General_Effort
@General_Effort@lemmy.world
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 22 hours ago:
I expect phones in the EU are going to become a lot more locked down in the next 14 months, like Samsung is already showing. But also think that Google will try its best to make developing for Android easy to get into.
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 1 day ago:
This is forced by EU regulations. I doubt Google would have introduced this on its own. If they wanted to do this, then why wait until forced?
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 1 day ago:
That’s only if the apps distributed are unverified. Mind, the EU already requires app stores to document the identities of devs, but there are loopholes for Small enterprises. In 2027, manufacturers need to document the identities of their suppliers. There are still exceptions for non-profit open source projects, but that’s not what Google is. Surely, no one here wants Google to avoid regulations by investing in open source.
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 1 day ago:
I’m sure the EU is not the only jurisdiction demanding this sort of thing, but I doubt Singapore has the pull needed to get Google to move.
Brussels effect. Imagine Google were to still allow unverified apps in the US. Most devs would still opt for verification so as not to lose the EU market. The proportion of malware is probably going to be higher among the few remaining unverified apps. Sooner or later, some US scam victims would sue Google for failing to protect them like it protects Europeans. Hard to refute.
- Comment on Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration 1 day ago:
Google is doing this to comply with EU regulations supposed to increase security. Now imagine that Google was pushing back against this instead of complying. As per usual, Lemmy would be up in arms against Google for failing to protect people’s data and not complying with our laws and culture. You’d be downvoted to oblivion for asked that question and called a corporate bootlicker.
I think these rules come from German legal culture, which traditionally has a strong need to control information exchange and processing.
- Comment on Dutch chips star exec slams EU for overregulating AI 1 day ago:
With friends who work in AI, I can tell you not all are motivated by money alone, some of them actually do want the scary potential (aka Flock, etc) regulated and are working from Europe.
If they are in favor of the AI Act, they don’t know the AI Act. But never mind… I’m curious what your friends are working on (and if it has a future in the EU). That’s Flock.io, promising decentralization?
- Comment on Delusions of a Protocol 4 days ago:
Yes, but that doesn’t seem sufficient for some. Conservatives certainly would like to remove trans people from the public completely. Aside: It’s foolish for trans people to copy these tactics, assuming this comes organically from the trans community. These people are certainly acting like the heels in some right-wing propaganda play.
Bluesky offers several ways in which users can remove unwanted content from their experience. Easiest is for users to block Singal; banning him from their personal part of the network. Blocklists can be shared easily. Users can also spin up their own moderation service.
I probably shouldn’t go into the details of what Bluesky can do on a technical level. Incidentally, that blog post contains errors.
In short: On a technical level, the Bluesky company can greatly reduce the visibility of someone. But they would likely run into legal problems if they used that on Singal. The EU regulates what can be done quite strictly. Maybe they could benefit from some industry friendly “loopholes”. I’d have to look that up.
- Comment on Delusions of a Protocol 5 days ago:
That needs a longer explanation.
An instance does not interact with all other instances. It only syncs with other instances when users follow someone there, join a community, …
But that’s also a problem. It means you can’t search the entire Fediverse from a particular instance and find new and interesting discussions and people. There is no discovery feed. For that, you need something like Bluesky’s relay. That relay actually does keep up with what everyone is posting and archives it.
But that’s one aspect of Bluesky that draws a lot of criticism by Fedi people. A full relay is expensive to run and not something anyone can self-host. Pruned down versions are doable, though. If everyone actually did run their own relay, then one would get you the combinatorial problem.
In practice, large instances are the Fediverse solution to the discovery problem. You can see what the many users on that instance post. Also, the many users subscribe to many things and so a large instance will cache much content from elsewhere. That architecture encourages centralization.
There’s other difficult issues. So you have a little server that serves your content to a few followers. Some celebrity with millions of followers would have to rent an entire server rack. But what if little old you interacts with a celeb and now all their followers try to fetch your content from your little server? Common problem. You just need caching. EG the celebrity rack also serves your content to their followers and takes the load off your server. But now whoever is doing the caching can also filter replies. There’s no simply solution there.
- Comment on Delusions of a Protocol 5 days ago:
Yes. On Bluesky, they could be individually muted or blocked. You can make and share blocklists, make your own custom feeds that exclude such posters, or even create your own moderation service that removes (or blurs, …) posts for your subscribers. Obviously, that is not satisfactory for some people.
- Comment on Delusions of a Protocol 5 days ago:
Yes. It’s only a problem if you expect or want the Fediverse to be the future of social media, which it isn’t.
- Comment on Delusions of a Protocol 5 days ago:
This does raise a question relevant to the Fediverse. Some Bluesky users are lobbying to have Jesse Singal banned, whoever that is. Of course, a hallmark of a decentralized network is that there is no central authority that could actually do that. Implicitly, this demand is a rejection of the very concept of decentralization.
Once people find out what decentralization means, are they even willing to tolerate it?
- Comment on Ethical artificial intelligence ? 5 days ago:
Ethical meaning : “private”, "anonymous, “not training with your data”, “no censured”, “open source”…
Yes. You have to be careful with the meaning of “ethical”. Most often, people write about “ethical AI” to demand money for copyright owners.
Case in point: Some people say that AI is only open source if the training data can also be shared freely. That means the training data has to be public domain or that permission by the copyright owner was obtained. If that’s what you mean by “open source”, then your options are extremely limited. EG some offerings from AllenAI.
Uncensored is also tricky. Many say that ethical AI does not output bad content. Of course, what bad content is depends very much on who you ask. The EU or China have strict legal requirements but not the same, of course. In any case, when you train an AI, you steer it to generate a certain kind of output. Respectable businesses don’t want NSFW stuff. Some horny individuals out there want exactly that. So it depends on what you want.
Check out the SillyTavernAI subreddit (and also LocalLlama). There you find people who value private, uncensored LLMs, though not necessarily copyright. It’s also where the above-mentioned horny individuals hang out for related reasons.
Duckduckgo offers free, anonymous access to major Chatbots. Maybe worth checking out.
- Comment on Delusions of a Protocol 6 days ago:
Bad rant. Wrong on technical aspects and self-contradictory. Anyway, off-topic here.
- Comment on Fell off the horizon into a black hole 6 days ago:
It seems awfully coincidental that, of all the curvatures out there, the universe should just end up having none.
- Comment on Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid 1 week ago:
Bear in mind that an open source license is a contract and it usually involves some form of reciprocity, like crediting the dev by name. That’s in principle not different from a sponsorship deal, where some sports stadium gets the name of a corporation.
The actual definition is even wider, though. I don’t see who you get out of that.
Trader defined in the DSA
>‘trader’ means any natural person, or any legal person irrespective of whether it is privately or publicly owned, who is acting, including through any person acting in his or her name or on his or her behalf, for purposes relating to his or her trade, business, craft or profession; eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/En/TXT/HTML/?uri=…
If F-droid ever has more than 50 employees, annual turnover over EUR 10 million, or over EUR 10 million on the balance sheet, then they will have to collect the same information.
- Comment on Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid 1 week ago:
European devs: Our laws will protect us!
Meanwhile, our laws:
Article 30
Traceability of traders
- Providers of online platforms allowing consumers to conclude distance contracts with traders shall ensure that traders can only use those online platforms to promote messages on or to offer products or services to consumers located in the Union if, prior to the use of their services for those purposes, they have obtained the following information, where applicable to the trader:
(a) the name, address, telephone number and email address of the trader;
(b) a copy of the identification document of the trader or any other electronic identification as defined by Article 3 of Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council (40);
- Comment on Elon Musk’s X calls for delay in Australia’s child social media ban citing ‘serious concerns’ about policy’s lawfulness 2 weeks ago:
so collecting votes from the many
All the notable socialist states, Soviet Russia, Red China, Cuba, arose out of a “2nd amendment solution to tyranny”, as might be said in the US.
The term “socialist” can be used in a much broader sense, but then the meaning is really unclear. I mean, you could call the US a socialist state. The left-wing revolutionaries, who founded it, claimed that all are born equal and fought a war to expropriate the rightfully inherited rights of the king. They even created a constitution to promote the general Welfare without even mentioning the protection of property.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s X calls for delay in Australia’s child social media ban citing ‘serious concerns’ about policy’s lawfulness 2 weeks ago:
The original left/right distinction dates back to the French Revolution. During a brief episode, supporters of the monarchy found themselves sitting on the right and opponents (republicans and anarchists) on the left.
Later, the term conservatism was applied to the ideas of Edmund Burke, who defended a kind of constitutional monarchy.
In that sense, the US founding fathers were radical left-wing revolutionaries. However, that happened a bit before the French Revolution, so the term is anachronistic.
WW1 broke the power of monarchies in much of Europe. Fascism rose in the interwar period between WW1 and WW2 as a kind of Ersatz-Monarchy. The fascist leader did not present himself as the true heir to the throne, but as a man of the people. He did not claim his position “by the grace of god”, but might invoke “providence”. As such, a stout monarchist might genuinely call fascism left-wing. They would also think the US Republicans are left-wing extremists; at least insofar as the Republicans are republican.
Since fascism is in many ways similar to the more authoritarian versions of monarchism, fascist leaders gained the support of old monarchists. There weren’t many of those around, but they still controlled key positions in government and industry. You were not a high military office, government official, or plain rich, if you had not kowtowed to the king.
Because of all the overt similarities in ideology, demographic support, and policy, fascism has always been considered a right wing ideology by any normal observer.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s X calls for delay in Australia’s child social media ban citing ‘serious concerns’ about policy’s lawfulness 2 weeks ago:
Whats a tankie btw?
Originally, these were western supporters of soviet/russian imperialism. Soviet imperialism was very much a seamless continuation of tsarist imperialism.
After WW2, Soviet Russia had military control of much of Europe. They installed authoritarian governments that were under their control, but of course there were occasional reform movements, notably in Hungary 1956 or Czechoslovakia 1968. Russia crushed these “revolts” with overwhelming military force. They sent in the tanks, and so those who favored military aggression were called “tankies”.
Note: These were regular wars between countries by any definition.
- Comment on Can you think of any now? 2 weeks ago:
Huh. TIL.
- Comment on Internet Archive’s big battle with music publishers ends in settlement 2 weeks ago:
It just seems odd to me, you know? AI in the hands of the few is harmful, but if they pay license fees, that can be allowed. Copyright infringement is theft, but it is acceptable if the result is shared freely. I don’t really see how that works.
- Comment on Internet Archive’s big battle with music publishers ends in settlement 2 weeks ago:
Why do you want it to work that way?
- Comment on Internet Archive’s big battle with music publishers ends in settlement 2 weeks ago:
The Archive strongly supports AI training being Fair Use. It has even advised the UK government to relax copyright laws to permit training. blog.archive.org/…/internet-archive-submits-comme…
Some of the precedents won by AI companies offer great support for the Archive, but remember that they also had to pay up on occasion.
- Comment on How many hands long do they get? 2 weeks ago:
People like you are the reason that they invented the guillotine on the very same occasion.
- Comment on AI Designs Viable Bacteriophage Genomes, Combats Antibiotic Resistance 3 weeks ago:
It’s interesting how it is seen the other way around in other contexts.
- Comment on AI Designs Viable Bacteriophage Genomes, Combats Antibiotic Resistance 3 weeks ago:
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.world | 5 comments
- Comment on Why is the human body so incredibly bad at responding to colds? 3 weeks ago:
Only if the medication doesn’t work. The evidence is that placebos don’t work. Mostly, the placebo effect is a statistical illusion.
It is plausible that the body will expend more energy to combat a disease if you are (sub-)consciously convinced that you are cared for and don’t need to stress. Stress hormones down-regulate the immune response. Cortisol, used for treatment of autoimmune disorders like asthma and allergies, is a stress hormone.
But a sham treatment could also have the opposite effect. If your subconscious understands that as a signal that you must get back into action, you may end up releasing stress hormones. These psychological effects are just too idiosyncratic and fickle to be used reliably.
Stuff like broken bones or cancer doesn’t respond to psychology at all. The body is already doing all it can.
- Comment on Why is the human body so incredibly bad at responding to colds? 3 weeks ago:
It’s more like colds are incredibly good at responding to the human body. Following the evolution of corona was quite amazing, no?
- Comment on ActivityPub vs RSS Atom etc. Why Federate instead of aggrigate? 3 weeks ago:
Many things are fundamentally feasible. I see 2 things you argue for.
One is changing the caching strategy. I don’t think that’s wise in terms of load sharing, but certainly feasible on a small scale. In certain circumstances, it may be preferred.
The other thing is using older protocols and standards. The practical reason to do this would be to use existing tooling, libraries, code. I’m not seeing such opportunities. I’m not that familiar with these, but it seems like they would have to be extended anyway. So I don’t really see the point.
