It’s an infuriating dark pattern that Facebook themselves have created.

I don’t think most business owners realize what’s even happening when they post their ads. I’ve had it happen a few times now where I saw a slightly interesting image in an ad and wanted to zoom in (e.g. to read the specs of a laptop being advertised), but when I tapped it BAM redirect to a Messenger conversation.

Classic enshittification: there’s a spreadsheet somewhere in Meta HQ that some dickhead middle-manager made proving that it increased conversion numbers, but doesn’t measure how pissed off it makes their users, or how long-term toxic it is to the brands using that feature.

They still have to develop the software.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold was released 7 years ago.

This is hilarious to me because all I hear from Apple fanbois about why iPhones are always years behind Samsung et al on new features is because “Apple don’t release things until they work properly”

deleted by creator

Unbelievable.

By which I mean, I literally don’t believe this story as presented. There’s definitely some details missing.

India, many cases: https://factly.in/analysis-do-dummy-candidates-with-similar-names-affect-election-results/

Russia, because of course: https://news.sky.com/story/russia-opposition-politician-boris-vishnevsky-says-two-lookalikes-with-same-name-as-him-running-in-st-petersburg-election-in-bid-to-confuse-voters-12402116

that’s just the first two that came up on a web search, I’m sure I could find others on the second page of results

…and to those who claim that US voters are too smart to get tricked by ghost candidates, this guy got 6,000 votes in Florida - enough to tip the win to the Republican candidate - despite not running any kind of campaign: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/frank-artiles-ileana-garcia-florida-election-b1820020.html

I think you’re letting what you want to be true override what you deep down know to actually be the case. But I guess I should know by now not to attempt injecting reality into an old fashioned partisan pile-on thread.

Trump’s approach is definitely corrupt and yet another of the hundred reasons he should be in jail.

But… recent years have seen other flawed democracies where unknown candidates with no previous track record in politics and no party affiliation but who just so happen to have the same name as a major party’s candidate show up. There clearly needs to be something in place to mitigate these shenanigans, but it seems more like a fix that’s needed in the ballot design, rather than the insanity that Trump’s pushing.

This really misses the point of [thing that the post wasn’t about]

FIFY

You do realize that being obnoxious to people who don’t share your support of violence as a teaching method, undermines your whole position? It makes you sound like one of those “I was spanked and I turned out OK” people who did not, in fact, turn out OK.

Last week, Google’s Finland country manager, Antti Järvinen, apologised for the forest clearings but claimed the company had acted “on the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time”.

That understanding being “it’s more profitable to just do it and pay the fine”

I suspect this was made with the whole “Art collection as tax avoidance scheme” thing in mind.

The first line was broadly right. But you blundered on the second, especially by phrasing it in a condescending way, because how many figures you should quote to depends on more context than just how many figures the input was quoted to.

financial misconduct

It’s always a grift. Time and time again all over the world, the far right are fuelled not from true belief in their bullshit but from the realization they can make bank by peddling hatred.

what’s to work out? just provide a phone number and city as your address, and one day someone will call you and mutter something unintelligible and you say “TELEGRAM… TELEGRAM” and then they telegram you to ask where you are and you send your location and then they show up with your grand piano on the back of their moto and ask for a mystery extra delivery fee.

fake: OP is not a frog in a suit

gay: OP did girl kissing

They don’t need to, OpenAI and Anthropic are running at a huge loss to keep it cheaper to use them than to buy the comparable hardware required to replace them. The only way running open source models is cheaper is if you ignore hardware costs, or if you have a very specific and unusual usage pattern (i.e. constant 100% capacity, and not a clock cycle more or less), or if you go with another cloud provider who are also running at a loss.

That doesn’t even stand up on its own terms.

Farenheit doesn’t “intuitively” tell you whether there’s going to be ice on the road or whether your pipes are liable to freeze, and also has the added pain in the ass that on a very hot day you need 3 digits to represent the number instead of 2, and doesn’t even compensate for it by removing the possibility of negative values which can still also happen.

On top of that the extra scale doesn’t give you a perceivable difference between the numbers, that is to say, I could put you in a room and ask you if it was 70F or 71F and you’d basically be guessing.

Celsius on the other hand is eminently relatable: negative number means ice/snow, single digit means heavy coat, tens means lighter coat/sleeves, twenties means nice, thirties means hot, forties means remain indoors.

Imagine if Mazda made an mx-5 EV or Toyota made an 86 EV.

I’m pro-EV in general (pro-trains notwithstanding), but don’t see the point in that. I’d rather they just got the people who designed the MX-5 and GT86 to design EV sports cars on their own terms. An MX-5 EV would just be there to remind you how much more fun the ICE version was to drive.

You’ve hit on my bugbear with most post-apocalyptic fiction: pretty much universally humans have shown that they will tend towards co-operation when placed in situations of hardship. But most writers, game designers and preppers want you to think that when civilization collapses everyone will be like “there’s no rules any more! I can murder whoever I want and take their stuff!”