I’m not eligible to vote in your country. In mine, voting is mandatory and there are no stickers, just democracy sausages to aid in the funding for local polling places like schools and community halls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_sausage

The thing about free speech is that there’s a whole lot of legislation surrounding it. At the moment, every single fediverse instance is run by( a small group of) people, many of them are run by individuals who are legally responsible for the content that’s posted on their site.

In addition, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, better known as the DMCA and the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, have requirements for people who own and publish data, like the people who run instances, not to mention privacy acts and myriad other provisions and laws.

Non compliance is very easy and costly, so instances who are aware of this are cautious in what they allow on their instance.

Finally, many instances want to create a community with a social cohesion and associated standards that they, depending on the level, encourage or enforce.

Why any instance bans something at any one time can generally be traced back to these reasons.

Of course there are also instances where it’s completely open season. Don’t expect these to stick around once lawyers get involved.

That’s like asking for an elephant stamp for wiping your butt after going to the toilet.

Voting isn’t an accomplishment, it’s your duty and the reward is the society you live in.

That was very helpful and interesting. Thank you for taking the time to explain.

How are Wikipedia articles like this protected against defacement and misinformation?

Thank you, much appreciated.

I just looked on the Google Play store and can’t find either of the apps you mention. Do you have a link?

If you don’t have any hair, it won’t change colour…

(It’s a joke, laugh)

Also, not for nothing, the human body changes daily. I’d recommend that you get used to it before you have an unhappy life pursuing battle against the inevitable.

Not sure how I feel about such a bot. I can see potential security issues arising in relation to stored relationships between users and posts.

I’m fairly sure that the price information shown on a Google Search result page is advertising that comes from a different source than the results do.

As far as I know, you could write a plugin for SearXNG to query suppliers and format the output as required.

I think that Google Shopping might be queried in the same way, but I’ve never looked into it deeply.

No, you didn’t “edit” your mistake, you completely changed the meaning of your response which makes anything after it look absurd.

You originally stated that an algorithm was intelligence, the implication being that using your logic, you thought that a calculator was intelligent.

As far as the meaning of AI, you clearly don’t understand the landscape surrounding the hyperbolic assertions made by ignorant journalism about the topic.

Machine learning is one aspect of the landscape, useful as it is, intelligence it is not.

LLM emissions on the other hand appear to emulate enough grammatically correct language to fool many people some of the time, leading to their mistaken belief that what is happening is intelligence rather than, at least from their perspective, magic.

(Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke)

So, intelligence it is not, Assumed Intelligence is what it is, or autocorrect gone uppity if you prefer, an algorithm either way.

Ignorance is bliss…

A.I. means Assumed Intelligence, despite what you might have read elsewhere. Using it to do “research” is how you’re going to get first hand experience with so-called “hallucinations”.

But you do you…

As opposed to Arabic speakers in the other party?

I’m an industry professional in ICT with 40 years experience.

I’ve come to form the view that industry certification is a vendor lock-in process created solely for the purpose of generating a guaranteed income stream for that vendor.

If your employer wants to spend its money on certification, by all means go for it as a learning experience.

If you have to pay for it yourself, I’ve yet to see any evidence that they represent a return on investment of any kind in your career.

That’s not to say that learning should be abandoned, quite the opposite. In this industry, if you’re not learning, you’re going backwards.

Stay curious, read verociosly and try to figure out how stuff works and more importantly, how it breaks.

Mathematics and Politics.

There are many more people who are “working class” than rich. The argument is that if you take some money from a lot of people, you get more money than if you take a lot of money from some people.

There’s also the argument that if everyone pitches in, the overall burden for each individual is less.

What this fails to address is that the richer you are, the more you can play with your money and end up with nothing to tax. This is why the rich get richer and the rest of us don’t.

Running through all that is a thing called “trickle down economics” which claims that the money from the rich ends up in society, but recent reviews of this have proven this to be nonsense. Politicians use this as an argument for the status quo.

Finally, the rich shape the narrative. Politicians are essentially elected by the rich through their manipulation of the story through their media empires and social media platforms.

How is this infuriating?

Would you like to sleep in a bed with clean sheets and have a shower in a clean cubicle?

How do you think that this happens?

Yeah, good luck with that. The Facebook bots are so bad, they literally hammer sites into the ground, to the point where they’re actively being blocked.

Where is this “community” you speak of?

So, if the author is prominently featured on the cover of a book, how hard is it to not pickup or buy a book by an author you don’t care for?

I mean, you have to at least be able to read before there’s any point in buying a book, unless you need toilet paper in a compact portable form and then the author really doesn’t matter…

Anyone?

I was recently introduced to a Microsoft focused Managed Service Provider who told me to my face that they absolutely adopted it in their business to “help run it”.

After that I stopped listening to anything they had to say.

Microsoft has very deep tentacles all over the Australian Government, even more after they donated some money for a random new initiative which does nothing for society and in my opinion absolutely benefits the Microsoft bottom line.

We’ve had “Cash for Comments”, this is “Government Bought and Paid For”…

https://news.microsoft.com/en-au/features/microsoft-announces-a5-billion-investment-in-computing-capacity-and-capability-to-help-australia-seize-the-ai-era/