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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Employers and romantic partners can be especially put off if they can’t find any trace of you online. And if they really care, they’ll dig harder to find that time where you declared bankruptcy, or you got arrested for public intoxication, or where someone deep in your past said something negative about you, and that’s all that will stick in your mind when they think of you.

    For me personally, having a simple, but relatively barren social media presence is worth it to avoid the persistent diggers, who will find something about you if they don’t see anything public.

    And besides, everything about most of us is already stored in Apple or Google’s datacenters. There’s no hiding from the deeply intrusive data collection those companies do. So having some simple information out in the open is likely better for privacy in some ways.

    If you disagree with my take, that’s fine, I just wanted to give another perspective.




  • Anyone who has used ChatGPT knows how restrictive it can be around the most benign of requests.

    I understand the motivations that OpenAI and Microsoft have in implementing these restrictions, but they’re still frustrating, especially since the watered down ChatGPT is much less performant than the unadulterated version.

    Are these limitations worth it to prevent a firehose of extremely divisive speech being sprayed throughout every corner of the internet? Almost certainly yes. But the safety features could definitely be refined and improved to be less heavy-handed.


  • Even in relatively corruption-free countries, there are often shadow mechanisms the governments uses to decide who they charge with a crime.

    Prosecutors can just say they don’t have a case, or they can fumble the case purposefully in the initial stages to give credence to the “no case” idea.

    We don’t have to look any further than how police charge themselves to see how the laws don’t fairly apply to everyone. And a simple google search will reveal that Sweden is not immune to police corruption, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

    “Disobeying police orders”, which is what Thunberg was charged with, is one of those catch-all laws that are purposefully vague in a way that allows police total discretion over how to enforce it.

    I guarantee in this case that calls were made all the way up the top of the Swedish government before police decided what to do here.

    Basically, my point is that there are so many strings to pull, even in developed countries, that it’s often possible to suss out the motivations of the administration just by examining how charges proceed.

    What this says about Thunberg getting charged for her actions? Probably nothing significant. Sweden cannot allow activists to freely disrupt their economic infrastructure, especially those involving energy. So they charge her as “normal” regardless of her celebrity status. Though they will be very careful to do everything by the book with so many eyes on the case.








  • The only thing you can’t do with an open API is exploit every dollar of value that passes through your service.

    The main difference between a Silicon Valley API and a FOSS API, is the SV API is trying to get tons of people rich as fuck by exploiting you. The FOSS API can live long and prosper by simply asking for donations every once in a while, or engaging in very light-handed monetization.

    There are like a million little nuances to this whole issue, and the lack of nuance is what Silicon Valley relies on to convince people that they must pillage their users, but that’s the gist.