I mean, apart from the places that aren't...

These are completely unremarkable temperatures for quite a lot of Europe, and quite a lot of Europe isn't particularly humid.

"North-West Europe" != "Europe" (however much they think it to be true...)

People that attend Untold, Neversea, and no doubt a whole host of other festivals around the world would look and think "first time?"

The point is very much that yes, for Paris, it is indeed the first time.

That's kinda the point of climate change. Lots of places will be getting "first times" they're not prepared for. "Herp derp but Death Valley is hot" is the Fox News formula for dismissing that.

If it brought a big picture mode with controller navigation that wasn't irretrievably broken, that would be an improvement.

Steam's website design generally is so bad, and when you then add big-picture and controller it's "I can't believe it's not a teenager's first web project" bad.

Steam has a lot going for it, but don't pretend it's perfect.

Because being pedantic just to try and make yourself feel superior to someone who was posting in good faith is obnoxious behaviour that deserves to be called out. You knew exactly what they meant, but thought you'd truth-bomb your way in for what, exactly? You did nothing to actually address their point - that the messages being identical is prima facie evidence that (original AI generated or not) it was probably candidates copy-and-pasting a standard form response, which could (and was) be done long before LLMs were a thing - and instead just added "look how clever I am".

Dick behaviour doesn't deserve a charitable response.

Huh? The BBC is a UK news site (not really sure what 'shilled' means, but anyway.) In the UK "a jab" is perfectly normal and not remotely negative vernacular for getting a vaccination. As in "I'm going to the doctor to get my jabs for my holiday to Timbuctoo" or "damn that scratch is deep, lucky I've had my Tetanus jab", or whatever.

So your hyopthesis is that instead of a load of people cutting and pasting the same response (AI generated or otherwise,) they all cut and pasted the exact same prompt into exactly the same model with exactly the same context running on exactly the same hardware, and went to the trouble of also fixing the same seed?

That certainly seems the simpler explanation.

You really need to learn to read who you are replying to.

Not my interpretation.

And what you were doing was "well, akshuallying". Own it.

Except the number cited isn't for social media posts. It's all arrests under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, which covers far more than social media (as you can probably guess, given social media didn't even exist in 1988.)

That includes arrests for threatening phonecalls, sharing indecent images (child porn and the like - you lot who bang on about Epstein all the time are meant to be against that, right?) - and not only on social media - stalking and harrasment adjacent offenses like nuisance calling, and a whole host of other offences completely unrelated to social media.

In other words, it's complete bollocks. And all from one woeful newspaper 'story'. Congratulations for providing an excellent example of how one right-wing rag with an agenda can confect a story, then have it cited by a load of other 'sources' that don't do anything beyond cutting and pasting the original lie, and then suddenly you've made a whole new fact.

Unfortunately, the data doesn't appear to be collected in a systematic way across the whole country, but one police force - West Yorkshire Police - does have data going back long enough for a trend, at least for the arrests on the Communications Act.

For West Yorkshire Police, the arrests under the Communications Act are pretty much constant from 2008 (around 200) to 2024 (actually a little lower, 152).

Given the changes in social media penetration over that time (things like the iPhone and Twitter barely even existed in 2008,) for the rate of arrests to have remained constant throughout I would suggest strongly indicates that there is a very strong element of "absolutely nothing to do with social media" in those numbers The Times quoted.

The numbers for the Malicious Communications Act are less easy to parse, because they don't go back far enough, and also they show a massive drop in the last 6 years.

All of this of course could be slightly moot - because in 2023, a new act (the Online Safety Act) was passed which specifically relates to "arresting people for their social media posts" [TM Musk et al].

In 2024, West Yorkshire Police made 5 (five! Count them! Hell, you could invite them all round to your house for dinner) arrests under the OSA.

"Thousands" of people are categorically not being arrested for their social media posts in the UK every year. Or even every decade.

Welcome to Lemmy!

So we can expect Vance to do another of his tours lecturing Europe on free speech imminently, then.

To be fair, the Brits fucked themselves with Brexit. While the US is trying to fuck the entire planet.

The fact you don't find that more embarrassing is pretty much the problem.

It's still the case that users from the US dominate most online spaces, so illiteracy is to be expected. I wouldn't consider it suspicious on its own.

I used to run my own instance, and then a couple of weeks ago thought it would be a good idea to upgrade to the 1.0 beta - which I made a complete horlicks of... And then made even more of a mess of trying to roll back, before throwing up my hands and saying "why not just use a proper instance!"

Which is to say - I'm very grateful you're doing all this (keeping up with upgrades, managing vulnerabilities etc. etc.) so I don't have to... Thank you!

I think that's more about telling users though that if they let an apl find local devices, that can be used to deduce your location.

It's not uncommon. Rivian, Rimac, and various Chinese cars all have IWD (Individual Wheel Drive.) For a rather longer time, trams have been running with stub-axles and individual motors for decades.

Thailand was on its knees begging for Chinese tourists to return after Covid. They'd be wise to do something about the goddamned Russians that are ruining the place - or any of the other endless-repeating-visa-run drug and sex offender contingents - before anyone starts worrying about the Chinese.

What a dumb take.

I make full use of my gigabit broadband (in both the places I have it - Bucharest and Bangkok), so there very much is a "point". I'm not going to bother enumerating all the ways I use it though, because the response will just be "ohhhh, but normal users don't do that". But exceptions are normal - the mistake being made here is assuming that you represent the whole human race just because you don't have a need for something.

Personally I think sanitary towels are useless, because I've never needed one and indeed the majority^* of the population don't need them...

This is just a cope post; "gigabit broadband is so fucking expensive in the UK I'm trying to justify it not being necessary". My gigabit fibre in Bucharest costs about 8eur/month, in Bangkok 15eur/month. I suspect if broadband in the UK were reasonably priced, this blog post would never have been conceived...

^* before you argue, remember (pre-)puberty and menopause are things.

TVs were always cheap compared to cost to make the things - it's not just the "oh, they have advertising now" thing.

Source: I worked in electronics retail in the late 80s/early 90s, and in one of the world's largest consumer electronics firms when my career proper started.

The TVs in the window of the local electronics chain store (or in Walmart) were sold at practically zero margin, or more often than not at a loss. The retail chains would basically hold a gun to the CE companies heads and tell them if you're not willing to sell at a loss, nothing you make is going in the window display, or worst case we're not selling you at all.

The retail chains didn't care because all their profit was in selling accessories and unnecessary extended warranties. The CE companies hoped that they could make it up by selling you the more expensive model they actually made a profit on once you were in the door, or by selling you a VCR or whatever as well.

This is why the TV companies were always looking for a "next big thing" (flat-screen, ultraflat, widescreen, HD, 3D, 4k, 8k...) to differentiate the "next model up", which is to say the model the store would actually allow them to make a profit on.

This particular race-to-the-bottom mutually assured destruction business model is also the reason there is practically no consumer electronics manufacturing left in the West, of course. And why manufacturers grasp at stuff like advertising.