Quality won’t increase relative to official methods because it’s already more or less at parity with them. If the file you watch is tagged as a WEB-DL, in most cases it’s identical to the file you’d be streaming via official methods in terms of quality. It’s just remuxed into an open container format like .mkv (the video and audio streams are losslessly copied into a file format which can be shared)

Paying a portion later means more cash can flow through the business and provide utility today. Your post implies that every business operating this way is effectively insolvent without access to credit, but even if your employer has the money to pay for the raw materials today, it generally isn’t in their best interest to do so

I stopped using it because it was kinda shitty. Some page elements in my webapps just didn’t display or work correctly. Firefox is the more polished experience now. But it is kinda nice not having to morally justify your choice of browser, too.

Mostly lurked since 2009, but always had an account so I could vote. Started commenting and posting more over time, to the point it was too much, having pointless internet arguments as a substitute for doomscrolling. So when I got the first notification about the API changes in RiF, decided it was time to cut the cord. I’d already mostly come around to the conclusion that I’d been wasting my time there, but I had a notion that it was somehow OK because the place I’d chosen to waste it was somehow different and better in comparison to other social media. It wasn’t that I wanted to get on a boycott bandwagon. But the API decision, the thinly veiled intent of their ridiculous pricing, and their steadfastness in making no subsequent attempt to mitigate the changes whatsoever truly was the tipping point where I could no longer do the mental gymnastics required to con myself into wasting more time there.

They also screwed themselves over by playing the r/place trump card so soon after the last iteration in 2022. Rather than doing it to create a cool event to experience once every few years, they did it to drive engagement on Reddit. That’s made people lose interest and even if it’s another 5 years before the next one, many of them won’t come back. It’s a self-acknowledgement that the peak reddit era is finished and wouldn’t have happened without the prior backlash against their enshittification. It’s the type of thing that sets up the conditions for a death spiral, because they’ve resorted to tricks to get people to use the site and eventually they’ll run out of tricks.

I get it, so I installed the extension and browsed with it today. My feedback is that I feel like blocking individual words like Elon or Bezos would be required to make this meaningful at all. I still saw a bunch of stuff about them that the filter didn’t catch because they are so ubiquitous that you don’t need to say their full name to communicate who you’re talking about.

At the same time, while I almost always don’t care and don’t want to hear about a piece of Elon news, it doesn’t mean I’m not interested in Twitter developments, but I think the filter will block most if not all links/info about Twitter since it’s intrinsically linked to Elon’s persona.

At the end of the day I think it’s a cool idea, but I don’t think you can effectively block these guys via this method without blocking any mention of any platform they’re associated with, which isn’t really what I want.

“Marketing” here being entirely incidental is the point, that the products appeal to youth simply by existing. To my knowledge, there aren’t any literal advertisements going around to young people like those ridiculous Juul ads 5 or so years ago. Talking about specific types of imagery or colours on packaging, or the types of flavours used in a flavoured product as “marketing” is using an umbrella term to suggest intent to actively market to kids, but that isn’t a thing that’s happening.

I can’t scrobble my music to last.fm on iOS without some janky workaround. The “almost same level of control” part of what you said relies on an assumption that only the set of use cases explicitly determined by Apple as ones that “matter” are worth supporting. That it’s more important to prevent the user from explicitly allowing a scrobbling app permission to read the music player app’s now playing notification than for the device to be able to perform this simple function.

This point of difference doesnt have any meaningful impact on collection of my data. It just stops the device from being able to do the function I want. So that what, I can sleep easier knowing that Apple designed a slick interface to point out data vectors which were already implied to be collected? It used to feel like a smartphone with training wheels, now they’ve just locked up the handlebars so that it’s easier to go straight.

My mother also got the smallpox vaccine and had a permanent scar from it. I pointed it out as a small child and she told me about it, I asked my dad and he had one too. I thought it was cool, like a rite of passage where one day I’d be old enough to get my own permanent vaccine scar. But then they had to go and eradicate smallpox, saving countless lives. Bummer, dude.

I’m talking about the WHO’s recommendations in their capacity as an advisory body on public health following their analysis of IARC research, not the research itself. Many of the studies do make substantial corrections for the participant candidates. I don’t think that’s necessarily translated through to the recommendations, which should be given in the context of existing public health outcomes.

The WHO agrees that two thirds of adults in countries like USA and Aus are overweight. They agree that obesity is an extreme risk factor for cancer. They agree that non-nutritive sweeteners confer at least a short term benefit to weight loss. They agree that the cancer risk associated with those products is comparatively insignificant. So they should be careful not to potentially mislead media and the the public about that specific causal relationship. It has directly resulted in the misleading headline of this post.

But then couldn’t you just as easily say rather than ‘people use diet products because they’re overweight’, that ‘people are overweight because they use diet products’ ? I’ve certainly heard both propositions before. “Never seen a skinny person drinking Diet Coke”

I didn’t, but I just found a few papers showing a relationship between awareness/use of nutrition claims/labels and obesity.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7622-3

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306919214001328?via%3Dihub

That second one sums up my logic pretty well:

The analysis revealed that people with excess weight display a high level of interest in nutrition claims, namely, short and immediately recognised messages. Conversely, obese individuals assign less importance to marketing attributes (price, brand, and flavour) compared with normal weight consumers.

Generally people that engage with products marketed as “diet” options are more likely to be people that want to improve their diet. In turn those people are more likely to be overweight. And people that are not overweight are more likely to select based on other product attributes.

Edit: The use of low-calorie sweeteners is associated with self-reported prior intent to lose weight in a representative sample of US adults - https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd20169

In cross-sectional analyses, the expected relation between higher BMI and LCS [low calorie sweetener] use was observed, after adjusting for smoking and sociodemographic variables. The relation was significant for the entire population and separately for men and women (see Table 1). The relation between obesity (BMI ⩾30 kg m−2) and LCS consumption was significant for LCS beverages, tabletop LCS and LCS foods (see Figure 1a). Individuals consuming two or more types of LCSs were more likely to be obese than individuals consuming none (42.7% vs 28.4%) and were more likely to have class III obesity (7.3% vs 4.2%).

Bummer, I think it should be all good now that the initial problems with updating the instance and closing the exploit vulnerability are sorted though.

My assumption isn’t completely absent of context. From the article: “The FDA reviewed the the same evidence as IARC in 2021 and identified significant flaws in the studies, the spokesperson said.”

But that’s not really what I meant. The issue I have is about language and presentation of info, not research methodology. Most people aren’t going to read WHO’s ~100 pages of recommendations on aspartame. We get CNBC’s interpretation, and some clickbaity editor has left their stink on it.

“WHO says soda sweetener aspartame safe, but may cause cancer in extreme doses” is both a more pertinent headline for countries in the west and from what I can tell, closer to being in alignment with what the WHO are actually saying.

Of the basis WHO is using here, most if not all longterm studies (the kind you’d want for assessing things like cancer risk) are based on observational evidence. That is, a study where the participants typically aren’t asked to do anything they don’t already normally do. For this topic, that means generally speaking the participants are going to be people that already normally drink low calorie sweetened beverages.

It doesn’t really seem like they’re accounting for the fact that this means that the participant candidates are going to skew towards people that are overweight, which is like the 2nd highest risk factor for cancer generally.

I can’t really make sense of their recommendation. The data required to recommend for or against just isn’t there. The totality of short term data is all very showing a very strong association between sweetened drinks and weight loss. Wish they’d just explain this stuff properly so we didn’t have to rely on the dumbass media to interpret advice meant for medical professionals

The main factor to consider in making an ultrathin phone in 2023 has nothing to do with the battery. It’s the requirement for a certain level of build quality to be suitable for end consumers. At some point we just need to develop new materials, because we can’t make it any more ultrathin without it also becoming ultrafragile using the materials available.

It hasn’t really been a focus since we realised back around the iPhone 5 that making these sweeping compromises for thinness was yielding diminishing returns and causing other problems. Today that’s still the thinnest mainline iPhone, only the SE and 12 Mini are thinner. 13 mini is thicker, and there is no 14 mini.

If it’s the same issue as me, you just need to logout/login inside the app. JWT secrets had to be rotated following a recent exploit, and the apps I’m using haven’t accounted for this case. Liftoff still thought I was logged in for example, but as far as the instance was concerned I wasn’t. No issues after I logged out/in manually.

The good news is they updated the game in late 2022, so now when you get around to giving it a try the experience should be improved 😁

I heard lemm.ee wasn’t vulnerable, so logging users out shouldn’t be necessary. To be vulnerable there would need to be custom emotes defined on the local instance by the admins, so I’m guessing they had none.

Maybe the situation just doesn’t call for use of a triggering word for the same reasons why swear words are less effective when used casually or arbitrarily in many situations. The meaning attached to the swear word is literally derived from the absence of its use in normal daily situations. In turn the use of the word alone is triggering for most that participate in this established convention - that’s the intended design for their use of the word. There’s plenty of forums where exclusively adults talk to eachother without swearing or where a blunt reference to SA would be weird.

When conversation about these topics is warranted, the person tabling it might feel compelled not to trigger other participants and self-censor as a measure towards that outcome. This might not actually prevent victims of SA from being inherently triggered by any discussion on the topic, but it at least signals to them that the organisers of the discussion have considered / are sympathetic to their position, which may encourage their participation in a way that enhances the discussion.

Personally I participate in communities where this topic comes up often and due to the established convention for the mode of discussion in that community, it sounds quite grating to me when someone uses the word rape, because I understand that convention and that it was established for the benefit of others (SA victims), not me.