America has always rejected fanaticism, especially since WWII. We are supposed to be E pluribus unum -- out of many, ONE. Now, the right wants America to be E unum pluribus -- out of ONE, many.
IMHO 2012 was the one that really broke their brains. The tea party types tried to get various firebrands on the ticket, but end up having to support Romney. Hey, at least he's a squeaky-clean telegenic millionaire pushing the most severe conservative fiscal policies! Proceeds to get stomped by the Obama campaign so bad that Karl Rove couldn't believe it as it was happening. THEN the establishment GOP flirts with moving to the center on immigration. The backlash against that on the right, supercharged by the mainstreaming of mobile social media (plus social justice protests and the looming Clinton campaign) was what fueled the rise of Trump.
It only contains a relatively small collection of banned reporting from various countries, not the whole Internet Archive, and only in the form of in-game books, not anything really usable IRL. It's neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.
It's just not practical -- no Minecraft server or map can realistically hold all the books in the Archive, or even just the 500k that were removed. Even if it could, you'd only be able to read them by literally taking your avatar to the book object and reading it in the tiny in-game interface.
The Minecraft thing is just a gimmick to promote awareness of press freedom and censorship, not a plausible way to deliver books to people. If the IA wanted to "set books free" they'd be better off using torrents or something like Libgen (and even then they'd still be criminally liable for making the files available, even if the publishers couldn't stop the files from being shared further).
Lemmy might be less active but doesn't make you feel like every contribution is rewarding someone who actively insulted and disrespected you and ruined something you used to enjoy. Big plus.
If it is just a repackaging of ChatGPT's existing "search the web" function, I don't know why they'd bother. It can at best summarize a page of search results for a very literal-minded query, and even then it's often lobotomized by the fact that OpenAI has made it easy for a large number of top websites to opt out of having their pages accessible to their search crawler, which means you're only getting a summary of the search result snippet and metadata. A competent user of Google search can run rings around it in terms of research, even with Google's decline in quality. I guess it makes it faster to answer basic queries for recent information not in the training data, but that hardly seems worthy of a big event.
Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don't get much from my choices. It...
Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate -- seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It's a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that's honestly pretty fair.
Japan: Faces made of living skin make robots smile ( www.bbc.com )
Japanese scientists have found a way to attach living skin to robot faces, for more realistic smiles and other facial expressions. ...
Why are Republicans/Conservatives embracing fanaticalism these days?
America has always rejected fanaticism, especially since WWII. We are supposed to be E pluribus unum -- out of many, ONE. Now, the right wants America to be E unum pluribus -- out of ONE, many.
Scientists Propose New Way to Find Aliens: Detect Their Failing Warp Drives ( gizmodo.com )
Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win ( arstechnica.com )
Reddit brings back its old award system — ‘we messed up’ ( www.theverge.com )
OpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday, sources say ( www.reuters.com )
Helldivers 2 now delisted in 177 countries ( steamdb.info )
Looks like Arrowhead might be moving forward with PSN despite "internal discussions".
What's a candy that's practically crack for you?
Oklahoma bill would require 'furries' be picked up from school by parents, animal control ( www.oklahoman.com )
Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish ( infosec.pub )
Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don't get much from my choices. It...
The splines have been reticulated ( lemmy.world )