Well, could be like Taiwan; never, ever underestimate the human capacity for fucking things up. If there’s one thing humans are exceptionally good at, it’s making the dumbest fucking decisions you can possibly make without being single-celled.

Who knows how the world would have turned out if things had gone in such a different direction.

Fines levied by the EU can be pretty damn stiff though, so I doubt Bluesky can afford to just ignore the DSA

People don’t give precise percentages though when surveyed. They might round to typical fractions like 1/4, 1/3, or they might round to 10 or 20 percent.

Nobody is saying “hmm, I estimate that it would be approximately 37 percent”.

Of course the wisdom of the crowd does wonders for smoothing those coarse estimates, but still, if the crowd is +/- 10 of the real percentage value, I’d say they’re pretty much on the money.

Oh yes absolutely, people would definitely just “eyeball” their estimate and the percentages we see in the graphs are population (well, sample) level averages, but I’d still say that the differences between these average estimates and actual reality are by and large much worse that “on the money”. To illustrate, if the estimate for some country was eg. 30% and the real proportion 40%, the relative error – off by a factor of 1.33 – would be smaller than if the estimate is 12% and the real value 2% – off by a factor of 6 – even though both have a 10 point error.

So eg Poles’ and Argentinians’ estimates are both 12 percentage points off, but because Poland’s immigrant population is smaller that means that they overestimated its real size by 650% and so their estimate was 7.5x higher, but Argentinians were “only” off by 460% / 5.6x. 'Strayans were off by 7 points, but their relative error was only around 23%, which is still almost a 1/4 error and their estimate looks like it was the best out of these. The average global error was 100%, so on average people think there’s 2x as many immigrants as there actually are, and characterizing that as “pretty much on the money” is, well, maybe a bit generous

Right, but those estimates aren’t 10% off, but closer to at least 10 percentage points off – percent and percentage points are not the same thing.

Even Australia is ~23% off, and eg. Germany is 42% off, the US is 120% off, UK is 57% off, and eg. Poland is a whopping 650% off

I’m hesitant to say it because I’ve gotten some ridiculously hostile reactions for it, but I’ve really liked Kagi.

Yes, it’s a subscription service but that means they have an incentive to not show you shit results. According to some, paying for a search service is wrong because online services should be free, and I’m just astroturfing if I even mention it

Or, I dunno, maybe just don’t use Google?

Yeah, same, I found it a bit surprising they have fewer than Germany

Shutting it does shut you out though, at least until you unshut it.

Oh I wish it was. Eg. here in Finland sharing movies etc. among friends or downloading them off the internet used to be legal as long as you weren’t doing it for profit or distributing stuff to a huge audience, but that changed in 2006 because the new EU Copyright Directive required it, and that directive was hugely influenced by the likes of WIPO.

Governments rarely realize anything related to IP that the copyright mafia doesn’t spoon-feed them, unfortunately.

Researchers have achieved data rates as high as 424Gbit/s across a 53-km turbulent free-space optical link using plasmonic modulators—devices that use special light waves called surface plasmon polaritons to control and change optical signals

This could be a line from Star Trek

Yeah I doubt those particular comments have anything to do with “AI”. It just seems fashionable to blame AI for absolutely everything nowadays

capiTALiSm bREeDS INnOvATIon

… what

What a cute little foka

No thank you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8pxmNi-eiw

Not nearly as horrifying as advertised

Conservatives see dystopian fiction and go “hold my beer”

Mussolini had an actual career as an intellectual

Well, he certainly considered himself to be an intellectual. Whether he actually was one is another matter entirely

Considering that both Mussolini and Hitler were also incompetent fucking morons, it’s no surprise that modern fascists also pick leaders like them.

They’re sending their best.