.
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Study finds no “smoking gun” for mental health issues due to Internet usage
> Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support “popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk” from the technology. > > However, Andrew Przybylski, professor at the institute—part of the University of Oxford—said that the data necessary to establish a causal connection was “absent” without more cooperation from tech companies. If apps do harm mental health, only the companies that build them have the user data that could prove it, he said.
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The Whale That’s Known Only by the Sound of Its Voice
> Scientists have spent 18 years looking for the elusive Cross Seamount beaked whale—a potentially new species they’ve heard but never seen.
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Plastic Waste in the Fuel Tank?
> Consumer societies produce enough plastic waste to power at least 10% of motorized road traffic. Dutch designer Gijs Schalkx grabbed the opportunity and now drives his car on the plastic waste he collects.
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Let the community work it out: A throwback to early internet days could fix social media’s crisis of legitimacy
> [...]why should a few companies — or a few billionaire owners — have the power to decide everything about online spaces that billions of people use? This unaccountable model of governance has led stakeholders of all stripes to criticize platforms’ decisions as arbitrary, corrupt or irresponsible. In the early, pre-web days of the social internet, decisions about the spaces people gathered in online were often made by members of the community. Our examination of the early history of online governance suggests that social media platforms could return — at least in part — to models of community governance in order to address their crisis of legitimacy.
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A lawsuit filed by 33 states in federal court in California, claims that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent, in violation of federal law. In addition, nine attorneys general are filing lawsuits in their respective states, bringing the total number of states taking action to 41 and Washington, D.C.

“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its social media platforms,” the complaint says. “It has concealed the ways in which these platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children.”

The suits seek financial damages and restitution and an end to Meta’s practices that are in violation of the law.

one conspicuous state absent to this lawsuit: Texas, which has otherwise gladly railed against “big tech” for dumb reasons that mostly seem to boil down to “you moderate too much and it’s affecting people’s ability to say heinous things on your platform”


correct. while we could fly under the radar, any DMCA we get for this would be completely inarguable and so we’d probably be obliged to prevent this after it happens the first time.


Maybe take away the ability to upvote a link post and reserve that for the actual discussion parts that take place?

this would probably cause its own problems as a design choice, but it’s also not even possible with Lemmy without changing the underlying code (which is a whole ordeal) so that’s not really on the table.


Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.


i feel like people have more than substantiated down thread why it’s not a “smooth brain” take to think Tesla cars aren’t actually that good relative to other options on the market.


i can only presume the remaining 5% is owned by NFTs Georg, who lives on the blockchain and is an outlier who should not have been counted


joint statement by GMG Union and Onion Union:

The Onion and GMG Unions are saddened to report that our colleagues at Gizmodo Español, a site that once housed original, quality Spanish-language reporting, have been replaced en masse by an AI translation service. Instead of relying on the talented journalists at Gizmodo Español, G/O Media has enacted an automation that takes English-language Gizmodo articles, translates them poorly into Spanish, and posts them on Gizmodo Español almost immediately, with no Spanish-language editing. We offer our deepest sympathies to the Gizmodo Español team and share in their frustration as jobs for working journalists continue to disappear worldwide. The Gizmodo Español team comprised of four full-time employees—one editor and three writers—who have been employed by G/O media for over a combined 25 years. Because of the nature of their yearly contracts, they will not receive adequate severance.

They were employed at half the rate of American staff writers due to the nature of these contracts, and were rarely offered raises. Unfortunately this move to eliminate the Español team represents yet another broken promise from G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller and Editorial Director Merrill Brown, who have repeatedly said that the company’s AI experiments were intended to supplement human writing, not replace it. This week, a team of four has been [replaced] by an undisclosed automated machine translation service. Adding insult to injury, when the Gizmodo staff objected to having their bylines attached to machine translations, G/O management removed all bylines from Gizmodo Español—even the bylines of the four journalists who were laid off by G/O Media this week. We remain stringently opposed to G/O Media’s use of AI-generated content and pledge to continue fighting on behalf of journalists and the indispensable public service they provide.

As always, we appreciate your support — and your continual support of real journalism.


like, to be clear: the scope of the article is laid out by those qualifiers, so naturally it’s not going to prescribe how to get rid of in-built batteries in consumer electronics since they fall outside of that scope. even so, it addressed the quibble you’re getting at here pretty bluntly, i think:

Of course, outsourcing chemical energy storage to the device is not the most sustainable option. The production of lithium-ion batteries requires fossil fuels, and (unlike lead-acid batteries) they are not recycled. The best solution, of course, is to reduce the use of electrical devices. But charging them with direct solar energy is a lot more sustainable and efficient than via other batteries or a fossil-fueled electricity grid. If we use high-tech devices, then preferably in the smartest way possible.

and Low-Tech Magazine has previously covered alternatives to battery technology in other posts. so i’m just not seeing what the objection here is.


yes, i literally posted it. the article’s context makes it pretty obvious that “Off-Grid Without Batteries” refers to off the power grid (because you’re receiving direct solar energy) without batteries for holding your solar panel’s energy (because those are carbon intensive and expensive), hence i don’t know what the purpose of your comment is and it appears entirely derived from reading the headline and thumbnail alone.


this sounds like a comment you’re making based entirely off of the thumbnail; i would strongly encourage you to actually read the article if so


for observers: please don’t essentially argue possession of child sex abuse material should be legal because otherwise the standard is set for making videos of police committing crimes illegal


There’s really nothing weird, petty or childish. You get a warning (suspension?) if you don’t fix the problem, you get defederated.

the issue here is not that i’m telling them to not do things–i don’t care what they do or don’t do. what i’m pointing out here is that people probably find this really stupid because it has an identical structure to and is similarly frivolous looking to a 16-year-old making a 10 page callout post against an artist for drawing problematic height gap


To me it looks like fragile egos are all around, and somehow get “offended” when defederation happens.

i would imagine most people’s issue here is this seems to be more “extremely petty schoolhouse drama” than “actual thing worth defederating over”, especially when mastodon has better and more granular defederation tools at its disposal than lemmy or calckey


People disagreeing with someone else’s politics doesn’t make them a bigot.

there are a very large number of ways disagreeing with someone’s politics would obviously make someone a bigot, such as “disagreeing that queer people should have the right to marry”. this is not a serious argument.


There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.

as a not-tech-savvy (relative to other users here, anyways) person: i have absolutely no idea how you can say this with confidence. Lemmy’s UI and UX is probably still on the worse end of FOSS projects i’ve used and i’ve had a year and a half to get used to it. i still have to double back to find certain settings that i use literally every day in moderating the site! i hang with it because i know the developers are slammed, but this would not fly with even most of my friends, much less my mom or someone who has extremely low computer literacy and mostly learns by repetition.


Based on this and other reporting on the subject, I am fairly convinced that the aviation industry cannot and will not become carbon neutral - we’ll continue to see these performative bits of PR as the industry tries to reposition itself, and meanwhile jets will continue to spew greenhouse gases into the sky.

yeah it’s probable we’ll just have to offset their much-reduced carbon footprint, since i’m doubtful we can get to literally zero flights. there’s just too much utility (and not enough utility/versatility with other modes of transit) to flying to completely get rid of the mode.


i’m sure Canadians are really peeved about this one, it’d really suck if Facebook weren’t allowed to continue promoting far-right misinformation, genocide denial, anti-vaccine bullshit and other goodies into everyone’s feed


yeah, default sort really messes with things but we average about a comment per minute and at least 100 submissions per day from what i can tell–there’s no shortage of activity even here, with just our ~4,000 active users and ~12,000 accounts overall, it’s just camouflaged.


i think OP may have mistaken Raddle for a mastodon instance of some kind, idk


I also find it amusing that many people say the solution is to build your own solution. Do you not want the fediverse to grow? If you want people to feel like they can just spin up their own instances, you need to stop assuming that they have the ability to do their own development, their own sysop and sysad, their own security, their own community management, their own… everything. People are not omniscient and the outright hostility towards someone asking for help, or surfacing their opinion on the matter isn’t helping.

to underscore this: if we had to do all of this this instance would not exist and/or we would have shut off applications about 10,000 people ago. we do not have the capabilities to do all of this even now with like a dozen people volunteering to help us! we are one of the largest instances on Lemmy and one of the most active! please recognize how ridiculous and burdensome it is to just throw more non-inbuilt tech at problems like this, and how exclusionary that is going to be to anybody who is without free time and extremely tech-savviness. if you want this space to grow it needs to be at a point where people can just use it and not have to worry about this shit.