And the gratuitous association between random brand X and random hot person Y surely also serves a purpose, like subliminally telling your lizard brain that you’ll become like hot person Y, or succeed in mating with them, if you buy brand X. That explains the problem, but does nothing to make it less of a problem.

Volume is the biggest problem, sure. Content is a close second. I was flabbergasted last time I was in the USA. Ads have barely any relation to what they’re selling.

A poster for shoes features a full-body shot of a half-naked model, the shoes barely visible with the whole poster within your visual field at once.

Ads for beer, travel agencies, clothes and antidepressant medicine, which should be illegal to advertise, by the way, are indistinguishable from each other: just a few happy 20-somethings in a nonspecific late afternoon outdoors setting.

A bunch of ads I saw I don’t even know what they were for, they just had hot young people and logos for companies I never heard of. No text, no nothing.

Several ads purporting to sell an “experience” when they were for the most mundane, use-it-on-autopilot products you’ve ever heard of. The products were so forgettable I can’t remember an actual example, but picture an ad selling you on the wonderful experience of using the new ad-supported monthly coat hanger subscription service and you’ve got it.

Ads for lawyers (something else that should be illegal) were on point though: “hey, do you want money you know you don’t deserve at all but can be argued in bad faith that you do? Hit me up”.

Oh, and everything is perpetually half-off, because the American consumer is apparently too stupid to realize that just means they’re lying about the price.

Samsung is cancer.

It works on 99% of consumers. As long as preventing the enshittification from stealing your data requires effort and knowledge, this will continue to be the case. Hence the arms race between enshittifiers and human beings, two grouos that are mutually exclusive.

My brother in Christ, you’re the only one who even mentioned character stats.

You should get it for free elsewhere. Don’t give this asshole your money.

What a surprise, the empathy-free text generator makes things worse when people expect it to output empathy. My condolences to the kid’s family and I hope he’s in a better place, but this sort of thing is going to happen more and more until people realize that AI chatbots only seem human-like because the human brain is so good at empathy that it projects emotions and agency onto anything, even a literal cowpile with googly eyes on top.

AI isn’t “good enough to fool us” . We’re just stupid enough to be fooled even by something as moronic as AI. What we emphasize in such a statement makes all the difference in how we handle this tech.

You should though. Not for the same reasons as Tate but you definitely should be afraid of being locked in the same room as a deranged and highly aggressive baby eater who is basically always going through violent withdrawal.

You misspelled “rapist and sex trafficker who looks like Gollum”

Either way, Trump is a pedophile who is close friends with several other pedophiles. That’s the important part.

Censorship is bad, but Facebook and X’s entire business models revolve around spreading content that is at once false and inflammatory, either just to create engagement or for more malicious purposes, and they reach a huge portion of the population directly, including children, teenagers, the mentally ill and other vulnerable populations. This requires a new understanding of accountability for spreading information.

I wouldn’t agree that it makes sense to hold a Mastodon instance responsible for what its users post, because they don’t have a financial incentive or the ability to promote misinformation at a massive scale. Twitter does. As Aristotle said, we must treat equals equally, and treat the unequal unequally according to the form and extent of their inequality.

The current CEO of Microsoft.

They can’t unless the parties agree that they can. The sneaky part is the “by continuing to use our services, you agree to the new terms” part, which is standard practice. You’d have to terminate your account before the new terms come into effect, then take them to court to make sure they didn’t keep your data around and use it to train their AI anyway because they “didn’t notice” that that particular content belonged to someone who didn’t accept the new terms.

Nothing suspicious at all about being contacted by the subject of a news story just to say it’s not newsworthy. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

These are all valid points but they don’t preclude the existence of an open-source alternative to MBFC, which is what the commenter you replied to was asking.

No, that was John McAffee.

To be fair, we absolutely should outlaw at least 99% of all currently practiced forms of advertising and make it so that new forms of advertising have to be whitelisted by a panel of psychiatrists, sociologists, environmentalists and urban planners before they’re allowed.

… with blackjack and hookers.

In other words, the consent of a corporation is more important than the consent of a human being… for the public distribution of that human being’s likeness in an intimate context. Holy dystopia, conservatives are fucked in the head.