flamingo_pinyata
@flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on China starts smartphone inspections to boost 'anti-espionage efforts', raising fears among expatriates and foreign business people about arbitrary enforcement 3 hours ago:
That’s just so impractical. The point of business travel is to get something done. For that you need your devices, and access to relevant data and systems.
Setting up a clean device for every trip where you cross a controlled border is such a hassle it wouldn’t really pass in any company. Well with the exception of defense companies, I could understand them being paranoid enough.
- Comment on This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born 2 months ago:
Yeah, she didn’t really addressed fraud comparisons. Went straight to sexism. Both can be true, and if you are a CEO of a medical company you should be ready to prove your shit works.
- Comment on Boeing: Last Week Tonight 3 months ago:
If I was in Embraer leadership I’d be scrambling to design a jet in the 737 class right now. It’s just one step up from what they already make. Embraer is already popular with US regional airlines and would be more acceptable in the US market than Comac.
- Comment on AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants 4 months ago:
From the perspective of the decision maker it does “work”. It rejects a % of candidates in such a way they can pretend it’s objective rather than random. Imho, just randomly selecting 100 out of 2000 would actually be more fair and give better results.
- Comment on AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants 4 months ago:
AI filtering has the promise of selecting good candidates very efficiently, due to pattern recognition on a level not immediately obvious to humans. Unfortunately no company is going to train their own hiring models, and good ones don’t exist on the market. Everyone vaguely competent is chasing LLMs and image generation. Specialized, focused models are almost forgotten in the hype.
So they just go with a commercial “enterprise” tool which are as we all know utter shite. HR AI tools are even worse than your typical fake “AI”.
- Comment on Bluesky is now open for anyone to join | TechCrunch 4 months ago:
Dorsey created one immensely popular social platform, sold it for a huge sum, let the new owner ruin it and then created the same thing again.
An actual real world case of “have your cake and eat it too”.
Respect where it’s due. - Comment on are people still all riled up about beehaw? 4 months ago:
That is exactly their goal. They openly state it, and I respect them for that.
Federating with others was never really what they wanted. It’s a semi-private discussion space with strict rules. - Comment on Multinational firm’s Hong Kong office loses HK$200 million after scammers stage deepfake video meeting 4 months ago:
After reading the whole article - wow that was one sophisticated scam.
Deepfake was only one part of it, scammers impersonated multiple people on video, chat and email to create a believable story. It was apparently not too out of line with the normal company processes, which makes it extra scary (and likely helped by someone on the inside)
- Comment on There’s a 5% chance of AI causing humans to go extinct, say scientists 5 months ago:
So the other 95% is that humans will cause humans to go extinct.
Checks out. - Comment on queer.af, a Mastodon instance, has been killed by the Taliban 5 months ago:
They could have renewed it just for the irony. Even if it means giving some money to the Taliban.
- Comment on YouTube Still Blocking Access To Steamboat Willie On Behalf Of Disney In Some Countries 5 months ago:
It could be not on purpose.
Did they even build their system with the idea that copyright can expire? This is the first major video work to expire.
In a lot of companies this would be the first feature to be given low priority and sent to the bottom of the backlog. To be done “when we have the time”
- Comment on Wi-Fi 7 Signals the Industry’s New Priority: Stability 5 months ago:
You could safely bet somebody already does
- Comment on Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, claims Human Rights Watch. 6 months ago:
It’s hard to claim either way - for example my bubble is also mostly pro-palestinian. Suspiciously missing pro-isreaeli side actually.
But that doesn’t mean it’s what the algorithm serves on average. No one outside some teams in Meta actually knows, any outside attempt to analyze it would expose you to the same bubble-creating mechanism
- Comment on VW Is Putting Buttons Back in Cars Because People Complained Enough 6 months ago:
The fact that they needed to receive a lot of complaints to reconsider makes me wonder - do they even do any kind of usability testing for their products? Anyone who even sat in a car with only touchscreen can tell you the experience is not comfortable.
And I don’t think it’s just about the price of physical buttons. Buttons are a selling point right now, they could charge a small premium (not in the thousands but ~$200 certainly.
- Comment on TikTok requires users to “forever waive” rights to sue over past harms | TikTok may be seeking to avoid increasingly high costs of mass arbitration. 6 months ago:
So it’s still possible. Didn’t you have a big kerfuffle in 1775 about basing your legal system on a British monarch
- Comment on Nvidia's employees are suddenly so rich and happy that the company's got a 'semi retirement' problem, insiders say 6 months ago:
Problem? Isn’t this the goal of any company - make a lot of money, primarily for the shareholders, but in this case employees are also the shareholders themselves. They are not a charity, they’re in this to make money.
One of the rare example of success in capitalism.
(and maybe a taste of what different systems could achieve if we didn’t separate ownership and employment)
- Comment on will the fediverse stop existing?? 6 months ago:
Of course.
All of us will stop existing at some point. You and me in a couple of decades. Our species and all life on Earth when the Sun goes red giant. Even the universe will die one day dissipating into the maximum entropy of the heat death, or another big bang (not sure about the latest theories)
- Comment on What are some cool people you follow on other Mastodon and other Fediverse Platforms? 6 months ago:
Yep, a large portion of the content is exactly that. Mastodon is successfully replicating the Twitter experience.
I’m not a huge fan of the format either. - Comment on This scary AI recognizes passwords by the sound of your typing 6 months ago:
Doesn’t matter that much if you cast your malware broadly enough, for example requesting mic access from a web page. A large percentage of keyboards (especially business laptops) will be covered just by Mac + Lenovo.
- Comment on Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to receive Serbian passport, president says 6 months ago:
He’s there at the invitation of the current president who’s doing an election campaign for his party, leading to parliamentary elections on Dec 17.
The way they got in touch is through a celebrity who is a member of the political party in question.
How is Woz going to help him I don’t know, probably boasting that rich and famous want to become Serbians due to their policies.
- Comment on Discord is on a quest to become a better messaging app 6 months ago:
It’s an overwhelming mess of everything. So many things going on at once - notifications, badges, mentions, boosts, stickers voice chats, kitchen sink …
I just can’t force myself to use it. My brain is accustomed to a minimalist UX, not whatever that is.
- Comment on Video of ceramic storage system prototype surfaces online — 10,000TB cartridges bombarded with laser rays could become mainstream by 2030, making slow hard drives and tapes obsolete 6 months ago:
People who need to archive a shitload of data without reading often, or ever.
- Comment on ASD jab: Chinese scientists reach milestone in revolutionary gene therapy for autism 6 months ago:
Blame DSM-5 for making the definition of autistic spectrum so broad as to be meaningless.
Tiktokers ran with it and basically defined every exaggerated personality trait as "autism’. Now everyone is autistic. - Comment on Pentagon Scientists Discuss Cybernetic 'Super Soldiers' That Feel Nothing While Killing In Dystopian Presentation 6 months ago:
Such a last-century worldview. Biological soldiers? That’s just more meat to feed.
The future is in semi-autonomous, semi-intelligent “AI” driven drones which you can program with a vague general mission and they can improvise the rest.
- Comment on Interview: Sam Altman on being fired and rehired by OpenAI 6 months ago:
During our interview, Altman repeatedly declined to answer the main question on everyones’ minds: exactly why he was fired to begin with.
Wtf is going on in that company … despite the falling out, both he and the board are still covering for each other.
- Comment on Are tech giants exploiting Ugandans? 7 months ago:
Didn’t read the article but the answer is - yes.
The “Ugandans” part is superfluous. - Comment on CEO Jack Dorsey tells workers he’s making it easier to fire them — There are reportedly no more performance improvement plans at Block 7 months ago:
According to the wiki, they started it as their original product. And later acquired Tidal, and some other services I’m not that familiar with (Afterpay, Cashapp)
- Comment on CEO Jack Dorsey tells workers he’s making it easier to fire them — There are reportedly no more performance improvement plans at Block 7 months ago:
They have 12.000 employees. Like yes they do have a couple of recognizable products - mostly Square and Tidal.
But still, 12.000 people is a lot. One more case of overhiring for imaginary growth.
- Comment on How does Anthropic compare to OpenAI? 7 months ago:
It’s also insufferablely slow, and the answers are … well … not exactly up to gpt-4 level to say the least
- Comment on OpenAI investors push to bring Altman back as CEO one day after he was ousted by board 7 months ago:
How embarrassing must it be for both sides if no one is willing to go public?
If it were something illegal, they wouldn’t be holding back. Unless the board is somehow complicit by default.