patatahooligan

@patatahooligan@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube removes 'gender identity' from hate speech policy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  “Gender” means nothing without context. By a MAGAs definition of gender this policy doesn’t protect trans people, for example. We don’t know how this rule will be interpreted in practice. Even if you don’t consider the intent behind making this change, this is objectively a weaker guarantee of protection than what we had with “gender identity and expression”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Law enforcement AI is a terrible idea and it doesn’t matter whether you feed it “false facts” or not. There’s enough bias in law enforcement that the data is essentially always poisoned.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Tesla blew its lead.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with any excuse you make for Elon is that Elon is too stupid to keep his mouth shut and give the excuse any plausibility. After the nazi salute he went on Twitter to make nazi puns about it. It is certain beyond reasonable doubt that he knows exactly what the salute was. Even if you give him the insane benefit of the doubt that it was really “his heart going out” and accidentally looked like the salute, his having shown he knows what it looks like but never stating he does not actually believe in the ideology or want present himself as an ally to nazis is just as damning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brother denies using firmware updates to brick printers with third-party ink⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I see. Thanks for sharing. This will be good to know next time I’m looking for a printer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Writing is on the wall for spinning rust': IBM joins Pure Storage in claiming disk drives will go the way of the dodo in enterprises⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Microsoft has project Silica where they store data in glass. Being electromagnetic field-proof is one of the stated goals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brother denies using firmware updates to brick printers with third-party ink⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  but they’re a different kind of hassle

  Can you elaborate on this? I thought they would be straight up better to work with and I was thinking of buying one in the future. Is it just about the drying up issue you mentioned or are there other drawbacks?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github: Nintendo Submit DMCA Notices to Ryujinx Forks⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The DMCA takedown seems to be specifically about Ryujinx’s ability to decode ROMs. Circumventing DRM is in fact illegal according to the DMCA so they appear to have a valid argument. However, in their takedown notice they assume that the decryption keys are obtained illegally. I’m wondering if the DMCA forbids extracting the decryption keys (without distribution) from your own legitimately owned Nintendo hardware for personal backup. If so, then the Ryujinx feature might also be defensible.

  This also raises the question of whether an emulator could be made to work on already decrypted media and let you figure out how to do that yourself. Nintendo could argue that its main use is still to play illegally decrypted ROMs but the emulator would have a decent defense imo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Two conversational AI agents switching from English to sound-level protocol after confirming they are both AI agents⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, the implied solution is to reevaluate the standard rather than hacking around it. The two humans should communicate that the standard works for neither side and design a better way to do things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Two conversational AI agents switching from English to sound-level protocol after confirming they are both AI agents⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is really funny to me. If you keep optimizing this process you’ll eventually completely remove the AI parts. Really shows how some of the pains AI claims to solve are self-inflicted. A good UI would have allowed the user to make this transaction in the same time it took to give the AI its initial instructions.

  On this topic, here’s another common anti-pattern that I’m waiting for people to realize is insane and do something about it:

  • person A needs to convey an idea/proposal
  • they write a short but complete technical specification for it
  • it doesn’t comply with some arbitrary standard/expectation so they tell an AI to expand the text
  • the AI can’t add any real information, it just spreads the same information over more text
  • person B receives the text and is annoyed at how verbose it is
  • they tell an AI to summarize it
  • they get something basically aims to be the original text, but it’s been passed through an unreliable hallucinating energy-inefficient channel

  Based on true stories.

  The above is not to say that every AI use case is made up or that the demo in the video isn’t cool. It’s also not a problem exclusive to AI. This is a more general observation that people don’t question the sanity of interfaces enough, even when it costs them a lot of extra work to comply with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta Says it Made Sure Not to Seed Any Pirated Books⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s much more complicated than this. Given that models have been shown to spit out verbatim copies of some training material, it can be argued that the weights do in fact encode the material, just in some obfuscated way. Additionally, it can be argued that the output of the model is a derivative copy of the original work regardless of whether the original work can be “found inside” the model weights, just by the nature of the process. As of now, there is no precedent that I know of on whether this constitutes redistribution of copyrighted material.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. A few year back the devs looking for quick fixes would go over to StackOverflow and just copy answers without reading explanations. This caused the same type of problems that OP is talking about. That said, the ease of AI might be making things even worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why doesn't phones numbers have a "DNS" servet so we can just type in words like we do with the internet?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Getting the entire world to switch to something better would be quite the undertaking.

  But that’s probably not necessary. You could install something on your phone that does phone number lookup and then just dials the number as normal. The service doesn’t need to be built into the old phone networks this way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This was Likely Recently Auto-Installed on your Phone.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As far as I know, the apps are not intercepting the text messages for passcodes. The messages have a specific format and a hash to indicate which app they are targeting. It is up to the messages app to read the message and to forward the code. This design should not need to give the apps any access to your messages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s only really feasible for phones they knowingly send to regulators. The phone would have no practical way of knowing that I’m having staged conversations around it and keeping track of the ads I see.

  But even if you’re right, that doesn’t change the fact that a lack of objective measurement means all these stories are unreliable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the heads up. I am aware of the spying issues with smartphones (and any way you access the internet really). This is part of the reason why I don’t think proving the unauthorized use of the microphone to spy is really important and why we need systemic solutions to prevent abuse in any case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you.

  According to the Signal foundation, the reverse is true. They claim they got banned for revealing that info.

  signal.org/…/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are billions of smartphones out there. Thousands of people getting ads relevant to what they just discussed is normal. And it’s not just about the number of stories. It’s also about how unscientific these reports are as well. If you want to come up with actually useful evidence you would have to test this multiple times to prove it’s not random and you would also have to objectively measure the effect. You need to show a significant increase in the probability of getting a relevant ad, which in turn means you need to know what the baseline probability of getting one is (when the phone has not been allowed to spy on you).

  All that being said, I don’t think proving that smartphones spy on us is all that useful. The fact that it can happen very easily is already a problem. Security and privacy are protected when we design systematic solutions that prevent abuse. They are not protected in unregulated systems where we might sometimes prove abuse has happened after the fact. There’s plenty wrong with a modern smartphone regardless of whether it happens to be spying on you right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LineageOS now officially supports the Pixel 9 series⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is the bootloader really that important for a lost phone? If someone finds your phone can’t they just tear it apart and read the storage with external tools? A locked bootloader sounds more like an anti-tampering measure and not for protecting your phone’s content after it’s lost.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Social media is becoming infested with climate change denial and misinformation⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For anyone stumbling onto this who actually wants to be educated, the science has practically unanimously agreed that climate change is mainly caused by human activity. No expert is unaware of the cycles that temporarily affect climate. They are well studied, modeled, and found to pale in comparison to human-made climate change. You can find comparisons between human and natural drivers, with sources from expert organizations and scientific studies, here and here. Funnily enough, the NOAA, which this commenter used as a source for El Niño and La Niña below, also hosts this article which literally starts by linking to a page that points out how climate change is mostly caused by humans.