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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   45027 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Of course like all lies there is a grain of truth. Bias is a real thing and it does degrade the usefulness of the models.

However I have absolutely no trust that in practice the usefulness being evaluated is to the user and not to the social movements of the activists.

I still believe in the ideals of free software, and I very much do not think anyone but myself is qualified to sort things on my behalf. Which is why I'm still clinging to RSS and configurable search engines.

Imagine living in a world where everything is sorted by the people who think /r/all is good. This is hell to me.

What does RSS have to do with software freedom?

With RSS, the user gets to do the curation and to modify the algorithm that does it if it is automated. Whereas large platforms today like Facebook, Twitter, etc hold a lot of power from being the only ones who can tweak the knobs of the algorithms that show most of the users the content they want to see.

My own personal experience of this is that I've thrown away my YouTube account and replaced it with a collection of channel feeds and now the content actually shows up instead of being eaten by the algorithm who decided that no, I don't get to see this video because it's badwrong.

User control over compute is I believe the cornerstone of free software, it's the very idea that underlies the freedoms, that the person running the software is in control, not the makers of the software or the software itself. I was told this by RMS in person.

Thanks, I'm an RMS fan too - but I never met him and don't think I will.

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