That’s what I did!

This is not from Google. This is Extinction Rebellion registering a domain to prank Google, by speaking in their voice and resolving to stop funding climate deniers. It’s both a cheeky prank and a way to put pressure on Google to take accountability.

Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

Very good to know. After following your Github link, I found my way to the blog post that it looks like you are quoting:

https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/announcement/State-of-the-Pipe-2023/

NewPipe is a killer app I would say, with nearly Youtube Red level functionality in something that’s free and OSS. A bit afield from privacy, but you do get to access youtube stuff without logging in.

Syncthing is brilliant, although for me it has had a heck of a learning curve to keep straight. Might just be me though.

That’s where the not that weird idea comes into play. It’s not that weird to not want to be misrepresented - that’s an entirely different thing from trolling, or strawmanning, or seeking out inflammatory topics on purpose. It’s a natural and understandable reaction, and we shouldn’t respond to it by deciding it’s ok to retaliate with increasingly less fair characterizations of their statements.

And again, that’s not even within an country mile of being a good faith attempt at charitable interpretation, for several reasons.

You’re twisting their words into some sort seemingly overnight goodbye to all software relying on third party libs. A more normal way of taking that is envisioning a more gradual progression to some future state of affairs, where to the greatest extent possible we’ve worked to create an ecosystem that meets our needs. An ecosystem that’s build on a secure foundation of known and overseen libraries that conform to the greatest extent possible to the FOSS vision. Ideally you don’t just say goodbye, you work to create ersatz replacements, which there’s a rich tradition of in the FOSS world.

Your other point was even worse:

important software shouldn’t reuse code already made, they should reinvent the wheel and in the process introduce unique vulnerabilities

Somehow, you decided that putting words in their mouth about going out of their way to solve the problem only with worst-case-scenario bad software development practices (e.g. lets go ahead and create unique vulnerabilities and never re-use code) is a reasonable way of reading them, which is completely nuts. FOSS can and does re-use code, and should continue to do so to the extent possible. And like all other software, strive to avoid vulnerabilities with their usual procedures. That’s not really an argument against anything specific to their suggestion so much as its an argument against developing any kind of software at any point in time - new games, new operating systems, re-implementations seeking efficiency and security, etc. These all face the same tradeoffs with efficient code usage and security. Nothing more or less than that is being talked about here.

we shouldn’t rely on free software made by free labor, and we need to say goodbye to some 60-70% or more of the software we use

Again I’m just reading along, and as a person who cares about, you know, the principle of charity, I don’t see how you can possibly think that’s the most charitable interpretation of what they said. I took them to mean we should do what we can to ensure these projects have financial resources to continue, not that we should “say goodbye” to them.

And here’s the crazy thing: I’m not even saying I agree. I just think it’s possible to address a face value version of what they’re talking about without taking unnecessary cheap shots.

Mate, we are discussing on two different threads. Chill out. Maybe I didnt get your point so feel free to elaborate or leave it.

I think it would be really good if all of us on the internet agreed to a rule, which is that if you mischaracterize someone or misread them, it’s not that weird for them to want you to not do that. So I don’t think it’s fair to response to a comment correctly noting they are being mischaractized by going out of your way to try and make it about their emotions/mental state.

And there’s the rub. Sure, it’s a financed phone. It doesn’t follow that we have to suspend judgment on the means they resort to, to enforce their terms.

What is the insight from your perspective?

Right, this is what it means to have a sober and comprehensive look at the issues that separate the parties. Nobody who says both parties are the same ever seems capable of participating in this type of conversation, they just talk in memes.

I agree that there is an unfortunate bipartisan consensus on national security issues that is normalized bombings.

I would nevertheless say you can find significant differences on foreign policy. And, you can find huge huge huge differences on domestic policy, on things like respect for the rule of law, on the type of people appointed to courts, on economic policy.

So I think you raise a legitimate concern, but then you proceed to completely abuse it by trying to make that concern stand in for the whole of everything that matters about political decisions.

Yeah, I would love to get an inside look at what information led to the decision to publish that report.

Wow, I actually believed in this one. Is there a short text version of what the videos are explaining?

I don’t think this is actually a myth. I think there’s an extreme version of the statement, but it nevertheless is true that there are specialized taste buds and that they aggregate on sections on the tongue.

And I think there’s a whole rabbit hole here, of overeager “corrections”, that are not in fact corrections but just someone engaging in bad faith with a statement that’s close enough to the actual truth. It’s actually more wrong to categorically dismiss it, then it would be to note the difference between it and the truth, which is to say while they are not strictly regions, they’re nevertheless as attested to be the NIH:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8956797/

There is undoubtedly a spatial component to our experience of gustatory stimulus qualities such as sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami, however its importance is currently unknown. Taste thresholds have been shown to differ at different locations within the oral cavity where gustatory receptors are found. However, the relationship between the stimulation of particular taste receptors and the subjective spatially-localized experience of taste qualities is uncertain. Although the existence of the so-called ‘tongue map’ has long been discredited, the psychophysical evidence clearly demonstrates significant (albeit small) differences in taste sensitivity across the tongue, soft palate, and pharynx (all sites where taste buds have been documented).

In my opinion, the more interesting phenomenon is understanding how these facts, and the temptation to correct, challenges our ability to sustain nuance and to carefully differentiate between degrees of truth, instead of just making blanket denials.

I’m not so sure you do get it because it seems like you want to hold protesters to the exact same moral judgment, despite agreeing with a factual analysis of how infrequent the most egregious behaviors were.

If you understand that, and, more importantly comprehend it, then that needs to cash out in your moral assessment of what happened, otherwise you have no business saying you agree or that you understand.

If the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, then the opposite of “I understand” is not “I don’t understand”, it’s “I understand, but still…”

It’s comments like this that make me glad Lemmy has a star that lets you favorite them. Thank you very much.