This is social media! Do you mean corporate social media or social media focused on using real names?
supersquirrel
Strawberry, Audacious, qmmp and Amberol are all decent audio players I have been happy with.
Embedded in the DSA is a theory about what X actually is. It treats platforms like X as communications infrastructure where speech happens, and the platform is conceptualised as a singular place, mostly neutral, with certain obligations for moderation and transparency attached. It views platforms as companies that are capitalistic in a textbook understanding of capitalistic companies: entities with the goal profit maximalisation, that are responsive to legal and economic incentives. This place can be regulated properly via transparency and via a set of complex process requirements. The platform companies that run these places will then implement these requirements as they are incentivised to do so via legal and economic pressures. The DSA’s approach follows from this understanding: establish transparency requirements, ensure researcher access, and prohibit deceptive design practices.
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Where the EC treats X as a communications network, Musk understands intuitively that X is something more than that, although he does not spell it out explicitly. Social networking platforms are collective sense making tools. Social networking platforms, whether that’s X, Instagram or TikTok, are platforms that we use to shape our common knowledge, and to determine which political opinions are currently in-vogue. These platforms are used to create a shared reality. This goes from how TikTok and Instagram influencers can push Dubai Chocolate into a global hype, to how the conversations on X shape what’s inside the political Overton window. The algorithmic feeds actively shape which voices get amplified, which narratives spread, and which facts feel established. Henry Farrell summarises the problem as: “The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.” The fundamental power of platforms like X comes from its ownership over the tools to shape the collective understandings of the public, and allows them to be malformed in favour of fascism.
Viewing platforms like X exclusively through the lens of a communications network, without taking into account how the platform affects collective knowledge, leads to two problems, both on the individual level and on the political level. This misunderstanding operates at both the individual and regulatory level.
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In a recent blog post, Mastodon calls for “social sovereignty”, as a response to how X can retaliate against government institutions. Mastodon understands social sovereignty here as public institutions taking control of their social media presence, mainly by running their own social networking servers on software like Mastodon. They mention explicitly that the EC already has their own Mastodon server, at ec.social-network.europa.eu, and invite other organisations to follow suit. That the EC already has their social sovereign presence, but only uses it for press releases without any of the Commissioners using the platform, further accentuates the large gap between the rhetoric and behaviour. Still, the infrastructure for alternative ways for the EC to take power already exists. Initiatives like Eurosky further indicate that the tools for the EC to shift power structures away from the platforms they’re trying to regulate are available.
Fantastic article thank you for sharing!
Housing & cost of living is something that affects everybody equally, so it’s somewhat weird to bring it up when discussing a particular profession. We’re ALL having trouble buying a house.
No, it really isn't, artists almost as a rule tend to occupy the peripheries of societies and not to make a ton of money or experience especially stable lives. This means if the average person is suffering artists are definitely suffering...
The decline in social safety nets, the increase in housing and cost of living and the rise of music distribution services that are openly hostile towards musicians earning an actual income off their music such as Spotify make my point indisputable (even worse Bandcamp being bought by Epic ensures enshittification of the last large platform left not hostile to musicians). Things are materially worse for the quality of life for people on the periphery of society.
“You can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough. The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans."
-Spotify CEO Daniel Ek
“Is this a sub for ants?!”
Artists are being treated worse, that is for sure, why do the details of if artists can still manage to create equally good art as we begin to treat them worse and worse matter? I don't know if I want artists to be capable of that past a certain point as it just ends up worse for artists anyways when they do this and normalize even worse treatment of their profession.
I think it takes more thought to decide whether to upvote or downvote a post than it does for a comment. A comment can be bandlimited, focused and directly or tangentially related to a post, upvoting it doesn't necessarily imply endorsement/validity of anything other than the specific content of the comment. Upvoting a post/link on the other hand takes a deeper consideration over the full set of things you are endorsing/validating as true by upvoting since what is under consideration isn't a contained specific statement set in the specific context of a conversation. Consider a link to an actually halfway decent article on a very problematic website, upvoting the link becomes a quagmire of thinking through ok well maybe this article is accidentally saying something useful but what is the context here? In contrast upvoting a comment about the article that says "I agree with this article for the most part, but fox news isn't a trustable source!" by comparison takes much less mental friction to calculate out for yourself.
Also I think the comments just tend to be very informative here, they are why I am here in the first place after all and not just going directly to where the links are posted to. Naturally this will lead me into following a conversation and upvoting/downvoting based on how I react to the conversation in a way that feels more important than the overall link because it is. The link is the starting point to a broader potential conversation and I think it is natural to be more focused on that when after all that is the entire point of this structure of social media. We would all be reading RSS feeds alone if we didn't care about the comments.
We need more audiophile memes in this sub! The amount of pseudo-science bullshit is intense in the audio world, it is nearly overpowering for somebody new to it.
Thank you!
Experience in the past few years makes it seem that the viability of tank-based warfare has dramatically declined.
I do disagree here though, I think this is a serious miscalculation that arose from as a narrative primarily from two things. The first was Ukraine having to innovate with what they were actually given (not enough traditional AT) and had access to in order to stop Russian assaults (quadcopters) and the second is Russian armor has fatal flaws that haven't been meaningfully been addressed despite decades of feedback and indicators of those fatal flaws.
Drones have radically changed land warfare, but in the end I think they will make armored vehicles more crucial as part of combined arms land operations.
Take the Bradley for example, it simply outclasses almost all Russian armor, Russia can't compete even against much older cold war western military equipment like this. On armor thickness alone most Russian armor fails to meet battlefield realities, even smaller artillery calibers shred their armor to pieces. This forces Russia to focus on drone tactics and also to HEAVILY propagandize the idea that traditional armored vehicles are obsolete lest they look weak and stuck in the past on a dead end of obsolete armor design like they are.
Drones have transformed the role of armor not made it obsolete, Russia is just trying to desperately bullshit the rest of the world this isn't the case with a firehose of propaganda about it.
Look at the most recent iteration of the Abrams, it incorporates a capacity for hull mounted PERCH systems for launching loitering muition/surveillance drones from within the vehicle, integrating the use of drones tightly in with the use of main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, further the CROWS system on Abrams tanks highly emphasizes the capability to observe and target fast moving targets with advanced optics and apply kinetic force to them. The Bullfrog turret program meant for Bradleys and other armored vehicles fulfills a similar role. This is the way forward rather than considering tanks obsolete unless you build a massive unwieldy metal cage on top of them and pretend artillery and other direct fire weapons don't exist as decisive counters.
Drone cages/cope cages are likely here to stay, I am talking about the Russian turtle "tanks" that are basically barely moving deathtraps for the crews.
As a modular system, PERCH is designed to be simply bolted onto an armored vehicle; in the case of the Abrams, it is fixed in place using existing attachment points. In the MARS event, PERCH was operated via a tablet interface, although GDLS says that future iterations will be fully integrated with existing vehicle computer systems.
By utilizing the Switchblade, PERCH provides the vehicle with not only extended-range surveillance but also over-the-horizon lethality. In certain circumstances, this can even be extended to beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS), in which the loitering munition is used in an autonomous, preprogrammed mode to fly a route and/or hit a fixed target.
https://www.twz.com/land/m1-abrams-tank-armed-with-switchblade-drones-tested-by-army
The Bullfrog is equipped with a .50 caliber (12.7mm) weapon and a cyclic rate of fire of 600 rounds per minute. It is designed to defeat Group 1 through Group 3 UAVs and features both autonomous and semi-autonomous engagement modes. At just 165 pounds without ammunition and accurate to less than 1 MOA, the system is optimized for mobile operations and fixed-point defense.
Company specifications state the Bullfrog can engage aerial targets at ranges of up to 1,500 meters. In addition to battlefield deployment, the system can be used to protect critical infrastructure such as power substations.
https://defence-blog.com/bradley-abrams-get-drone-defense-upgrade/
These conclusions must be hard science because we used math and numbers!
Forums are a type of social media.