The whole article reeks of bullshit, with the only source being a “former member of Israel’s Eurovision delegation”. But the difference is that Italy and Germany allegedly threatens to leave the song contest in protest, whereas the other countries listed are merely expected to vote to keep Israel in the contest.

Not necessarily the government - this is from the public broadcasters, who should ideally be somewhat independent. Also this article asks us to trust some person from the former Israeli Eurovision delegation as a source.

That said, Italy’s current government is a dark cloud over the country. But at least in Italy it feels like an exception. In Germany it’s just the same broad coalition as always, and despite being the first country who should really know better they do not seem to be doing any better than the neo-fascists in Italy.

It’s really fucking striking.

For most jobs it’s hard to do a hiring process without in-person interviews, or at the very least video calls. So I’m not really sure how one could realistically get rid of biases. But I completely agree that whenever there are too many applications to interview everyone individually, the initial screening of applicants should be completely anonymized and rely only only technologies where biases can at least be understood.

For the final step I’m afraid we’ll have to try to train people to be less prone to biased decision-making. Which I agree is not a very promising path.

It’s not men against women, it’s people against billionaires.

It’s not the fact that these people are men that I take issue with, it’s that they are hypocrites capitalising feminist sentiments without making any actual effort towards real change.

Edit: Since I wrote my response the comment I responded to was changed into something even dumber. I’ll let it speak for itself.

At least where I’m from, it’s pretty well know that the education system is better suited to girls than boys, probably because it needs a reform

I didn’t say it doesn’t, clearly there’s a problem when half the population is systematically favoured.

To paraphrase: women can get pregnant and can’t work and it’s the man’s fault

Where the fuck did I say that it’s the man’s fault? It’s a societal problem, doesn’t mean it’s anybody’s fault. At least not an entire gender in general. Capitalism as a system, yeah, probably.

What I observe in society are a huge increase in the amount of advertising aimed at women with a feminist message because women are being programmed to flock to such messages

I’m the first to criticize corporate feminism (just like greenwashing and pride washing), but I suspect feminist messaging appeals to women because they are sick of the patriarchy, not because they are programmed by marketing agencies. The fuck are you on about.

That said, I think you’re right that the messaging of companies trying to appear feminist in their communications while nevertheless usually being run almost exclusively by men is a huge part of the source material that produces the bias here. I’m not sure we disagree much in substance, but I suspect we come from different starting points in how we see gender dynamics in society.

At least where I’m from it’s pretty well known that girls outperform boys in school, possibly because their brains develop slightly earlier in some ways useful to perform in a class room.

This could give women a head start and very well lead to them on average performing better in work life, until they are forced to choose between careers and families while they partners continue to advance their careers at full speed not worrying about being pregnant.

But that’s a different discussion. We should avoid biases in hiring because biases suck and make for an unjust society. And we should stop pretending language models make intelligent considerations about anything.

What’s fascinating here is that LLMs trained on the texts we produce create the opposite bias of what we observe in society, where men tend to get preferential treatment. My guess is that this is a consequence of inclusive language. In my writing, whenever women are under-represented, I make a point out of defaulting to she and her rather than he and him. I know others do the same. I imagine this could feed into LLMs. Whatever it is that causes this, it sure as fuck isn’t anything actually intelligent.

the AI considered

Sorry to break it to you, but the “AI” does not “consider” anything. They are talking about a language prediction model.

I was confused for a second, but it turns out the native client hasn’t been updated since 2021. So I guess it’s nice to have a web app alternative. :)

Cinny is another native Matrix client that’s actively maintained, so I guess it’s not all that bad.

Yeah, I’m not all that original. :)

Forgot to mention their efforts to ruin podcasts for everyone. I refuse to listen though anything else than independent podcast clients.

There’s several issues, but for me it was:

1. Supporting questionable podcasters like Gwyneth Paltrow and Joe Rogan - I do not want my money to go to these people
2. Not supporting the artists I actually listen to
3. Lobbying the EU against AI regulation, which goes directly against my opinions and preferences, again not something I want my money to be spent on

All of this new stuff is bad, but I already decided that this was not a company I want to support. They seem to represent everything I hate.

Yeah, no Linux app, and no third party apps as far as I’m aware. I really liked the GTK app Spot. But for me, Spotify was no longer an option - I deleted my Spotify account before I found an alternative.

Yeah, they don’t do much in terms of tracking your listening habits and suggesting playlists based on similar users (which I personally did not enjoy much on Spotify, for me it always repeated itself and rarely hit the spot), but they have some great curated playlists and editorial material. :)

For those who still want a streaming service: I switched from Spotify to Qobuz, no complaints.

Just make sure to set up your Qobuz before you delete your Spotify, as you can export your playlists. I messed up on that part.

“misidentified as a suspect” my ass. Correctly identified as a person of colour. I wish they would talk honestly about these things.

European legal systems are largely built around the idea that courts are apolitical, and that judges make their decisions neutrally based on the word of the law and the facts of the case.

This is of course impossible, but some people—especially judges themselves—are afraid that the system would collapse if the public learned how political the work of courts really is. So when France started publishing all the judgments of their courts to the public, they also forbade the public from studying individual judges.

It’s pretty funky.

Thanks, updated my post! Some of those are pretty intuitive, but I didn’t want to make assumptions. :)

Hadn’t quokk.au before - looks great!

So some general purpose PieFed instances with neat domain names other than the flagship are:

• https://quokk.au/ 🇺🇲
• https://feddit.online/ 🇺🇲
• https://piefed.ca/ 🇨🇦
• https://piefed.zip/ 🇪🇺
• https://piefed.au/ 🇦🇺
• https://piefed.world/ (“still under construction”)

The list seems to be growing very quick, which is of course cool.

Lykke til!! Artig å høre at det fortsatt er norskamerikanere som holder stand. 💪

A few weeks ago I finally emptied and cancelled my Dropbox in favour of a Nextcloud server.

The app works much better on Linux, it integrates wonderfully with all my devices (I already used it for contact lists and notes), and I save €50 per year that I can donate to open source projects instead of wasting it on Dropbox.

Super happy to see Nextcloud take the lead on other fields as well. My co-authors sometimes insist on word, and co-authoring via Word and LibreOffice in locally stored files as we are currently doing is a mess.