It’s a news article in their news section, not a scientific study, Nature’s domain of prestige/authority. In the hierarchy of evidence, this ranks at the bottom as background information.

The previous comment stands: it’s an isolated claim lacking independent, impartial corroboration.

A YouTube video and an opinion piece lol.

News investigation & report quoting correspondence between biosafety experts/researchers & their letters to journals?

a Nature article

Paywalled & also in the news section?

It’s possible despite lax biosafety, they didn’t leak the virus & didn’t have it. Based on what little I can read of the article: the word of a person at the center of the matter may be true; however, that’s considerable weight for their word to carry that leaves doubt over impartiality & independence. Findings of an independent monitor/investigation would be more convincing.

I don’t know what logically led you to that conclusion. Maybe you ought to self-reflect & work on your own biases/not jump to conclusions?

I’m linking to supporting references, and you’re not, so 🤷.

We ought to be vigilant about leaping to conclusions or letting biases creep in, and I can’t control others doing that.

Concerns about biosafety standards first caught my notice with this report stating that the laboratory may have been working with coronavirus at biosafety levels as low as 2 and explaining the significance. Questioning the source (even though it seems coherent), I noticed other reports with references seem to corroborate. These laboratories may not be taking the best precautions.

Let’s be clear - if they were studying the virus in a lab and it “got out” from the lab or from the wild what difference does it make?

Firmer policies & enforcement of safety protocols? Informed selection of safety protocols?

Federal government reported the possibility without Trump in office:

• FBI reported it was likely
• Department of Energy joined them in saying it was possible.

Sources

• WSJ
• NPR

It’s not a wild conspiracy theory. Virological gain of function research & lax safety protocols could lead to unsurprising results that aren’t necessarily malicious.

identified by the police as REDACTED

REDACTED is such a sturdy name. I wonder if it’s a new naming trend.

He also said bluesky’s shift toward a traditional corporate structure and the introduction of centralized moderation tools were major factors behind his leaving the company, and he vouched for alternatives like nostr.

It seems a bit more challenging to pull shit like this on nostr.

Guilty as charged. What is my sentence for this crime?

don’t call women “females”

It’s fine. Call men “males”, too.

People roman ?

I found it odd, too: dictionary entry. I’m guessing it’s cross language: romance languages tend to place nouns before modifiers. Or maybe it’s “People of Rome”?

• Roman people
• pull request
• parliamentary report
• press release
• prize ring
• proportional representation
• Puerto Rico
• Permanent Resident
• Progress Report
• Pressure Regulator
• Park Ridge
• Pattern Recognition
• PageRank
• Planning and Responsibility
• Performance Review
• Performance Rating
• Problem Report
• Papa Roach
• Personal Record
• Peer Review
• ⁝

You wouldn’t download a car?

I understood exactly what you were saying & assuming: it’s just wrong and off-topic.

The article contends “generating Ghibli art style” is an attack on democratic values, which is bullshit. You’re saying I’m advocating for disrespecting artists, which I’m not, and has nothing to do whether “generating Ghibli art style” attacks democratic values. The pointless outrage over who is or isn’t “respecting artists” is a distraction from the broken thesis of the article: it’s wrong & you’re letting that appeal to emotion & red herring fallacy

1. distract you from the fact that the article’s conclusions don’t follow from its premises
2. demonize people who point this out as somehow “against artists” (when they may even agree that it’s good to respect artists).

That’s wrong, irrational, and you’re falling for the article’s deception.

worthless when the website itself decides thatbit won’t show you the content

Businesses are legally bound to make their online content accessible: a screenshot without alt text doesn’t solve this for them. Isn’t it common practice around here to link to archives? Quoting & linking isn’t worthless.

quoting? you mean, all of the response tweets?

Yes. Unreasonable? No, compulsory & common standard industry standard. Out of legal necessity (and market reach), they already write text out (as alt text for all meaningful images). An image of a tweet with replies requires writing all that text out.

Try this exercise yourself to realize how pointless an image of text is (which images of tweets mostly are). Take an image of text, write the markup to display the image, include an alt attribute set to the full text shown in the image. If you have any sense, you’ll return to the source of the image to copy & paste the original text into the alt attribute. If you lack sense, you’ll tediously read the image and retype it into the alt attribute. Your choice.

Realize anything yet?

1. You’re returning to the source, so linking it is basic sense, right?
2. You already write text out, but your effort is wasted as a flat text attribute for an image that adds nothing compelling, only some meaningless visuals of UI artifacts. That text could instead be the main attraction with semantic mark up (blockquotes, paragraphs, lists, etc). It makes more sense to skip the image entirely & quote the text directly: less work, more functional, better.

and how do you quote images, videos?

The way it’s already done. Online news doesn’t typically give screenshots of images or videos. They link, embed, or copy the image or video to directly provide it alongside some quotes.

Selecting lines of text instead of rectangles of screen to copy & paste isn’t a novel, farfetched idea.

In Florida, students have this one cool trick to get their teachers fired. Thanks, Florida!

Also, is that government punishing speech?

If the point is to reproduce an image, not text, then yes, definitely provide those images. Agreed: nothing wrong in that.

As written multiple times, there are better alternatives. Disregarding them is shortsighted ableism. I suggest some attention span.

In that case, too, the text can be quoted, then just like magic it’s accessible. A quote that links to the source is a strong combination.

Everyone benefits: the text is searchable, reflowable, adaptable to multi-modal input & output, easy to quote via copy & paste, etc. It’s simply more useful & screenshots don’t inherently give any of that.

No

Please stop with the “ablism” thing to shut down anything good but not good enough.

What is not helpful is calling people tomstip using a normal day to day tool just because it isn’t perfectly adjusted for < 1% of the Internet users.

Emphatic no to your no. Disabling content isn’t good or helpful. Disabled content is worse for everyone: no source, less functionality, less to corroborate, often harder to read. It’s only “good enough” for people able as you while pointlessly excluding those unlike you, ie, ableism.

16% of the world population experiences some form of disability. Anyone can become disabled temporarily or permanently. With age, nearly all of us become disabled in some capacity. This is as much a matter of self-regard & forethought as it is for regard of others. It is in your interest to have accessible content whether or not you realize it.

we can improve upon this by, I dunno, making an image format for screenshots that allow for alt text or whatever.

A new technology isn’t needed: not breaking what isn’t broken is enough. Better alternatives have existed since the beginning of the web: linking, embedding, or even copying & pasting the text into a blockquote. A screenshot of web content is a shitty tool serving the able-bodied.

If I can’t see the info on bluesky without an account then yes, a screenshot should be required.

That’s a strong argument for pressuring bluesky to cut their crap instead of enabling their structural ableism by taking screenshots. The alternatives mentioned before still exist.

Bluesky content can be deleted

There’s this crazy feature where if you select the text instead of a rectangle of screen, you can copy & paste it. Always been there. About the same number of steps. Wild.

I’m not saying I don’t care about them

Whether you “care” doesn’t matter when the effect is the same as not caring and the simplest actions anyone could take aren’t taken. The effect of that blithe, inconsiderate disregard is structural ableism. Rather than take the easy way out & reinforce this, we each have the power to address it.

Unlike the abstract issues often discussed here far removed from our control, these are practical actions within our immediate control. We all have power with the simplest of gestures to make our content accessible instead of selfishly able-centric.

Choosing not to when we know better indicates who we are. Defending acts to harmfully disable content also indicates who we are.