abbenm

What’s the issue if they’re ONLY using this info to improve my experience

Suppose they start out entirely benevolent. That commitment must be perpetually renegotiated in upheld over time. As the landscape changes, as the profit motive applies pressure, as new data and technologies become available, as new people on the next step of their careers get handed the reigns, the consistency of intention will drift over time.

The nature of data and privacy is such that it's perpetually subjected to these dynamic processes. The fabric of any pact being made, is always being rewoven, first with little compromises and then with big ones.

SSRN is a kind of vast warehouse of academic papers, and one of the most ~~excited~~ cited and well-read ones is called "I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy."

The essence of the idea is that privacy is about more than just hiding bad things. It's about how imbalances in access to information can be used to manipulate you. Seemingly innocuous bits of information can be combined to reveal important things. And there are often subtle and invisible harms that are systematic in nature, enabling surveillance state institutions to use them to exercise greater amounts of control in anti-democratic ways, and it can create chilling effects on behavior and free speech.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

On the contrary I would say it is exactly Schrodinger. The actual physical world itself can be in a superposition of states until the point of observation/measurement, and that whole thought experiment is meant to highlight the absurdity in a vivid but somewhat comical way.

Probably my 2008 Suzuki Reno. It's coolant system was made of such brittle crumbly plastic that it would crack and leak out all the coolant, and I didn't realize this at first I didn't know to look for it, so I get off the highway after driving 20 miles just in time for huge plumes of white smoke to be coming out of the front of my car.

I got it fixed only for it to crack again and leak again. And it became this nightmare of whack a mole where I'm constantly adding coolant, constantly checking my temperature gauge, constantly bringing it in to be fixed.

And then the whole engine died on the highway and I had to pull over while driving to my new job.

Not when they use the conjunction “so”. If they’d used “and”, then sure - there could be any number of reasons. Using “so” as a conjunction like that in the sentence gives it an equivalent definition of “therefore"

You're technically correct in your narrow focus on the conjunction "so," but you are missing the bigger picture. Yes, "so" generally functions as a logical connector like "therefore," meaning that the first statement is directly causing the second. Their sentence could be read as "Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it's harder for users to investigate," which isn't a comprehensive or precise statement on its own.

But that's a pretty pedantic take. The point that they were making doesn't rely on an exacting technical breakdown of the closed-source nature of Vivaldi. Rather, they're making a general observation that closed-source projects tend to be harder to investigate. With that in mind, the use of "so" is informal and reflects a broad conclusion that aligns with general knowledge about open vs. closed-source software. Closed source inherently implies limitations on access, which, while not exhaustive in this single sentence, still holds weight in the general sense.

I wouldn't rely on them for predictions, but I do think they can be a reasonable proxy for people's beliefs and/or assumptions. And I would say they at least loosely track the truth..

NBA betting is not perfectly predictive, but there's a reason the Celtics are at the top and the Pistons are at the bottom.

Trump outperformed polling in both of the last elections, and the polls are much closer now, so if he even just outperforms the same amount as before he wins.

I think the polls have tried to correct for this, and I also believe Kamala has huge and sophisticated ground game operation aimed at turnout while Trump's team seems completely disorganized. So I wonder if that advantage in operational sophistication counts for anything.

Right, and it's possible that what's really happened outdistances what's publicly known.

I still like to believe that our systems are resilient against such shenanigans, that Georgia Court just threw out some sketchy b******* that Trump affiliated election officials were trying to pull. Literally every Trump court case fell on its face last time around.

But I'm a lot more worried now. When the history of this election's written, something we never thought of is going to turn out to be one of the most important events in history.

I'm not saying this will literally happen, but this is kind of what I think: some random election clerk in North Carolina is allowed to trigger a freeze on the counting of votes based on their 'reasonable suspicion', and after recounts and delays, it starts trending Kamala's way, so they never complete the account. The Supreme Court invents some new legal doctrine that says we can't allow the paralysis of one state to prevent the determination of a winner, the court throws it to the House of Representatives, the house holds the vote open for 16 hours until Trump wins, with God knows what violence and rallies and stuff happening outside.

Why are you making it about that question in particular? There's a lot of topics that have been raised here, notably Google's Chromium project, the way it's killing ad blockers, the way that other browsers also use chromium, people associated with those browsers.

In this range of subjects I'm not sure what the significance is of elevating this libre software question above everything else.

I don't love Peter Theil by any means, and his association with any project is, to my mind, enough to completely discredit it.

But I get a little worried when it starts turning into references to the bilderberg group, and whatever that link is to NCIO.ca is just completely nuts, low evidence jumping to conclusions.

He certainly has crazy ideas that I want no part of, but I think it crosses the line into conspiratorial to suggest he was instructed by Germany to act as a foreign agent to sabotage the global economy.

Please show me where you explained that Vivaldi’s source code is harder to investigate because “users need to download a 2 GB repo” or a “tarball dump”.

I can see why you think this is not entirely implied. But I also don't think that it's incumbent on them to have laid it out with such specificity. You can read this reference to closed source in the most charitable way as alluding to the whole motley of things that render closed source projects less accessible.

It takes a little squinting, sure, but the internet is a better place when we read things charitably, and I don't think such fine grain differences rise to the level of straight up misinformation.

I mean, there are some real whoppers around here on Lemmy. There's no shortage of crazy people saying crazy things, I just don't think this rises to that level.

Sounds pretty fricken near death to me.