The problem here is that if this is unreliable…

And the problem if it is reliable is that everyone becomes dependent on Google to literally define reality.

Those would be easy things to add, if you were trying to pass it off as real.

Regardless of how the image was generated, why is Google treating a random blogspam site as the authoritative version of a work of art over (say) Wikipedia?

According to the article:

As 404 Media has reported in January, Google is regularly surfacing AI-generated websites that game search engine optimization before the human-made websites they are trained on. “Our focus when ranking content is on the quality of the content, rather than how it was produced,” Google told 404 Media in a statement at the time.

Does that mean I can search for any famous image, take the largest existing version, upscale it by 1% and post it on my own site, and instantly be featured at the top of google searches?

For the Greek gods, the greatest sin was attempting to be like them.

If there’s ever a Giraffe Interchange Format, I’ll pronounce it the same as giraffe. And unlike some people, I’ll be able to tell the two apart.

Stuck a wire in a power outlet.

Direct democracy—except instead of directly voting on legislation, voters vote on the desired effects of legislation and a metric for measuring if those effects are being achieved. The actual legislation is then written by specialists trained on effective policy implementation, who can adjust the legislation on the fly if it isn’t having the desired effect. Their mandate is limited by the associated metric—if they can’t meet the goals, they lose their mandate and the case goes back to voters for review.

At least Oracle Weblogic is being useful for someone.

Typing with long nails is the embodiment of “beauty is pain.”

The pain is real, but the beauty is subjective.

Couldn’t you theoretically do the same thing by tracking someone’s eye movements on video chat, if they look at their keyboard while typing?

I’m not familiar with every client, but on mine it only hides the domain for users on my own server. (Early email used to work exactly the same—you could send an email addressed to just a username with no tld and it would go to the user with that name on your own server by default.)

It should work the same as email: you can trust it’s them if the user account is hosted on their own site, or their employer’s, or if they link to it from another confirmed source.

They don’t mention any kind of control—I guess an appropriate one would be having a human interact with the participants one-on-one to see if they were as effective. (Although even if they were, the chatbots would likely be easier to implement in practice.)

There is no dark side of the moon Facebook, really—matter of fact it’s all dark.

This user’s name is displayed in Arabic, although the characters in the URL are Latin.

The most notorious is probably thalidomide, but there are plenty others on this list of withdrawn drugs that cause long-term side effects.

And that’s different from the commercial pharmaceutical industry how?

AFAIK, the only practical thing in the way of having a separate server that just hosts identity accounts for all types of fediverse content (while the content itself is hosted on other servers) is that your host server is responsible for presenting the interface through which you view the rest of the fediverse, and the interfaces are specialized for a particular content type. You could have a server running a variety of fediverse software (mastodon, lemmy, etc.) which automatically generates similar accounts for each user on each service, so users could sign up once and then switch interfaces; but I think the rest of the fediverse would still treat them as separate identities.

Not advocating for restoring the mammoth, but this is a dangerous line of argument.

With climate change and ongoing mass extinctions, many current species are or will soon be in the same situation that re-introduced mammoths would be—and you could use the same argument to say that trying to preserve them is cruel so we should kill off any current species facing environmental stress.

Yeah, “generating your own Marvel movie” was considered high art for most human cultures before copyright: from traditional epics to Greek dramas and even Shakespeare’s “serious” plays, audiences were already familiar with the characters and stories and valued the art of the re-telling. Novels (so-called because the characters and stories were “new”) were considered low-brow trash for people unfamiliar with the myths and stories that “real” literature was based on.

Now, that primal human urge to build on and re-tell familiar stories is relegated to unlicensed fan-fiction and to franchises like Marvel who only permit certain sanctioned creators to build on their “property”.