korazail
@korazail@lemmy.myserv.one
- Comment on Robot dogs priced at $300,000 a piece are now guarding some of the country’s biggest data centers 2 days ago:
Claude, code me a robot dog admin platform. I want to be able to monitor and control the dogs from my iOS tablet.
- Comment on US state laws push age checks into the operating system 1 week ago:
Fair enough. My point wasn’t to equate code with github, but to suggest that github, and any other code repository, is effectively an app store by the definition of the California law, and is therefore supposedly responsible for handling this ‘age signal’ bullshit.
Similarly, GeoCities from the 90’s is a publicly accessible website (*actually it’s not – just tried and it seems to completely dead now as opposed to mostly dead in early 2000’s, RIP) with the ability to (and did) distribute software and would have also been an “application store”. Archive.org is maybe a better example now: you can download tons of ‘applications’ from there and none of them will ever have age verification baked in. Is Archive.org now illegal? Let’s find out.
- Comment on US state laws push age checks into the operating system 1 week ago:
I get really upset when there’s this association between “the libs” and “non-authoritarian voters”. I’ve not done and don’t support lobbying for state control of social media.
I fully agree that there are shitty people elected as democrats.
I could go on a whole mile-long monologue about this, but I won’t do it here. I’m aware of the various definitions of liberal and I don’t want to talk about that – I’m using the US scope of the two parties that can actually matter: Conservative/Republican vs Liberal/Democratic. [If you Identify as Liberal in the US, you’re probably actually Socialist, but the media hates that word, so we don’t use it]
The short version is that the PEOPLE want things to be better; the voters called “the libs” want things to be better. Not enough of us are engaged at the low-level to fix this and I think it’ll only take a few of us to do the grass-roots remix that the conservatives did as the tea party, and fix the situation with the democratic org that will both win us elections (if we get anymore) and cut out the rot.
Gotta start local though. If you’re mad, join your precinct and choose who votes in the district, etc. Don’t wait for November and then be mad at your choices. Primaries are over for 2026, but you can influence choices for local offices in 2027 and other state and national ones in 2028.
Don’t just be mad at your options, help make the options better. And 'Both Sides’ing is either malicious or at least detrimental:
“Oh, the system is fucked. Guess we’ll keep aiming for the dystopia! We can’t possibly change the system!”
- Comment on US state laws push age checks into the operating system 1 week ago:
It wasn’t Microslop-owned for most of my experience with it, but even sourceforge went the way of enshittification. The only real hope is, unfortunately, decentralization. My worry that is that discoverability is the payment.
We can’t trust that any single point of failure won’t eventually fall to corporate greed. But if there’s a central place to locate things, there’s a central place to control them; even if it’s literally “search”!
- Comment on Datacenters are becoming a target in warfare for the first time 1 week ago:
I used to be corporate IT, and this would have ruined my weekend… but my CEO donated to McConnell, Trump and the RNC, so fuck them.
- Comment on US state laws push age checks into the operating system 1 week ago:
I’ve been posting this in other threads too and while the OS angle is huge, and worth picking a fight with, I haven’t seen any coverage over how this goes after developers too.
I think this is an attack on ALL open-source.
These bills are written by people who are clearly or maliciously tech illiterate and don’t understand either the terminology or the practical impacts. And of course it’s wrapped in ‘what about the children?!’
They include definitions like (paraphrasing; not quoting a specific bill, but New York, Colorado and California do this):
- “Application” is any software application that may be run on a user’s device – so … EVERYTHING.
- “Application Store” is any publicly accessible website or similar service that distributes applications – so … also everywhere, such as GitHub or GeoCities.
- “Developer” is a person who writes, creates or maintains an application – so if you have a github repo, or you’ve posted a binary or perhaps even a script somewhere recently, you’re a developer.
And then require both developers and operating system providers to handshake this age verification data or face financial ruin. I think the original intent or appearance of intent is that the store developer needs to do the handshake. I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t imagine these definitions aren’t vague enough that they can’t be weaponized against basically anything software.
I have a github account, and have contributed to “applications”. As I read them, these bills pose a serious threat to me if I continue to do so, as that makes me a “developer” and would need to ensure the things I contribute to are doing age verification – which I don’t want to do.
I think that even outside the surveillance aspect, the chilling effect of devs not publishing applications is the end-goal. Gatekeeping software to the big publishers who have both the capacity to follow the law and the lawyers/pockets to handle a suit. These laws are going to be like the DMCA 1201 language (which had much much more prose wrapped around it and was at least attempting to limit scope), which HAS been weaponized against solo devs trying to make the world better.
I fully expect some suit against multiple github repo owners on Jan 2, 2027.
I’ve emailed the office of Buffy Wicks, the author of the California bill, with similar details as the above. I haven’t yet identified the authors of the NY and CO bills, but I’m working on that too. If you live in one of these places, please contact your state officials and tell them this is a bad idea – and if you don’t live there, keep an eye on your state bills.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 2 weeks ago:
It was 2002-ish.
A much younger korazail saw how my friends were leaving highschool, going to different colleges and foresaw they would continue to spread out after that.
He had an idea of building a website to help keep track of friends so we could keep in touch despite physical distance and enable networking; a blend of Facebook and LinkedIn.
I was a CS major and built a forum and database architecture that my local friend group used for a little bit to chat, but we were all still mostly local and it didn’t seem super useful, and while always on Internet was a thing, I didn’t have it and my server needed to be online to use my application.
A few years later, Facebook.
I wonder sometimes how the world would be if I’d promoted my idea, figured out how to host it outside my bedroom, etc. I might have also just been a Myspace or live journal, but maybe I’d have gotten there first…
I don’t think I’d be a megalomanic asshole, but I can’t prove it.
- Comment on Xbox as a platform is officially dead 2 weeks ago:
Tiny caveat: If the “windows tax” is less than the cost of building the device by parts – which it might be – then buying a new XBox Series X 360 Box X Box 360 One and installing linux on it might be a cost savings for a consumer… assuming no signed OS fuckery.
- Comment on We're just scanning for the bear... 3 weeks ago:
I’d wager that women are taught to be aware of their surroundings for safety and men just don’t ever get told, so unless there’s an experience that teaches them, they tunnel vision.
Teaching situational awareness seems to be something that is lacking. Similar to critical thinking, I believe that there are skills we sometimes just don’t get taught by our parents or natural experiences. These are things we hopefully learn over time, but having them called out while we develop isn’t happening (I blame screens, but it’s nuanced).
I tend to monologue to my kids when doing routine things, like loading the dishwasher (There’s a big bowl over there that I need to save room for…) or driving (I can see a car on the on-ramp, it will want to be where I am in a few seconds, so I’m adjusting my speed); just pointing out things around me that have either a real impact or a potential one and why those items came to my attention.
- Comment on Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras. Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage. 3 weeks ago:
The fun part is that these cameras are not owned, operated or property of your local jurisdiction. They are hardware/software as a service. IANAL, but I think Flock would have to sue you.
I have not personally de-flocked anything, but my local area doesn’t have any that aren’t tied to a business parking lot.
If some show up, I can’t imagine a 5 minute walk with a hat, face mask and a can of spraypaint wouldn’t be sufficient to disable one without risk. Might need a stool.
- Comment on I don't know the reason why. 3 weeks ago:
When I was a kiddo in the 80s, pistachios and other shelled nuts were commonly a winter holiday thing and I rarely ate whole nuts otherwise. I think peanuts, almonds and cashews are the exceptions, but they were almost always without shell. It’s been a few decades, but I remember having red and green (default, I guess, but maybe dyed green as well?) pistachios at Christmas and having to fight with the shells to get them out. They were the tastiest and I didn’t care much for walnuts, chestnuts or pecans.
Searching about ‘red pistachios’ also suggests it was a way to hide lower quality nuts. I’m not fully convinced about that, though, because I remember red dyed things tasting terrible as a kid. I don’t think most modern red food coloring tastes bad, but it used to. The amount of dye that made it on to the edible portion may not have affected the nut’s flavor too much, though.
All that to say: It could have been a marketing gimmick?
- Comment on Amazon's Ring cancels Flock partnership amid Super Bowl ad backlash 5 weeks ago:
Agreed. For anyone not already following Louis Rossmann, he’s a right-to-repair guy on an anti-surveilance arc and is always posting good information that will make you seethe.
His city tried to buy Flock cameras and he organized enough resistance that they cancelled… but then they are trying again a while later, assuming the scrutiny is off: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MiLiQ6olkI
Ring will do the same thing.
Microslop, Meta, Google, et al will get their hands slapped when they are too proud about how they are fucking you, and then will issue a retraction, but only long enough to let the anger die out before doing it again more quietly.
- Comment on 10+ year manager named Joe was apparently fired for bringing cookies to be thrown away before their sell by date to a food pantry in my town 5 weeks ago:
This really should be the first go-to.
Old goods? Assign liability to the food bank and let them handle sorting.
Tossing perfectly edible food in the trash because it’s no longer pretty and (acknowledging) I won’t buy it, it is just insane.
I try to buy bruised food when I can because I know others won’t. a wrinkly bell pepper, cucumber, or zucchini will be exactly the same once I chop it up and put it in my meal.
- Comment on Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face 5 weeks ago:
This is one of the real root causes of enshittification, particularly around privacy.
Once a product is profitable, the profit needs to be protected. That’s not really a slight against it, just a reality of capitalism. Those developers expect their jobs to persist. Middle management probably wants to keep those developers on staff. C-suite needs number-go-up to keep their jobs (fuck them, but if number-go-down then other people lose their jobs too). Adhering to regulations limits the risk of the government suing the company to oblivion.
Discord has been big enough for a while that it needs to be aware of the legal and political landscape in order to survive. This is just them limiting their risk. It will cost them customers – sort of: I’m gone, and have been since September when they updated their TOS, but I’ve also never given them any money and I’ve never seen an ad other than theirs. I’ve been nothing but a cost, so maybe good riddance?
Discord is not the enemy here. The enemy is congress/parliament and the power grabs they keep enacting. Big Tech has captured our governments and wants our data. The ‘for the children’ angle is such a trope that everyone who isn’t a potato can see through it, and we need to tell our leaders that this isn’t acceptable.
- Comment on Discord will restrict your account next month unless you scan ID or face 5 weeks ago:
The parenting aspect is a red herring. Nothing about these policies is really to ‘protect the children’. The big tech groups have figured out that they can gate-keep … everything… and require your pii/data to get to it; and that many/most people will give up that data to keep access to their content.
That said, teaching your children about the importance of privacy is becoming as important as teaching them about other harmful online content. “Don’t trust a Nigerian prince, let me know if you’re being bullied, don’t watch porn* and don’t scan your face to get on discord”
* until you’re 18-ish, at which point go nuts, just know it’s all fake.
- Comment on YSK TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale. We know this because we obtained messages from TikTok engineers and executives 5 weeks ago:
Did you sneak around and do things you were told not to? Probably.
While doing so, did you have the context that you shouldn’t do it? Maybe. Sometimes the learning happens when you get caught, get hurt or have other consequences.
Sure, the answer is education. Tell them that they shouldn’t do <thing> and why. Hopefully, the guilt/shame/pain of doing the thing they know is incorrect will be enough of a deterrent, but adults are fallible and kids cannot be expected to be better at it than adults who also have vices they know intellectually are bad. I don’t want to “completely control” my children, but I do want to prevent harm. Same way we put guard rails at the edge of a cliff.
Just to be clear:
Oh god, they’ll get some access? Like, I can’t completely control my children and they are individuals who have the right to start making choices? Jesus Christ, I’m not going to be able to exert my will over them indefinitely?
Are you recommending that we just sit back and let kids random-walk through tiktok? At what age should algorithm-dopamine-drug-app be allowed? There are studies out there showing that this stuff is harmful to ADULTS and this thread is about known impacts on kids. We prevent kids from smoking or drinking. Why do you think preventing access to social media like this is a step too far?
There’s also a question of age. I’m talking as a parent of a pre-teen. I need these controls where I can get them because the internet is a dopamine machine. It’s a real challenge to limit access to it and my kid isn’t prepared to stop watching tiktok the same way they aren’t prepared to stop eating candy. I can physically limit the candy in the house, but guess where I find rogue candy wrappers? Maybe by the time they are 15, I’ll have taken the training-wheels off, in which case we probably agree.
Finally, there’s an additional context for parents that is cultural context: My kid has never watched squidgames, five nights at freddy’s or stranger things. Many, maybe even most, of his peers have, and that leaves him out of those conversations. There are threads up in this post that haunt me: Am I preventing my child from being able to socialize because I won’t let them play/watch <content> that I think is unacceptable? I don’t want roblox, fortnight, or predatorily-monitized games in my kid’s hands until they are ready.
I recently relented on fortnight. My kid spent about $20 of their money on skins and a battle pass. I asked them recently if it was worth it. They said, “no”. I also recently let them create a roblox account. It took about 2 hours for them to determine the whole game was dumb. I think I’m a good parent.
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 1 month ago:
Perfect. And then later, “I hope you enjoyed your glue pizza. We don’t have enough fuel to reach Paris or return to land. This plane has no emergency beacon or flotation devices and is about to “land” in the ocean. Sorry for the inconvenience!”
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 1 month ago:
I wish him to sleep in a bed made by AI. Eat a meal made by AI. And then take a flight in a plane made and pulled by AI.
- Comment on lightbulbs 1 month ago:
That’s a neat form factor.
I have something like this mounted in a torchiere floor lamp. high output (something like 15000LM) and a cool color temp (6500K I think). My office has daylight when I turn it on, but it’s aimed up, indirect and high enough it’s not generally in line of sight. Probably would have used the bulb above if I could find cob lights when I bought this one.
- Comment on lightbulbs 1 month ago:
I feel… seen? or maybe not seen.
If I need to read some tiny-ass model number printed in silver on a grey background off the back of a gadget, I need me some 6000K and 1000+ lumens, not some muddy-warm-white <800.
- Comment on France will replace Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, Webex and others with its own sovereign video conferencing application "Visio" for public officials 1 month ago:
Does that make this better? A translated French search query would be ‘joining video call isn’t working’ and that will return results for every conference tool known to man.
Call it something like FVC (la France VisioConférence) , or some French play on the way that sounds, which would be a uniquely searchable term in this domain.
This is not a hill I’m dying on, but it’s terminally short sighted and a bad user experience to name your product the same thing as a microslop trademark. They are the worst for this already with their multiple active variants of office 365 tools like outlook and their xbox name nonsense.
Oh, I have a great idea for a new car company. Lets call it ‘Car’! Then people can have a Car Car, or maybe even a Car Car 2026… oh or a Car Truck when we branch out. (future google search: replace car truck 2028 oil filter)
- Comment on France will replace Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, Webex and others with its own sovereign video conferencing application "Visio" for public officials 1 month ago:
Came to comment this. I know there are only so many letters, and so many combinations of 4-8 of them, but can we quit naming new things with the name of an old thing?
Finding any details about France’s Visio is going to be a cluster.
- Comment on Microsoft gave FBI a set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops: Reports | TechCrunch 1 month ago:
I’m certainly not a microslop supporter, but…
They designed a system that recommended that the average user use full disk encryption as part of device setup, and then provided a way that Grandma could easily recover her family photos when she set it up with their cloud.
This was built by an engineer trying to prevent a foreseeable issue. The intent was not malicious. The intent was to get more people more secure by default, since random hacker couldn’t compell ms to give them keys, while still allowing low tech literacy people to not get fucked.
It’s been a while since I installed a new Windows OS, but I’m pretty sure it prompts you to allow uploading your bitlocker key. It probably defaults to yes, but I doubt you can’t say no, or reset the key post onboarding if you want the privacy, and now it’s on you to record your key. You do have to have some technical understanding of the process, though, which is true of just about everything.
That all said, if a company has your data, it can be demanded by the government. This is a cautionary tale about keeping your secrets secret. Don’t put them in GitHub, don’t put them in Chrome, don’t put them online anywhere because the Internet never forgets.
- Comment on AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns 1 month ago:
The big difference is that smart phones and centralized internet are somewhat useful. Smartphones at least. Centralized internet… meh, but maybe a dependency.
AI is useful in only very niche and intentional cases. A ‘generic’ LLM is pretty bad at almost everything.
If ‘AI’ had been sold more like: “Give us a year of data samples from your production line and we can use ML to optimize time and temperature based on current weather patterns…” (real world use case I was working in on 2019) etc. then they would have really made the world better. Instead, I have crappy clippy constantly reading my email and suggesting words I wasn’t going to type*.
- I don’t understand how corps accept the idea that their internal emails are no longer internal, since everything is sent to chatgpt/copilot/gemeni/etc as it’s created. Shouldn’t Legal have thrown a tantrum over this?!
- Comment on AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns 1 month ago:
Big tech boss tells delegates at Davos that broader global use is essential if technology is to deliver lasting growth
Let me rephrase:
“Smart” entitled person says our product is not showing value, so we need to force people to use it more than we already are after years of cramming it down their throats.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 2 months ago:
I really like this comment. It covers a variety of use cases where an LLM/AI could help with the mundane tasks and calls out some of the issues.
The ‘accuracy’ aspect is my 2nd greatest concern: An LLM agent that I told to find me a nearby Indian restaurant, which it then hallucinated is not going to kill me. I’ll deal, but be hungry and cranky. When that LLM (which are notoriously bad at numbers) updates my spending spreadsheet with a 500 instead of a 5000, that could have a real impact on my long-term planning, especially if it’s somehow tied into my actual bank account and makes up numbers. As we/they embed AI into everything, the number of people who think they have money because the AI agent queried their bank balance, saw 15, and turned it into 1500 will be too damn high. I don’t ever foresee trusting an AI agent to do anything important for me.
“trust”/“privacy” is my greatest fear, though. There’s documentation for the major players that prompts are used to train the models. I can’t immediately find an article link because ‘chatgpt prompt train’ finds me a ton of slop about the various “super” prompts I could use. Here’s OpenAI’s ToS about how they will use your input to train their model unless you specifically opt-out: openai.com/…/how-your-data-is-used-to-improve-mod…
Note that that means when you ask for an Indian restaurant near your home address, Open AI now has that address in it’s data set and may hallucinate that address as an Indian restaurant in the future. The result being that some hungry, cranky dude may show up at your doorstep asking, “where’s my tikka masala”. This could be a net-gain, though; new bestie.
The real risk, though, is that your daily life is now collected, collated, harvested and added to the model’s data set; all without your clear explicit actions: using these tools requires accepting a ToS that most people will not really read and understand. Maaaaaany people will expose what is otherwise sensitive information to these tools without understanding that their data becomes visible as part of that action.
To get a little political, I think there’s a huge downside on the trust aspect of: These companies have your queries(prompts), and I don’t trust them to maintain my privacy. If I ask something like “where to get abortion in texas”, I can fully see OpenAI selling that prompt to law enforcement. That’s an egregious example for impact, but imagine someone could query prompts (using an AI which might make shit up) and asks “who asked about topics anti-X” or “pro-Y”.
My personal use of ai: I like the NLP paradigm for turning a verbose search query into other search queries that are more likely to find me results. I run a local 8B model that has, for example, helped me find a movie from my childhood that I couldn’t get google to identify.
There’s use-case here, but I can’t accept this as a SaaS-style offering. Any modern gaming machine can run one of these LLMs and get value without the tradeoff from privacy.
Adding agent power just opens you up to having your tool make stupid mistakes on your behalf. These kinds of tools need to have oversight at all times. They may work for 90% of the time, but they will eventually send an offensive email to your boss, delete your whole database, wire money to someone you didn’t intend, or otherwise make a mistake.
I kind of fear the day that you have a crucial confrontation with your boss and the dialog goes something like:
Why did you call me an asshole?
I didn’t the AI did and I didn’t read the response as much as I should have.
Oh, OK.
- Comment on Attitudes 2 months ago:
Similarly, my fantasy is that If I won the lottery, or otherwise became independently wealthy, I’d be doing a ton of different entry-level jobs to find one that hit as a passion.
Construction worker, stagehand, (i’ve already been retail), food service, intern for anything that requires a degree I don’t have, etc.
I like my current job but if I didn’t need the paycheck then I’m not sure I’d stay. I might stick around if I could negotiate terms and only do the parts I liked, though.
I wish I could learn a little about everything, but our culture pushes us to commit and be deep instead, and then we get stuck in a job that used to be a fun hobby.
- Comment on Do we have No Man's Sky fans here? 2 months ago:
This is my issue with NMS.
It’s fun for a while, but it’s a pretty shallow sandbox and after you’ve played in the sand for a bit, it’s all just sand.
If you’re not setting yourself a complex and/or grindy goal, like building a neat base, finding the perfect weapon or ship, filling out your reputations or lexicon, or learning all the crafting recipes to make the ultimate mcGuffin, then there is really not much to do. And, for me, once that goal is accomplished, I’m done for a while.
Each planet is just a collection of random tree/bush/rock/animal/color combinations that are mechanically identical (unless something’s changed. I haven’t played since they added VR). I’m also a gamer who likes mechanical complexity and interactions; I don’t tend to play a game for the actual ‘role playing’.
The hand-written “quests” were fun to do most of the time, but that content runs out quickly.
I have the same problems with Elite Dangerous (I have an explorer somewhere out a solid few hours away from civilized space) and unmodded Minecraft (I can only build so many houses/castles). I’ll pick all of these up every now and then, but the fun wears off more quickly each time.
- Comment on Corn or something idk 3 months ago:
On Mobile, copy paste is not working, so paraphrasing:
They are everywhere and almost nobody is racist anymore
Take a cue from the US. The racists are still racists. They are just currently quietly pissed and likely working to be openly racist again.
Fighting against hate requires constant vigilance.
- Comment on Lemmy users who say that Lemmy users are smarter than Reddit users 3 months ago:
Not antagonistically speaking here.
Do you think your input is not being used to train LLMs when posting on Lemmy? It’s publicly visible without an account.
I’d be shocked if there wasn’t either a scraper, or a whole federated instance, that was harvesting lemmy comments for the big ai companies.
The only difference is that no one is trying to make money off providing that content to them. A big part of the reddit exodus was that reddit started charging for api calls to make cash off the AI feeding frenzy, which broke tools the users liked. With lemmy, there’s no need for a rent-seeking middle man.