Dirt_Possum [she/her, undecided]

The site could also be set to display whatever font it wants but also set to list standard fonts that also work which the browser can then choose from on the user’s end if the user doesn’t have the first choice font. That way you the user don’t have to worry about it and there is no way to fingerprint by the browser just handing out an entire list of fonts installed on the user’s system. There are plenty of ways to make things like this work, but the incentive is to keep them as they are or to increase uniqueness so people can be more easily fingerprinted.

Yeah I guess it was human expression that confidently insisted superglue was a safe ingredient to put on my pizza to hold the cheese on it. I don’t even give much of a shit about LLM slop on the occasions it’s accurate, it was your bad faith and absurd response to the other commenter that I was calling out which you ignored in order to shift the discussion to philosophical arguments about AI that make you sound like the entrepreneur genius Sam Altman or the other tech bro capitalists trying to keep that bubble from popping.

I was taking the statement about what you found “fascinating” in isolation because it was phrased as such. You were surprised that the other commenter could find enjoyment in “something” not knowing how it was produced then feel less enjoyment after learning more. That is a silly thing to be “fascinated” by because it is something that the vast majority of us are keenly familiar with. But because that commenter has qualms about AI which you don’t, you suddenly can’t understand how later information about something can alter one’s enjoyment of it? It’s an absurd thing to say. As is your sunset question. I don’t get upset looking at most AI slop either, but I absolutely do place it in a different category than either a natural phenomenon or something I know was made by human expression and if you can’t understand or recognize that difference, I don’t know that anything I could say could help you with that.

it’s also fascinating how you could enjoy something if you didn’t know how it was produced, and then the act of knowing would remove the enjoyment you were deriving from it.

Would you feel differently about, say a book you read and somewhat enjoyed if you later learned it was written by a fascist? It sure would make a difference to me. Have you never consumed any sort of media that you later felt was tainted by who created it, or used a product that you later decided not to use again after learning how it was produced? There’s even a colloquialism referring to this very thing, about “knowing how the sausage is made.”

It should be, yes. But browsers like Chrome are literally made by the company that stands to profit from fingerprinting you, so they’re always going to be made to make it easy to do just that. Firefox at least has “resist fingerprinting” option which apparently can limit font visibility to only base system fonts rather than fonts you installed and language-pack fonts. LibreWolf has this on out of the box.

This comment is extremely well said and gets at something very deep and important. Thank you for saying it so well and I hope more eyes read it. In every case I’ve seen of fascist sympathizers (aka fascists who aren’t wearing boots yet) justifying the crimes of ICE, or regular cops, or whatever bourgeois institution murdering workers, they frame it in a way that the perpetrators of these crimes are a simple force of nature, a physical law, exactly like you said, rather than the outcomes of those cop’s choices, just as arbitrary if not more so as the choices made by their victims. They’ll say “that person made the CHOICE to challenge the cops/ICE/institutional power, and that choice resulted in an expected outcome, their death,” blaming the victim. And they’ll call it “logic” like this fucking bootlicking loser who is now banned. But it’s never framed the other way around. They’ll never frame it as the result of the choices made by ICE/cops, where the response to their violence and oppression is the natural force, even though it’s just as valid of a framework. There are fascists with institutional authority who are making arbitrary decisions about who they want to murder, whether it was a planned out operation, or a choice made in the moment when they executed some “uppity” civilian. Of course there are going to be people who challenge them, it is a natural consequence (like a physical law) resulting from the pressure created by the choice fascists have made to oppress people. There will be those who resist, inevitably, and there will be those who are no threat but get murdered anyway - by definition a natural consequence of fascists with power. The bootlicking fascist-sympathizing logic-enjoyers want to make everything that happens some deterministic series of events (your reference to a Rube Golberg Machine being the chef’s kiss perfect analogy) but they’ll sob and cry foul the second one of those institutional fascists gets the inevitable natural consequence of what’s coming to them. Once that third law of motion kicks in they’re going to forget all about “natural consequences.”