Breve
@Breve@pawb.social
- Comment on I investigated millions of tweets from the Kremlin’s ‘troll factory’ and discovered classic propaganda techniques reimagined for the social media age. 1 month ago:
My new rule of social media: Unless I know and trust the person or the organization making a post, I assume it’s worthless unless I double check it against a person or organization I trust. Opinions are also included in this rule.
- Comment on Student dorm does not allow wifi routers 2 months ago:
The post mentioned a wireless mesh network, so it sounds like the ISP/provider already has a bunch of wireless access points set up to cover the whole building. One of the problems with high-density living spaces is that there are only a limited number of communication channels WiFi can use, so if everyone living there also runs their own wireless networks they use up all the available channels and have to cross-talk over eachother, leading to everything slowing down.
- Comment on What makes it “Legitimate Interest“? 4 months ago:
Advertisers believe they are doing you a favour by using personal information to serve “better” ads that would be more “interesting” to you.
- Comment on Elon Musk Begs Advertisers to Return as Twitter's Revenue Plunges 4 months ago:
Unfortunately advertising doesn’t work on the majority of their users who are bots. 🤷
- Comment on near zero 5 months ago:
The infinitesimal has entered the chat.
- Comment on After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year 6 months ago:
The big record labels are shareholders in Spotify so they’re happy to get less money in streaming royalties because that’s the part they have to share with artists, but the value of their shares they get to keep all for themselves.
- Comment on Meta’s “set it and forget it” AI ad tools are misfiring and blowing through cash 6 months ago:
I bet the AI was tuned to select ads that maximize both profit and engagement for Meta over maximizing either profit or engagement for the advertiser. Totally working “as intended”.
- Comment on ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets 7 months ago:
The AI is probably more like:
- Comment on [deleted] 8 months ago:
Typically you can assume a pronoun isn’t introducing any previously unmentioned people, as that is confusing and bad grammar. The only case I would find this confusing is if you thought “Taylor” referred to a group of people like a band.
- Comment on Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media 8 months ago:
Hahah but really AI is already being used to amplify and exploit all the problems of social media to new levels. It was nice while it lasted, but we can’t stuff this all back in Pandora’s box.
- Comment on is this the moment spez became Heisenberg? Reddit CEO warns users: "We know your dark secrets' 8 months ago:
Probably all those throwaway accounts that people create to post comments that they don’t want attached to themselves in any way. I doubt many people took enough precautions to prevent Reddit from identifying them as alternate accounts though.
- Comment on Change tracking ideas 8 months ago:
I’ve started using Obsidian with a kanban plugin, though any sufficient kanban style solution would work. I have a to-do column (aka backlog), an in-progress column, and a finished column. I add notes to the cards about what I did and I never delete stuff from the finished column so I can review if I need to re-open or re-do a task in the future.
- Comment on Google is blocking RCS on rooted Android devices 8 months ago:
Is this how I can stop the messages app from bugging me about enabling RCS every time I open it? Sign me up!
- Comment on Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has replaced the Hide Desktop icon with Copilot. 8 months ago:
Everyone: Don’t say anything sensitive or personal to an AI because it could end up in training data!
Microsoft: We’re making it easier to feed everything you do on your computer to an AI from notepad to your desktop!
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- Comment on Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has replaced the Hide Desktop icon with Copilot. 8 months ago:
I just made the switch and Steam with Proton has been really smooth, they’ve made a lot of progress to make it easy since the Steam Deck has come out. I don’t play any online competitive games that use anti-cheat though.
- Comment on Bridgy Fed, a bridge between the Fediverse and other protocols such as BlueSky, is using an opt-out model and that raises a lot of discussion 8 months ago:
Those examples are all forms of linking back to the content which is still hosted by the original server in which it was posted. Effectively they are sharing links to the content over the content itself, because if the hosting server removes the content then it is no longer available through those other mediums. And yes there are caching mechanisms involved, but those fall to the personal use case because the cache is not made publicly available.
For these bridge services to work, they are creating and hosting duplicates of the content. That is the biggest difference. If BlueSky actually federated then they would not be rehosting the content either.
- Comment on Bridgy Fed, a bridge between the Fediverse and other protocols such as BlueSky, is using an opt-out model and that raises a lot of discussion 8 months ago:
How is reposting content to another social media platform with over a million users “personal consumption”?
- Comment on Bridgy Fed, a bridge between the Fediverse and other protocols such as BlueSky, is using an opt-out model and that raises a lot of discussion 8 months ago:
Okay, well try this one:
Take any media publicly uploaded by a major artist on X and repost it to YouTube unaltered. You should be able to defend any copyright strikes because of your “publicly available” argument, right?
Allowing public broadcast once doesn’t void the rights of the creator to control when and where that content gets broadcast again.
- Comment on Bridgy Fed, a bridge between the Fediverse and other protocols such as BlueSky, is using an opt-out model and that raises a lot of discussion 8 months ago:
Well, go ahead and take a music video your favorite artist posted publicly on X and upload it to YouTube unaltered and see how far fair use gets you with the defense that the content was publicly available. 🤷
- Comment on Bridgy Fed, a bridge between the Fediverse and other protocols such as BlueSky, is using an opt-out model and that raises a lot of discussion 8 months ago:
Does that mean every TV show broadcast over the air, every song on the radio, and every book in a public library is now “free” to pirate on the Internet because they were made publicly available? There’s a reason that social media companies include clauses in their EULA that posting content gives them (and only them unless otherwise noted) the right to reproduce that content.
- Comment on Skyrocketing bluesky engagement since opening to the public 9 months ago:
Fair, though this is also where the double-edge sword of discoverability steps in too. Many people complain about the lack of it on decentralized systems, but centralized systems have a nice catalog of users for bots to message with little effort.
I’ll admit that lack of discoverability isn’t a perfect solution since there are other ways for spammers to discover users. E-mail is a great example of a large, long running, decentralized system that has increasingly suffered from spam since its inception due to mass data collection of addresses. However if you’re really careful about who you share your address with, it’s possible to still avoid most of it. I give out unique e-mail address to companies and spam tends to only come in on a few, often because they were breached or are otherwise “leaky” about their user’s data. Dropbox is by far the worst offender.
- Comment on Skyrocketing bluesky engagement since opening to the public 9 months ago:
I’ve seen pictures of rooms with walls full of Android cell phones on shelves all hooked up by USB for power and remote control. They can load apps, register accounts, and interact with content inside the app while appearing as legitimate mobile users. That’s why moves like Reddit restricting API access only hurt legitimate users and lazy bot farms, cause the hardcore bot farms have been using the official app on real phones all along.
- Comment on Skyrocketing bluesky engagement since opening to the public 9 months ago:
I’ve been using Mastodon and it’s a pleasant change of pace. I’ve heard of some spam happening there but I think the lack of algorithmic feeds and responsive admins really reduces their reach.
- Comment on Skyrocketing bluesky engagement since opening to the public 9 months ago:
Oh actually it’s worse than that. There are online companies that offer online SMS services that can receive messages from real phone numbers by essentially telling your carrier you want text messages forwarded to them. Obviously they usually make you prove that you own the number before requesting forwarding, but there’s ways around that. I’ve known several people who’ve had their online accounts broken in to because someone hijacked their phone number’s SMS in order to perform password resets or bypass 2FA.
- Comment on Skyrocketing bluesky engagement since opening to the public 9 months ago:
While some may see this as good for Bluesky, I bet this is the floodgates opening to bots and algorithmically boosted harmful content. Good luck everyone on there!
- Comment on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes to families of children harmed online at hearing 9 months ago:
Well if Meta is the “industry leader” of tools designed to prevent this yet it’s still happening at a large scale, then he’s basically admitting that there is no way the industry can solve this. I hope they get legislated into the ground.
- Comment on Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off 9 months ago:
Yeah that’s true, I was thinking more of consoles but I suppose Steam doesn’t really have any bearing on that market. I guess the better equivalent for PC would be DRM free games where it’s downloadable, and could be backed up to physical media (not provided). 😅
- Comment on Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off 9 months ago:
I think the direct parallel was Netflix. It used to be the only platform of it’s kind with an extensive catalog, so it was a far easier sell for people to sign up and stay subscribed. Even at it’s peak though, Netflix never managed to kill off physical media because there are still fans who want to own that disc of their favorite TV show or movie that they could watch anywhere, anytime. Then when other media companies wanted to grab their share of streaming revenue by clawing back their stuff from Netflix and setting up their own smaller catalogs, thinking they would get the same retention that Netflix achieved, instead people started to play the subscription hopping game. In the wake of this, sales of physical media are even seeing an increase too.
I feel like Steam comes close to being the “Netflix” of games because even though it’s not literally streaming games and doesn’t use a subscription model, it still has an extensive catalog and acts as an alternative to owning physical copies of games which comes with both benefits and drawbacks. I’m pretty sure that if publishers keep trying to claw their stuff away from Steam though, that we’ll see a similar uptick in people returning to buying physical copies as a result.
- Comment on Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off 9 months ago:
What’s funny to me is the streaming model for media already has shown this won’t work out well for gaming companies. When a new game drops people will sign up for a month, binge it, then cancel their subscription. They could try and trickle out DLC to get people to stay subscribed, but unless the DLC is significant people will probably just wait a while until a bunch of DLC is available then binge it again.
Personally I can only focus on one or maybe two major games at a time so I’d be happy to only pay a small monthly fee to one major game company at a time over paying for several $80 AAA titles a month from each.
- Comment on Japan determines copyright doesn't apply to LLM/ML training data 10 months ago:
Copyright infringement is about the act of reproduction, not the tools used to reproduce it. The court effectively said the LLM itself is not illegal just like a photocopier or CD/DVD burner is not illegal. It’s illegal if someone used an LLM, or photocopier, to make an unauthorized copy of a protected work though.
