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Just out of curiosity have we posted about the dog leading their owner to a cat that was stuck down a well? I haven't quite got the hang of searching here yet, but we could post about that if we haven't already. Just saying.

For those wondering. The Illinois Policy Institute (IPI) who wrote this is a rabid libertarian/conservative think tank group. If you read through on this you'll see their "solution" is that government just makes it difficult for able-bodied people to work.

To which I would say, "Yes government should make it difficult for able-bodied people to be coaxed into slave labor wages that while technically gets them above the poverty line, offers no economic mobility. The entire point is that all people should have the ability to not just work but to work towards something that personally affects them in a positive manner, not just grind out 300,000 widgets to allow some CEO buy a new yacht."

This is a SLAPP with chilling effect.

And I don't disagree with you one bit there. But Texas' anti-SLAPP law is the Texas Citizens Participation Act and it used to be one of the strongest in the country. In 2019, it was modified by the Texas Assembly to introduce a lot of gray area and weaken it considerably.

So I don't disagree with the assertion that this is absolutely frivolous. But Texas' current laws on the book are likely to give Musk enough room to avoid challenges on that aspect.

and I can tell you that they followed accepted academic practice

Oh no doubt, that's the point. To sow doubt on that whole process.

IBM and Apple know pretty well how Internet advertising works

Oh yeah, the notion that they're indicating that Apple pulled their revenue because of "THIS REPORT" is just them grasping. But Musk is absolutely banking that IBM and Apple won't file brief with the Judge to provide more motivation to stick to the broad questions put forward by Media Matters. Business wise, this case isn't bringing dollars back to the platform, it is just being vindictive. Musk had his feels hurt and now he wants to hurt something else.

he’s got full blown narcissistic rage

I'm going to guess that one. Just the way Musk's been talking about this case, it feels like this one got deep under his skin.

That's how Tesla won their most recent case with an autopilot failure. They acknowledge that the car did indeed drive itself into a tree. But that the company did not knowingly sell a defective product as they routinely update the vehicle.

That wasn't the argument that won the day for them, but it was the argument that allowed them to start on a way more technical footing that would allow them to misdirect the court to focus more on any driver impairments.

Musk's lawyers are insanely good at misdirection, they are some of the best at this one particular thing. Additionally, the case was file in an incredibly friendly court to Musk, so it's likely the Judge will be willing to go down the rabbit hole of insanely technical arguments while losing sight of the more broad questions.

There is a lot stacked up against Media Matters here.

You think Apple & Disney didn't verify this for themselves before ditching Twitter?

They might have. It would be great if they file a brief with the court to support the argument. I'm pretty sure that Musk is absolutely going to tear through Media Matter's search history and say some bullshit like "Yeah, if you search for Nazi 10,000 times and Apple 10,000 times, we're absolutely going to do the thing you asked. But the number of people who actually do that is few and Media Matters made it sound like it was everyone."

Media Matter's is going to absolutely need others joining in to provide other sources of information independent of them. That'll make the almost inevitable argument from Musk that "Nazi + Apple is a rare thing" incredibly weak.

as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform

The thing is that it looks like Musk is going to mount a technical defense. There's likely to be an admission that there's all kinds of Nazi crap on Twitter and that they allow it to roam free, within it's own little echo chamber. The whole "it's not what the average user experiences" tells me is that what they're going to do is cover the keywords that unlock the Nazi echo chamber and how that sequence of required words aren't in some top 5,000 search terms on the site.

I'm pretty sure the entire point will be to sow some distrust on Media Matter's manner by which they got those screenshots. Basically an argument of "Well, yeah, if you search Nazi 100,000 times and then Apple 100,000 times, we're going to absolutely show you Nazi + Apple stuff. But the number of users who have that as their search history, we here at Twitter, can count on one hand."

The idea is to not deny that it is possible to get Nazi + Apple, but to indicate that the chances of getting it are so rare that Media Matters had to know that their research was contrived. I don't think they're going to deny one ounce of what Media Matters presents to the court, I think what they're going to try and do is shift what the underlying question is on the matter. Basically, shifting it to "this happens to rarely that you just have to go out of your way to get it to happen."

Media Matters will need to keep focus on their broader topic. "X admits that such a combination can happen, they indicate that it is super rare, but there is no way that X could have calculated every permutation. Because of that, the arguments of Media Matter stand firm in that such CAN absolutely happen and X has no idea the frequency of it."

And the fact that X has filed in a very friendly to them courtroom, it's likely that the court is going to entertain the more technical merits of the case rather than the broad questions. It'll absolutely put Media Matters in a very hard position.

There is no way Musk can prevail.

First rule of any kind of litigation. Don't ever say never. Law is black and white but the people who enforce it and judge it are still fleshy emotion pods.

Musk is clearly doing it to shut down public disclosure and discussion

Oh yeah, he's absolutely doing that.

For those wondering the others are:

• M(0) = 2
• M(1) = 3
• M(2) = 6
• M(3) = 20
• M(4) = 168
• M(5) = 7581
• M(6) = 7828354
• M(7) = 2414682040998
• M(8) = 56130437228687557907788

And our new one M(9) = 286386577668298411128469151667598498812366

That is two hundred eighty-six duodecillion, three hundred eighty-six undecillion, five hundred seventy-seven decillion, six hundred sixty-eight nonillion, two hundred ninety-eight octillion, four hundred eleven septillion, one hundred twenty-eight sextillion, four hundred sixty-nine (noice) quintillion, one hundred fifty-one quadrillion, six hundred sixty-seven trillion, five hundred ninety-eight billion, four hundred ninety-eight million, eight hundred twelve thousand, three hundred sixty-six.

It won't work for sure. That said, with the rich continually robbing people left and right by hording the last bits of wealth on this planet, desperate people do desperate things. For the time everyone's mostly still sticking to the Democratic mode of trying to solve that issue, but I wouldn't give it much longer before that option starts running out for some folks.

Milei has a very, very steep hill to climb, a world economic system that's less interested in helping him out, and a Congress that's not exactly weighing in his favor. He is very much two or three steps away from civil unrest in his country. Lots of luck to him, maybe he's thinking he'll be able to fake till he makes it or something.

That naturally involves wear and tear

Houses have wear and tear as well, they unsurprisingly do not suffer the same evaluation by the market as cars do. That doesn't tell the whole story because a lot of the depreciation of cars is how the market itself views that asset. Some cars even lose up to 20% their value once driven off the lot for pretty much the same reason an iPhone loses value so quickly when a new model comes out or isn't fresh out of the box.

The entire point is that while the argument of "They're meant to be driven" and "wear and tear" are valid arguments they are valid because of how the market views that "wear and tear" as a massive negative. Some of that is spurred by the difference between rehabilitation of a used house versus rehabilitation of a used car, that's including the logistics of how a motor for an early 2000 model vehicle is much harder to find than say a replacement HVAC system. There's a bit of the logistics of how cars are made and how you cannot just drop XYZ transmission into a random car unlike say how you can just drop ABC model hot water heater into your plumbing.

There's a deeper reason why that wear and tear on a car is so vastly different and thus treated differently than wear and tear on other more repairable things.

Kavanaugh and Barrett only joined the majority opinion on a super specific technicality just FYI. There is no way they did not want this to go ahead and be enforced in Florida.

As a reminder, Firefox's Manifest v3 implementation will differ from Google's. Additionally, it isn't that Manifest v3 is the problem, it is that Manifest v2 compatibility is being mostly removed from all browsers. You can literally have V2 and V3 in your browser no issue technically there.

But it is important to remember what prompted this. Most extension authors are well meaning people, but in due course they will make decisions that aren't exactly widely accepted. Case in point was Stylish which was an extension that allowed one to apply various CSS styles to websites. Long story short, good intentions by the author, poor execution.

Manifest v3 was aimed to reduced the vectors that things like Stylish used to carryout their activities. This however, does damage the ability for uBlock to handle some of the various sophisticated ways adverts gets into your webpage. Firefox's implementation is an attempt to meet some middle ground. Additionally, Google has made some concessions to the final format of Manifest v3 to permit SOME ad-blocking that uBlock has indicated that they need.

In the end the important thing to remember is that uBlock Origin's manifest V2 version will be ending soon. There is a "lite" version of uBlock Origin that is compatible with Manifest v3, your mileage may vary with it however. Firefox offers the only solution at this time that is permissive enough to continue uBlock Origin's current development and ability to block most sophisticated adverts from getting into your page.

And the whole Manifest v3 issue highlights just how not open web standards are today. Yes, there is a standards body that issues the standards that govern the web. That body was once independent and sought a web for all. Today that standards body is mostly "what's Google doing?" And that has become problematic and mostly is why "everything is Chromium" at this point. Folks like Opera and Microsoft saw the political landscape at the Web Standards changing, read the writing on the wall, and converted over to Chromium. The vast majority of the issue is that the standards committee has become complicit in just accepting whatever Google offers up as a purposed standard. They have become mostly a rubber stamp for the machinations of Google's engineers to the detriment of everyone.

Hey what y'all talking about?