Is this a joke about the EU’s desire to curb misinformation? Like, I’m 90% sure that you can’t be serious.

Everything you wrote is factually wrong.

Europe has a lot less social resistance to this stuff. You can see it here. Watching the watchmen turns out to be one of the best tools for defending democracy. And still the call is for more censorship. It’s insane.

Did you pick up, like 2 weeks ago, when Italy fined Cloudflare for not censoring hard enough? Italy is literally ruled by a fascist party. They literally present themselves as being in the tradition of Benito Mussolini. No one bats a fucking eye.

Of course, the censorship is about copyright; protecting the Italian media industry. Maybe people here are too young or unpolitical to remember Italian media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi. In the 1990s, he used his media empire to get himself elected prime minister and escape prosecution for corruption. At one point, he used his office and some lies to get an underage prostitute, he’d been fucking at one of his sex parties, released from police custody. That guy was Italy’s longest serving prime minister since WW2. He then was an MEP until 2022.

Italian intellectuals, identified Trump as a Berlusconi-type populist 10 years ago, when Berlusconi was fading out and Trump rising. Maybe something could be learned from that experienced.

So it’s not like Europeans believe that “It can’t happen here.” It is happening all the time. I think the pro-censorship people are simply so privileged that they can’t conceive of the state ever not being on their side. They seem to feel that being harassed or doxed on the net is the worst that could ever happen to them, personally, and they might be right.

No offense. I just never know how widely understood such facts are. People do not seem to appreciate that open social media requires that the data be stored anywhere.

Right. Merely making the recording may already be criminal; not only sharing it. I didn’t want to sound too alarmist. But when we’re ad it. Pixelating the faces means processing personal data which may already be illegal.

What it boils down to is this: If some lawless government goons arrest anyone recording their deeds and seized their phones, no honest, law-abiding judge or police officer would see a problem with that. Anyone live-streaming, just in case, would be guilty of violating fundamental rights in the eyes of all defenders of European values. The government could rely on the technical and organizational infrastructure to enforce GDPR to suppress inconvenient videos without bending the law.

But no problem. Freedom of information is in the constitution. So you just go to court and insist on your right. Of course, a far right government will have packed the highest courts with its people, and so you lose. Well, everyone has rights. Freedom of information isn’t everything. No problem there.

That’s something that may cause some grief in Europe. Moderation in ATproto is opt-in. You don’t have to subscribe to a US moderation service or any moderation service. One will probably want someone to filter spam, harassment, or content that one finds objectionable. But moderation according to EU regulations is about removing content that other people don’t want you to see. I’m not sure if that’s going to be super popular.

how the data is used and stored

That’s a tricky one and will potentially cause a lot of problems to open social media in Europe. Just know that there is no such thing as “looking” at a post, comment, or profile. It gets downloaded to your device and stored for as long as it’s needed, or maybe longer.

Just bear in mind that many Fediverse instances are in Europe and Europe has no free speech culture. EG In Germany, people who upload videos of police are commonly prosecuted for GDPR violations. It violates the fundamental rights of the police officers. When European activists oppose Big Tech in the name of democracy, they want more censorship; more government control.

Y’all will enjoy this: https://w-social.eu/

The company Bluesky Social PBC created the microblogging service Bluesky and the ATProtocol. It’s like the company Mastodon created the microblogging service Mastodon. There are other services built on ATproto that are EG like Reddit/Lemmy. But these have not taken off significantly.

The ecosystem is mature enough so that you can participate in Bluesky without using services offered by Bluesky Social PBC and without making sacrifices. For the most part, you can move without abandoning your account.

It is true that the servers are mostly run by the Bluesky company, but so what? Email is mostly run by Google and no one seems to think that’s a problem.

The option to self-host your identity piggybacks on the DNS-system. A certain domain name resolves to the server where you store your ATProto identity. As long as you control the domain name, you control your identity. The ATProto identity is simply a pointer to where you currently store your data that your followers/contacts can use to find your content (IIRC).

The non-selfhosted alternative is a central identity service run by Bluesky. Unfortunately, the identity cannot be moved for obvious reasons. It would be good if there were some more options there. In principle, if the ATProto identity was tied to the government identity, that would make it moveable and non-hijackable. For some people, celebrities and such, that would be a good option.

Regardless of whether you selfhost your identity, you can selfhost a Personal Data Server (PDS), which stores your data and makes it available to the network. The PDS can move, cause that’s what the identity is for.

Feeds and other stuff is again independent.

The basic building block of the Fediverse is the instance, right? Every instance is its own self-contained, centralized social media service that optionally interacts with other instances. EG Trump’s Truth Social is a Mastodon instance that does not federate.

ATProto takes a more radical approach. Everything is modular. There is no instance or anything that is complete in itself. It’s more like the WWW. You can make websites in different ways. These are made findable through search engines like Google or Bing, which are not affiliated with companies offering web hosting.

ATProto takes everything apart. It tries to avoid choke points or lock-in as far as possible to thwart monopolies. You have a server that stores your data (posts, etc …), called a PDS. You can move your data to a different server. An identity provider tells others where your account is at any moment. A relay collects all the posts that people make and makes them available for further processing. This can be used to create algorithmic feeds, or moderation (aka labelling). These things are independent of each other and can be independently offered by different parties. You can pick and chose which to use, though there isn’t a whole lot of choice yet.

ETA: No idea what W wants to offer in that regard.

Looks like W is being built on ATProto.

https://atprotocol.dev/w-for-atproto/

https://bsky.app/profile/ducky.ws/post/3md2b73w3g22j

I wasn’t clear enough. Turing was wondering if machines can think. But there is no sufficiently clear definition of the word “thinking” that could be used to answer the question.

If you want to know if LLMs are AI, you can just look up the definition of AI and check if LLMs meet the criteria. You cannot do that to answer if they are thinking.

So let’s take a task, which we agree takes thinking, and see if a machine can do it as well as a human. If it can, then the machine must be able to think. That’s how you think as a scientist.

The test itself is similar to modern, placebo-controlled medical trials. That was not SOTA at the time, showing how clear thinking he was. Perhaps the WP entry on RCTs helps to understand how logic and reason may be applied in the face of uncertainty.

But of course the test revolves around the definition of a word. Such definitions are fundamentally arbitrary. That means that the test itself is arbitrary. Science is rarely concerned with colloquial definitions. Usually you come up with some sort of operational definition that you use for the purpose of inquiry. The only question is, if that definition is useful.

When Turing proposed the test, he was talking philosophically about whether machines can think. He observed that we are not likely to agree on what “thinking” means. So we cannot simply test if a machine does that.

He proposed that we might instead agree that some task requires thinking. If a machine can perform that task, then the machine can think. Turing told of a three-person party game called the “imitation game”, in which an interrogator asks questions of a man and a woman in another room in order to determine the correct sex of the two players.

It’s very rational, very scientific. In the words of William James: "A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all."

In light of his sexuality, It’s interesting that he chose that game. Looking at the transgender issue today, I think it’s a given that he wouldn’t have chosen that example now. Or believed that people are rational enough to be swayed by facts and logic.

I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.

How would that actually work? Like, you’d have pro-Trump and anti-Trump companies that only employ pro- and anti-Trump employees and only serve pro- and anti-Trump customers? What happens when someone who is basically pro-Trump thinks that ICE goes too far?

To me, this feels like school politics.

OMG! Jaden invited ICE to his birthday party! I’m never talking to him again!

Oh No! ICE nabbed Julio! I’m telling the teacher and they will get suspended!

Probably a good number of these people are actual children. I know there are adults who have broadly similar ideas. For someone living a very sheltered and privileged life, being trolled on the internet is the absolute worst form of aggression they ever experience. Particularly in Europe, activists and politicians talk about “digital violence”, which tells you that they have no sense of proportion.

Trump being able to clone Mastodon is not the same as letting Trump on Mastodon.social

The Mastodon devs made a choice in releasing it as open source. They could have decided to pick and chose who is allowed to use it. It was completely foreseeable, that the software would be used for something like Gab or Truth.Social. When they release update, they know that these will also be used by such services.

This is merely a statement of fact, not criticism. They chose not to exercise power or become arbiters of good and evil. That is laudable.

Bluesky is a centralized platform and their mods don’t ban Nazis.

I get it. You feel that tech companies should deny service to bad people. For example, to a government agency acting on behalf of a president elected by a solid majority of the popular vote.

I agree that the voters got it wrong, but I don’t think that the rich and powerful vetoing voters will lead to good outcomes. Look at medieval Europe. Life got better with democracy, not with a supposedly more just king.

The tech lord most in line with your ideas is Elon Musk, except that he’s kinda nazi. So, on a purely practical note, it doesn’t seem very likely that tech companies being more political would lessen racism.

Do you think it would be better if all the billionaires, who are probably mostly non-nazi, were activist like him?

So, trying to parse what’s going on here.

Bluesky has verified that an account claiming to belong to the US government agency ICE really is controlled by that agency. Somehow that shows that Mastodon is better. Because Trump has his own Mastodon instance and doesn’t need anyone to vouch for his goons?

Looking at the comments, maybe the issue is rather that the Bluesky company provides services to ICE. Tech companies should refuse service. Huh. I guess there is more diversity of opinion on Lemmy than I had thought, regarding the power of tech companies, democracy, and law.