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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I’ve gone through the list a bit and out of the most popular ones that spied on you, most were adblocks, coupon finders or AI Chatbots.

    Some notable extensions:

    • Stylish. A theming extension, I used to use this back in the day!
    • Smarty. Some sort of coupon code thing like Honey
    • Video Ad Blocker Plus for YouTube™
    • Video Downloader PLUS
    • Karma - Another coupon thing
    • Audio editor online Audacity. Some sort of web-based Audacity clone?
    • GIMP online - Same sort of thing as above with GIMP
    • Ground News Bias Checker - To be fair it probably makes sense this one sends the URL you are visiting, as it’s purpose is to look up the bias of the publication you are looking at.

    Worth a read regardless.



  • The point is that I’ve seen several comments on other posts about this vulnerability, and in the body of this one, saying that Notepad is bloated and terrible now.

    I’m offering a counterpoint that this is not necessarily bloat. It’s debatable that this is the right tool to have this feature, but it can be a useful feature.

    I’m fine with Markdown support, but I wish MS got the message about Copilot being unwanted. Not sure if they’ve added it to Notepad or not at this stage, but given all the places they’ve crammed it into I wouldn’t be surprised.









  • Hmmm…

    As the article correctly states, machine learning (“AI” is a misnomer that has stuck imo) has been used successfully for decades in medicine.

    Machine learning is inherently about spotting patterns and inferring from them. The problem, I think, is two-fold:

    1. There are more “AI” products than ever, not all companies build it in responsibly and it’s difficult for regulators to keep up with them.

    The gutting of these regulatory agencies by the current US administration does not help ofc, but many of them were already severely undermanned.

    1. As AI is normalised, some doctors will put too much trust in these systems.

    This isn’t helped by the fact that the makers of these products are likely to exaggerate the capabilities of their products. This may be reflected in the products themselves, where they may not properly communicate the degree of certainty of a diagnosis / conclusion (e.g. “30% certainty this lesion is cancerous”)


  • Well, I’d summarise the X-Files as (no spoilers):

    • Mulder has his sister (purportedly) kidnapped by aliens as a child.
    • As a result, Mulder is an occult nut who wants to spend all his time investigating supernatural stuff.
    • For some reason the FBI lets him spend all his time doing that. (Kind of nepotism maybe?)
    • They send Scully to go watch him, but she does a terrible job of that.
    • Every episode there’s a different monster or paranormal thing. Mulder says something like “It’s Bigfoot”, Scully says “That’s silly, Bigfoot isn’t real”, then they see it is Bigfoot but Scully tries to rationalise it away.
    • At some point Mulder gets tangled up in government conspiracies.
    • He makes it his side job to try and crack those conspiracies, but continues his monster-of-the-week formula of normal paranormal investigations for the most part.
    • As time goes on, there’s more and more conspiracy unwinding stuff, but they never fire him or kill him because one of the secret cabal members has a soft spot for him.

    More stuff happens in the later seasons, but I’ll leave it out for spoilers.

    TLDR; Mulder is not anti-government / FBI, he’s anti-secrecy and anti-conspiracy. He’s an occult nut who just wants to engage in his hobbies on the government dime.



  • Armand1@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlLiberal Double Standards
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    14 days ago

    When a country does war crimes, the entirety of its populace is not to blame, the systems, power structures and people in charge are.

    Most people in a country are not for wars or other attacking other countries. This is true for America and Russia alike, to the best of my knowledge (which granted, is anecdotal).

    More people should be engaged in activism and should push back against the inhumane actions of their state, and people should be less gullible to the promises of their leaders.

    Both America and Russia are overdue for major reform. Their systems are broken and many of their people brainwashed. Wishing harm on them does not help and imo is not a constructive approach. If anything, hate just begets more hate, making things worse.

    If you are going to have hate, it should be more focused on the people in power.


  • Armand1@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlLiberal Double Standards
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    14 days ago

    Splitting hairs. If you think a group of people are intrinsically worse than others, you are effectively racist.

    We can come up with new names, but ultimately it’s all the same. If you think racism means black vs white then your understanding is kindergarten level.

    If you prefer, we can use the term bigoted. That term also covers other intrinsic groups like trans, gay and disabled people among others.