AmbitiousProcess

@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨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.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Gotta keep those engagement numbers up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For anyone who has a Ring camera, wants to get rid of it, but still wants a doorbell camera for security/convenience reasons, I’ll point out that Ecobee has a fairly good rating on Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included page where they review products for their privacy.

  E2EE transmission of video from the camera to your phone when streaming, on-device processing of video feeds, auto-deletes any cloud footage when people uninstall the app (so non-technical users who think uninstalling an app deletes their data will actually get that benefit), only saves clips when actual motion is detected, first line of their privacy policy is “Your personal information and data belong to you”, and their subscription is 100% optional.

  Only real privacy concern is that if you choose to integrate yours with Alexa, it might get some data from that, but that’s optional. The main downside is just that they only have a wired option for outdoor setups, but they do have an indoor one that doesn’t require any kind of hookup directly into wires in your wall.

  As always though, if you have the technical ability to set something up yourself that runs only on your local network, do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'This case is about two of the richest corporations who have engineered addiction in children’s brains' — lawsuit against Meta and YouTube could decide the fate of social media⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think these corporations deliberately aimed their content at any age group.

  Instagram intentionally targeted ads at teenagers specifically when they were identified as feeling low self worth or depressed. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/09/meta-whistleblower-sarah-wynn-williams-says-company-targeted-ads-at-teens-based-on-their-emotional-state/

  Instagram used this data to more effectively keep teens hooked on the app. For example, they’d show a girl who just deleted a selfie out of embarrassment more photos of attractive women, which she would then likely scroll through, attempting to internally figure out how she could become attractive like them. Coincidentally, the perfect time for Instagram to then serve an ad for a new skin cream, weight loss program, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Translate is vulnerable to prompt injection⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Same. hs8fUYArdQtCdSl.png

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon discovered a 'high volume' of CSAM in its AI training data but isn't saying where it came from⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. They are allowed to use your photos to “improve the service,” which AI training would totally qualify under in terms of legality. No notice to you required if they rip your entire album of family photos so an AI model can get 0.00000000001% better at generating pictures of fake family photos.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The main problem is that LLMs are pulling from those sources too. An LLM often won’t distinguish between highly reputable sources and any random page that has enough relevant keywords, as it’s not actually capable of picking its own sources carefully and analyzing each one’s legitimacy, at least not without a ton of time and computing power that would make it unusable for most quick queries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t speak for the original poster, but I also use Kagi and I sometimes use the AI assistant, mostly just for quick simple questions to save time when I know most articles on it are gonna have a lot of filler, but it’s been reliable for other more complex questions too. (I just would rather not rely on it too heavily since I know the cognitive debt effects of LLMs are quite real.)

  It’s almost always quite accurate. Kagi’s search indexing is miles ahead of any other search I’ve tried in the past (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant, SearXNG) so the AI naturally pulls better sources than the others as a result of the underlying index. There’s a reason I pay Kagi 10 bucks a month for search results I could otherwise get on DuckDuckGo. It’s just that good.

  I will say though, on more complex questions with regard to like, very specific topics, such as a particular random programming library, specific statistics you’d only find from a government PDF somewhere with an obscure name, etc, it does tend to get it wrong. In my experience, it actually doesn’t hallucinate, as in if you check the sources there will be the information there… just not actually answering that question. (e.g. if you ask it about a stat and it pulls up reddit, but the stat is actually very obscure, it might accidentally pull a number from a comment about something entirely different than the stat you were looking for)

  In my experience, DuckDuckGo’s assistant was extremely likely to do this, even on more well-known topics, at a much higher frequency. Same with Google’s Gemini summaries.

  To be fair though, I think if you really, really use LLMs sparingly and with intention and an understanding of how relatively well known the topic is you’re searching for, you can avoid most hallucinations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TikTok claimed bugs blocked anti-ICE videos, Epstein mentions; experts call BS⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, a bug that specifically automatically chose keywords like “ICE”, and “epstein”, then blocked them from appearing, while leaving literally all other content unharmed????? How conveniently specific and well-timed! /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that a general strike is one of the most effective ways to push for change. There is a general strike in the works across the US for this Friday.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  General strikes are illegal in the US.

  It’s not illegal to strike on a date with other people. It’s illegal for unions to call for a “general strike” because it’s considered them calling a strike on behalf of other non-union employees for other businesses.

  Also, jobs can fire workers on the spot for participating in them

  Not always, (though yes, it would probably be likely for many people) since they can use things like sick/vacation days conveniently timed right, or if they’re backed up by a union, they might have a contract that helps to prevent at-will firing without certain specific causes, excluding striking.

  However, if enough people strike, it’s kind of hard to enforce coming into work via firings, as it’s similar to if an entire unionized company goes on strike. What are you gonna do? Fire every single worker and shut down for good the next day because the only person running every single operation is the remaining CEO?

  even if the workers are part of a union and the union want to participate.

  As long as the union doesn’t say “this is a general strike” and just says “we are striking on this date for better working conditions”, and that date happens to be the same day other unions are striking, it’s legal. There is no law preventing different unions from striking on the same dates, and it would take very long for any legal process to try and make that claim before the strike has already occurred.

  national guards have been sent in to shut down general strikes in the past.

  This is the most likely outcome in my opinion. However, it’s still kind of hard to actually enforce the end of a general strike. It’s one thing to arrest someone, or to stop them from doing a given thing, but it’s another to forcibly remove people from their homes and make them work no matter their condition or reason.

  Essentially, I’m saying it’d be messy.

  Doing it multiple days? You realize most people live paycheck to paycheck? Nobody wants to tell their kids they’re going to be homeless.

  This is the biggest hurdle, though there is a degree to which it can be mitigated, at least for a little while. For example, there are a lot of people with backyard and community gardens, small businesses with stockpiles that are willing to support their community as we’ve seen with the current situation in Minnesota, not to mention that if the situation got bad enough you’d probably just see people stealing from their nearest billionaire-owned store because fuck it, why not screw them over more?

  To clarify, I’m not like, disputing your actual overarching thesis here, or saying a general strike is easy or likely to succeed, I’m just saying it’s not entirely impossible :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In multiple shots (no pun intended) it is shown him holding a phone to record. Question is what happened to the phone and why not release his video?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Most of the time, if someone’s phone is confiscated by any kind of officers/agents, it’s gonna be stored somewhere just so they can have it. Even if they don’t want to release a video, they can still crack your phone and get your data, (considering your phone has to be after the first unlock state to record things on it, it would be trivial to exfiltrate all data on the phone unencrypted) like your messaging history, to later paint you as a terrorist or find some other thing they can use to smear your reputation as a martyr.

  They don’t want to release the video because it’d make them look horrible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New research finds that ChatGPT systematically favours wealthier, Western regions in response to questions ranging from 'Where are people more beautiful?' to 'Which country is safer?'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Kagi had a good little example of language biases in LLMs.

  When asked what 3.10 - 3.9 is in english, it fails, but it succeeds in Portuguese, if you format the numbers as you would in Portuguese, with commas instead of periods. image

  This is because… 3.10 and 3.9 often appear in the context of python version numbers, and the model gets confused, assuming there is a 0.2 difference going from version 3.9 to 3.10 instead of properly doing math.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just the Browser: tools to remove AI and other bloatware from Chrome, Edge and Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It kind of is. For example, Edge will automatically pop up in the corner at checkout and offer coupon codes, most of them will never work, then they’ll steal the affiliate revenue from whoever actually sent you to the site in the first place, or add an affiliate link where it didn’t previously exist, so that the site now has more expenses that are just… paying Microsoft for no reason, making everything you buy more expensive in the long run.

  It pops up whether you want it or not, it’s convoluted to disable, it slows down your browser when it’s running, it financially harms the shops you buy from, and it often just lies about having coupons to waste your time while pretending it’s helping you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “The torment nexus could falter without more public support for tormenting people”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ai does work great, at some stuff. The problem is pushing it into places it doesn’t belong.

  I can generally agree with this, but I think a lot of people overestimate where it DOES belong.

  For example, you’ll see a lot of tech bros talking about how AI is great at replacing artists, but a bunch of artists who know their shit can show you every possible way this just isn’t as good as human-made works, but those same artists might say that AI is still incredibly good at programming… because they’re not programmers.

  It’s a good grammar and spell check.

  Totally. After all, it’s built on a similar foundation to existing spellcheck systems: predict the likely next word. It’s good as a thesaurus too. (e.g. “what’s that word for someone who’s full of themselves, self-centered, and boastful?” and it’ll spit out “egocentric")

  It’s also great for troubleshooting consumer electronics.

  Only for very basic, common, or broad issues. LLMs generally sound very confident, and provide answers regardless of if there’s actually a strong source. Plus, they tend to ignore the context of where they source information from.

  For example, if I ask it how to change X setting in a niche piece of software, it will often just make up an entire name for a setting or menu, because it just… has to say something that sounds right, since the previous text was “Absolutely! You can fix x by…” and it’s just predicting the most likely term, which isn’t going to be “wait, nevermind, sorry I don’t think that’s a setting that even exists!”, but a made up name instead. (this is one of the reasons why “thinking” versions of models perform better, because the internal dialogue can reasonably include a correction, retraction, or self-questioning)

  It will pull from names and text of entirely different posts that happened to display on the page it scraped, make up words that never appeared on any page, or infer a meaning that doesn’t actually exist.

  But if you have a more common question like “my computer is having x issues, what could this be?” it’ll probably give you a good broad list, and if you narrow it down to RAM issues, it’ll probably recommend you MemTest86.

  It’s far better at search than google.

  As someone else already mentioned, this is mostly just because Google deliberately made search worse. Other search engines that haven’t enshittified, like the one I use (Kagi), tend to give much better results than Google, without you needing to use AI features at all.

  On that note though, there is actually an interesting trend where AI models tend to pick lower-ranked, less SEO-optimized pages as sources, but still tend to pick ones with better information on average. It’s quite interesting, though I’m no expert on that in particular and couldn’t really tell you why other than “it can probably interpret the context of a page better than an algorithm made to do it as quickly as possible, at scale, returning 30 results in 0.3 seconds, given all the extra computing power and time.”

  Even then it can only help, not replace folks or complete tasks.

  Agreed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Which of course, Google did just so you’d have to search more, so you’d see more ads.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This Year⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Same here. I get the nostalgia factor, and that tactile buttons can feel nice, but other than that I feel like it’s just a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t necessarily work well.

  Instead of a quick tap, you have to actually press on each button, which slows down typing. You can’t resize, recolor, or reformat your keyboard to fit your needs better, there’s no split keyboard functionality for landscape mode, etc.

  Plus it’s just more mechanical failure points and areas that dust and gunk can get stuck in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RIP Pinterest⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Same issue here, also stuck at exactly 97%.