Who are you calling an amateur, buddy? I can argue you under the table!

I guess 2000 was long enough ago to forget

If the dems ever sweep the house and senate, I hope they pass legislation

I mean, it’s pulling from MBFC and ground news, which are not both owned by Dave Van Zandt, and he doesn’t work alone. Also, when compared to other fact checking organizations, MBFC performs well, from what I’ve read. Well enough that if you find their output uncomfortable, you should be second guessing yourself.

It’s not really a bot’s opinion though? It’s reporting on salon in general, and letting you know that the reporting has a bias, which means generally, it might promote parts of the story that show Vance in a bad light compared to other reporting, and the. The Ground News link shows that reporting on this topic across several sources tends to be pretty non biased and factual. That’s all good information to have, and saying otherwise means you want to let yourself be misled.

And everything other than joining the topic and the source is written by humans who are trying to keep people informed.

But following media reports, it has also admitted that China-based employees had access to US users’ data, although the company insisted it was under strict and highly limited circumstances.

Employees of ByteDance might be Chinese, but they don’t work for the government. They work for ByteDance. I haven’t found anyone claiming to have proof that data in US citizens has left the company. Just fears that it could.

If you’re down voting a fact checker, you might want to do some self reflection on why you’re upset that Salon doesn’t have a perfect rating

There is concern that ByteDance may be giving the Chinese government access to data on US citizens. It’s worth noting that no proof of this actually happening has surfaced.

Mostly because of this. TikTok is the app collecting massive amounts of data on its users with dubious intent and questionable security that is currently being scapegoated, and discord is on the long list of popular apps that collect massive amounts of data their users with dubious intent and questionable security that we are not scapegoating.

That’s what the article is about: how that change has pushed politicians to be open about their flaws and having much more public lives, like celebrities. Meaning that voters vote for politicians who act like celebrities. The sentiment in other comments of “No. No we don’t.” ignores the reality of who has been winning elections for the last 30 years.

I’m gonna guess there’s a lot of down votes from people who just read the title…

The author points out the last 30 years of presidential candidates as their evidence, and paints a pretty nuanced picture of his politicians have dealt with changing voter trends. No one wants to vote for the candidate that doesn’t act like that can emphasize empathize (glide typing failed me) with them, even though that’s not really the president’s job.

Don’t ruin your own experience because someone else is enjoying it differently than you like to

If those ~25 Lemmy users could read they’d be very upset

Pretty sure you just attacked someone for agreeing with you.

Oh, no, that wasn’t excusing Meta in general. Just giving them a pass on that they’ve had, to my knowledge, a history of respecting robots.txt, which makes this piece of software better than outright malware. Starting it secretly and not giving site hosts a chance to make sure they had their privacy configured the way they liked first was a shady as hell move, no argument there.

I think of this as a problem with opt-in only systems. Think of how sites ask you to opt in to allow tracking cookies every goddamn time a page loads. A rule based system which lets you opt in and opt out, like robots.txt, to let you opt out of cookie requests and tell all sites to fuck would be great. @aniki@lemm.ee is complaining about malicious instances of crawlers that ignore those rules (assuming they’re right and that the rules are set up correctly), and lumping that malware with software made by established corporations. However, Meta and other big tech companies haven’t historically had a problem with ignoring configurations like robots.txt. They have had an issue with using the data they scrape in ways that are different than what they claimed they would, or scraping data from a site that does not allow scraping by coming at it via a URL on a page that it legitimately scraped, but that’s not the kind of shenanigans this article is about, as meta is being pretty upfront about what they’re doing with the data. At least after they announced it existed.

An opt-in only solution would just lead to a world where all hosts were being constantly bombarded with requests to opt in. My major take away from how meta handled this is that you should configure any site you own to disallow any action from bots you don’t recognize. As much as reddit can fuck off, I don’t disagree with their move to change their configuration to:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

I know what you’re trying to say, but that phrasing though. Being able to opt out is an important part of consent. No means no, man.

But meta’s will, and Alta Vista. I’m not angry at them when a script kitty makes a bad crawler

I guess I don’t really see the problem with that though. There are configuration levers you could be pulling, but those sites you’re hosting are not. There are lots of shady questions about how these models are getting training data, but crawlers have a well defined opt out mechanism.

The web would not be what we know it as without them, because it’s how you find sites. Why shouldn’t Alta Vista have one? I don’t object to what Alta Vista does with the data.

Have you used a search engine? Crawlers are not generative AI.