They want you to do just that: https://community.signalusers.org/t/public-username-testing-staging-environment/56866 That link has instructions on how to sign up.

It’s not a blog. These are the strongest of the tech journalists from Vice News’s Motherboard (tech section) who started their own separate venture independent of Motherboard.

• https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/business/media/404-media-vice-motherboard.html
• https://muckrack.com/media-outlet/404media

Survey research is hard – especially when you are a student learning to do it.

In a podcast I listen to where tech people discuss security topics they finally got to something related to AI, hesitated, snickered, said “Artificial Intelligence I guess is what I have to say now instead of Machine Learning” then both the host and the guest started just belting out laughs for a while before continuing.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Social media platform Reddit has struck a deal with Google to make its content available for training the search engine giant’s artificial intelligence models, three people familiar with the matter said.

The contract with Alphabet-owned Google is worth about $60 million per year, according to one of the sources.

The deal underscores how Reddit, which is preparing for a high-profile stock market launch, is seeking to generate new revenue amid fierce competition for advertising dollars from the likes of TikTok and Meta Platform’s Facebook.

The sources were not authorized to speak to media and declined to be identified.

Reddit and Google declined to comment. Bloomberg previously reported Reddit’s content deal without naming the buyer.

Last year, Reddit said it would charge companies for access to its application programming interface (API) - the means by which it distributes its content. The agreement with Google is its first reported deal with a big AI company.

San Francisco-based Reddit, which has been looking at a stock float for more than three years, is preparing to make its initial public offering filing this week, which would detail its financials for the first time to potential IPO investors. The filing could be available as early as Thursday, two of the sources said.

The company, which was valued at about $10 billion in a funding round in 2021, is seeking to sell about 10% of its shares in the offering, Reuters has previously reported.

Reddit’s stock market launch would mark the first IPO of a major social media company since Pinterest floated its shares in 2019.

Makers of AI models have been busy clinching deals with content owners in recent months, aiming to diversify their training data beyond large scrapes of the internet. That practice is rife with potential copyright issues as many content creators have alleged that their content was used without permission.

Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit is known for its manifold niche discussion groups, some of which boast tens of millions of members.

Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco, Echo Wang in New York and Martin Coulter in London; Additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin; Editing by Anirban Sen, Krystal Hu and Edwina Gibbs

But they do sync. They just don’t keep messaging history, which is, as you say, by design. Signal doesn’t keep copies of your messages so they cannot give you old message history if you connect your account to a new device.

I think they are starting to write this way, because there’s huge numbers of Americans who do not even know what the Holocaust is and that it happened let alone the basic facts about it. It’s shocking when you read the recent polls which demonstrate the levels of ignorance we are dealing with around this.

Edit:

I’m surprised that people don’t know about the ignorance of the Holocaust. Here is some reading for our collective edification.

• Kovac, Adam. “Almost half of Americans don’t know how many Jews died in the Holocaust, AJC survey says.” Forward, 2023. https://forward.com/fast-forward/533204/ajc-poll-holocaust-knowledge-americans/
• O’Kane, Caitlin. “Survey finds ‘shocking and saddening’ lack of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Gen Z.” CBS News, 2020. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/holocaust-lack-of-awareness-millennials-gen-z/
• “Most Americans lack some basic knowledge about Holocaust — poll.” The Times of Israel, 2023. https://www.timesofisrael.com/most-americans-lack-some-basic-knowledge-about-holocaust-poll/
• “What Americans Know About the Holocaust.” Pew Research Center, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/01/22/what-americans-know-about-the-holocaust/

It might seem unbelievable to see how ignorant people are of the Holocaust, but what you and I find common sense and basic facts of history which we all know are unfortunately not generally known to be basic facts of history and we do not all know these facts. Less and less of us know these facts.

It’s alarming and it’s good that publishers are writing to state basic facts for an ignorant readership. Because of this we shouldn’t see this style of informative writing as a fault but rather as a boon to ignorant readership.

🤔😔🤷🤷🤦

You don’t “blame” the holy spirit. That means she’s saying one of the incarnations of God wanted her to do it. That’s like saying God is a Nazi.

It never died, because it already existed for fucking years: Active Worlds from 1995 is where I started, Second Life later, now the dominant “metaverse” is VR Chat.

The corporate simpletons just never did their homework to see what the market is like for this.