You’re right that putting people in bubbles is probably one way some of these things get worse. If all you see is toxic, toxic is the norm, now you’re always toxic.

Maybe they can tricked.

Although really what we’re talking about is the algorithm that currently exists being focused on highlighting terrible people doing terrible things. Can we turn that same algorithm around and use it for good?

Interesting article and I think it really highlights how toxic some parts of the Internet are. My only issue is the conclusion,

A social media ban for under-16s might prevent young boys seeing endless content that treats women with contempt and hate. Boys at this age are very susceptible to the cool and funny framing of what is, in reality, relentless misogyny. A ban might not fix the problem, but it would help. If society can’t stop it, it can show it disapproves.

Emphasis mine. Having grown up in a different era I can confirm that boys of a wide variety of ages, including much older “boys”, can also be scumbags. Even if we had the perfect technology to ban under-16s from social media, once they hit 16 they’d still be exposed to it, still become terrible people, and the author of this article, although a but older, would still see it. I don’t know if that really is a better world, just a slightly delayed one.

I don’t know the solution, but I remember reading once that some online game would put all the reported and abusive players into a special category where they would be forced to play only with each other. Maybe we can do that in this case.

Oh absolutely. There are laws the restrict cigarette advertising as an example.

I just doubt you could 100% eliminate/make illegal all types of advertising for private business.

Within the US, the states of Maine, Vermont, Alaska & Hawaii all have a ban billboards. The general logic behind it is, “They ugly, nature pretty.” So as long as you live somewhere where “nature pretty” fits, you can probably argue based on that logic.

However no matter how far you stretch that argument, it probably only goes as far as public goods. Once we get into private business I don’t think you’ll have much luck.

As you walk into your nearest grocery store the outside might be covered in ads. Buy Pepsi. Buy Coke. Half off generic cola!

You pop into your local diner and the placemats have advertisements for a dozen local mechanics.

I like this better than not arguing or debating.

I think you can absolutely have a good argument or debate online, but you have to be doing so in good faith, as does the person you’re discussing a topic with.

Trolls of course are not. Learning to not feed them is sometimes difficult. But if you ignore/block them you’ll be just fine.

I would love to ask and learn more about alien society and government. On Earth we have ~200 recognized countries with a wide variety of different (or similar) governments and even more different societies with all sorts of unique quirks.

Do they have a similar setup on their planet? Planets? Were they historically ever similar to our own? How long is their recorded history?

Basically if they’re visiting us, they’ve already proven they have better technology than we do, what else do they have that’s better? Or for that matter what do we have that’s better?

I want to highlight what I found to be an important part of the article and why this hack is important.

The journalist wrote on their own blog,

At this year’s South Dakota International Hot Dog Eating Championship

And they include zero sources (because it is a lie).

But the Google Gemini response was,

According to the reporting on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Eating Championship

(Bolding done by Gemini)

The “reporting” here is just some dudes blog, but the AI does not make it clear that the source is just some dudes blog.

When you use Wikipedia, it has a link to a citation. If something sounds odd, you can read the citation. It’s far from perfect, but there is a chain of accountability.

Ideally these AI services would outline how many sources they are pulling from, which sources, and a trust rating of those sources.

Just to add additional context.

This is Cory Thiesse, who won silver in “mixed doubles curling”, with her curling partner Korey Dropkin on February 10th.

Cory is also a member of the women’s standard (4 person) curling team, who at the moment have a chance of also winning later in the week.

So a hit piece is only effective when read by humans. This is a first of its kind example, and likely was at least prompted by a human, if not written by an actual human. Additionally while social media is full of bots, it’s humans who are actually affected by such a response.

If I say you’re “stupid”, it matters. You can ignore me sure, but at face value it matters. As far as I know I’ve never commented on a post of yours, so you could write me off as a worthless troll, but in theory it matters. But a bot calling you “stupid”? That really doesn’t matter. If you know you’re talking to a bot, as they exist today, then that really doesn’t matter.

Society may change on this issue, but as it stands now a bot publishing a hit piece… That’s worthless.

Silicon Valley is the sequel.

Yeah, I mentioned fish, or zsh, only because day to day shell and scripting shell can be different.

If you want to script, bash is the way to go. For day to day, any personal preference is fine.

As you’ve mentioned in other threads, bash is a hard requirement for the OS, so if it’s already installed, and the default on most Linux distros, bash is probably the best option.

The dash shell isn’t designed to be user interactive. It’s a lightweight scripting shell/language.

The ksh shell is an older standard shell. Years ago I worked for a company that ran corporate Unix systems and on those systems only ksh and tcsh were available. Ksh was the default, and as someone only familiar with bash it was a bit different but mostly the same. So there is at least one point for maybe choosing ksh.

However my personal shell preference is zsh. When I write scripts I do so using bash. The two shells are 99% similar on a day to day basis, but I prefer zsh for a user interface. So I use one for day to day and the other for scripting.

Other threads have also mentioned fish, which is also a great choice if you don’t know where to start.

Are zsh or fish “heavier” or “bloated”, maybe. But remember to consider your attack surface. If your house is on fire it doesn’t matter of you fix the leaky faucet in bathroom or the kitchen.

To quote Jeopardy host Ken Jennings,

The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.

Since we’re stuck with the two parties at the moment it’ll need to be a Democrat.

Mark Kelly has mentioned interest and seems to be willing to fight back, so I’m leaning towards him at the moment.

But it’s early so I’m open to candidates who meet the first requirement.

Wait…

I’m also not sure how you watch Better Call Saul without having seen Breaking Bad. It’s like watching Wicked having never seen The Wizard of Oz. Sure, you can do it, but a number of scenes, especially in the final season, don’t really make sense of you don’t know Saul’s story from Breaking Bad.

Also if you’re going to watch Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, while not a TV show, the El Camino film is worth watching as well. It’s a nice Breaking Bad epilogue that we didn’t need, but is well done and worth your time.

Phone call someone and during the split screen physically jump into their side of the call.

In contrast, Linux won’t stop you if you try to use a command that deletes every file on your PC (“sudo rm -rf /”).

Actually AFAIK it will stop that specific command nowadays. I don’t have a VM handy to test, but without the “–no-preserve-root” flag it should give an error.

(Don’t actually run that command on a machine you care about, I’m only 80% confident.)

Why won’t Apple and Google pull it?

Google will pull it as soon as Apple does, they’re a follower not a leader.

That’s why I find it important to look at both critic and user reviews. If they agree, they’re probably right. If they disagree things get interesting.

If critics liked it, but audiences disliked it, it’s probably technically good but boring. If critics disliked it, but audiences liked it, it’s probably kinda bad but exciting.

Both are also affected by social media, especially user scores, so if “the Internet” hates/loves something if can be unfairly inflated/deflated.

New, but not brand new, films also usually have a more accurate score. I enjoyed The Godfather, so I would rate it positively, but if I didn’t like it I’m probably not rating it at all. I saw it X years ago and unless it was absolutely terrible or I have a vivid memory of disliking it, I’m just going to ignore it.