I think so, I don’t remember how long that was. But I do distinctly remember the era where it was shoved down everyone’s throat, which I have to say stuck with people far more. Telling people that they must use it, generated so much hatred for it it was insane.
I remember when they offered 1GB, was at a time when I think the standard hotmail was like either 10 MB or 100 MB, and they made the announcement on april 1st.
Then did it via an invite system.
You know now that I think of it, I wonder what would have happened if google plus had used a similar playbook to that. Seems like with gmail google knew the “exclusivity” was a selling point. Facebook grew big via similar strategies (only these special college students can get it, ok a few more colleges can), meanwhile google plus was "HEY, USE GOOGLE PLUS NOW, Oh you aren’t using it yet, we made your youtube account a google plus account now, so now you have an account please use it now!
While social media in general is toxic. I do feel design wise google plus was leaps and bounds ahead of facebook at the time. Circles is IMO the feature that would have made social media actually semi-useful. (IE post your video game content to gamer friends, fun activities to friends, and not putting any job risking content to bosses etc…).
I can give you they had different ways to get to that position. As much as I hate IE, I do have to admit it was ahead of netscape for quite a significant time. But yes google used less monopolistic practices to get in there, beyond like spamming you whenever you went to google. I will admit even now edge does worse in the monopolistic practices "I see you went all out of your way to download another browser, are you sure you really want to switch to it, have you at least given edge a fair shot? Please try it out for a bit longer. (and of cousre it’s worth noting now edge is basically a skin of chrome),
But how they got there wasn’t what I was talking about anyway, The point is web pages now cater to chrome, as that’s what makes up over 60% of the total usage, with about 20% being safari (of which you can pretty much assume almost all of that is mobile), and almost everything at the top is running chromes engine.
So in short, if you are designing a page.
Does it work on blink engine, that covers 76% of users, then does the mobile site work on safari, that covers another 20%,
Point is a monopoly is a monopoly, even IF the reason they are there is purely good. The point of the article is just noting that to not use chrome’s engine, browsers have to take the time to make things work, because the websites themselves have little incentive to do so. for such a small percent of their userbase.
So TL:DR, chrome is like internet explorer was before firefox. It does some things outside the standard, and because it’s the modern day “default”. sites sloppily code to work with it, and other browsers are left carrying the bag because if tiktok doesn’t work on firefox, people will view that as a firefox problem. Even if firefox is the one actually following the standards when tiktok and chrome aren’t.
Honestly to me I’d actually want, smart glasses in a form where I can actually control every bit of the data etc… (though I can also see the problem of others having it.
Same vein that I like having security cameras around my yard, that I can access from anywhere. BUT big caveat… I don’t use any of their built in networking, actually my router only gives them local internet access just in case the camera manufacturers did something shady, they only connect to my frigate system.
Something like glasses and AI I pretty much feel the same way. Something like glasses that record, and an AI that indexes all the information, alllows me to go to a computer and say “did john smith ever tell me his birthday”. and be able to discover that even for in person conversations would be an insane QOL tool. But only even remotely worth considering if that data isn’t going to every other company.
I mean I thought putting the first statement of “lol, lets use AI to get an opinion of how good AI is at reducing shootings”.
so yeah the joke I was intending to do was to point out that, if someone asked AI if it was good at stopping school shootings, AI would tell you it isn’t. Which makes it ironic that someone who claims that they trust AI in important roles, can’t seem to trust AI telling it it’s not good at those things (or at least not ask it).
lol, lets use AI to get an opinion of how good AI is at reducing shootings
what direction is the trend going in school shootings in the united states, more or less frequent over time?
The long-term trend in the United States is that school shootings have become more frequent overall, especially since the late 2010s and during/after the COVID-era years. Multiple major datasets and studies show a substantial upward trend over the past 25 years.
A few important nuances:
The exact numbers vary depending on the definition used: Some databases count any gunfire on school property (including after-hours incidents, accidental discharges, gang-related events, etc.). Others count only targeted attacks or mass-casualty events. Even with different definitions, most datasets still show an increase over time.
Some notable findings from recent research:
A study in the journal American Academy of Pediatrics found that the 2017–2022 school years had dramatically more school shootings than the previous two decades, with 2021–2022 reaching the highest level in their dataset.
KFF reported that student exposure to school shootings has nearly tripled since 1999, with the sharpest increases occurring during the pandemic years.
The broad K-12 School Shooting Database showed a peak around 2023, though 2024 and 2025 appear to have declined somewhat from that peak.
So the short version is:
Over decades: upward trend (more frequent). Very recently: there are signs of a modest decline from the post-pandemic peak, but rates remain historically high compared with the 1990s or early 2000s. how likely is it that the use in AI is reducing school shootings?
There’s currently no strong evidence that AI is already reducing school shootings in a measurable national way. The honest answer is that researchers are still in the “possible tool, unproven impact” stage.
What does seem plausible is that AI may help in a few narrow areas:
identifying threatening posts or communications, assisting school threat-assessment teams, sorting large amounts of tips or reports, flagging patterns humans might miss.
Researchers studying threat assessment think technology-assisted systems could potentially help identify credible threats earlier.
There’s also evidence that many attackers show warning signs beforehand — threats, writings, online posts, or concerning behavior — which is exactly the sort of pattern-detection task AI is often good at. One review noted that roughly 75–80% of school shooters communicated intent before attacks.
But there are major caveats:
Experts repeatedly say school shootings are rare and difficult to predict accurately. False positives are a huge problem — you do not want systems incorrectly flagging ordinary students. Many AI school-safety technologies (facial recognition, social-media scanning, behavior monitoring) have little rigorous evidence proving they actually prevent shootings.
Some researchers warn AI systems may introduce bias or over-policing concerns.
And there’s another side to this:
AI may also be creating new risks. Recent investigations and studies suggest some chatbots can, under certain circumstances, provide harmful or violent planning information despite safety guardrails.
So overall, the current evidence points to:
Potential modest preventive benefit through threat assessment and monitoring, but no demonstrated large-scale reduction in school shootings yet, and possibly some offsetting harms from unsafe AI behavior.
If you want, I can also break down:
which anti-shooting methods currently have the strongest evidence, whether armed guards actually reduce shootings, or how “threat assessment” programs statistically perform compared to other approaches.
I mean there’s probably a pretty large aspect of slow storage that’s far more ideal for archiving/backup options, as LLMs are really only interested in the fastest of things.
Which makes sense, as long as you haven’t said it was absolutely perfect I wouldn’t change a thing.
It’s like watching the primary for the 2016 presidential election. The one time trump was able to be largely honest, (Mainly because all of his opponents had hugely obvious horrible things about them that they never would have spoken of, and even the democrats wouldn’t have said just because of formalities. Of course he realized very quickly after that bald face lies are actually a lot easier
Honestly even in things targetted at adults, the overwhelming majority of it caps at high school aged characters. I think that’s just partly the last time they are, psudo free before getting sucked into the work machine
I mean it’s hollywoods wet dream. They constantly treat actors and writers like sh*t. leading to big strikes and sudden degrades in quality on the shows etc…
top it off actors are, well literally the face of their products. If Scarlet Johanson gets angry and goes on the interview circuit, people listen, No one gives a sh*t what Bob Iger has to say. I think hollywood execs would be happy to see the average quality of movies go way down, in exchange for 100% control of the face of the movies.
and that’s going to be the key strategy as well. Point is if EVERYTHING gets bad at the same time, people just accept it and pick the least bad option. Long as no studio can afford to make high quality acted movies… people will go see the new crap. Especially as they’ve transitioned everything to focus on IP rather than actors.
Honestly on so many things, no joke there but the right constantly proposes the democrats as, awesome and great.
It’s like
Right: My democratic opponent wants to help the homeless, and make sure average people have a dignified life. and not torture babies for no reason!
People: Hey you know that actually sounds like a good idea
Actual democratic candidate: Those people on the right are slandering me, don’t worry I won’t make any of your lives easier, and here I’ll torture a baby right now to prove this slander wrong!
Gambling and math would seem to me the opposite of two face’s concepts. IE the classic coin flip is because he considers 50/50 luck to be fairness. Gambling maths are typically, figuring out how to make something unfair in your favor.
I think the real point is, to try to adjust for the source, figure out what topics they seem to avoid, and take that into account. Point is there’s not really any news you can trust to be honest always about everything. But if you can figure out what topics each source is likely to censor and misrepresent, you can get the most accurate picture possible.
Wouldn’t law be the thing for Harvey to teach?
No there’s a valid point to not want to be a part of a community that platforms the individuals. and I can certainly see a valid point in why blocking doesn’t solve it. 1. different users post from the artists, it’s not going to be met at an individual level.
IMO it should be a community level decision.
Though that’s why I still hold to the suggestion that this scism is large enough that a community should be made. Because I can agree with the concept, if the mods in a community don’t agree, making a new community is a solution
I feel like we just need to split comics. Whole point of lemmy is to basically allow us to fragment. so mods of world comics don’t care, why not pick an instance make a comic strips with a banned author list. If more people would like to be free of comics from unsavory authors they can move there.
Based on cawthornes votes etc… I’d say the concept he has is more money going into the millitary budget, and more pre-emptive actions abroad keeps us safer back here.
Fully completely disagree with it a thousand fold. Had we not stuck our noses into the middle east so much 9/11 would never have happened (and I’m just working with what had happened at the time of cawthrons controversy rather than the obvious much more recent iran nonsense.
I don’t think marketing was wave’s problem… nobody understood what the hell wave was. I used it for a few months… and I can’t tell you what the hell it was.