DigitalDilemma

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  • 438 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • Good article and a reminder that all might not be as it seems, and I’m glad they’re reporting this to the French Police as well as raising awareness. The language used in the emails do suggest it could be a single zealot rather than a professional body. It also highlights how often “but what about the children?” is used to enact censorship. (Not least by my own government in the UK with the OSA)

    I have one issue though;

    The complaints against the site look extremely suspicious. In our case, they came from an organization that was only recently registered that seems deliberately set up to hide the identities of those behind it.

    Surely anyone registering any online organisation today would want to take reasonable steps to protect their real identity, especially one dealing with such sensitive matters? Anyone thwarted would want that information for malicious ends.











  • “That’s a great question!” </ai>

    The truth is, we don’t need AI to have misinformation, and AI is not the biggest problem in the current post-truth society. There has been a war going on globally in undermining truth for a long time. The old saying, “The first casualty in war is truth” is invalid now, because truth is no longer relevant and lies are weaponised like never before in history. People don’t want to be certain of something, their first reaction to news is to react at a deep and emotional level and the science of misinformation is highly refined and successful in making most people react in a certain way. It takes effort and training not to do that, and most of us can’t.

    Journalists have been warning us about this for decades but integrity costs money, and that funding has been under attack too. It’s pretty depressing whichever way you look at it.









  • A book. Teach yourself Perl in 30 days. (Edit - may have been 21 days)

    I bought it around 25-30 years ago. I have dyslexia and autism and have had problems learning from books in the past, but something about the way that was written just clicked for me.

    It allowed me to write some pretty cool software, including a huge system that ran a large animal charity for a very long time, tons of automation software and scripts, and several full webuis. Indirectly it led me to a new career where I write perl every day.

    (I can write in many other languages now, but that was the keystone of everything for me)