deathbird
@deathbird@mander.xyz
- Comment on Meta found liable in child exploitation case 3 days ago:
If Facebook as it is today is the only profitable way for it to function, it shouldn’t exist.
That’s not the case of course. A disenshitified Facebook is possible, and would be profitable too, it just wouldn’t make literally all the money. It just wouldn’t exploit you and literally every single way it could manage. Zuckerberg and the other shareholders would have to tolerate lower profits, but they wouldn’t have zero.
- Comment on Meta found liable in child exploitation case 3 days ago:
I think you’re still misunderstanding me, and the scope of existing solutions.
It is not sufficient to have tools to monitor behavior, blocking whole websites is too crude. If those are the tools that you have you’re really just encouraged not to use them, or to overuse them. There’s no real in between.
These platforms make desired choices. There are some things they decide not to do because it’s less profitable.
Again, what if I want my kid to have a Facebook account so that he can coordinate with his soccer club independently, but I don’t want him to DM strangers or join strange groups? I want to facilitate independence, not have to look over his shoulder constantly, but still protect him from groomers. It is not hard platforms to enable this kind of control. It’s just not profitable.
- Comment on Meta found liable in child exploitation case 4 days ago:
That’s literally how Facebook used to function, and a big motivator as to why people joined it. People wanted to interact with people they knew.
And this would not prevent people from making new connections.
If you wanted to meet, I don’t know, hot singles in your area, you would actually have to talk to people who knew about the singles group on Facebook and have them share the link to the group with you. Or find it in the search bar if it’s public. You know, seek it out.
Keep in mind that Facebook does not show you groups or people because it cares about the connections that you make. It just wants you to keep clicking. Your own desire to connect is more than sufficient to drive you to connection…with a search bar.
- Comment on Meta found liable in child exploitation case 4 days ago:
You can control a lot about how platforms specifically work with legislation. After decades of seeing how they function we are more than capable of accurately identifying what functionalities are deleterious to the well-being of people generally or children specifically, what should be under the control of the parents of children, and therefore we have a good idea of what we should legally require platforms to disable or otherwise put under the control parents.
Again I propose as an example: having an account marked as a child’s account, with a designated parent account and making it so that if someone would attempt to add that child account as a friend or connected account on a social media network such an addition must be approved by the parent account.
- Comment on Meta found liable in child exploitation case 4 days ago:
OS level parental controls do not give a parent control over a child’s use of a social media platform, to the best of my knowledge. For example, how do you prevent a child from friending someone you don’t know on facebook, while still letting your child join a Facebook group for their soccer team? That kind of fine grain control needs to happen on the level of the platform. Universally blocking DMs to your child’s account from accounts they are not friended to needs to happen on the level of the platform. Etc.
Universally preventing children from joining social media is also an option, or giving parents the tools to block their children individually from accessing known social media sites from hardware under the parent’s control is also an option, but neither of these are sufficient or without negative consequences. Blocking children from social media by law requires age verification to have any effect. Blocking access to certain websites on a hardware level encourages the child to use hardware outside their parents control, or else excludes them from a part of social life.
Platforms need parental control tools as well, not just operating systems, and those tools need to be sufficient to allow a parent to have real control over what their child can access. I don’t think that will exist without legislation, because it is contrary to the platform’s financial interest.
- Comment on Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms 5 days ago:
Meta sucks, but not for the reasons claimed by the state. It’s bad for everyone’s mental health, and the best fix shouldn’t be apology money and undoing end-to-end encryption but restructuring with robust parental controls and making it so it doesn’t constantly encourage you to interact with strangers.
- Comment on Meta found liable in child exploitation case 5 days ago:
“The design feature changes the state is seeking include “enacting effective age verification, removing predators from the platform, and protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors”.”
Oh fuck right off.
I’m sorry but this is a bad “think of the children” decision. There are limits to what Meta or any platform can do about bad actors at that size without structural changes.
What might actually help: only show people content from groups and people that they follow, preferably in chronological order, rather than suggesting new groups and pages algorithmically all the time and thereby increasing the likelihood of children interacting with strangers on the Internet.
And improve parental controls for children’s accounts. I’m sure there’s nothing currently giving a “parent” account high level control over a “child” account, but I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong.
But also: require intercompatibility with other platforms and a standardized form of profile data export so people can leave Facebook but stay in touch with the people who still use it.
- Comment on OpenAI Will Shut Down Sora Video Platform 5 days ago:
Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll have other tools for quickly and cheaply creating falsified videos and the like. Faith in the veracity of video evidence probably won’t be coming back.
- Comment on AI companies try to pay staff in AI tokens, not money 6 days ago:
You run 16 gigs, and what do you get? A pile of bugs and technical debt Copilot don’t ask ask for tokens cause I don’t got no 'mo I sold my soul to the Microslop store
Booted up one morning when the sun didn’t shine Looked through my Windows none of the software was mine I paid 16 subs for what I need to run And shareholders said “See now that’s how it’s done!”
(Refrain)
It was a torrent one morning saw it was made outta bits On an 8 gig stick and with Rufus it fits Wiped my hard drive clean and I was ready to go Left the Microslop store for the Trixie repo
(Refrain)
- Comment on How a Family of 3 Lives on $500,000 on the Upper West Side 6 days ago:
They spend $3,900/mo on rent for 800sqft, but on $500k/year that’s about 9.4% of their income. The recommendation is no more than 30%, or for them $13,888/mo. That’s close to the $10k/mo they say they try to save. And of course at this level food cost is no object.
And there are plenty of large condos in this area that they could afford right now.
They’re winning.
- Comment on Teens using AI meal plans could be eating too few calories — equivalent to skipping a meal 1 week ago:
Can AI tools make meal plans that help us lose weight the right way?
No. Don’t use it for that.
- Comment on From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT 2 weeks ago:
Yeah as a record on a ledger it’s fine. I think a lot of people wanted them to be more than that though.
- Comment on Mastodon.social is not a good way to join Mastodon. If you’re already on it, you might want to move your account to a different Mastodon server. | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the F 2 weeks ago:
Aggressive defederation is a plague on the Fediverse. If Hotmail blocked Juno blocked Yahoo blocked Gmail blocked whatever as aggressively as a lot of these Fedi platforms blocked each other, email wouldn’t work.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 2 weeks ago:
From what I’ve seen in a cluster F and NB as one category separately from M.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 2 weeks ago:
I think people will do all kinds of shit for money.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 2 weeks ago:
From what I’ve seen of these apps, they cluster NB and F together. And I’m assuming they don’t go further than state ID for validating, but I can’t say for sure one way or the other.
- Comment on System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks 2 weeks ago:
Oh yeah why put age checks on a service when we could just put it on the whole freaking operating system?
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 2 weeks ago:
In like, 20 states plus DC you can change your sex on your ID basically demand (no doctor’s note or court order or whatever). There’s enough Uber drivers out there someone will mark themselves F or X to keep their job options open.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 2 weeks ago:
You think they’re checking?
- Comment on Valve Sued By The Performing Rights Society Over Music Rights in Games Valve Doesn’t Make or Own 2 weeks ago:
See, if rules were applied honestly and equally, yes.
- Comment on New ntfy.sh v2.18.0 was written by AI 2 weeks ago:
“but reviewed and heavily tested over 2-3 weeks by me. I created comparison documents, went through all queries multiple times and reviewed the logic over and over again. I also did load tests and manual regression tests, which took lots of evenings.”
This is the way.
- Comment on Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package 3 weeks ago:
A creature of McKinsey.
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 3 weeks ago:
Section 230 of the dmca is designed to allow platforms to exist because people can say whatever the fuck they want. But nobody should make a machine that says things they can’t control, and if you do you need to be disciplined for such irresponsibility.
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 3 weeks ago:
Name checks out.
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 3 weeks ago:
If implemented, that would just ban chatbots that use large language models. It’s not a terrible idea.
What would actually happen is that so-called AI chatbot systems would try to detect if someone is from New York and then try to exclude them from receiving medical or legal advice, fail, and then get sued and then pay a small fine, over and over again forever.
- Comment on Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant 3 weeks ago:
I didn’t think the next-token guess machine would guess “delete my database”!
- Comment on Step-government, what are you doing?! 3 weeks ago:
Adds a dash of transgression to an otherwise vanilla scene I guess.
- Comment on We Overhauled Our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy - Another VC funded bait and switch 3 weeks ago:
It looks like the code is mostly under GPL. Has anyone tried forking it?
- Comment on Not Found 4 weeks ago:
It’s pretty galling watching the US government retaliate against a company for not wanting to create Terminators or that surveillance thing from The Dark Knight for them.
It’s blatantly retaliatory and a violation of the spirit of the law that allows that designation, and if the law is written well and the courts are honest then it would be illegal too. You shouldn’t be able to lie and call a company an enemy of the state because they won’t build you a Torment Nexus.
And I don’t even want AI being used for half the things they already do.
- Comment on ISIS teaching recruits how to use AI ‘responsibly’ 4 weeks ago:
Not The Onion?