"Anyone got a lighter?"

Do you think the government is paying for the park...?

Technically, it's basically equivalent to "oh my god", but the Vietnamese phrase Oi Troi Oi is outstanding

Technically, Gilead is a breakaway state from the US ☝️🤓

Presumably because they're just people, and don't deserve death wished upon them?

I agree - but that's user error, not a bad tool

Hammers are unreliable.

You can hit your thumb if you use the tool wrong, and it can break, doing damage, if e.g. it is not stored properly. When you use a hammer, you accept these risks, and can choose to take steps to mitigate them by storing it properly, taking care when using it and checking it's not loose before using it.

In the same regard, if you use LLMs for what they're good at, and verify their outputs, they can be useful tools.

"LLMs pointless because I can write a shopping list myself" is like saying "hammers are pointless because I can just use this plank instead". Sure, you can do that, but there's other scenarios where a hammer would be kinda handy.

Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag as an excuse to clamp down on political dissidence and consolidate his power. It's still not clear whether it was intentionally caused by the Nazis or just a convenient opportunity for them.

As a more serious aside to the above, it is generally worth paying a bit of attention to which instance other users you interact with. There's obviously no blanket statement you can make about the users of particular instances, but there are definitely certain instances that are more appealing to... certain groups of users.

lemmy.ml in particular has a bit of a reputation for having tankies on it, but there's lots of very interesting and reasonable people there (or here, I suppose, given this is an ml community), also.

They're both the respective heads of state, and they're both not members of the legislative branches.

So yeah, in this context they are effectively the same.

I wasn't claiming that he hasn't been the president of France; I did, in fact, notice.

I said that's not what the president of France does.

It's like getting mad at the King of England for Canadian laws, that's just not his responsibility, even if he is head of state.

There's loads of issues with Macron, but I don't see how he's responsible for any of the above

The president doesn't legislate, and he doesn't command the police, he's the executive head of state.

I think 3) is a really interesting point, and probably the primary reason why a model like that may be less viable for e.g. the Guardian. I think having that parasocial relationship is key to having people take interest enough to be willing to pay for the extra content around the main news output. My concern is that a model like that might incentivise being intentionally divisive and/or making the main content be more like entertainment than information.

I think that's largely for the same reason; their legal obligations to ensure they don't facilitate illegal stuff means that the risk of working with companies that do e.g. amateur porn makes the potential consequences (financial processing ban, i.e. effectively the entire company being shut down) massively outweigh the potential benefits.

So you're right that PH's legal liability was part of the reasoning, but that pressure largely came from payment processors, for whom the legal consequences are more severe.

Sure, personalised ads can be seen as a form of an invasion of privacy, and everybody has a right to not engage with any organisation for any reason they like. But ads are an imperfect solution to the fact that it's impossible to run a news organisation at that scale on voluntary donations and un-personalised ads alone, and it's definitely preferable (in my view, at least) to having a total paywall.

Unless you have an innovative alternative income source to propose, I'm not sure I see what alternative there is.

Respectfully, your argument seems to simultaneously be that they:

a) need a better source of income, because ads and subscriptions aren't raising enough revenue

b) are acting unreasonably by asking you to allow them to use one of those revenue sources

"Would you rather pay for this service, or have ads on it?" Doesn't seem like an unreasonable ask, frankly. Especially given that it can be trivially avoided with an ad blocker, anyway, and will not prohibit you from reading the article if you do so (this, to me, is the key difference compared to other outlets that have similar requirements).

As far as I can tell, their statement was that they will always make the content available for free. Serving that content with some ads alongside it doesn't violate that policy.

Edit: as an aside, having "my one news source" is a bad way to engage with the media. Every source will have their own priority, biases, errors and blind spots that will change over time; you should have a diverse set of sources, ideally with different mediums.

Per the above, here's some of the sources in my media diet, in no particular order: The Guardian, Byline Times, TLDR News, BBC News (digital & radio), Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the UN, Novara Media, PoliticsJOE, New York Times, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Bellingcat

Edit: wrt "Centralist [sic] bore me", yeah, sometimes a reasonable take on the news is boring, but important nonetheless. Sorry 🤷

Oh no, a toggle switch! Whatever will we do?!

Actually, the Finns already spend 2.4% of their GDP on defense, making them one of the highest defense spenders in Europe (relative to GDP). And they're famously very well prepared for wartime scenarios.

Turns out sharing a border with Russia makes military spending look very appealing.

No, it isn't. Acknowledging that a strategy is ideal for the people executing it isn't the same as agreeing with that strategy.

In fact, the idiom "a perfect storm" refers to a disastrous situation caused by a combination of multiple problems. You wouldn't argue that using that phrase means you support the disaster.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by web tech? I don't know much about how matrix works