I'm a bit annoyed when people talk about "fake news" as if everyone understands what that means. It seems pretty clear to me that different people have different conceptions of what that is.
One of the best ways to make me cringe is to use "fake news" as a joke in the completely wrong context. It physically hurts me to realize this every time it happens (which is unfortunately common)
Not implying you are doing this, had to chime in tho cause it really does piss me off
I should clarify that doing this on purpose isn't even remotely funny. It's the realiziation that they have an extremely incorrect understanding of the term that hurts
I'm sure there was a moment when "fake news" meant stories coming from superficially reputable looking websites, that in reality were fugaciously created to give a veneer of respectability to made up stories. This meaning of "fake news", which I think is actually meaningful and useful, seems to have completely vanished, or maybe I just imagined it?
The term dates to the late 1980s when it referred to propagandistic video and audio "news releases" generally created by or for corporate interests. That usage continued through to mid-to-late 2000s decade.
It was applied to more general misinformation in the 2010s, before being 'undefined' by many of the promotors and beneficiaries of fake news.
It didn't vanish so much as it was vanished. Trump and friends calling anything they didn't like "fake news" effectively destroyed any utility or specificity the term may, briefly, have had. Brilliant move.
It’s also interesting that those who popularized the term “fake news” (left wing politicians) used it to discredit their opposition, by claiming some sort of “collusion” between Trump and the Russians.
And now that whole construct, which was reported on to great lengths by “real” news outlets, has been proven to be “fake news” as well.
As in, the phenomenon of fake news was actually faked? Could this even be messier?
Clinton didn't create the term fake news. The article you link to mentions her having used the term in a speech, but that doesn't mean she created it, nor, as I assume we're meant to infer, that she or the Democratic Party fabricated the phenomenon referred to as a post-hoc rationalization for having lost the election.
In fact, if you read the Wikipedia article on fake news[0], you'll note the term as well as the phenomenon predate Clinton's campaign and loss, even within that campaign cycle. People were talking about it well before that point.
I've seen many discussions about whether the groundings of the MAX (especially the earliest ones) are hysterical/political or is it based on any facts. The facts is two of these BRAND NEW planes crashed within 5 months under very similar circumstances. Doesn't that alone seems statistically justified to ground the MAX? The chances of human error and/or environmental factor striking twice within such short period seems infinitesimally low, no? Just curious how that math works out.
“The company also wanted to cover the trenches with epoxy, rather than the typical asphalt mix.”
Along with the rest, this outlines a basic problem that modern Google and other Silicon Valley companies have with technologies. The Google people have massive talent, capabilities, and funding. Yet the use this almost as a handicap nowadays. Because they have talent doesn’t mean they have a monopoly of it.
We have extensive testing of every conceivable paving and repair mathod done over 100+ years. Engineering colleges around the U.S. (and the world of course) have a massive legacy of tests. To go in and just guess your new idea is going to work for a new project just isn’t necessary in such basic technologies.
Has no one heard of planned obsolescence? Facebook has outserved its usefulness; it is little better than a rudderless ship under the current leadership and business model. The bell has tolled; and the Feds are at the gates. Cease operations and move on. There's a plot available in the social media graveyard next to MySpace with Facebook's name on it.
That's not what planned obsolescence is, but there are certainly cycles of capital whereby businesses build great and useful products with the initial help of capital infusions, then slowly degrade the usefulness of said product or increase their exploitativeness in order to reduce costs or increase prices. Perhaps that is happening with facebook now.
Well, maybe Marlinspike should consider just not moving so fast. There’s something to be said for stability. (Cue Debian.)
On the other hand, I do strongly agree that the extensibility of XMPP basically killed off Jabber. I’m back to just IRC except for a (non-federated) work-internal server, and occasionally (say twice a month) firing up a Jabber client to get a message through (though I mostly eMail those people instead).
I’ve expressed my thoughts on this already. And now it wasn’t 5% teens, but 18%?!?! That changes….nothing. Look through the letter from Facebook and see how many times they were notified they’d be collecting your data. They knew what they signed up for and they got paid to do it. This is such a non-issue, it’s insane. What terrible thing has happened as a result of this app? A few teens made a little extra money by letting Facebook see how they use their phone? Let’s do another 15 stories on it please TC.
