WalnutLum
@WalnutLum@lemmy.ml
- Comment on VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom 5 days ago:
Remember:
There’s no such thing as a perpetual license, there’s only “until we change our mind” licenses
- Comment on ‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment. 1 week ago:
The jimi-halloween trend from Japan but it’s /r/nosleep instead
- Comment on China turns on ‘minors mode’ to keep kids safe online 1 week ago:
Looking up more information about this I found a much less sensationalized analysis on this from the UofC:
- Comment on China turns on ‘minors mode’ to keep kids safe online 1 week ago:
I think that was the draft proposal for this.
- Comment on China turns on ‘minors mode’ to keep kids safe online 1 week ago:
there are internet filters you can buy
Seems like that’s exactly what this is, it’s a mode that you turn on on the phone and it uses a government supplied list of vetted websites for the kid to visit.
Interestingly the way this feature set reads out is exactly the same way that Nintendo’s parental controls work.
I realize that this being the Chinese government, them keeping usage stats has connotations that go beyond the data itself… But in a country with a more liberal government I’d rather have them keep records of my kids’ internet usage than a private company. The idea being that you can pass protections around that data. (Not that that seems to be stopping the current US government so maybe that’s a pipe dream).
Ideal is, of course, completely on your own hardware (the device or your server at home), but between this and a system where Apple/Google/Nintendo does all this instead I’d prefer the government method.
- Comment on China turns on ‘minors mode’ to keep kids safe online 1 week ago:
Parents can invoke minors mode with a single click and set usage time limits. Devices set to minors mode will even remind users to take breaks, and collect stats so parents can make sure their offspring are surfing the web in an age-appropriate and socialist fashion.
This sounds awesome. This isn’t the weird shit like some states in the US have for determining if you can log into porn, or South Koreas weird government-login-page-in-everything scheme, it’s part of the parent’s family plan for their kid they can turn on/off.
I realize there’s worrying undertones (that already exist on the Chinese internet regardless) but the actual delivered feature seems like the ideal for this sort of thing.
- Comment on 13 Creepy Things Your Smartphone Knows About You 1 week ago:
It would! This is just an extra layer of data they can use to identify and infer!
- Comment on 13 Creepy Things Your Smartphone Knows About You 1 week ago:
Sooooo. This is actually scarier than it may seem…
You can tell what outlet or building a phone is plugged into sometimes by micro aberrations in power output.
Also interestingly you can kind of tell what webpages somebody visits by their phone’s power usage:
- Comment on 13 Creepy Things Your Smartphone Knows About You 1 week ago:
It’s pretty scary what information you can infer from geolocational data, it’s why you should try your best to not use it as much as possible.
When an app asks for your location only give it the minimum geolocation and time if you’re absolutely sure it needs it (for delivery make sure there’s not a place you can manually enter the dropoff location first, etc).
Also, “fine location” is a much more invasive technology than people think. Apple and Google have giant databases of Wifi broadcast locations and associated positions, which is what gives you the “more accurate location.”
If you want to help do your part to mitigate that turn off your router’s SSID broadcast and make sure none of your devices attempt to “auto connect” to your wifi.
- Comment on Google won't bring new Nest Thermostats to Europe 2 weeks ago:
Aren’t there a lot of split units in Europe? Here I just needed an IR blaster to make my AC(s) “smart”.
- Comment on Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones 2 weeks ago:
And do what? Sentiment analysis on the conversation you were having?
Remember semantically aware models are still fairly new and even they lack the context for a particular field if text. That’s something even the new fancy LLMs struggle with.
Unnecessary when there’s way better targeted models trained on years of data that people willingly send as part of everyday smartphone use.
- Comment on Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones 2 weeks ago:
If you use android google grabs your GPS data regardless, you have to root and disable it.
Apple does the same thing but they didn’t have their pants occupied by third-party network’s fingers like google did until the pixel came out.
Google maps is basically a beacon for AdMob to target you nearly perfectly.
Also using “fine location” in any app grabs the nearby wifi list and sends it to Google/apple if it’s not cached.
Also most ad providers these days have made deals with major networks that let them tell what tower your IMEI pinged off of.
It’s why google tried to push android/ad IDs, way less info for the networks to advertise over, and it also put the tracking in their hands instead.
- Comment on Looking for ... inventory management, I guess? 2 weeks ago:
Libreoffice has a database engine and frontend that’s pretty applicable to Microsoft Access
- Comment on Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones 2 weeks ago:
I used to work for a mobile advertiser, and we installed hella bloatware on phones.
This idea was floated a couple times but was deemed not very effective cause you’d have to store and process hours and hours of audio data that didn’t tell us much more than just having a week or so of GPS data, your Facebook profile, and your phone IMEI.
It’s pretty easy to see if you’re near a Popeyes and what other IMEIs are connecting to the same tower, extrapolate that to you being near your wife and you and your wife thinking about shit on the Popeyes menu.
Boom targeted ad/video for fried chicken.
The rest is general tech paranoia leading to Apophenia.
There’s no microphones or cameras, it’s just the already gigantic mountain of data anyone who uses a smartphone is constantly broadcasting getting ground through the big data machine that has been the pillar of all tech since the last recession.
- Comment on Waymo reports 250,000 paid robotaxi rides per week in U.S. 2 weeks ago:
The level that waymo operates requires an insane level of digital space mapping.
Considering san Francisco is the most 3d scanned city on the planet I’m not surprised the expansion is happening at the rate it is.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 2 weeks ago:
If you enjoy this sort of stuff make sure to support the Kiwix Project which like 90% of these commercial offshoots are based off of.
- Comment on An Alarming Number of Gen Z Ai Users Think It's Conscious 3 weeks ago:
I wish philosophy was taught a bit more seriously.
An exploration on the philosophical concepts of simulacra and eidolons would probably change the way a lot of people view LLMs and other generative AI.
- Comment on ChatGPT spends 'tens of millions of dollars' on people saying 'please' and 'thank you', but Sam Altman says it's worth it 3 weeks ago:
Don’t they charge per token?
So they’re also making money every time somebody says please or thank you…
- Comment on Best ‘simple’ budgeting app 5 weeks ago:
Command line, plain text files so anything can read them, and GPL!
- Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech 5 weeks ago:
According to the Trump that’s exactly what he wants, countries to sell off the bonds they have in exchange for super long term bonds that defer interest for like 100 years.
- Comment on Your Doctor's Screen Time Is Hobbling Health Care. 1 month ago:
You really gotta hope those 5-10% LLM interpretive miss rares don’t hit your particular case.
Also if it fucks up, the doctor is still liable for malpractice right? Or do they get to kick that ball down into the abyss of trying to get LLM companies to take responsibility for their products.
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 1 month ago:
In terms of getting to an exact location, the most efficient is no vehicle, walking.
Cars are less efficient, followed by busses, then probably trains, then boats, then airplanes (unless you parachute).
Cars are the least efficient in terms of moving large numbers of people from places they can then walk from.
- Comment on Mediawolf - Looking for contributers 1 month ago:
I’d say this seems useful mostly for pulling non nbz/torrent sources from readarr and lidarr services
- Comment on Warning users that upvote violent content : RedditSafety 2 months ago:
I’m pretty sure comments with directed violence get removed and repeat users banned on most Lemmy instances as well…
- Comment on Nintendo has sent a DMCA notice to Ryujinx forks 2 months ago:
Why is Ryubing beyond reproach? I don’t see them doing anything differently than Ryujinx.
- Comment on “It’s a lemon”—OpenAI’s largest AI model ever arrives to mixed reviews 2 months ago:
I think most ML experts (that weren’t being paid out the wazoo for saying otherwise) have been saying we’re on the tail end of the LLM technology sigma curve. (Basically treating an LLM as a stochastic index, the actual measure of training algorithm quality is query accuracy per training datum)
Even with deepseek’s methodology, you see smaller and smaller returns on training input.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 2 months ago:
Licenses for sublime text 2 just said “and future updates”. I remember the “lifetime” thing being a selling point on producthunt. This was back in 2012 though, and the weird way the licensing change was handled made me switch to emacs.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 2 months ago:
Before sublime text 3 all updates were included in the single license, not just major revision updates. This was back in 2012.
- Comment on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?! 2 months ago:
After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a “lifetime subscription” is such.
A “lifetime subscription” is just a “until we decide otherwise” subscription
- Comment on Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code 2 months ago:
Again from my experience, knowing lisp (yay guix and emacs) definitely helps me write more elegant code in every language.
I also have to explain almost every single thing I write in code review.