AmbitiousProcess
@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social
- Comment on I signed up for Trump Mobile two weeks ago and I still don’t have my SIM 5 days ago:
And it’s more expensive than the most expensive US mobile plan, which would have faster speeds, whereas Trump Mobile’s drops off after a certain (lower than T-Mobile’s own plans) amount of GB data usage since they’re solely using T-Mobile as an MVNO, and also has deprioritized data speeds during periods of network congestion.
It would also get you the ability to switch underlying network providers if you’re in a dead zone, international calling and data in more locations, better customer support given all the experiences we’ve seen from reviewers, and unlimited hotspot data, plus better bundle deals for families or people with smart watches that need separate data.
Hell, even T-Mobile’s own own plans, which are usually substantially more expensive than other companies they solely act as an MVNO for, like Mint Mobile, (which is actually owned by T-Mobile now) which will get you the same value as T-Mobile’s $50/mo plan in a $30/mo plan that is just $15/mo for new users for up to a 12 month period.
Trump Mobile is just $2.55 cheaper than T-Mobile’s $50 plan.
- Comment on Racism restaurant 5 days ago:
I went to her profile expecting her to be the usual brainbroken conservative, and instead she’s like, complaining about a reply getting removed because it had the F slur in it, but she also replied to one of Elon’s AI-generated videos about his Tesla robot saying “Get the fuck out of here with this clanker bullshit”, so I respect it.
- Comment on *Yawn* 1 week ago:
Increase alertness
Decrease alertness
lmao
- Comment on *Yawn* 1 week ago:
Apparently there isn’t much consensus on what the actual reason(s) are for yawning. Apparently fish yawn though, so that’s cool.
- Comment on Introducing SlopStop: Community-driven AI slop detection in Kagi Search 1 week ago:
It runs autonomously to a degree, but a lot of these sites operate via posting a wide variety of content on the same domains, after those domains have previously gained status in search engines.
So for example, you’ll have a site like epiccoolcarnews[.]info hosting stuff like “How to get FREE GEMS in Clash of Clans” just because previously they posted an article about cars that Google thought was good so they ranked up the domain in their ranking algorithm.
Permanently downrank the domain, and eventually they have to start with a new domain that, as is the key part here, has no prior reputation, and thus has to work to actually get ranked up in search again.
They’re also going to be making this a public database, and have said they’ll use it to train AI-generated content detection tools that will probably be better at detecting “AI generated articles meant to appear legitimate by using common keywords and phrases”, rather than just “any text of any form that has been generated by AI” like other AI detection tools do, which would make them capable of automating the process a bit with regard to specifically search engines.
- Comment on The House Of The Guy Calling You A Libtard 2 weeks ago:
That’s how I read it, too.
- Comment on Are physical mail generally not under surveillance? If everyone suddently ditched electronic communications and start writing letters, would governments be able to practically surveil everyone? 2 weeks ago:
Physical mail generally isn’t under surveillance past occasional package inspection (e.g. an X-ray of a suspicious package), and the rare targeted government surveillance operation on an individual or group, at least for the contents of mail.
The U.S Postal Inspection Service has a number of data sources they do collect from, though. If you make a USPS account, for example, then they can get info like your credit card number and IP address. If your package has a tracking number assigned, they can tell where exactly your mail is in transit. And if your address and the sender’s address is on your mail, then they will of course know who sent you which piece of mail when. Pretty standard stuff.
In terms of actually inspecting what’s inside people’s mail, that’s very difficult, because mail isn’t standardized. Some envelopes will have one small sheet of paper. Some will have a larger folded one. That might be folded into 2 pieces or 4. It might be 3 sheets of paper. Maybe it has a smaller paper card inside as well. You get the idea.
Whereas internet traffic is based on actual standards, and so if they want to know the contents of the data in an HTTP request, for example, they know exactly which parts of the packets to look at, every single time.
It would make surveillance more difficult, for sure, because individually opening, scanning, and putting back any possible variant of mail in envelopes is very time consuming and difficult, but it would do absolutely nothing to stop targeted surveillance of given individuals, and would also make individual associations more apparent.
To give another example, the government doesn’t know which people are communicating with which other people if you use Signal, because not even Signal knows, so not even a court order could allow them to find out. If you were sending mail between all those people, the government now has a list of every single time you sent a letter, and to whom.
Using that same example, with Signal, the contents of your message is encrypted. With mail, it’s in plaintext. Anybody could read that. If they intercept the data from your Signal chats, they get encrypted nonsense. If they intercept your mail, they get your entire conversation.
The smart decision is to use tools that preserve privacy and anonymity, making surveillance near impossible, rather than a system like mail, which just makes surveillance annoying and time-consuming.
- Comment on The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing" 2 weeks ago:
the article says they’re comparing it to their earnings and likelihood to switch jobs among other things.
Two things that are coincidentally lower (in terms of pay) and higher (in terms of propensity to switch jobs) for black people, rather than white people.
- Comment on The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing" 2 weeks ago:
They just use the buzzword “AI”, but in reality it’s probably going to be a machine learning algorithm.
Take the dataset, split out the groups of people you do/don’t want to hire based on whatever criteria, train the model to be more likely to pick faces with characteristics from the “do hire” group, and less likely to pick those from the “don’t hire” group.
Then, use it on real people, and it will provide similar outcomes based on faces.
- Comment on The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing" 2 weeks ago:
The study claims that they analyzed participants’ labor market outcomes, that being earnings and propensity to move jobs, “among other things.”
Fun fact, did you know white men tend to get paid more than black men for the same job, with the same experience and education?
Following that logic, if we took a dataset of both black and white men, then used their labor market outcomes to judge which one would be a good fit over another, white men would have higher earnings and be recommended for a job more than black people.
Black workers are also more likely to switch jobs, one of the reasons likely being because you tend to experience higher salary growth when moving jobs every 2-3 years than when you stay with a given company, which is necessary if you’re already being paid lower wages than your white counterparts.
By this study’s methodology, that person could be deemed “unreliable” because they often switch jobs, and would then not be considered.
Essentially, this is a black box that gets to excuse management saying “fuck all black people, we only want to hire whites” while sounding all smart and fancy.
- Comment on The trauma. The terror. The humanity!!!1!!1! 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think so, but he did say while testifying: “He did it. He threw the sandwich,” that the sandwich “exploded all over” his chest and he felt it through his ballistic vest, and that “You could smell the onions and the mustard”.
The sandwich never left its wrapper.
The defense attorney finished closing arguments with “This case, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is about a sandwich”
- Comment on The Guy Claiming That You Have TDS 3 weeks ago:
We even have fucking Marjorie Taylor Greene getting angry at Trump and blaming the shutdown on the Republicans.
If that doesn’t show anyone how common this type of thing has gotten…
- Comment on The Internet is Dying. We Can Still Stop It 3 weeks ago:
A great Medium article on the topic that analyzes the entire situation: (coming to the conclusion that no, Proton does not really seem to be in favor of Trump/MAGA at all given their actual actions, and how the original statement was misinterpreted)
- Comment on xkcd #3163: Repair Video 3 weeks ago:
deleteduser said: [deleted]
randomuser said: “It works! Thanks OP!"
(posted 12 years ago) - Comment on Got my invite 4 weeks ago:
I fucking hate that emojis of all things are now a sign of AI-generated text.
Like come on, the ONE thing that’s meant to better pass on human emotion and visually represent things in a more fun format just HAD to be co-opted and become so generic and AI-related that people, including me, don’t trust it anymore.
- Comment on a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service 4 weeks ago:
And even if it’s never political, so what?
Someone uses it to promote a dangerous supplement, with thousands of fake, AI-generated videos of people taking it without issues, and suddenly a bunch of people buy it, take it, and suffer severe consequences, or even die.
But good thing it’s not gonna manipulate who you’d vote for amirite? Totally harmless! /s
- Comment on Load bearing Tupperware 5 weeks ago:
I can see why your account is marked with two red marks on PieFed for low reputation, because man do you come off confrontational.
How many banks didn’t work? Which ones? You have a source?
Search engines exist. Use them before acting as if I"m making shit up.
The list of financial institutions that had issues, as far as I can tell from industry reporting and downdetector graphs, is Navy Federal Credit Union (~15 million members), Truist (~15 million customers), Chime (~8-9 million customers), Venmo (~60 million users), Ally Bank (~10 million customers), and Lloyds Banking group (~30 million customers).
Assuming no overlap, that’s nearly 140 million people that lost banking and money transfer access.
Sounds like you’re just trying to exaggerate around an edge case that frankly isn’t the end of the world even if it were common for 4 hours a year
The outage lasted for 15 hours in some cases, due to many AWS services recovering after the outage, yet having a backlog to work through, which took many more hours. Many services also depend on AWS in a manner where AWS coming back online doesn’t instantaneously restart service. These systems are complex, and not every company that relied on them could instantly start back up the moment the main outage was resolved, let alone when many services were still marked as impacted for hours and hours later as they worked through their backlog.
Why aren’t you blaming the bank for having redundancy outside a single DC? How many banks do you know if that were out susessfully using other providers that have a higher SLO/SLA?
I also blame them for not having additional redundancy. I blame both them for not having a fallback, and AWS for allowing such a major outage to happen. Shockingly, more than one party can be at fault.
- Comment on Load bearing Tupperware 5 weeks ago:
The outage also took down people’s banks, which stopped many of them from doing things like buying groceries 💀
I don’t think saying it’s good for us “touching grass” is a good argument here when AWS hosts such a substantial portion of all online services.
- Comment on The Discord Breach Might Be Worse Than We Thought, As The Hacker Is Said To Have Two Million Age Verification Photos 1 month ago:
Oh, of course the legislation is to blame for a lot of this in the end. I’m just saying that Discord could have already partnered with a number of identity verification services that do already have this infrastructure up and running, with standardized and documented ways to call their APIs to both verify and check the verification of a user.
At the end of the day, Discord chose to implement a convoluted process of having users email Discord, upload IDs, then have Discord pull the IDs back down from Zendesk and verify them, rather than implementing a system where users could have simply gone to a third-party verification website, done all the steps there, had their data processed much more securely, then have the site just send Discord a message saying “they’re cool, let ‘em in”
- Comment on The Discord Breach Might Be Worse Than We Thought, As The Hacker Is Said To Have Two Million Age Verification Photos 1 month ago:
In my opinion, they’re still somewhat at fault, because this was them failing to find and configure their software to work with a third-party identity provider who’s infrastructure was built to handle the security of sensitive information, and just choosing to use email through Zendesk because it was easier in the meantime. A platform that I should note has been routinely accessed again and again by attackers, not just for Discord, but for all sorts of other companies.
The main problem is that legislation like the Online Safety Act require some privacy protections, like not collecting or storing certain data unless necessary, but they don’t require any particular security measures to be in place. This means that, theoretically, nothing stops a company from passing your ID to their servers in cleartext, for example.
Now compare this to industries like the credit card industry, where they created PCI DSS, which mandates specific security practices. This is why you don’t often see breaches of any card networks or issuers themselves, and why most fraud is external to the systems that actually process payments through these cards. (e.g. phishing attacks that get your card info, or a store that has your card info already getting hacked)
This is a HUGE oversight, and one that will lead to things like this happening over and over unless it becomes unprofitable for companies to not care.
- Comment on The Discord Breach Might Be Worse Than We Thought, As The Hacker Is Said To Have Two Million Age Verification Photos 1 month ago:
These were images of people’s ID’s, along with photos of their faces to check for a match, not stock photos or even just real selfies on their own.
- Comment on The Discord Breach Might Be Worse Than We Thought, As The Hacker Is Said To Have Two Million Age Verification Photos 1 month ago:
These were photos submitted via the compromised support provider (Zendesk) via the Discord support portal.
Automated age verification via their partner (k-ID, which has its own issues) is a separate system, which was only available to some users. Other users had to contact Discord support manually and submit photo ID, which went through Zendesk, which was then compromised in this breach.
Additionally, for the automated process, it’s the video selfie that’s on-device and never transmitted, but photos of your ID and selfie photo are transmitted, just supposedly deleted afterwards. Those ones are *not included in this breach, as far as we’re aware, as it’s an entirely different third-party with wholly separate infrastructure.
- Comment on He died doing what he loved. 2 months ago:
People can care about school shootings while also not wanting to see a dying body and someone's bloody gunshot wound randomly appear on their timeline when they're just trying to look at some fucking memes.
This is like if I started filling your timeline with random snuff films and gore videos, and when you complained, went "OH you don't like this? Well the human trafficking victims used in these videos didn't either."
- Comment on Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring 2 months ago:
the sticker, for anyone curious.
- Comment on Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring 2 months ago:
Great article, would highly recommend anyone with the time give it a full read through.
Wikipedia is incredibly valuable, and insanely well edited and put together, and we're all lucky to have something like it available for free.
- Comment on Just a little bit more 2 months ago:
Woah woah woah there pal, we don't even say sw--r around these parts, that's too far! If you're going to censor an image at least do it right. smh /j
- Comment on FTC chair Andrew Ferguson warns Google not to filter or suppress emails sent by Republicans over Gmail 2 months ago:
https://workspace.google.com/blog/identity-and-security/an-overview-of-gmails-spam-filters
User feedback, such as when a user marks a certain email as spam or signals they want a sender’s emails in their inbox, is key to this filtering process, and our filters learn from user actions.
Maybe a lot of people just mark it as spam for some reason, wonder why that could be? Could it be because they simply don't like your emails and think they feel spammy? No, that couldn't be it, it has to be that the same company that kissed up to Trump also just hates republicans now for some reason! /s
- Comment on WATER! 2 months ago:
I doubt that's the case, currently.
Right now, there's a lot of genuine competition in the AI space, so they're actually trying to out compete one another for market share. It's only once users are locked into using a particular service that they begin deliberate enshittification with the purpose of getting more money, either from paying for tokens, or like Google did when it deliberately made search quality worse so people would see more ads ("What are you gonna do, go to Bing?")
By contrast, if ChatGPT sucks, you can locally host a model, use one from Anthropic, Perplexity, any number of interfaces for open source (or at least, source-available) models like Deepseek, Llama, or Qwen, etc.
It's only once industry consolidation really starts taking place that we'll see things like deliberate measures to make people either spend more on tokens, or make money from things like injecting ads into responses.
- Comment on Where is Immich going to be in 1 year? What's your prediction? 2 months ago:
I have a feeling it'll simply grow more in popularity, since stable release will probably make a lot more people feel more comfortable recommending it to people, myself included.
Right now, I don't treat it as if it's a backup in any way due to its beta nature, and I hope that can change.
- Comment on Where is Immich going to be in 1 year? What's your prediction? 2 months ago:
Maybe a simple photo editor would fit in nicely?
Basic photo editing capabilities are planned after stable release, this year :)
