And android users are not obligated to give a good review after not receiving support.

I have no problem with his actions, (if he doesn’t have the resources/energy/time to support on all platforms, who can complain about that?), but I don’t think he’s very good at the whole communicating with other humans part of software that sadly in the OSS world tends to fall on the same devs that do the work, he could have avoided both this comment thread and the angry android user above with zero extra effort by simply phrasing things better.

The particular poor phrasing he chose seems to imply to me that he’s lumping all users of each platform together in his head, and each negative interaction builds on the previous, which isn’t the healthiest attitude, and does indeed make him look like an arsehole to anyone who’s just turned up and hasn’t yet done anything wrong.

Who said he was wrong? He basically guaranteed that android users will respond that way by refusing to support them, thus ensuring he will always be right about them

But removing them from the specific games they object to would not lose any more revenue than removing the games entirely, and reduce the backlash significantly, as long as they could find 1 obscure payment provider to handle the obscure games and keep some form of access.

“Safeguards and regulations make business less efficient” has always been true. They still avoid death and suffering.

In this case, if they can’t figure out how to control LLMs without crippling them, that’s pretty absolute proof that LLMs should not be used. What good is a tool you can’t control?

“I cannot regulate this nuclear plant without the power dropping, so I’ll just run it unregulated”.

Neither can humans, ergo nobody should ever be held liable for anything.

Civilisation is a sham, QED.

Neither of you are talking nonsense. The US clearly has a combination of problems that combine to cause their massive problem with mass shootings.

Their limited gun control is a contributing factor, but not the only factor. Other countries have weak gun laws and don’t have nearly the same problems, the US didn’t have the same problems in the past, they’ve grown worse over time, and at this point the very concept of mass shootings in media is a major cause of them.

Removing guns (magically removing all existing guns) would certainly reduce the problem and probably would eventually fix things, but at this point the US has been broiling itself in this idea for too long and it would probably continue with knives or homemade bombs or something instead, at least for a while.

I’ve wondered before if someone could start an “uninsurance” company which makes the same deals with hospitals that insurance providers do, but charges its customers almost nothing and just lets the customer pay their deal price. I guess the hospitals would catch on and refuse to deal eventually…

Around, of course!

The obvious limitation being that you can take a real photo with attestation with a real camera of a real computer screen displaying any fake shit you can imagine, then you have an officially hashed photo of anything.

I’m not a fan of the laws regardless, but if we pretend for a second they’re justified, it’s worth considering how they should work in a case like Wikipedia. Wikipedia has quite strong protections against problem content already, and that’s because it has a shared global view of content with effective moderation tools and a wide moderator base that respects the rules. That reality should be taken into account in the governments new rules. On the other hand, anyone who understands how this all works was already against this stupid law, so I guess they didn’t get any useful feedback internally

Everyone can always call themselves whatever they want. But fear that people might use a kernel of truth to sell a lie isn’t a good reason to throw away even a tiny part of the truth.

Because democracy is not the best way to solve every problem.

The messy job of squeezing entire countries into a handful of words is fraught enough without throwing away up to half of the information.

As a more amusing answer: Dictatorships throw away 99.9% of the opinions, so should we let one arsehole decide which countries are called a dictatorship?

Yes, great example. That would indeed be stretching the definition to breaking point. The fuzzy logic approach would be that you’ve described a 99% monarchy with 1% democracy.

Personally I’d put the US as a 60% democracy with a 40% oligopoly. The UK is similar since on the one hand we have more than 2 parties and are slightly better at avoiding gerrymandering and voter suppression, but on the other hand we have the silly rules for the House of Lords, and weaker freedom of speech (I don’t mind the theory of banning violent extremist speech, but I don’t like the application we’ve got at the moment, it prevents too much speech that isn’t unreasonable, free speech would be better).

Based on what you’ve said, I’m Sure you’d put it lower, but I don’t think you can justify putting 1% when it’s so easy to find worse countries even in the real world, that are still on the democracy spectrum.

Strongly disagree. Yes, all the problems you listed weaken a democracy. Some by a lot. But that’s “no true Scotsman” logic, and dangerous. Better to apply fuzzy logic than Boolean logic, countries are not perfect democracies or non democracies. They are on a sliding scale, and there’s not much point making a scale that is so idealistic that no existing country can get on the scale (or where only the best few can).

You can claim the US and UK are weak democracies, that’s justifiable if you define why (and you have, I see your point there). But calling them non democracies is just willfully twisting the meaning of words, in fact they’re unusually good democracies by some measures (both have unusually free and trustworthy elections compared to most in the world, and that has to be taken into account).

Or to put it another way, any scale needs space at the bottom.

Imagine an alternative USA where every single state was gerrymandered to hell by whoever won, where electors were routinely bribed by opposition parties to vote against their states results, where people were bullied at the polls or where minorities were entirely disenfranchised. That would be a worse place than our USA, but by your definition both would be the same. Clearly they are not the same, that one is a worse democracy. By my definition that hypothetical and awful democracy is still a democracy, just a very very bad one.

As a Brit, this all seems unhelpful. The only reason anyone cares how the US was “founded” hundreds of years ago is that they were a bit closer to having the right idea at the start than most countries. Doesn’t mean they did of course, but compare to how the UK was “founded”, or Greece, “the birthplace of democracy”, and suddenly it really doesn’t matter.

As for whether it is currently a democracy, a flawed democracy is still a democracy. Trumps a terrible choice but he did get a lot of votes by ordinary people, and whilst their system is skewed by being a shitty fptp setup (just like the UK sadly) and their crazy elector system, it is nonetheless fairly democratic, in the sense that most people can vote, they didn’t pressure or threaten voters much, they didn’t fake lots of votes, and the flaws can only influence and skew the result to some extent, rather than being the deciding factor. But it isn’t the best democracy in the world, we can all agree on that. I hope they manage to replace it in our lifetimes with something that would allow for more than 2 parties (UK too).