Skip Navigation
Tokyo District Court Rules AI Cannot Be Issued Patents; Law Recognizes Only ‘Natural Persons’ as Inventors
  • Would be cool if they did constitute prior art, though. That would leave them in the public domain by default, as far as I can see.

  • The US has so much space
  • You can do that and still not get all the way through Nordland county (!) in Norway 🤷

  • Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place?
  • I live in the UK, but am from Norway. I know a few librarians though, and I know that community libraries are usually (or at least often) interested in projects that can connect their communities and help them with outreach. Something like this certainly could do that, and with libraries existing in most communities there is a built in network for broader proliferation there.

    I’m also just very keen on the idea of libraries having a central role to play in the future of the broader fediverse ecosystem.

    Edit: It may be key to pitch this to them not as a platform, but as a decentralised community network.

  • Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place?
  • Loving this concept. May I make a suggestion? Show this to and discuss this with your local library. That strikes me as a good potential partner, and a model that can be replicated in most places to potentially help with everything from hosting to community resources access.

  • You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits
  • Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that's a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).

    Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn't just social manipulation at scale.

  • You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits
  • I really, really need people to grok the distinction between engagement and entertainment.

  • astronomy has a colonialism problem | Dr. Fatima
  • This has no business being downvoted, an excellent video from an excellent creator.

  • Dead Space 2, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Battlefield 1943 and Crysis 3 will have their multiplayer shut down on December 8th
  • Removal of dedicated server functionality in favour of matchmaking was always going to be a horrible, horrible idea. And this is honestly the least of its negative consequences. Even before that there was the requirement of multiplayer servers to be set up through 'official channels' of various sorts, which has this same problem because those are still platforms with maintenance costs that companies will eventually cut.

    It's the same platforms vs protocols issue that the fediverse is addressing, just in a different sphere of the internet.

  • TIL The Goodhart's Law: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
  • It's pretty well established academically that basically the only way KPIs can actually work toward their intended purpose is if they are changed often and determined by the people doing the work that is ultimately measured. Ongoing measurements should only ever be used as indicators - hence the term *key performance indicators_ - and should never be used as targets. What that means in practice is that you should generally ignore all the individual metrics, and look across all of them instead to see if you can spot trends and anomalies, then investigate these qualitatively with the workers who ultimately produce those data to figure out what is happening and if any intervention is necessary.

    The problem is that the higher up you get in the hierarchy, the less of that kind of work there is to do and you end up chasing the people below you for nice numbers to plot into your presentations to make it look like there's a point to your job's existence.

  • TIL The Goodhart's Law: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
  • Alternative (and generally easier to understand) formulation: Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

    See: grades, GDP, workplace metrics...

  • language hot take rule
  • People huffing and puffing about other people not using words the way they expect: "God this wind is terrible, we need to abolish wind or at least make it blow in a different direction"

  • Baldur's Gate 3: Act 3 Bugs and Missing Content Becoming a Problem as More Players Near End
  • Honestly, the game is amazing 95% of the time. But Act 3 feels a bit too packed and a bit rushed at the same time. I’ve not been able to complete it because the game consistently crashes for me at a particular point on what amounts to ‘the final run’.

    The fact that instead of just leaving the gsme until patched I instead chose to start over with a second character says something about how good the game is otherwise.

  • Allo Allo (1982-1992)
  • Genuinely my favourite comedy TV show of all time. I have lost count of how many times I've watched it (it used to run in syndication on Norwegian national broadcast TV), and it's basically just the same relatively small set of jokes repeated over and over. How they managed to do that so well that it's still funny today is just absolutely incredible. Just a genuinely hilarious show.

  • Do you ever despair at the apparent lack of regard for the "social contract" by so many?
  • You only feel bound by the social contract of the community / communities of which you actually feel part in your day to day. The one-two punch of neoliberal hyper-individualism (and the associated deliberate deconstruction of community) and online communities of special interests leads to people walking about a shared world with widely disparate senses of what their 'social contract' stipulates.

  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • I have autism. First time I had covid, it got bad enough that I ended up in hospital for a week. Mentally, covid did two things; it made me a lot more forgetful in ways that I weren't before, and it ruined my ability to focus. Effectively, due to symptomatic overlap with autism, covid gave me ADHD inattentive type. No signs of it going away, nor would I expect it to. Much of the damage caused by covid is permanent and cumulative with later re-infections, and I really wish people got that point.

  • What's a philosophical (not overtly political) position that you hold?
  • First and foremost, treat people like people.

  • Norway regulator to fine Meta over privacy breaches
  • Thing to keep in mind on this is that it's a national regulatory decision based on an EU regulatory decision, and it is expected to be just the first of several more like it to come from it. Meaning, it is likely to spread and it is likely to escalate over time. And even if it's just an added cost of doing business, it does impact the financial viability of Facebook surveillance-capitalistic model.

  • Doctors stage biggest walkout in NHS history. Senior hospital doctors, known as consultants, in England will also begin a 48-hour strike on July 20, with radiographers following suit from July 25
  • Most such tactics are explicitly illegal in the UK, unfortunately. Basically, the legal framework for labour strikes in the UK is set up to maximise inconvenience to the public and minimise the tools (and effectiveness of those tools) available to the workers and their unions.

  • why can't we have federated identity ?
  • The technical challenges are vast, is the long and short of it. But it's high time there's a good discussion over how it should (or might) work, at least the kinds of properties such a system should have.

    • Self hosting of federated credentials should be possible, but not required
    • 'Backwards tracking' of federated credentials should only be possible with limited requests (e.g. 'verify author of post') and approval of the credential owner
    • All data on the credentials instance should be properly encrypted
    • All data on credentials instance should be fully and easily portable to other instances via common protocols

    There are several issues involved here, beyond just 'mere' technology, that need addressing. Personally I think a good start might be to engage with public libraries here. They already keep simple identity records (library cards) and have public service purpose well-aligned with the concepts of the federation and public distribution of information and knowledge.

  • Sweden charges Greta Thunberg for blockading oil port
  • The purpose and function of the police and the courts is the protection of capital from the people. Some cases illustrate this more clearly than others. This is one of them.

  • BJHanssen BJHanssen @lemmy.world
    Posts 0
    Comments 21