PaulT 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Ding Dong KOSA’s Dead (For Now)

    PaulT ( profile ), 01 Aug, 2024 @ 12:26pm

    Congratulations, you're human. The "us vs them" polarisation of politics is a very bad thing, especially in the US where so often one side is explicitly driven there by religion rather than thought. But, it's certainly still possible for someone like Paul to be correct, as his father was on a few issues before. I wouldn't trust either of them for a second and I know they'd turn on another issue I cared about if the thought it would be profitable, but even in the binary concept of the current US system there's still room for independent thought and compromise if someone chooses to allow it.

  • On the post: DSA Ruling: ExTwitter Must Pay Up For Shadowbanning; Trolls Rejoice

    PaulT ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2024 @ 05:18pm

    "Show someone the door enough times and they’ll get the message"
    But, that can backfire. 8chan/8kun was set up because some people thought that 4chan was too restrictive, and at minimum several mass shootings can be traced there. Then, there are people who think 8kun sold out... Shadowbans can be useful in the sense that some people do stupid things for attention and lose interest if they lose it. You can't turn away determined trolls necessarily, but those are a special sad type of person to begin with.

  • On the post: DSA Ruling: ExTwitter Must Pay Up For Shadowbanning; Trolls Rejoice

    PaulT ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2024 @ 05:12pm

    "And then think about how to stop that from happening without doing anything to the troll’s account."
    OK. Then, I think about what happens when trolls get to spread disinformation unchecked. It would be nice to just ignore or block them. But, then you notice that some people take them seriously, and use them to decide how they vote or respond to public health crises or act toward minority populations, and it gets a bit more worrying. Especially when you consider how different the audience is compared to 40+ years ago. I'm not sure of the best response given that fact checking and so on can egg them on, but I know that ignoring them doesn't help in the long term.

  • On the post: Elon’s ExTwitter Engagement Stat Exaggeration: Outside Stats Paint A Bleaker Picture

    PaulT ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2024 @ 05:05pm

    From what I understand, when someone posts a video to "X", it counts instantly as a view even if you just scroll past it in your feed. Which is why so many of his Nazi friends have high view counts - it's pushed to anyone not really interested and if it plays for so much as a second while you scroll past it's a view. That explains why people not popular in the mainstream have such high engagement numbers, and why advertisers aren't returning (since serious advertisers need verifiable numbers and don't like being on Nazi feeds). I'm not sure who still uses it, but I have no doubt the number of real users is way, way lower than he pretneds.

  • On the post: Elon’s ExTwitter Engagement Stat Exaggeration: Outside Stats Paint A Bleaker Picture

    PaulT ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2024 @ 04:59pm

    "Elon is right-wing garbage who thinks Trump is a good idea."
    I mean, he is a good idea... for Elon. A disaster for most people, but for a manbaby who lucked into much of his wealth and is throwing a tantrum because one of his kids dared to be trans, Trump's policies will be ideal. The brownshirts he's gathered might be disappointed with the outcome if he gets elected, but Elon will be happy.

  • On the post: Appeals Court Tosses Lawsuit Brought Against Tennessee’s Anti-Drag Show Law

    PaulT ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2024 @ 04:52pm

    I'll bite. A "good" court is one that judges based on facts and evidence. A "bad" court is one that judges based on culture war nonsense. Since this argument's been happening, I've seen a lot of stories about youth pastors, scout leaders, religious leaders, right-wing political figures and such people being caught abusing children. But, I've not seen anything about practitioners of drag, an artform that's been around for centuries and even explicitly as childrens' entertainment through pantomime and the like, being dangerous to kids. I grew up in the UK which had its fair share of scandals, and it was never the drag performers involved. Unless you count Catholic vestments as drag, of course.

  • On the post: Appeals Court Tosses Lawsuit Brought Against Tennessee’s Anti-Drag Show Law

    PaulT ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2024 @ 04:46pm

    "Don’t the supremes get a vote here?"
    The same supremes who got rid of RvW and said that presidents can't commit a crime if it's an official act (while not defining what an official act is)? I somehow doubt they'll be judging in favour or drag or trans rights.

  • On the post: Spain Is Using AI For Domestic Violence Risk Assessment And It’s Going As Well As You’d Expect

    PaulT ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2024 @ 04:38pm

    "The police accepted the software’s judgment"
    This is the real problem. If software is a tool to enhance or aid normal investigations, it can be valuable. The moment law enforcement start letting it think for them, the public is in trouble. Overall, there's a long-standing problem with gender-based violence in Spain and the country's made a lot of steps forward dealing with it. But, I suspect that replacing a traditionally unsympathetic officer with a questionnaire isn't going to improve things further. These are things that might help with commercial activities, but not domestic violence victims.

  • On the post: The Kids Online Safety Act And The Tyranny Of Laziness

    PaulT ( profile ), 26 Jul, 2024 @ 04:29pm

    This is the problem with such bills. People write bills because they need to be seen to "do something", and "for the children" is an easy political move. Then, you have to hope that sanity opposes them or forces them to be watered down because the original form is so obviously toxic. It's a big problem everywhere, but hopefully this isn't another example of something that's destroying peoples' lives before even the people who wrote the bill start seeing the problems.

  • On the post: This Week In Techdirt History: July 7th – 13th

    PaulT ( profile ), 13 Jul, 2024 @ 07:50pm

    So, you're saying that your idea of credible sourcing is to search two words on a site that is known to be filled with bots and trolls, and believe the first thing you see? There's other examples, but look at the Boston marathon bombing for why this isn't a good idea, for starters.

  • On the post: This Week In Techdirt History: July 7th – 13th

    PaulT ( profile ), 13 Jul, 2024 @ 07:47pm

    The problem with "breaking news" is that it's often people making crap up because they don't have all the details. People guessing on Reddit and 4chan have literally got people hurt or jailed for no reason. I don't see any reason why Twitter would have more credibility.

  • On the post: This Week In Techdirt History: July 7th – 13th

    PaulT ( profile ), 13 Jul, 2024 @ 07:45pm

    Since you mentioned Infowars, I'll just mention that a few days ago Alex Jones went on a truly disgusting rant where he's still claiming that Sandy Hook was a false flag, while misrepresenting the content of the publicly available deposition recordings. He's doing that because he knows his audience is too stupid and lazy to check, and because he's desperately trying to move his income stream to his Dad's company, which he mistakenly believes will be exempt from paying the victims of his actions over several years, which included employing or funding people who hounded the families of the victims. So, it's worth waiting for confirmation from a credible source about this incident. As I search now, I'm not seeing a credible source identify the shooter, so I'll assume claims of "ANTIFA" are as credible as his claims that he's fighting literal demons and that COVID was a race-specific bioweapon - that is, not credible. Though, I'm sure he'll have a heavily edited demo reel in a few months to pretend that when he's been saying that someone will try to kill Trump that he was prophetic. He's not, he just makes so many "predictions" that something looks similar to an event that happened.

  • On the post: Xbox Game Pass Gets ‘Enshittified’: Pay More, Get Less

    PaulT ( profile ), 13 Jul, 2024 @ 07:25pm

    Erm, unless I missed something, console always had online multiplayer. Console was just the tier that didn't include PC, whereas Ultimate included PC and xCloud, but all of them included online. Core was the renamed Gold service that included a limited selection of Game Pass games instead of the Games With Gold program, but the other tiers all included Gold before that. All that's really happening here is that they don't want to give away CoD without a price hike, so they're offering the Standard tier to allow people to opt out of the day one releases that includes the CoD games.

  • On the post: Xbox Game Pass Gets ‘Enshittified’: Pay More, Get Less

    PaulT ( profile ), 13 Jul, 2024 @ 07:19pm

    "I still buy my games on Steam"
    Word of warning - no, you don't. You may have purchased a licence to access those games, but there are examples where that licence you thought you had isn't what you expected. If DRM is infecting those games, you don't "own" them. Outside of that, while the new pricing is annoying, I'm not sure what people expect. It's not a service where you own the games, it's a service where you rent a library for a month at a time. I can see the problem with people only wanting the online access with what used to be Gold, but at the other tiers you can just choose whether to rent games or not.

  • On the post: Elon Says ExTwitter Will Sue The Group ExTwitter ‘Excitedly’ Joined Just Last Week

    PaulT ( profile ), 13 Jul, 2024 @ 07:12pm

    Nah, it just means, as ever, that people need to use their dictionary instead of the real one. In their dictionary, "free speech" means "we can say whatever we want without consequences, and everyone else has to listen". They're consistently absolutist about that. They just get unstuck when they encounter the real world which includes definitions like "other people have the right to respond" and "people can choose not to listen, which includes not financing you".

  • On the post: California AI Bill Tells GenAI Startups To Nerd Harder

    PaulT ( profile ), 13 Jul, 2024 @ 07:00pm

    "there are essentially infinite methods of fingerprinting"
    There are equally as many ways of removing the fingerprints. You're very much on a losing path if you think this is the solution.
    "The legislation admittedly achieves basically nothing of use"
    Then, whether or not you agree with the above, it's a waste of time and energy from perhaps the least equipped people to deal with the problems.
    "While it may be infeasible to identify how many monthly users open source software actually has, and possibly difficult to identiy who coded it, it does cover them."
    No, as you just admitted - if you place a restriction on who it applies to but you have no way of working out who that restriction applies to, the restriction either applies to everyone or nobody. Then, while you're trying to work out how to apply it to the people you want it applied to, people outside of your jurisdiction have already altered it. It's a hard problem, but watermarks and laws that apply to 3% of the world population (even if the entire US is covered, which is not the case with CA legislation) won't cut it. Ultimately, it is the same as the "nerd harder" crypto demands - there are very real problems that make the request either unfeasible, impossible, or only applicable to US markets.

  • On the post: Big Telecom Prepares For The Final Killing Blow Against Net Neutrality

    PaulT ( profile ), 13 Jul, 2024 @ 06:47pm

    "The issue is the degree of government managing the networks"
    In most countries, we deal with this by telling corporations that they can't have local monopolies, that they have to use the subsidies they get to deal with infrastructure to deal with congestion to do that instead of paying CEO bonuses, and that they can't overcharge. What's the issue with the US following suit?

  • On the post: Disney Cites Supreme Court’s NetChoice Decision In Fighting Gina Carano’s SLAPP Suit

    PaulT ( profile ), 09 Jul, 2024 @ 03:28pm

    First off: bullshit. Secondly: so what? In the great land of opportunity you supposedly have in the US, employers don't have to jump though as many hoops as they do here in the EU. She was given the choice between hate and alienating her employer's customer base, and she made that choice, as did her employer. So, are you arguing for the government to come in and mediate free speech, for employers to have no recourse if an employee's actions are harming their bottom line, or for the end of the right to free association?

  • On the post: Free Speech Absolutist Elon Musk Removes Tweets Revealing Ted Cruz Fundraising Notes

    PaulT ( profile ), 21 Jun, 2024 @ 01:25pm

    When he says "free speech absolutist", he means that he and his friends have absolute free speech and they should never be criticised or proven wrong, even if that means preventing your speech. The problem is, when you allow an actually free discourse that usually requires moderation to keep things civil, and his side never comes off well when rules are needed. I can imagine that this had been a Democrat, there documents would have been everywhere in every Spaces and thread on the site. Because they're important documents, you see. But, they made Cancun Cruz look bad? He's on his team, can't have them seen...

  • On the post: Crypto Bros Sue Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli Over Making A Copy Of That Wu-Tang Album The US Government Briefly Owned

    PaulT ( profile ), 21 Jun, 2024 @ 01:21pm

    Like Elizabeth Holmes and so many other people, he could have escaped with so much evil, but he made the mistake of ripping off other rich people.

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