Earlier this month, Senator Lindsey Graham became the fourth member of the US Senate since 2013 to have died while in office and the sixth member of Congress to have died while serving in the 119th Congress. Because the US is the greatest democracy in the world, Graham has now been replaced in the Senate by his sister Darline.

That really is a tremendous paragraph.

The important thing is this: can you still deliver lectures to the rest of the world on the Importance of Freedom Of Speech, and the fact that only Yanks have it because Elon can worship Hitler on the Internet?

And the answer is, yes. Yes you can, and always will. So the actual reality isn’t really important. Because all you actually learned from 1984 is that of the government tells you that you have freedom of speech, and also tells you that Eastasia and Eurasia don’t, That’s Good Enough For You and you’re The Free-est People In The World.

I don’t buy the Epstein files distraction, because it’s pretty clear the US public don’t give a shit. What would the Epstein files even prove?

You could release an authentic video of Trump fucking an 8 year old and then throwing the lifeless body down a laundry chute and most Yanks would just shrug and say “whaddaguy”. Hell, if the kid was an immigrant’s, his ratings would probably go up.

There is nothing in the Epstein files that could possibly touch Trump. It’s all already priced in and you elected him anyway.

I turned kitty’s bed - that she slept in as a kitten, but then spent about 5 years refusing to acknowledge - back into a bed by putting an electric heating mat under it. Hey presto, it’s back in favour!

No idea why the downvotes here.

I mean, someone up there just unironically called someone else a “class traitor”.

This is not a crowd that’s hanging straight on its hinges.

A brigade of yanks with “you just can’t understand how many solar systems fit in Texas, though” is incoming…

Be fair though, “saving from a GUI app” is not exactly Linux’s strong point either.

Click “save”; wonder which badly written save dialog this app is going to use; is it the one with the save button at the top? Or the bottom? Will it actually appear, or will it pop up below the window for Reasons, making you think the dammed thing has crashed? Maybe it’s one with a list of favourite locations in the left maybe it’s not… Maybe they’re actually my favourite locations, or maybe it’s an entirely different set of the developer’s. If I’m lucky, there’s a way to navigate to my home directory without going all the eay to the root and working up from there, more than likely not…

Best of all, it’s one of those Save dialogues that thinks it’s smart to enumerate the entire goddamned filesystem, network mounts and all, before it will respond to any input at all, leading to the window manager eventually fretting that maybe the application has crashed… Or perhaps it’s one of those ones related to Dolphin that thinks it understands WebDAV mounts better than davfs, except that it actually doesn’t and you end up saving to a temporary directory just so you can move the file where you actually wanted it from the commandline…

aaaaaargh

Don’t get me wrong, I use Linux on all my machines and have been a Unix user since NetBSD 0.8 (33 years, fml…) But clicking “save” or “open” is one of those things that has me shaking my head thinking “how can it STILL be this bad” every time.

TL;DR: “I had a child and now that makes me THE MOST SPECIAL PERSON IN THE WORLD and why doesn’t anyone RECOGNISE how special I am for God’s sake PLEASE VALIDATE ME”

Either it wears off or the brat ends up a serial killer…

Honestly? Let the wave of neo-ludditism pass?

Is it necessary to respond to every Internet fad? Ignore it and eventually it will go away. Pretending otherwise is like thinking King Cnut can hold back the tide.

(Or, if that’s not good enough - just ban promotion entirely. I don’t give a rat’s arse if code was AI generated or artisanally hand-woven onto magnetic cores by Jeff Minter in a kaftan - the real problem is spam, so just stop all promotional posts and the problem goes away.)

Christ.

When will the forward-planning sub-committee of the AI tagging steering group be meeting? I presume they’re going to need to submit a motion to the ways-and-means council sub-sub-committee first and then maybe we can expect a notice on the procedure to follow for interim planning permission to write a post? Will interim planning permission allow the post to be made (subject to the countersignature of the automated post approval bot) or should it be saved in Drafts and then a separate submission (noting the interim permission and any objections received in the consultation period) be made to the full plenary session of the zoning committee?

Or do we just say “fuck this shit” and find another group?

I mean sure, Anthropic are pricks, but “they did exactly what the license I put on my code said they could” is probably not the way to highlight that.

Because being pedantic just to try and make yourself feel superior to someone who was posting in good faith is obnoxious behaviour that deserves to be called out. You knew exactly what they meant, but thought you’d truth-bomb your way in for what, exactly? You did nothing to actually address their point - that the messages being identical is prima facie evidence that (original AI generated or not) it was probably candidates copy-and-pasting a standard form response, which could (and was) be done long before LLMs were a thing - and instead just added “look how clever I am”.

Dick behaviour doesn’t deserve a charitable response.

You really need to learn to read who you are replying to.

Not my interpretation.

And what you were doing was “well, akshuallying”. Own it.

So your hyopthesis is that instead of a load of people cutting and pasting the same response (AI generated or otherwise,) they all cut and pasted the exact same prompt into exactly the same model with exactly the same context running on exactly the same hardware, and went to the trouble of also fixing the same seed?

That certainly seems the simpler explanation.

Unfortunately, the data doesn’t appear to be collected in a systematic way across the whole country, but one police force - West Yorkshire Police - does have data going back long enough for a trend, at least for the arrests on the Communications Act.

For West Yorkshire Police, the arrests under the Communications Act are pretty much constant from 2008 (around 200) to 2024 (actually a little lower, 152).

Given the changes in social media penetration over that time (things like the iPhone and Twitter barely even existed in 2008,) for the rate of arrests to have remained constant throughout I would suggest strongly indicates that there is a very strong element of “absolutely nothing to do with social media” in those numbers The Times quoted.

The numbers for the Malicious Communications Act are less easy to parse, because they don’t go back far enough, and also they show a massive drop in the last 6 years.

All of this of course could be slightly moot - because in 2023, a new act (the Online Safety Act) was passed which specifically relates to “arresting people for their social media posts” [TM Musk et al].

In 2024, West Yorkshire Police made 5 (five! Count them! Hell, you could invite them all round to your house for dinner) arrests under the OSA.

“Thousands” of people are categorically not being arrested for their social media posts in the UK every year. Or even every decade.

Except the number cited isn’t for social media posts. It’s all arrests under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, which covers far more than social media (as you can probably guess, given social media didn’t even exist in 1988.)

That includes arrests for threatening phonecalls, sharing indecent images (child porn and the like - you lot who bang on about Epstein all the time are meant to be against that, right?) - and not only on social media - stalking and harrasment adjacent offenses like nuisance calling, and a whole host of other offences completely unrelated to social media.

In other words, it’s complete bollocks. And all from one woeful newspaper ‘story’. Congratulations for providing an excellent example of how one right-wing rag with an agenda can confect a story, then have it cited by a load of other ‘sources’ that don’t do anything beyond cutting and pasting the original lie, and then suddenly you’ve made a whole new fact.

Welcome to Lemmy!

Thousands? Source?

What a dumb take.

I make full use of my gigabit broadband (in both the places I have it - Bucharest and Bangkok), so there very much is a “point”. I’m not going to bother enumerating all the ways I use it though, because the response will just be “ohhhh, but normal users don’t do that”. But exceptions are normal - the mistake being made here is assuming that you represent the whole human race just because you don’t have a need for something.

Personally I think sanitary towels are useless, because I’ve never needed one and indeed the majority^* of the population don’t need them…

This is just a cope post; “gigabit broadband is so fucking expensive in the UK I’m trying to justify it not being necessary”. My gigabit fibre in Bucharest costs about 8eur/month, in Bangkok 15eur/month. I suspect if broadband in the UK were reasonably priced, this blog post would never have been conceived…

^* before you argue, remember (pre-)puberty and menopause are things.