partofthevoice
@partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras? 1 hour ago:
I’m half curious if I cut open the box… you think there’d be an easy way to replace the camera with a video stream of my choosing? Because I wouldn’t mind cutting out the camera and leaving the device plugged into my PC for a constant headless stream of video content.
- Comment on Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras? 1 hour ago:
My wife and I recently moved to a home with ring cameras preinstalled, but no subscription of course. We can only access a live feed via the cloud service. I told my wife, I don’t think it matters whether we have a subscription or not… if they want to use the footage from our home cameras for any reason at all, it’s in their power to do so. They can save it, scan it, watch it, … they don’t even need to save the video, they can save results from a scan to get out the important details more efficiently.
My wife didn’t want to hear it. She said we aren’t paying them, so there’s nothing they can do. Then this news story dropped about Google Nest. I showed my wife. We no longer have the ring cameras.
- 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 1 day ago:
Those skills are too far taken for granted. It’s the very reason you see increased crime and addiction in high poverty areas. Families who had good access to healthcare, education, work opportunities, … those families were privileged enough to learn the value in self control far more naturally. Families that struggled to put food on the table, parents in and out of jail, constant exposure to drug use, … those families experience a much different reality and the kids are statistically more likely to reproduce that experience in their own adult life.
- Comment on No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring's Surveillance Nightmare 1 day ago:
Sounds like free advertising.
- Comment on Discord Users Threaten Exodus Over Age Verification Face Scan Controversy 2 days ago:
Anyone want to script through the signup process and feed the damn thing a bunch of AI generated faces?
Typically when a signup page is difficult to automate, you can use a library meant for automated testing within a browser—like Selenium. Also, disposable emails services come in handy—like mailsac. If they block all the disposable email services, you can also use your iCloud+ custom email domain (if you have it) with the Allow All Incoming Messages setting turned on—then you use randomly generated user handles for each signup.
Not sure about the easiest way to recycle your IP, in case they monitor signups that way too. I’m sure there’s a way to overcome that too via VPN.
If 2% of Discord users did this 50 times, that would make half of Discords user profiles and face recognition data completely fake.
- Comment on Russia Launches First Brain-Chipped Bird Drones for Surveillance Over Cities 3 days ago:
Pretty sure I saw this one before… something something, wunderwaffen technology.
- Comment on New Objective: Convince an astronaut to use the Fediverse from space 5 days ago:
Community driven decentralized radio frequency communications network. Some state populations have started using it in-large for emergency comms in case of severe weather knocking out power. Some people just use it because it’s like $50 to build a node yourself and get into the cool hobby.
- Comment on New Objective: Convince an astronaut to use the Fediverse from space 5 days ago:
I was thinking guys into Meshtastic or something
- Comment on TikTok's 'Addictive Design' Found to Be Illegal in Europe 6 days ago:
Nope. I turned off infinite scroll in the settings. I use the Voyager app, which paginates the feed when configured to do so.
- Comment on Was there censorship on TikTok after the U.S. takeover? 6 days ago:
Yeah, and now that you mention it directly it’s got me thinking… technology in its own right seems to maintain this capacity to destabilize power dynamics, given it can change fundamental ways in which we depend on the world. With social media, you could say our discourse in many ways has become dependent on a platform built by the private interests of its creators. In a perverse way, maybe a necessary consequence of it being able to fundamentally change our way of life, technology poses this constant risk doesn’t it? And in our societal culture of glorifying technological innovation (e.g., social media at its start) at its early stages without proper risk assessment — aren’t we kind of inviting this kind of power disruption?
I suppose, in a way, a “functional” government should be able to intervene to prevent changes in power structure where it shouldn’t occur. Or, perhaps some kind of social paradigm that has the passive capacity cannibalize any such movements in its power structures? What do you think is the cause effect relationship there, and a proper response to maintaining long term stability?
- Comment on Was there censorship on TikTok after the U.S. takeover? 1 week ago:
Are we a part of the social media site? I’d argue, given all the effects those damned sites have on its users, its governments, and the economy… the damned sites are actually a part of us. Our behavior changes after the introduction of those things, because we are now (1) whatever we were before + (2) whatever those sites have done to our species. That makes us (3) the result.
- Comment on FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled 1 week ago:
Yes, probably so. I haven’t seen the designs of lockdown mode, but I get the case for my hypothesis being far fetched. Wasn’t trying to start any conspiracies. Please, you may ignore me.
- Comment on FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled 1 week ago:
It’s really great, isn’t it? But I’d leave you with one theoretical angle to consider…
What if the FBI actually did get into the phone? If so, then why would this information have been made public?
The only reason why, that I can think of right now, is that the FBI wants more people using Lockout. If so, the only reason I can possibly image for that is—there are actually some good commonly available techniques to keep them out of your devices, of which Lockout is insufficient. They’d want more people assuming that it is sufficient, and this news could accomplish that.
Purely theoretical… but the bigger point here, whether that framing is strategically true or miraculously over-thinking things, is that something does work. No matter what, you know something works.
- Comment on Elon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private Company 1 week ago:
if there was a infinite line, like so:
<——sentient——sapient——>… where it marks each stage of “awareness,” where would you personally think humans go on that line?
If you think it belongs over the “sapient” point, I’d think that’s very interesting. Isn’t it also interesting that we bond most well with animals that exhibit human-like social behavior?
- Comment on Elon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private Company 1 week ago:
Yeah, I’m agreeing with you more now.
I’ve thought a lot about god and decided that, even if it does exist, my best way to honor it would be to live my life honestly and freely as though it does not exist.
I’ve considered the argument about the size of the universe, with us being specks of dust in all of that…that perspective does make us seem insignificant, until (IMO) you consider that we humans (as far as we know) are the only species in the whole universe that even tries to worship a god. We’re matter that asks about morals, and it’s possible you might only find that here on Earth. Given, we’re the center of the epistemological universe — not the ontological one.
I’m not saying that’s necessarily true. I am saying, however, that there are angles while make us more significant even in this big universe.
Personally, I like to think of God as being the first thing that could move. It very well may be explained as a quirk of quantum mechanics that results in the state of nothing being inherently unstable — allowing for something to arise. We are beings of that something which this mechanic produced, and that’s godly enough (relative to me) for me.
Again, I’m not saying that’s what god is necessarily. That’s just how I think about it.
- Comment on Elon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private Company 1 week ago:
I disagree completely, and I am not a believer in any god. You care about things as a human, but (should a god exist) don’t you think it a step too far to assume a gods experience would be anything at all like our own? Whether it cares or doesn’t may be the wrong question entirely — too anthropic of a question. Even if it did have the human sense of care in its faculty of psychology, something that entirely be a social construct, then wouldn’t it equally so be arrogant to assume what a creator does/not care about? A creator might care a lot about you, and sees suffering as some kind of tough love… who the hell can say? The universe could be infinite, and that could simply be a preference in design. Who the hell can say?
God isn’t our enemy, whether or not it exists. Our enemy is the people who claim to speak for god.
- Comment on Elon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private Company 1 week ago:
“Sentience” is like this hand-waving magic word. Defined typically as the ability to experience sensations and feelings, it’s very anthropic and egocentric.
We know that life evolved on Earth, to include our own species. We know that much life on Earth has an internal sense for pain and pleasure, as well as many instinctual drives like self-preservation. We know that our species knows things, and we know that other species don’t have the same depth in their capacity to know things. We’ve demonstrated that other species don’t seem to understand the world in the same way as us humans. Yet, we’ve never quite figured out what any other species knows. We’ve never modeled their form of sentience, let alone our own. We only really know about sentience intuitively, via our own experience. We judge everything’s capacity as though it’s either less than, equal to, or greater than our own — without consideration for how something might just be different. Not higher or lower, but parallel in a way.
I don’t know what sun sentience would be like, not any more than I already know why any sentience is like, but I can say one thing for sure. Our own sentience is heavily influenced by bias: social, political, legal, economical, financial, emotional, religious, moral, and scientific bias. Peel back those layers of bias, what’s left? Sun sentience might be something like that, like a blank slate that just exists.
- Comment on Microsoft’s $440 billion wipeout, and investors angry about OpenAI’s debt, explained 1 week ago:
The hurricanes keep getting stronger
- Comment on Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law— New York mayor says terminating the ‘unusable’ bot will help close a budget gap 1 week ago:
Yeah, I’m also liking Mamdani. However, I may be traumatized because I don’t completely trust the situation. What did Mamdani tell Trump to make Trump support him so quickly? Trump did a 180 over night, and I want to know how Mamdani did that…
- Comment on Do you have a plan for your self-hosted data if you die? 2 weeks ago:
I’ve learned to wear brown pants so it’s not as bad.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
The people who know least what freedom is, because they’ve been convinced freedom to be an ignorant asshole is the same thing as freedom from an oppressive upper class.
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 2 weeks ago:
It’s not End to End and The guy in the Middle. The message is encrypted from one end to the other. The detail about who has a copy of the key doesn’t spoil that fact, and I guarantee you Meta doesn’t care about using E2EE as a marketing term even if it misrepresents their actual product by matter of status quo. What matters is what they can theoretically argue in a court room.
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 2 weeks ago:
Yeah. E2EE isn’t a single open standard. It’s a general security concept / practice. There’s no way to argue that they don’t really have E2EE if in fact they do, but they keep a copy of the encryption key for themselves. Also, the workers client app can simply have the “decrypt step” done transparently. Or, a decrypted copy of the messages could be stored in a cache that the client app uses… who knows? E2EE being present or not isn’t really the main story here.
- Comment on London PR firm rewrites Wikipedia for governments and billionaires 2 weeks ago:
What was the typo? “I’m horny?”
- Comment on How the regime in Iran jams Starlink and what people could do 3 weeks ago:
It sounds like the downside here would be that you loose reliability in your connection. Probably fine for most things.
- Comment on Self-host Reddit – 2.38B posts, works offline, yours forever 4 weeks ago:
*Bot propaganda?
- Comment on Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again 4 weeks ago:
You raise some very interesting points. Not trying to argue, but I’d like to share some thoughts I had in response.
The surveillance and ad networks are products of the same ecosystem as any other digital technology. Short of regulating them out of existence, I don’t know how you can’t distinguish between the two with a disposition like ”we want one but not the other.” Telemetry is core to iterative development, and it only becomes “surveillance” when you use it a certain kind of way. Content delivery is no different in how a specialized use case, barely a socialized implementation, can produce an “advertising network.”
Lock-in at platform, ecosystem, and hardware levels is also the easiest path forward many times, from a development perspective. Short of having a bolstering engineer culture that spends time prioritizing quality over capital, how do you incentivize companies to wait for standards to be developed and adopted before they engineer their products? How do incentive them to redesign legacy code such that it uses open standards? How do you tell the difference between priority disparity and intentional ecosystem management for the purpose of lock-in?
“You are the product” is right on the money, and it’s astounding that culturally we know, but most of us don’t seem to care enough. To change that, I think people need to start making better arguments for why “being the product” is bad. Arguments that the average person can relate to. It might help if people understood that a platform that crowd sourced public contributions probably wouldn’t have a fraction of the success as the tech giants we see today. This is reminiscent of the feudalist era — they own the land where market + public discourse occurs; they draw influence and power from that relationship.
- Comment on Going to a Protest? Don't Bring Your Phone Without Doing This First 4 weeks ago:
I turned off biometrics for unlocking the phone. Still works for downloads, passwords, everything but unlocking the phone. I’ve barely noticed a change.
- Comment on Stop using MySQL in 2026, it is not true open source 4 weeks ago:
You clearly haven’t tried using one of there services APIs.
- Comment on Sony AI patent will see PlayStation games play themselves when players are stuck 5 weeks ago:
You’re right. We don’t need a whole ass neural network. I’m throwing mine out right nowwwwwwwwwwjdjfjcmxn;&:@, jsi2@29394