jocanib

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

The criticisms of these polls is broadly correct. But I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion.

Nate Silver was bitterly attacked for weeks before the 2016 election for giving Trump a 20% chance of winning when most other (mainstream) pundits were giving him ~1%. It was bizarre to watch; they might as well have straight up told people not to bother voting.

It was Dem complacency that lost that election and thinkpieces like this do little but encourage more complacency. Trump fans will turn out. Biden-haters will turn out. People who would otherwise be holding their nose and voting for Biden will only turn out if they believe it matters. As they would have in 2016 if they'd known Trump had a realistic chance of winning.

Dems should be thanking biased Republican pollsters because Biden will only win this if a big chunk of eligible voters realise that they're going to have to hold their nose and vote for him.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Cork insulation would usually be skimmed over with plaster. You could have a look at insulatiing plaster too, but I think that needs to be thicker than cork to work well. Less munchable by critters though.

In an old building, you need to use breathable insulation, breathable plaster, and breathable paint (and breathable mortar, if you're repointing the outside). The moisture needs an escape route.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Jewish fascism, not Nazism.

Nazism is, in part, defined by its anti-semitism and, while many of Israel's supporters are anti-semitic (notably Christian Zionists but also those who insist that 'real' Jews support Israel regardless) it's just not appropriate to identify Nazism as the form of fascism practiced by Israel. It is authoritarian and supremacist but it is not specifically Nazi.

Ur-Fascism is a good read.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It's not supposed to help you spell the word? It's a comment on the danger of assuming things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Executives likely to use such a device aren’t using public transit.

Yes they are. Probably not in the country that calls it transit, mind. And lots of people would like to be able to have more private conversations in public, whether or not they're travelling at the time.

Plus, I've seen a lot of threads over the years from gamers, or the people who have to live with them, looking for something exactly like this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Install HP Smart without permission.

I checked when I saw this story a few days ago, and there it was. I uninstalled it. Today it asked for permission to install itself again. I suppose at least this time it asked and could be refused.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Is this a troll?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Stochastic terrorism is spreading hatred and fear that is likely to make someone, somewhere, commit a violent act against the targets (or individuals within the targeted demographic). In this case, specific eBay employees were told to target this specific couple to shut them up. I don't know how precise the instructions were but the targets, and the people told to target them, were not random.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The fact that there was invisibilised third party access to the accounts used as the basis for prosecutions is important in and of itself. But I'm not seeing much about the underlying reasons for it.

Fujitsu knew that Horizon didn't work properly before it was rolled out to the Post Office. They were told by their own engineers that parts of it had to be rewitten because they were so shoddy. They chose, instead, to have a team of people correcting errors in the background, without disclosing this to subpostmasters or, apparently, the Post Office.

The concern is not that Fujitsu's trouble-shooters might be deliberately falsifying accounts, there is no obvious motive for them to do so. But it does make it clear that the ramshackle system did not work properly, that Fujitsu knew that it did not work properly, and that the only errors which could be corrected were the ones that got picked up centrally, with the process for correcting them creating the potential for more human error.

Fujitsu bosses knew about Post Office Horizon IT flaws, says insider

There's an interesting report on the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance site also: Origins of a disaster (and long form version).

It is well-documented that the Post Office’s Legacy Horizon was a reconfigured version of a disastrously flawed parent project, the Benefits Payment Card. The impression given by three Secretaries of State to a Parliamentary Select Committee in July 1999 was that, once the BPC was thought to be irredeemably faulty by autumn 1998, all efforts were then focused on the reconfiguration into the Horizon project as we know it. But their evidence was far from complete. In late 1998 the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who had been warned of the system’s instability, was asked to decide the future of Horizon. The No.10 Policy Unit had advised on cancelling the BPC and the Law Officers had given a clear view on how the public sector might terminate the project. Blair’s steer, however, paid no heed.

Many extremely well-paid heads need to roll.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thank you! Surprised the report didn't mention that (I was too lazy to do a search).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

If he were said to be omnipotent, this would be an interesting conundrum. But he isn't so it doesn't really work?

 

"Last week we got a letter from Elon Musk’s X. Corp threatening CCDH with legal action over our work, exposing the proliferation of hate and lies on Twitter since he became the owner. Elon Musk’s actions represent a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research in the desperate hope that he can stem the tide of negative stories and rebuild his relationship with advertisers."

[With apologies to anyone who dislikes endless Musk/Huffman spam in this community. I put it here because misusing the law to silence independent tech researchers this has wider implications.]

 

"As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols. The most common software used in this area is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point."

168
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

"After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with people on the very impure Bluesky, where I had seen people casually talking about Mastodon being confusing and weird.

"My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space."

60
Tesla’s Dieselgate (pluralistic.net)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn't its cars, it's Tesla's business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

 

"What the ultra-rich want is to sustain and extend the economic system that put them where they are. The more they have to lose, the more creative their strategies become. As well as the traditional approach of buying media outlets and pouring money into the political parties that favour them, they devise new ways of protecting their interests.

"Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to devise justifications and to demonise, demoralise, abuse and threaten people trying to sustain a habitable planet. The junktanks devise new laws to stifle protest, implemented by politicians funded by the same plutocratic class."

257
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:

  1. Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)

  2. Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)

  3. Defederate (wait and see)

  4. Defederate with the intention of staying defederated

  5. Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too

It's all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.

In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?

I'm not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.

 

Useful Masto thread on strategy.

 

US researchers have spent years studying how conspiracy theories spread. Now they are accused of helping to suppress conservative opinions.

 

One of the most difficult problems for instances which do federate with Threads (full support for both them and the Fedipact) is the lack of moderation and very large number of bad actors on Threads. The ability to share block lists and automatically apply certain types of block would help a lot. Does anything like this already exist, or is anyone working on it?

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