stravanasu

  • 62 Posts
  • 257 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • As most who have already commented here, I’m somewhat unimpressed (and would expect more analytical subtlety from a scientist). Wittgenstein already fully dissected the notion of “free will”, showing its semantic variety of meanings and how at some depth it becomes vague and unclear. And Nietzsche discussed why “punishment” is necessary and makes sense even in a completely deterministic world… Sad that such insights are forgotten by many scientists. Often unclear if some scientists want to deepen our understanding of things, or just want sensationalism. Maybe a bit of both…















  • Thank you! What you wrote confused me at first, I thought that using @something created a post that was only visible to user something – like a direct message. Now I’ve re-read the help pages, and I see that there’s a second “@” at the bottom of the post field, to make the post only visible to something; otherwise (globe icon) is public.

    May I ask: in this latter case, what does @something achieve then? is it a sort of “user mention”, so the user is notified to have been mentioned in a public post? Will other users interested in something see it then?

    [Edit: I realize that my question was phrased in a completely misleading way. Corrected now.]

    Cheers!




  • Nothing dense in this, I don’t quite know what to write either. In my opinion what you wrote in your comment is just perfect, you’re a citizen simply expressing an honest concern, without lying – not all people are tech-savvy. It also makes it clear that it’s a letter from a real person.

    But that’s only my point of view, and maybe I haven’t thought enough steps ahead. Let’s see what other people suggest and why.





  • (also @ridethisbike@lemmy.world)

    Maybe it is pointless, maybe it is a bad idea. Maybe not. It’s difficult to predict what this kind of small-scale actions will have on the big picture and future development. No matter what you choose or not choose to do, it’s always a gamble. My way of thinking is that it’s good if people say, through this kind of gestures, “I’m vigilant, I won’t allow just anything to be done to me. There’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed”.

    Of course you’re right about supporting and choosing alternative browsers, and similar initiatives. There are many initiatives on that front as well. I’ve never used Chrome, to be honest; always Firefox. But now I’ve even uninstalled the Chromium that came pre-installed on my (Ubuntu) machines. Besides that I ditched gmail years ago, and I’ve also decided to flatly refuse to use Google tools (Google docs and whatnot) with collaborators, as a matter of principle. If that means I’m cut out of projects, so be it.

    Regarding WEI, I see your point, but I see dangers in “acknowledging” too much. If you read the “explainer” by the Google engineers, or in general their replies to comments and criticisms, you see that they constantly use deceiving, manipulative, and evasive language. As an example, the “explainer” says a lot “the user needs this”, “the user desires that”, but when you unfold the real meaning of the sentences it’s clear it isn’t something done for the user.

    This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human

    Note the “need for human users”, but the sentence actually means “websites need that users prove…”. This is just an example. The whole explainer is written in such a deceiving manner.

    The replies to criticisms are all evasive. They don’t reply the actual questions or issues, they start off a tangent and spout a lot of blah blah with “benefit”, “user”, and other soothing words – but the actual question or issue never gets addressed. (Well, if this isn’t done on purpose, then it means they are mentally impaired, with sub-normal comprehension skills).

    I fuc*ing hate this kind of deceiving, politician talk – which is a red flag that they’re up to no good – and I know from personal experience that as soon as you “acknowledge” something, they’ll drag your into their circular, empty blabber while they do what they please.

    More generally, I think we should do something against the current ad-based society and economy. So NO to WEI for me.