“Data, stop. Data. Stop. Data, SHUT UP!”

Not to mention, even if you can accurately measure calories in a specific serving, companies produce thousands and thousands of servings per day. They can’t accurately measure all of them. And ironically, the more ‘natural’ the food is, the less accurately they can measure the nutritional value: protein paste is going to be a lot more predictable than pasture-raised chickens.

Title game on point tho

Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.

Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.

So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.

Isildur: BTW I’m selling these cool new One Ring™ limited edition rings, forged in darkness and bound to the One Ring…we’ve got sizes for men, women, elves, and dwarves!

Elrord: O shit gimme 5 of those bad boys

This is sort of implicitly true. You can’t get people’s money if they can’t figure out how to use your product/service.

At the same time… People are pretty dumb.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

Well, right, you’re dealing with statistics. It’s not impossible that Trump will quantum-teleport into the sun, physics allows for that possibility. It’s just incredibly unlikely. And the odds of some other person getting elected with no actual effort to make it happen before now is similarly basically zero. Theoretically possible is all very well, but we live in the real world.

Aww, why didn’t he stay the course? Things have been going so well!

I think they claimed they’re not discriminating against browsers, they’re just better at identifying adblockers on Firefox or something.

Illegal to do…what? Not offer high-res videos? To have any delay before streaming videos? To refuse to serve you videos, even if doing so caused them to lose money? How would you enforce that on Google, much less on smaller startups? Would it apply to PeerTube instances?

Google sucks for doing this. It’ll drive people to competitors–hopefully even federated competitors. But laws to ‘fix’ the problem would be nearly impossible to craft–and would be counterproductive in the long term, because they’d cement the status quo. Let Google suck, so that people switch away from it.

Well, fair. But even in that case, they have every right to degrade your YouTube experience, as owners of YouTube. As ISP (I mean, assuming NN was still a thing) they couldn’t selectively degrade traffic, but YouTube has no obligation to you under net neutrality.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

There’s an important difference, though, especially with Lemmy. You used XMPP to communicate with particular people. When Google convinced, whatever, 70% of users to use Talk and then slammed the door shut, the smaller instances were no longer viable. People on those instances lost contact with their friends. They aren’t going to just chat with whoever else happened to be left outside the walls.

But I don’t look for specific people on Reddit, or on Lemmy. Any large-enough instance is fine. Just like people moved from Reddit to Lemmy, they can move from one instance to another. A major rift could drop the quality of the experience, at least for a while, but the instances would still be viable. They’re not suddenly useless the way an isolated Jabber server was.

FTX stole from customers. Binance didn’t sufficiently spy on its customers. They are not the same.

You think Google was fishing for VC money?

Not supplying them with water and electricity would be a crime against humanity.

So they’re simultaneously committing genocide, and carefully avoiding violations of international law?

Again, I’m definitely not saying Israel has done nothing wrong. I’m specifically pushing back on the casual and irresponsible claims of genocide.

including Gaza, as much as Israel would like you to believe otherwise

In what way were Israelis occupying Gaza before the attack in October? Not with troops, right? They controlled the border pretty tightly, but it’s not Gaza’s only border. So…by what mechanism were they occupying it?

The settlers in the West Bank are a problem, and their relationship with the government & people of Israel is complicated and messy. To be clear: they’re wrong, they’re fundamentalist religious assholes, and to the extent the government supports them, the government is wrong to do so. I can totally get on board with that criticism!

I don’t buy the claim that relocating people is a genocide. Many genocides do involve relocation, and relocation on it’s own may well be be considered a crime against humanity (especially if there are signs that it’s permanent), but it’s a different crime than mass extermination.

Well, but basically what you’re saying is that the genocide in Gaza exists in the hearts and minds of certain Israeli leaders. The Israelis have had the Palestinians at their mercy for decades, and they’ve been…supplying them with free water and power. Doesn’t seem very genocidal to me.

I agree that there are some scary government figures. I wouldn’t doubt that some of them have genocidal desires. But they’re counterbalanced by the fact that, in the end, Israel is a liberal country. And if the standard for ‘genocide’ is that some government officials harbor or express the desire for genocide, then the list of countries in the Middle East that are not genocidal would be a pretty short list.

What’s happening in the West Bank is wrong. You could, at a stretch, call it ethnic cleansing, but usually that term is reserved for government policy in land it controls. Extremists creeping across the border to settle and claim land, with the goal of driving the Palestinians out–to the annoyance of most of the government in power–doesn’t really fit the mold. I mean, the attack on Israel was executed by the governmental body that can best be claimed to represent the Gazans, with the eventual intent of driving all Jews out of the region, per their officially stated policy. Is that therefore ethnic cleansing?