ArchRecord
@ArchRecord@lemm.ee
- Comment on Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads | TechCrunch 13 hours ago:
Chrome is relatively limited in scope compared to, say, a user on an instance of degoogled-chromium just using the same Google services along with all the other browsing they do. The extra data that’s gathered is generally going to be things like a little more DNS query information, (assuming your device isn’t already set to default to Google’s DNS server) links you visit that don’t already have Google’s trackers on them (very few) and some general information like when you’re turning on your computer and Chrome is opening up.
The real difference is in how Chrome doesn’t protect you like other browsers do, and it thus makes more of the collection that Google’s services do directly, possible.
Perplexity is still being pretty vague here, but if I had to guess, it would essentially just be taking all the stuff that Google would usually get from tracking pixels and ad cookies, and baking that directly in to the browser instead of it relying on individual sites using it.
- Comment on Philosophy moment 23 hours ago:
The fact that we ever allowed kids to scroll instead of paying attention in class is absurd.
I’ve never actually seen a classroom where this was the case. (aside from after work was completed, sort of as a reward for finishing their assignments on time) Most teachers will immediately tell students to put the phone away and will confiscate it if they keep trying to use it.
When they’re talking about phone bans, they’re usually meaning things like taking phones away at the front and returning them at the end of the day, or requiring students to leave them in lockers/locked pouches.
- Comment on Put him on the cart. 3 days ago:
- Comment on In heat 5 days ago:
It depends on the person in my experience.
For instance, I’ll often use a question format, but usually because I’m looking for similar results from a forum, in which I’d expect to find a post with a similar question as the title. This sometimes produces better results than just plain old keywords.
Other times though, I’m just throwing keywords out and adding
“”to select the ones I require be included.But I do know some people who only ever ask in question format no matter the actual query. (e.g. “What is 2+2” instead of just typing “2+2” and getting the calculator dialogue)
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 price has been dropped to €499. The phone is designed to be the most advanced environmentally friendly smartphone. 1 week ago:
Is this phone also more secure?
Probably not.
Apple & Google have spent considerable amounts of time building out hardware security infrastructure for their products that I find it extremely unlikely Fairphone would have been able to match.
For example, the popular alternative Android OS GrapheneOS only supports Google Pixels, because: (Emphasis added by me)
“There are currently no other devices meeting even the most basic security requirements while running an alternate OS. GrapheneOS is very interested in supporting a non-Pixel brand, but the vast majority of Android OEMs do not take security seriously. Samsung takes security almost as seriously as Google, but they deliberately cripple their devices when unlock them to install another OS and don’t allow an alternate OS to use important security features. If Samsung permitted GrapheneOS to support their devices properly, many of their phones would be the closest to meeting our requirements. They’re currently missing the very important hardware memory tagging feature, but only because it’s such a new feature”
If even Samsung, the only other phone brand on the market they consider close to meeting their standards, doesn’t support every modern hardware security feature, and deliberately cripples their security for alternate OS’s, as a multi billion dollar company, I doubt Fairphone has custom-built hardware security mechanisms for their phones to the degree that Google has.
- Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ | TechCrunch 1 week ago:
Not to mention the fact that the stronger IP law is, the more it’s often used to exploit people.
Oh, did you as an artist get given stronger rights for your work? That platform you’re posting on demands that you give them a license for any possible use, in exchange for posting your art there to get eyeballs on your work.
Did your patents just get stronger enforcement? Too bad it’s conveniently very difficult to fund and develop any product at scale under that patent without needing outside investor funding into a new corporate entity that will own the patent, instead of you!
To loosely paraphrase from Cory Doctorow: If someone wants a stronger lock, but won’t give you the key, then it’s not for your benefit.
If corporations get to put locks on everything with keys they own, but also make it hard for you to get or enforce access to the keys to the locks on your stuff, then the simplest way to level the playing field is to simply eliminate the locks.
- Comment on Did ChatGPT come up with Trump’s tariff rate formula? AI chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok all return the same formula for reciprocal tariff calculations, several X users claim. 3 weeks ago:
I tried replicating this myself, and got no similar results. It took enough coaxing just to get the model to not specify existing tariffs, then to make it talk about entire nations instead of tariffs on specific sectors, then after that it mostly just did 10, 12, and 25% for most of the answers.
I have no doubt this is possible, but until I see some actual amount of proof, this is entirely hearsay.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 3 weeks ago:
These folks include presenting a false person as being of age, then switching to underage at the time of meetup when the target shows up.
I’ve never seen even a single instance in my own viewership of numerous channels that engage in pedophile hunting where the person is presented as being above the legal age of consent, then only switching to underage at the time of the meeting. They’re presented as underage from the get-go.
Then the group tries to kill the person
Again, this doesn’t seem to be a widespread thing compared to the number of them that simply lure them to a location then ask them questions (and directly state that they are free to leave at any time since they’re not law enforcement and can’t arrest them) The people you’re talking about are a small minority of both the actual number of pedo hunters, and the number of overall views received.
And the perpetrators think this is justice.
I doubt the people that are explicitly lying to farm content think it’s justice. I do believe the people actually catching people who voluntarily contacted someone presented as underage from the start do.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 3 weeks ago:
It depends on how these channels are going about finding their victims for it to be considered similar.
Remember, entrapment is based around luring someone to do something they otherwise would not have done had the operation to entrap them not occurred. If they created an account posing as a minor, then directly DM’d a person asking if they wanted to do x/y/z with a minor, that would be entrapment.
But if they made an account claiming to be a minor on social media, and the person contacted them voluntarily, asked their age, was told it was under 18 and still continued messaging, then sent explicit photos, that’s not entrapment.
However, if they were then the people who initiated the conversation about wanting the person to come to their house / visit them somewhere, that could be considered entrapment, and the only evidence against the person that could be eligible for use in court would be the explicit material they sent without being prompted.
It varies case-by-case, but from what I’ve seen, most of the larger operations tend to try and avoid entrapment-like tactics in most cases, where they only allow the other person to initiate unlawful behaviors, rather than prompting anything themselves.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 3 weeks ago:
couldn’t they just run down the registered sex offender list
The point of their channels is usually to find new predators that haven’t been caught, so they can then face legal consequences, (or at least be pushed to stop acting on their desires) rather than to punish people for being pedophiles in general, so it wouldn’t really make sense to go after those who were already convicted.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
hotel
I think you mean “all-inclusive” resort (that isn’t all inclusive and actually charges a gazillion dollars in random fees) that makes them feel like they’re experiencing local culture while actually just experiencing the effects of the resort chain exploiting the local population for cheap labor while cheaply imitating the culture.
Don’t worry, we Americans are definitely capable of escaping our cultural bubble! /s
- Comment on 50% of parents financially support adult children, report finds. Here's how much it costs them. 4 weeks ago:
Not only are their wages lower than their parents’ earnings when they were in their 20s and 30s, after adjusting for inflation, but they are also carrying larger student loan balances, many reports show.
True, true. Surely they won’t try to both-sides this and make it seem like they’re overreacti-
But by other measures, young adults are doing well.
Oh no.
Compared with their parents at this age, Gen Zers are more likely to have a college degree
Because more jobs require them even when they’re not necessary. Also, see the crippling debt you just mentioned.
and work full time.
Yet still make less than their parents while working longer hours. How is this “doing well?”
Plus, many millennials have more saved for retirement than they did just a few years ago, after reaping the benefits of positive market conditions.
Fun fact, if you save money for retirement, it tends to go up, shocking.
- Comment on GrapheneOS partial offline backup? 4 weeks ago:
GrapheneOS has Seedvault integrated in Settings > System > Backup, where you can choose what you want backed up, back it up into a file, then transfer that file anywhere you want.
You can then restore a backup from the three-dot menu in the top right.
I haven’t had to do restore yet myself, so I’m unsure how well it restores, say, text messages, to an existing client on your phone. (I’m not sure if it replaces your existing messages or not)
As for Signal, I believe it now supports restoring up to the last 45 days of message history from your device. (Even after wiping your messages off Signal from your phone, leave the app itself, as it has totally innocuous files that definitely don’t possibly harm police hardware used to crack phones embedded in it.)
- 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. 4 weeks ago:
- Say something blatantly uninformed on an online forum
- Get corrected on it
- Make reference to how someone is perceived at parties, an entirely different atmosphere from an online forum, and think you made a point
Good job.
- 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. 4 weeks ago:
We cant even handle humans going psycho. Last thing I want is an AI losing its shit due from being overworked producing goblin tentacle porn and going full skynet judgement day.
That is simply not how “AI” models today are structured, and that is entirely a fabrication based on science fiction related media.
The series of matrix multiplication problems that an LLM is, and runs the tokens from a query through does not have the capability to be overworked, to know if it’s been used before (outside of its context window, which itself is just previous stored tokens added to the math problem), to change itself, or to arbitrarily access any system resources.
- 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. 4 weeks ago:
Here’s the key distinction:
This only makes AI models unreliable if they ignore “don’t scrape my site” requests. If they respect the requests of the sites they’re profiting from using the data from, then there’s no issue.
People want AI models to not be unreliable, but they also want them to operate with integrity in the first place, and not profit from people’s work who explicitly opt-out their work from training.
- Comment on Signal's Meredith Whittaker says AI agents doing tasks on users' behalf pose security and privacy risks and refers to their use as “putting your brain in a jar”. 1 month ago:
There are some things it would be nice to have a brain in a jar to do for me.
I do not, however, want that jar sitting in an Amazon-owned server room somewhere, where they can modify the jar to change how the brain works.
Take back your brain-in-a-jars from big tech! /j
- Comment on Fucking leeches 1 month ago:
Government-provided housing, social housing where your payments get you partial collective ownership, cheaper mortgages now that landlords aren’t artificially inflating the rates?
- Comment on Fucking leeches 1 month ago:
The key difference is that these goods and services wouldn’t exist if you were not paid to do the job.
If landlords didn’t exist, then all housing would either be government-distributed, socially-owned, or obtained through mortgages.
If the workers building those houses didn’t exist, then the house wouldn’t either.
The only difference between a system for housing with a landlord, and one without a landlord, is that the landlord is an intermediary that shaves some money off the top any time money is used to pay for housing, even when the building is already fully paid off, or they aren’t there, and your money just covers the cost of construction and maintenance directly.
- Comment on Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content 1 month ago:
Anything else is a birth defect
Any exception disproves your rule. If you say there are only 1 and 2, and I show you 3, then the statement that only 1 and 2 exist is false, because it’s only true if no other numbers ever exist. Show me a binary, I show you numbers outside that binary, it’s not a binary.
Sex and gender are fundamentally the same thing
What genetic code determines things like:
- Women wearing skirts (…while not being socially accepted for men. Except in Ireland, with Kilts, where it is, because this is cultural, not biological)
- Men being louder and more aggressive (on average)
- Women being better cooks (on average)
- Socially accepted hobbies/personality traits of men/women
- Your preference for “pink”/“blue” toys (e.g. toys usually promoted to only girls/boys, like dolls, which we have no evidence kids naturally pick along a binary line unless taught to by parents/guardians)
Oh wait, what’s that? None of that is biological, but it’s all traditionally gendered traits? Interesting, maybe biological characteristics and social ones aren’t the same.
What about someone with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS), where someone can have XY (usually male) chromosomes, but goes through female sexual development? Or someone with Mosaicism, who has a split of XX and XY chromosomes in their body, could have the genitalia of either group, or ambiguous genitalia, and who’s split of chromosomes across their cells could be as high as 50%, or shift in one direction or the other over time. Or someone who has chromosome patterns that don’t fit into XX or XY, like XXXXX. (yes, that’s a real combination of chromosomes that humans can have.)
You cannot easily classify these people into sex categories, and no definition you make for sex and gender being the same thing will be capable of properly resolving which group these people fall into. You’ll end up putting ambiguous people into categories that don’t align with how they internally feel about themselves, you’ll find ways to accidentally lump cis people into categories they don’t fit in by trying to define these people into male or female categories, and that means it’s impossible to make a definition that covers every single one of these people and neatly fits them into the categories you think only exist in a rigid binary, and by extension, any attempt to assign them to man/woman categories will only demonstrate how subjective the entire thing is in the first place.
Even just the fact that various traits traditionally assigned to men/women (e.g. high heels originally being worn by men) have shifted over time to being in different categories, and that different ways of self-expression, and experience, have developed over time, disproves the notion that there is this simplistic binary of human experience that cannot be un-aligned from your sex, or that certain traits are tied to sex as opposed to entirely social expectations.
And they absolutely do not have the right to start throwing abuse and words like transphobe around simply because beliefs don’t match.
Your position is categorically hostile to their existence. The definition of transphobia includes “fear or dislike of transgender and non-binary people” If you dislike what they believe, and by extension, what they are, then you are categorically transphobic. You can agree and say that you believe being transphobic is correct, but you still definitionally dislike trans people, and thus fit the definition.
- Comment on Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content 1 month ago:
If I were to say “there are two genders (male and female) and you can not change what you were born as” the red mist descends and because my views don’t align I get called a phobe or ist or a bigot. They simply can’t accept that not everyone shares their ideology.
Because that statement is not just fundamentally wrong, (male and female aren’t genders, they’re sexes, even sex is a spectrum of characteristics that can’t be cleanly defined in 100% of cases, so a blanket statement that only 1 and 2 exist when 3, 4, 5, etc do as well fundamentally fails even when it comes to sex, let alone social identity characteristics and expression) but it is used to justify erasing trans people from existence, and is the core statement that allows for anti-trans policies to exist.
That statement is directly used to justify and further policies that directly harm trans people, and thus it isn’t just a difference in opinion, but a clear and obvious case of intolerance that we know leads to real harm.
If you’d like any further explanation of why exactly that statement is incorrect, I’d be happy to provide it.
As for the right starting the abuse just look at the Reform member conference in Cornwall last week.
Apologies, but considering I’m American, I don’t have much of a personal social context for the events, so do take my opinions here with the understanding I don’t follow UK politics much. I agree that any violence there was likely extreme, at least based on my very limited understanding of the party’s politics, but that is, of course, what seems to be an isolated incident.
As I don’t think we share as much direct societal context, I’m fine with dropping this point against your argument if you don’t wish to continue it, especially considering it’s a little subjective in terms of, say, statistically determining which group is more likely to be aggressive, since I haven’t seen many actual studies or meta-analyses on that particular topic in specific.
- Comment on Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content 1 month ago:
they preach tolerance but are ALWAYS the ones to start the abuse, insults, name calling and threats when they are disagreed with.
First off, the group that I’ve always experienced starting with outright hate and name calling has been the right. Look at two protests, one by leftists, one by the right wing, on the same issue, and you will almost always find the most aggressive, slur using, name calling people on the right making themselves known far before anyone on the left will actually start doing anything even remotely similar.
And secondly, tolerance doesn’t work when dealing with the intolerant. Consider this: Hitler is a brand new figure, comes into the public square, and starts preaching his views. Do we tolerate him, or do we not tolerate him? We should tolerate him, because after all, tolerance is good, right? Well, of course not, because his ideology is intolerant, and directly attacks the tolerant, extinguishing them from society.
The only way you maintain tolerance is by being intolerant of intolerance.
If a conservative states that trans people shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public spaces, and the left shuns that person and ostracizes them, the left is being intolerant, but so is the conservative, who if they had their way, would have then eliminated far more presumably tolerant trans people from public life, if given the chance.
However, conservatives will then frame this as the left being intolerant, and act as if it’s some kind of hypocrisy to try and preserve tolerance by being intolerant of intolerant ideologies.
On a place light Reddit most subs will just ban you for showing any right leaning opinions.
Because many subs have moderators that respect marginalized groups that are often the ones attacked by conservatives.
If someone comes into your community, and begins spouting off an ideology that’s explicitly harmful to members of that group, the most tolerant thing a moderator can do when given two choices:
- Tolerate the conservative and let them spout hate
- Don’t tolerate the conservative and prevent them from spouting hate
is the second, because otherwise your community is now persistently allowing in someone who is intolerant of the others in the community.
- Comment on Nobody Wants a Nazi Electric Car 1 month ago:
Let’s look through your own Wikipedia link.
Nazism […] [has] disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system.
The union hating, multi-million dollar lobbying, vote-bribing billionaire totally supports actual democracy guys, trust me!
Its beliefs include support for dictatorship
He actively supports Trump’s unitary executive theory and related policy goals.
antisemitism
Elon supporting an antisemetic tweet
anti-communism
He blames communism for making his trans daughter mad at him
anti-slavism
He actively supports stopping aid to Ukrainians and ceding their land to Russia
scientific racism
white supremacy
Nordicism
Here’s him spreading scientific racism that claims people of European descent are superior
homophobia
Elon refuses to enforce Twitter’s policies against homophobia and transphobia
ableism, and the use of eugenics
ultranationalism
white supremacy
He regularly promotes white nationalists online
The only very few, specific categories I didn’t find any explicit mentions of him doing in my 10 minutes of searching around were anti-Romani sentiment and social darwinism, and you’d be hard pressed to prove that everyone you’d probably otherwise consider a Nazi throughout history believed every single possible bullet point in this Wikipedia page.
If all this doesn’t make him a Nazi, then I don’t know what does.
- Comment on Mullvad's privacy-focused search engine Leta is now free for all users | Leta acts as a proxy for Google and Brave search results 1 month ago:
The entire reason I stopped using them was because they agreed to share more user data with Google and Microsoft in return for being allowed to keep using their search results. If they had an independent index without those kinds of tracking for big tech companies, I’d switch back in a heartbeat.
- Comment on Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases 1 month ago:
I personally just like using it for rewording/re-explaining a topic that I don’t quite get. LLMs may not be the best at actually providing factual evidence themselves, but they can be damn good at reformatting any given content/context you give it into almost any format you want.
- Comment on Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases 1 month ago:
For the last time, people need to stop treating AI like it removes their need for research, just because it sounds like it did its research. Check the work your tools do for you, damn it.
- Comment on Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data 1 month ago:
The recipient doesn’t get any identifying data about you, because the data that shows the link was clicked does not identify you as an individual, since it’s passed through privacy-preserving protocols.
To further clarify the exact data available to any party:
- The ad marketplace only knows that someone, somewhere clicked the link.
- Mozilla knows that roughly x users have clicked sponsored links overall.
- The company you went to from that sponsored link knows that your IP/browser visited at X time, and you clicked through a sponsored link from the ad marketplace
There isn’t much of a technical difference between this, and someone seeing an ad in-person where they type in a link, from a practical privacy perspective.
Their implementation is completely different from traditional profile/tracking-based methods of advertising.
- Comment on Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data 1 month ago:
Ask the lawmakers who wrote the laws with vague language, because according to them, that kind of activity could be considered a sale.
As a more specific example that is more one-sided, but still not technically a “sale,” Mozilla has sponsored links on the New Tab page. (they can be disabled of course)
These links are provided by a third-party, relatively privacy protecting ad marketplace. Your browser downloads a list of links from them if you have sponsored links turned on, and no data is actually sent to their service about you. If you click a sponsored link, a request is sent using a protocol that anonymizes your identity, that tells them the link was clicked. That’s it, no other data about your identity, browser, etc.
This generates revenue for Mozilla that isn’t reliant on Google’s subsidies, that doesn’t actually sell user data. Under these laws, that would be classified as a sale of user data, since Mozilla technically transferred data from your device (that you clicked the sponsored link) for a benefit. (financial compensation)
However, I doubt anyone would call that feature “selling user data.” But, because the law could do so, they have to clarify that in their terms, otherwise someone could sue them saying “you sold my data” when all they did was send a small packet to a server saying that some user, somewhere clicked the sponsored link.
- Comment on Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data 1 month ago:
Some jurisdictions classify “sale” as broadly as “transfer of data to any other company, for a ‘benefit’ of any kind” Benefit could even be non-monetary in terms of money being transferred for the data, it could be something as broadly as “the browser generally improving using that data and thus being more likely to generate revenue.”
To avoid frivolous lawsuits, Mozilla had to update their terms to clarify this in order to keep up with newer laws.
- Comment on Why can't we go back to small phones? 1 month ago:
Plus they don’t support GrapheneOS. (or rather, GrapheneOS doesn’t support them due to it being too expensive to support more than one model while also not having the same hardware integrity measures that Pixels have) It’s the only thing stopping me from getting them for my next phone, because while I don’t necessarily need the fastest processor, highest resolution screen, etc, I do need a phone that won’t break over time until it becomes useless in a few years.
