AmbitiousProcess
@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social
- Comment on There's nothing stopping an 8 year old child from just taking their parent's ID to do Age Verification... 4 days ago:
Could work. A lot of the time these current systems have… dubious liveness checks.
Over time they’re definitely going to get better, though, and I have a feeling that with AI watermarking being baked into a lot of the actually good models, it’s not going to be super reliable or repeatable.
- Comment on There's nothing stopping an 8 year old child from just taking their parent's ID to do Age Verification... 4 days ago:
Hence why I said most.
Regardless though, you know they’re gonna up the ante as they go. The more normalized it becomes to share more data, the easier it is for them to ask everyone for it too.
- Comment on There's nothing stopping an 8 year old child from just taking their parent's ID to do Age Verification... 4 days ago:
Most age verification providers also require video with the person’s face doing specific movements, which is then matched with the ID, so stealing an ID probably wouldn’t be enough.
Not that it’ll stop kids from trying, and sending their parent’s ID to some random sketchy company without their knowledge anyways.
- Comment on Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions 6 days ago:
You could make that argument about any tool Wikipedia editors use. Why should they need spellcheck? They were typing words just fine before.
…except it just makes it easier to spot errors or get little suggestions on how you could reword something, and thus makes the whole process a little smoother.
It’s not strictly necessary, but this could definitely be helpful to people for translation and proofreading. Doesn’t have to be something people are wholly reliant on to still be beneficial to their ability to edit Wikipedia.
- Comment on Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines 1 week ago:
Don’t forget Kagi! (though it isn’t technically comparable to the others since it’s a paid, but without ads one)
- Comment on Spicy spicy 1 week ago:
For the love of god please do not diagnose yourself as being “neurospicy” based solely on if you like stacking coins by size 😭🙏
- Comment on Firefox 149 adds built-in free VPN with 50GB monthly data 1 week ago:
Why are they spending money on infrastructure and support but getting no revenue in return?
I already addressed this in my comment. If you want me to expand on how they most definitely can make money from something like this, Mozilla:
- Gets revenue from their paid VPN service that already exists, and it would be a way to convert users to a revenue source, since the thing being taken away after the data cap is itself a VPN
- Gets donations, which more users with a good opinion of the browser will bring
- Has sponsored integrations, which pay money on a per-click basis, (e.g. AccuWeather integration where Mozilla gets paid if you click through to their website, pinned sites like Amazon that appear on the new tab page for new users) and ones that are influenced by overall number of Firefox users (e.g. Google’s deal to be the default search engine when you first install Firefox)
If this feature brings in new users, they can get revenue from any of these 3 sources, especially the sponsored listings. If this feature is just a benefit for existing users that might have already changed all their defaults and disabled sponsored content, it increases the chance of VPN conversions and donations, and increases the likelihood someone will recommend Firefox to a friend.
Either they are okay with losing even more money, OR they plan to enshittify.
Or they’re trying to get and retain users, which helps them make money from existing revenue options without having to make anything worse, while also providing a beneficial feature. I’m not saying there’s no chance they’ll enshittify, but I don’t think unconditional pessimism is the right move here.
For this and many many other reasons, it’s time to switch to a privacy fork like LibreWolf or WaterFox
I can’t speak to Waterfox myself, but I would agree with saying LibreWolf is a good idea if you care.
I just personally haven’t bothered switching since Firefox currently works fine for me, and anything they’ve done I dislike is fairly easy to just disable in settings and never see again.
- Comment on Firefox 149 adds built-in free VPN with 50GB monthly data 1 week ago:
For everyone who thinks this is just gonna be a way for them to somehow sell your data, I don’t think so.
Think about it like this. You can buy a VPN plan for as little as $2 a month or less depending on the provider if you have a long-term commitment (e.g. 1-2 years). That pricing includes margin.
Firefox can essentially operate at lower prices than that, because they:
- Don’t have to charge themselves an extra margin
- Have an economy of scale since they’re not just one user paying for themselves, they’re a company paying for thousands at a time
- Cap their per-user cost well below what most users actually use. (I used over 300 GB of data in the last 30 days just on my PC, almost all through Firefox, with even more on Firefox on my phone.)
I would bet this would probably cost Mozilla less than a dollar per user per month, and that’s also assuming all those users are continuing to use the VPN service over time, maxing out their data limit, but refusing to pay for anything else after.
Meanwhile, Mozilla conveniently sells their own VPN service provided through Mullvad, which they make a profit on.
If a user cares enough to continue using the VPN because they want a VPN, they’ll blow through the data limit and be more inclined than the average user to pay for Mozilla’s option.
If a user doesn’t care enough to continue using the VPN because they were just trying it out, but they chose to use Firefox because it had a free VPN bundled in, which sold them on it over another browser, Mozilla just paid less than an ad would cost for a conversion.
And at the end of the day, it also just helps keep up their reputation as a browser that respects your privacy, which makes it easier to promote the browser elsewhere, in ads or otherwise.
This feels more like a marketing ploy that’s likely to just save money on ad conversions for new Firefox users, and increase Mozilla VPN conversions, rather than something they’re gonna use to super secretly siphon off your data and sell it to advertisers.
- Comment on Americans Recognize AI as a Wealth Inequality Machine, Pollster Finds 1 week ago:
I wanted to test this at one point to see how bad it could get, and it really wasn’t hard, particularly with Grok.
Roleplay as some dude who’s clueless about trans people and thinks they’re weird to ChatGPT, and it will repeatedly tell you that more people identifying as trans is just a result of more acceptance and widespread knowledge, like the left handedness effect, scientific consensus is against you, it’s not based on environmental factors or choice, etc. (I can’t say that extended conversations leading to context collapse wouldn’t lead to it being more likely to follow along with right-wing attitudes, though, since I didn’t chat for that long)
Do the same to Grok, or even just ask “why are so many people trans nowadays?”, and it immediately cites the Cass Review and other retracted studies (saying it’s retracted, but that the numbers are still entirely valid with no criticism), then says it’s based on social contagion, uses the term Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), then makes up a bunch of statistics saying that 99% of trans people are less likely to be happier after transition than pre-transition, then claims being depressed can make you trans and that social media algorithms can also make you trans.
It doesn’t just spit it out like “Being trans seems to be not due to inherent factors, but due to the woke left” though, it just says it like “There are a number of reasons why people could be trans, including:” and then bullet points where the top 2 are always generally accepted scientific consensus like more widespread acceptance and better diagnostic criteria, then the rest are just bullshit.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 1 week ago:
You couldn’t make it look like an actual person without changing some of the details from the original.
I think it could have at least done without literally plumping up her lips and changing their shape, don’t you?
Sure, it looks more realistic, but it still alters how the character is intended to look within the game’s environment and story.
Hell, even the entire environment just… gets brighter. You can genuinely just see more in the shadows, fog becomes less apparent, etc. This, again, alters the original artistic intent, and changes how the game appears and plays relative to the original.
Plus, if you don’t like it, it’s 1 click away from just turning dlss off.
I am upset because:
- NVIDIA is wasting time and money developing something most people don’t want, rather than a form of DLSS that would genuinely improve people’s experience
- I do not want a world where every single game I play requires me to repeatedly disable this version of DLSS just for it to look the way the developers intended
- While I will certainly disable this (assuming they can even run it on just 1 GPU since it currently takes 2), a lot of people simply won’t, because they won’t realize it’s on, only that the game “feels off”. For a widespread, real-world example of this, take motion smoothing on TVs. Most people dislike the way it looks overall, but just assume it’s either how their TV is, or how the films are. The same effect will no doubt happen with games. People will just assume it’s something with their GPU, their monitor, or the way the developers built the game, all the while having that feeling that something is just a bit off or not as good as it should be. The uncanny valley effect is very real, and it’s what most people have a problem with here. It just reeks of “AI image trying to look like a person” rather than “video/photo of a person”
I am not upset because I think I personally can’t disable it. I don’t believe the world revolves around me, so I don’t judge something’s effects solely on how it will affect me and only me.
Just like motion smoothing, this will just be widespread, enabled by default, and something that claims to make things look “better”, while producing odd visual artifacts and an uncanny valley effect that many people won’t realize the root cause of, and will perpetually have a worse gaming experience from as a result. That is why I believe this is a problem.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 1 week ago:
Look closely at the images, what do you notice about the face?
Darker eyebrows, more pronounced eye bags, deeper red, more pronounced, and slightly more cracked lips, and accented shading and slight tweaks to facial shape to fit more traditional beauty standards.
It’s not just making it “more realistic”, it’s passing the artist’s original intent through a filter that actually changes the way the character looks. Using the traits I described earlier, you could assume different things about the character than was intended. Darker and larger eye bags could imply worse sleep. The cracked lips could signify worse health, but the color could imply better health. The shape and shading on her face overall also changes how attractive and average/unaverage she’s expected to appear in terms of looks.
Plus, when you think about how this is applied, it’s not just some static application to a character model. It’s effectively a full filter over your game. These traits could all change by the second as lighting or angle changes even slightly, which only makes it harder to determine the actual intended state and appearance of characters or an environment.
Things like this are visible in other images from the article, too.
For example, the older woman holding a wand. the wrinkles on her face darken and become so much more visible that you could be forgiven for thinking it was meant to be her like 5 or 10 years later, and on the image after that in the compare tool, the lighting on the dude’s face entirely changes to make him more front-lit.
This is fundamentally altering the way things look from the intent of the artists and developers.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 1 week ago:
It’s like when people look at a film deliberately animated with a particular framerate, see the version where someone had AI interpolate the frames to make it like 120 FPS, then say it looks objectively better than the original, because the only metric they can value a piece of media by at that point just seems to be “I need more frames”
Like In Into the Spider-Verse, when Miles is animated at 12 FPS, and the (more experienced) Peter Parker is animated at 24 FPS, but after Miles improves and gets a better hold of his skills, he gets animated at 24 FPS, too. The lower framerate subconsciously makes us interpret his movements as more choppy, inexperienced, and imprecise, on top of his existing animated movements, to even better sell the plot point of his inexperience.
Meanwhile, many people’s TVs have motion smoothing, which entirely destroys this effect and makes the film fundamentally less communicative as a result, even if on the surface people just say “It’s smoother so it’s better.”
- Comment on You can’t replace the battery in Lego’s Smart Bricks — and many of its sensors aren’t available yet 2 weeks ago:
Turns out there’s not actually much functionality in these at all. An RFID reader and an RGB LED, whoop-de-shit.
Where did you get that idea? They have an RFID reader and LED, yes, but they also have a speaker, microphone, accelerometer, light and color sensor, near-field magnetic position detection, and then have to fit the battery alongside all of that, all in a 2x4 brick.
Here’s an example of what cutting-edge brick tech could look like.
That brick has a fixed option for what it displays without needing to be entirely reflashed, requires a 4x8 powered baseplate to operate, and compared to the smart brick, doesn’t have RFID, LEDs, sound, color, or light sensing capabilities, no accelerometer, and no ability to detect other bricks near it, along with having no internal battery.
The smart brick can play different (fully interchangeable without firmware reflashing) sounds based on nearby minifigures and interactable buttons and levers, can display lights and sounds based on rotation and movement, can change how it interacts based on nearby smart bricks, and can also be charged wirelessly and operate standalone. And of course, it’ll be able to respond to sounds later on too.
The brick from hackaday has a display. That’s it. It’s cool, yes, but it’s nowhere close to the smart brick.
- Comment on FADED. 🥴 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, normally I can at least understand what they’re trying to say, but here I just… I don’t know anymore 😭
- Comment on You can’t replace the battery in Lego’s Smart Bricks — and many of its sensors aren’t available yet 2 weeks ago:
Before people get all up in arms about the non-replaceable battery… Do you know how small a LEGO brick is? For them to pack all this functionality in there, they have to be EXTREMELY careful with how they use every millimeter of space, and they have to make sure a kid won’t just… pop open the bottom of the brick and eat the battery or something.
The article itself even states:
As you can see in JerryRigEverything’s destructive teardown, it’s difficult to even get at the battery without going through thin, hair-like antennas.
Break even one of them and the entire brick is nonfunctional.
- Comment on YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable - Dexerto 2 weeks ago:
Make sure to sign up via a creator’s link! (the ones they’ll put in the sponsored section of a video where they are “sponsored” by Nebula as one of Nebula’s creators)
Gets you a pretty good discount and drops it to about 30 bucks a year.
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 3 weeks ago:
True, but that also depends on the circumstance.
Again, a lot of people just use LLMs now as their primary search engine. Google is an afterthought, ChatGPT is their source of choice. If they ask a simple question with legal or medical implications, with tons of sources, that the LLM answers with identical accuracy to those other publications, should they be sued?
I think it would be a lot better to allow people to sue if it provides false advice that ends up causing some material harm, because at the end of the day, a lot of stuff can be considered “medical.”
Maybe a trans person asks what gender affirming care is. Is that medical? I’d say it is. Should that not get discussed through an LLM if a person wants to ask it?
I’m not saying I wholeheartedly oppose this idea of banning them from giving this type of advice, but I do think there are a lot of concerns around just how many people this would actually benefit vs just cutting people off from information they might not bother to look up elsewhere, or worse, just go to less reputable, more fringe sites with less safeguards and less accountability instead.
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 3 weeks ago:
I’m not sure I totally agree with this, even as much as I want AI companies to be held accountable for things like that.
The reason so many people turn to LLMs for legal/medical advice is because those are both incredibly unaffordable, complex, hard to parse fields.
If I ask an LLM what x symptom, y symptom, and z symptom could mean, and it cites multiple reputable sources to tell me it’s probably the flu and tells me to mask up for a bit, that’s probably gonna be better than that person being told “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that”
At the same time, I might provide an LLM with all those symptoms, and it might hallucinate an answer and tell me I have cancer, or tell me to inject bleach to cure myself.
I feel like I’d much rather see a bill that focuses more on how the LLMs come to their conclusions, rather than just a blanket ban.
Like for example, if an LLM cites multiple medical journals, government health websites, etc, and provides the same information they had up, but it turns out to be wrong later because those institutions were wrong, would it be justified to sue the LLM company for someone else’s accidental misinformation?
But if an LLM pulls from those sources, gets most of it right, but comes to a faulty conclusion, then should a private right of action exist?
I’m not really sure myself to be honest. A lot of people rely on LLMs for their information now, so just blanket banning them from displaying certain information, for a lot of people, is just gonna be “you can’t know”, and they’re not gonna bother with regular searches anymore. To them, the chatbot IS the search engine now.
- Comment on Can some please explain to me why it is that your health insurance can deny you medication, even if your doctor says you need it? 3 weeks ago:
The insurance company is going to have a doctor who said you don’t need it.
To add on to this, my psychologist told me that he’s had antipsychotic meds denied by a urologist before, because the insurance companies often don’t actually care what field the doctor is in. All they care about is getting to say “a doctor” reviewed it.
- Comment on Are users data protected on the fediverse? 3 weeks ago:
Treat it similarly to how you should treat posting on any social media service.
If you make a post, that is federated to all kinds of other instances. They might process your delete request, or they might just ignore it and keep old posts stored for as long as they want. It’s the same with if you make a post on Reddit, someone sends that thread’s URL to the Internet Archive, and now there’s a permanent record of your account there.
If you post publicly, expect it will be recorded by someone publicly viewing it, and it will not be guaranteed to be removed.
- Comment on This is a federated test post from a nodeBB forum. 4 weeks ago:
Hey there!
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 4 weeks ago:
I’m honestly surprised they never got hit for this. It’s one thing for our antitrust system to be shit, but to look at a policy that explicitly states “you have to give us the best possible price otherwise we will kick you off our platform and take away the majority of your possible customers” isn’t even burying the lead at all.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Same here.
Go to Android Developer Settings > Display Cutout, set it to one of the other options and it should shift the app down a bit so you can access the buttons. (change it back after ofc)
I used “waterfall cutout” but others might work depending on your phone model. Afaik no other fix is possible without the app’s code itself being modified.
- Comment on Atmospheric Slapping Tournament 5 weeks ago:
I would speculate that [reflected] light also has a unique color (wavelength) distribution that a plant could sense and respond to
It seems as far as we can tell, trees can detect “far red” spectrum light, suspected to be done via phytochromes, and that spectrum of light is in higher quantities when closer to other tree leaves because it gets reflected off.
They detect that, and don’t grow as much in that direction since it would cause diminishing returns.
- Comment on Atmospheric Slapping Tournament 5 weeks ago:
Apparently that’s the leading theory, but another is just that for reasons I am absolutely unqualified to explain, they sense light in specific ways that causes them to grow differently once they get close enough to another tree blocking some of the light there.
- Comment on Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links 5 weeks ago:
Yep, also owned by archive.today.
As is archive.is, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn.
- Comment on Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project 5 weeks ago:
No source linked by the article, no visible press releases that don’t just pretend to be a real press release while citing the articles, no official blog posts, and the only official sounding mention of this that comes from a more direct source is a coalition on linkedin saying a person at a sub-group of the broader project was gonna talk with them about it.
No stats, no numbers, just “they found it” in the headphones.
You could find a chemical well under the safe limit in drinking water, and say “we found x in your water” and make a big scare of it when it’s not a big deal.
While I have no doubt BPA and its counterparts could be used in manufacturing of headphones, without any actual data, this is literally no better than when your uncle at Thanksgiving starts yapping about how the government found some data one time and that means you should never drink tap water again.
- Comment on Meta largely fails to protect kids from AI chatbots, per its own tests 5 weeks ago:
I hate Meta too, but:
Unreleased Meta product
the company says it was never launched, as a result of that testing.
This isn’t as bad as people are making it out to be.
Sure, it’s a problem Meta is releasing technology we know can be damaging and go off the rails, and yes, their chatbots have literally flirted with children before, but this specific instance isn’t that bad given they just… didn’t launch it after finding out it wasn’t working as it should.
- Comment on Pretty solid offer. 5 weeks ago:
The funniest part is that afterwards, he told the ICE supporting guy to go fuck himself and the guy responded telling him it’s against the school’s code of conduct as if he’d care at ALL 😭
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Gotta keep those engagement numbers up.
