https://bird.makeup/ should allow you to follow twitter accounts from the fediverse. Obviously interactions don’t make it back to twitter, but could be useful nevertheless. See for example @franceskalbs@bird.makeup. Unfortunately twitter is full of trolls, so many instances block bird.makeup to avid spam from seeping through.

It’s not an alternative to xcancel as it doesn’t allow you to read feeds you don’t follow, but it’s good if you want to keep up to date with what users post.

Also as illustrated again and again, from ICE hunting down good people to cops stalking women because they are pigs, surveillance is not safety. It’s rather the opposite. I want privacy so that I can remain safe.

I don’t think anyone who ever lived in a totalitarian regime would describe it post fact as having made them safer.

They literally want to have surveillance cameras sticking out of our fucking ears and have us pay for it. And no doubt a bunch of idiots cannot wait to comply.

As other people in this thread points out, WSL is not ideal but it really saves the ass of anyone forced to use Windows at work.

I have a thinkpad handed to me from work with windows on it and all the usual restrictions. I tried for a while to use it by constantly running a virtual machine with Linux, but Windows is not a stable enough environment to host that. So in the end I just bought myself a framework laptop because nobody actually controls that I use the laptop provided by work.

Not everyone is that lucky. Canonical found a way to make their life easier. I think that’s objectively great, no matter what you think about Canonical as a company.

WSL is not generally something people use because they are afraid of changing to Linux, they use it because they are not allowed by IT to change their OS.

I have a FP5 and a similar problem to you. My FP3 before it died on me so it’s not much help.

I’m low key planning to find a second hand FP3 and use it to experiment with Linux until I find there are no big problems with using it as a daily driver. In practice I don’t really have enough time to put into it so I’ll probably keep on using /e/ for the forseeable future.

I got myself a physical code chip because MitID doesn’t work with /e/. The code chip works great.

The app is probably convenient, but I am also very happy not to depend on my phone to sign in to everything.

“workers admitted to sabotaging their company’s AI by […] intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it”

Lol. Sounds an awful lot like the company is sabotaging itself in this case.

Also he is a raging lunatic who actually speculates whether trump is the literal Antichrist in a biblical sense.

That’s a positive development on his end, but still pretty batshit.

To be fair he also gave cyanide capsules to his wife and kids, so I guess that’s just how he showed affection.

Because I thought you were obviously wrong about the 7000 years thing, here’s a history of trademarks by some guy named Olivier Pierre:

Since ancient times, merchants have been using signs or marks in trade to distinguish their products. Registrations came much later, in the 18th century with the establishment of Intellectual Property Offices.

[…]

The use of trademarks dates back thousands of years, however we can’t date their origins with precision. Some of the earliest forms of identification of marks date from Prehistory. For instance, the Lascaux cave paintings in France show bulls drawings with marks on them. Experts believe that people were using personal marks to claim ownership of livestock, long before literate societies. That was about 15.000 years ago.

The Egyptian masonry from some 6,000 years ago shows distinguishable quarry marks and stonecutters signs, to identify the source of the stone and the laborer who carried out the work to claim their wages. There were creative entrepreneurs who marketed their goods beyond their localities and sometimes over long distances. Wine amphorae marked with seals were found inside the Tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun who reigned between 1336 a.c. to 1327 a.c. over ancient Egypt.

I’ve gotten so used to think of trademarks as registered trademarks, but it makes sense that it has existed much longer in the literal sense. The earliest known law however dates back little more than 4000 years, and there’s nothing about trademarks there, so I think it’s fair to say trademark law is a lot more modern. :)

Sorry for being entirely off-topic.

I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.

On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.

Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.

“I don’t want residents to think we’re giving a stamp of approval to Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and all their oligarch owners,” said City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler at Monday’s meeting. “There’s no ethical social media companies under capitalism,” he said. “We can try to use the ones that are the least bad and reach the most Cambridge residents.”

Somebody tell this guy about Mastodon.

Also worth noting that this article is about the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Cambridge, England nor the University of Cambridge. They still apparently thrive in the gutter.

A lot to unpack here.

She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.

I feel like this summarizes the time we’re living in. Some poor bastard somewhere sitting on his computer chatting with some lady he believes he is paying for attention, but in fact he is just being pitied by some unnamed underpaid worker in the Philippines. Meanwhile they’re both filling the accounts of an online influencer and some onlyfans tech bro, both of whom are surely completely miserable in their own right.

They’re putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ fish gay

The article touches upon race here and there:

Dan is white. Nicole is Black in a city that is 94 percent white.

In these cases, we found, people charged with growing vegetables in residential communities were more likely to be people of color (usually either Black or a recent immigrant), but not always. In Orlando, Florida, Jason and Jennifer Helvenston, a white couple, plowed up their front yard to grow vegetables. “A budget thing.” The city fined them $500 a day until it was replaced with “approved ground covers.” White defendants usually found it possible to shift vague lawn laws in their favor or overturn fines, but this was rarely the case for non-white homeowners.

And for the white folks out there who are looking for yet another reason to be self-hating:

communities with vegetable bans had 30.4 percent fewer Black, 28.5 percent fewer Asians, 7.8 percent fewer Hispanics, and 12.6 percent more white people than the population of their state. Those communities were also richer, with a 73.5 percent higher median income. This demographic profile supports what geographers call an “ecology of prestige” in which residents of higher-income communities attach greater importance to turf grass.

I think a lot of people struggle to realize just how close this situation is to civil war.

Well, yeah, they’re run by a corporation, which I guess means they need to show infinite growth to return value to stockholders. If so they can keep growing on subscriptions for a while, but eventually they’ll turn on their customers. So fair enough.

I think that’s part of my problem with them honestly. They seem to always want to grow and do more, but I would rather have seen them focus on search and make the subscription more affordable. But as they need growth I guess that’s not possible.

Yeah, this is not the case as they run on a subscription based model.

I used Kagi for a while. I stopped because it’s prohibitively expensive, and rather than prioritizing lowering prices they kept giving me AI features I did not want at all - hell, it’s the kind of shit I was paying to get away from. Mix direct support for Russian companies into the mix, and you have an expensive AI fueled multi-purpose web monstrosity that supports war crimes. No thanks. I just wanted a search engine.

Their search results were good though. I wouldn’t mind supporting a subscription based model, but I’m sick and tired of tech bros and their bullshit.

Cuomo supporters such as the not-at-all-a-nazi Elon Musk.

The US was not really playing in the first place. Basically the other kids invited the US to play a game of international justice years ago, the US said “fuck that” and refused to join in, and now they are trying to put fire to the club house.

Thankfully the fact that the US are not parts of the ICC means they have way less leverage. Basically it is a problem to the ICC because they depend on American companies like Microsoft, and companies that want to do business with american companies and are afraid of sanctions.

Going down this route will do incredible harm to US companies as it’ll be obvious to everyone that they cannot be trusted.