What an odd title. WorldCoin never masked its biometric collection effort as “public art”. There was never any mention of art anywhere in the white paper or anything. Art has literally nothing to do with any of what WorldCoin is doing.

The concerns about WorldCoin are absolutely genuine and worthy of public discussion, but this particular title is just clickbait from an art publication trying to draw traffic about a trendy but unrelated AI and crypto topic.

Another voice for the Brother laser printer, a truly dependable workhorse.

If Netflix’s reporting on the matter is to be believed, then it’s an ironic outcome considering the wave of strongly-opinionated comments predicting the death of Netflix following the crackdown on password sharing. I guess convenience and habits really trump principles and posturing.

Suck it Karl Popper!

Just because he called it an apparent paradox doesn’t mean that Popper disagrees with you. He merely said that open societies should first fight intolerance with reason and civil discourse; but if that fails, the tolerant majority should hold the right to suppress intolerant opinions.

I think I speak for most of the world when I say “Netflix still does DVDs??”

I mean, you literally do, because that service apparently only existed in the US.

In the US, perhaps. But the logic that “if you work at a Catholic school you gotta do their shit” is precisely the problem here, and what needs to change. In many other countries, a contract is unenforceable if it contains discriminatory terms. The onus ought to be on religious schools to adapt to contemporary societal norms if they want to engage with society through labor, procurement, etc contracts. Otherwise we’re just tolerating and perpetuating little islands of discrimination and bigotry in the name of religious freedom.

Title is borked - what was on sale were credentials to remotely view home cameras in which child nudity may occasionally be involved, and still pictures of the same. There is no mention of abuse nor deliberate exploitation of children. It’s still completely fucked up, illegal, and a massive privacy breach, though.

Le pire, ce sont les sites qui tronquent silencieusement les mots de passe trop longs au lieu de les rejeter…

I miss it too - the curated experience after years of filtering out the crap and muting the nonsense, the sleek UX in Apollo, and the many friendly and familiar voices left behind who didn’t make the switch.

My advice would be - don’t give up on the Fediverse just yet. It will take a bit of time for the dust to settle and these multiple federated communities to find their voice. Like on Reddit, don’t ever browse /all - it’s just a litany of low-effort memes. Be deliberate about which communities you sub to, and browse by /sub. There’s enough quality content here to fill a feed, though perhaps not in any single community where the critical mass has not yet been reached to offer fresh content throughout the day.

Cette question se pose également dans la perspective, non pas de faire le choix entre sauver l’humanité ou la planète Terre, mais dans celui de laisser la technologie graduellement remplacer la biologie.

L’un des fondements du transhumanisme est l’idée que la prochaine évolution d’Homo sapiens ne sera pas biologique, mais technologique. Il suffit pour s’en convaincre de constater qu’Homo sapiens d’aujourd’hui est identique à celui d’il y a 200.000 ans. A l’inverse, la technologie croit à une vitesse exponentielle ; y compris dans les domaines de la médecine et de l’intelligence artificielle, qui impactent ou concurrencent l’humain.

En extrapolant, se pose l’expérience de pensée du “bateau de Thésée” appliquée à nos corps. Personne ne remet en question qu’un homme équipe de lunettes n’est plus humain ; ni celui doté d’une prothèse de jambe ; ou d’un pacemaker ; etc.

Mais si l’on continue de remplacer ou d’augmenter les fonctions corporelles grâce à la technologie, à quel moment l’individu n’est plus un Homo sapiens, mais une nouvelle espèce (“cyborg”) ? Quid si le génie génétique permet de concevoir des humains davantage adaptés au monde moderne ? A l’exploration spatiale ? A abandonner le tribalisme et sa violence qui caractérisent nos cerveaux de primates ?

Car par ailleurs, si l’on refuse de “cybernétiser” les humains, ils seront de plus en plus à la traîne face à l’intelligence artificielle et ses instantiations physiques (robots de plus en plus agiles, performants, et passablement humanoïdes). Quid si ces humanoïdes atteignent la sentience ? Devrions-nous les traiter comme nos subordonnés, ou comme nos enfants aptes à prendre notre relève dans l’univers ?

Est-il finalement souhaitable de prendre le contrôle de l’évolution humaine, grâce à la technologie (y compris génie génétique), plutôt que de laisser l’évolution, processus éminemment lent et stochastique par nature, faire son œuvre avec tous les “déchets” qu’elle engendre (mutations délétères qui tuent par millions) ?

Et si au final nous pouvions (grâce à la technologie) donner naissance à une nouvelle espèce, à l’intelligence et aux performances supra-humaines, ne serait-ce pas une forme de spécisme (c’est à dire de racisme appliqué aux espèces plutôt qu’aux races) que de refuser de faire converger l’humanité en elle, et de laisser derrière nous notre passé d’Homo sapiens, tout comme Homo sapiens a laissé derrière lui Néanderthal et Cromagnon ? L’humanité se limite-t-elle à sa forme actuelle, que nous aurions arbitrairement choisi de figer dans le temps par égoïsme envers nos ancêtres et nos successeurs possibles ?

spez : je recommande la lecture du livre de Ed Regis “The Great Mambo Chicken or the Transhuman Condition” sur le sujet. Drôle et provocateur.

I agree that investors requiring demonstrable returns has played a role in this cycle. Steve Huffman is desperate to show profits ahead of Reddit’s IPO, and Musk is desperate to recoup his $44B investment in the blue bird.

However, I believe that there’s also another consideration. Many of today’s platforms started out with a somewhat idealistic intent. Jack Dorsey wanted Twitter to be an open protocol, though never quite achieved his vision. Aaron Swartz contributed to the open design of early-days Reddit. Facebook was meant as a non-profit university community builder. Google has a “do no evil” motto. Etc.

The original user-first approach of these platforms created organic growth and encouraged ambassadorship by motivated users who became frequent contributors, unpaid moderators, etc.

Over time, however, people moved on (Dorsey, or very sadly Swartz) or got greedy from success (Huffman, Zuckerberg). The focus shifted from user-first to advertiser-first. Platforms like Reddit still used a loss-leader approach of losing investor money on frills such as API because it helped sustain growth for a while longer.

But once critical mass was reached, there was no longer a need to coddle the most enthusiastic and long-time users. They had exhausted their usefulness. The platforms could finally embrace the advertiser-first model in which the user, not the content, becomes the product.

So here we are with the worst of both worlds. Reddit could have offered a reasonable paid API plan that would have allowed the thriving third-party ecosystem to retain the power users and contributors. Instead, it went all-in with a walled-garden approach buoyed only by advertising money, even if it means that the content quality dwindles. Twitter also went “private” in the sense that an account is now required to even view the content, and aggressively promotes its paid plan to users –who are still subject to interstitial ads and promoted content– even for basic hygiene features such as 2FA.

As for why Reddit, Twitter, and Discord shit the bed at almost the same time, part of it has to do with VC pressure (as mentioned by the parent), and part of it is they are the same generation (more or less) of social networks and are reaching an equivalent stage where buyout (Twitter) or IPO (Reddit) is the next logical step.

The writing is on the wall that a paradigm shift is in order. The pendulum has considerable momentum, though, and will allow the centralized, walled-garden web to thrive for a while longer, just like Facebook survives catering to mostly an audience of unsavvy boomers. But the swing back will gradually enable alternative models to grow that are based on open platforms and federated content. We’re just very, very early in this cycle.

Oh, and sorry for the long-ass essay, I got a bit carried away.

I’ve been online since circa 1993 and for the first decade or so, discoverability was a challenge due to the lack of efficient search engines like Altavista or (later) Google.

Webrings consisted in individual website owners (e.g., on Geocities) placing one or more banners at the bottom of their webpage linking to a directory of like-minded sites.

This was when “surfing the web” meant exactly that - you would surf from one site to another using hyperlinking within web communities. Bookmarking was then how you kept track of the most interesting sites you came across.

Now there is hardly a need for hyperlinking and bookmarking, since much of the content is centralized on a few platforms, and search engines take care of the discoverability of niche content.