“I can’t follow Mr. Trump,” McKellen added at the time. “I don’t always understand what he says and when I do, I have to admit later that I got it wrong because he changed his mind or changed his mind about what he said. He’s a very bad communicator, at least to me. Get more straightforward, Donald. And then we can take you seriously.”

A final Community thing is that over the past five or so years, Mozilla has been turning away from it's powerhouse, the Community. I have no idea why, but I can say that it's a top down decision. At some point, some folk at a high level decided that Mozilla got to where it did on it's own. It did not. The thing I was beating a drum about was that the folk working there were the lucky ones who got a paycheck, but most of their peers were folk who didn't have a badge and a @mozilla.com email address. Leadership was convinced that the people in our Community were just customers, and maybe fans. This pissed off so, so many folk, and rightly so. They had given hours or years of effort and time without compensation, because they believed they were part of a larger effort. They felt betrayed because they were betrayed. I'm sure that someone probably had a reasonable argument about “how could we let all these outsiders have say?" or "I don't like that those folk hate the amazing work we're doing promoting lemony fresh bell bottoms (or whatever trend they were chasing)?" I dunno, boss, maybe the folk using your browser actually might have solid reasons of their own and might really appreciate things that don't show up on LinkedIn top takes?

Now I understand, cheers. That's a huge difference!

Admins decide which instances federate with each other

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this true as also for Lemmy, Mastodon, and the Fediverse in general?

A reminder also to boycott, as much as possible, those thirteen major publishers – most or all of which are stealing from academia:

APRESS MEDIA, LLC; CENGAGE LEARNING, INC.; ELSEVIER INC.; HACHETTE BOOK GROUP, INC.; HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS LLC; JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.; MCGRAW HILL LLC; BEDFORD, FREEMAN & WORTH PUBLISHING GROUP, LLC D/B/A MACMILLAN LEARNING; MACMILLAN PUBLISHING GROUP, LLC; PEARSON EDUCATION, INC.; PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC; SIMON AND SCHUSTER, LLC; AND TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP LLC

How some Linux developers defeated (for now) the new OS age-verification laws. Long live those Linux developers, who "heavily criticized the mandates", made public statements, and contacted the legislators.

Because other Linux developers, instead, immediately bent over backwards to start implementing changes towards accommodating those laws; for sure they didn't heavily criticize the mandates, nor make public statements, nor contact the legislators.

Something feels fishy... The user who made this pull request has more than doubled his contributions to various repositories since January (from 20–400 to more than 1100), and this is his first pull request in the systemd repo.

From this github comment:

If you oppose this, don't just comment and complain, contact your antitrust authority today:

• US:
  • https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
  • antitrust@ftc.gov

• EU:
  • https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en
  • comp-greffe-antitrust@ec.europa.eu

• UK:
  • https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition-or-market-problem
  • general.enquiries@cma.gov.uk

• India:
  • https://www.cci.gov.in/antitrust/
  • https://www.cci.gov.in/filing/atd

• Canada:
  • https://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/frm-eng/GH%C3%89T-7TDNA5

Title:

ChatGPT broke the Turing test

Content:

Other researchers agree that GPT-4 and other LLMs would probably now pass the popular conception of the Turing test. [...]

researchers [...] reported that more than 1.5 million people had played their online game based on the Turing test. Players were assigned to chat for two minutes, either to another player or to an LLM-powered bot that the researchers had prompted to behave like a person. The players correctly identified bots just 60% of the time

Complete contradiction. Trash Nature, it's become only an extremely expensive gossip science magazine.

PS: The Turing test involves comparing a bot with a human (not knowing which is which). So if more and more bots pass the test, this can be the result either of an increase in the bots' Artificial Intelligence, or of an increase in humans' Natural Stupidity.

There's an ongoing protest against this on GitHub, symbolically modifying the code that would implement this in Chromium. See this lemmy post by the person who had this idea, and this GitHub commit. Feel free to "Review changes" --> "Approve". Around 300 people have joined so far.

The number of people protesting against them in their "Issues" page is amazing. The devs have now blocked the creation of new issue tickets or of comments in existing ones.

It's funny how in the "explainer" they present this as something done for the "user", when it's clearly not developed for the "user". I wouldn't accept something like this even if it was developed by some government – even less by Google.

I have just reported their repository to GitHub as malware, as an act of protest, since they closed the possibility of submitting issues or commenting.