WesternInfidels
@WesternInfidels@feddit.online
- Comment on An 18-year-old woman in Queensland faces two years in jail for wearing a shirt that says "from the river to the sea." 22 hours ago:
What if I have a shirt that says “From the river” and my friend has a shirt that says “To the sea?”
Would we be arrested for standing too close to each other?
What if we stood the wrong way round, and our shirts read “To the sea from the river?” Would that be an offense?
What if the shirt was in the form of a rebus, with pictures and/or wordplay as stand-ins for words like “river” and “sea?”
What if it were a remix that nevertheless put the original slogan in your head: “River. Sea. Some assembly required?”
- Comment on Easy-to-use solar panels are coming, but utilities are trying to delay them 23 hours ago:
“The utility” has never had a way to prevent you from doing something dangerous with your wiring or with the electricity they send you. The best we’ve managed has been to encourage appliance manufacturers to design their products with safety in mind, through the UL program (which is voluntary). This is why the writer talked to the “vice president of engineering at UL Solutions.”
- Comment on From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT 1 day ago:
Putting a dollar figure on your schadenfreude? Do you want a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude? That’s how you get a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude.
- Comment on Russia-backed hackers breach Signal, WhatsApp accounts of officials, journalists, Netherlands warns 3 days ago:
The kind of thing only your grandparents would fall for
But evidently not.
Last week I helped someone navigate their bank’s tech support to regain access to an account they’d been locked out of. I believe the bank was having some technical difficulties that they weren’t admitting to (or which the support people weren’t even aware of). Many standard approaches did not work, and we kept getting escalated. The top person we talked to eventually asked for some information that didn’t conform to the usual security question / answer format ("What year what the account opened?” for a ~50 year old account that had been opened many bank mergers ago) and wound up reading us a new password over the phone.
This approach alarmed me, it seemed to violate some security rules of thumb that I thought I understood. But this is what the bank does, sometimes. Given the sort of nonsense that goes on legitimately sometimes, expecting the general public to understand which information flows to be suspicious of – expecting them to think in terms of information flows at all – may be asking too much. We’d all hope journalists would be more savvy, I guess, but “government officials?” Nope. I used to think “Oh, I wouldn’t fall for that” when I read stories like these, but now I’m less sure.
- Comment on Satellite firm pauses imagery after revealing Iran's attacks on US bases 4 days ago:
The stated reasoning sounds okay in isolation, but: 1. Why didn’t they start the blackout when the conflict began, as opposed to waiting like this? 2. Why is it just a delay, instead of a real blackout?
- Submitted 4 days ago to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 5 days ago:
Your objection does nothing to address the issue you raised. Where is the line drawn between “information” and “legal advice?”
Wikipedia and the lawmakers themselves present us with static information that is not specific to us personally or to any particular situation we may find ourselves in, and which generally does not include specific recommendations. I think most people would agree that’s just information, not advice.
If an LLM can be coaxed into saying things like “you should,” advocating specific courses of action for your circumstances, is that legal advice? I think many of us would agree that would be unlicesenced legal advice.
- Comment on New York considers bill that would ban chatbots from giving legal, medical advice 5 days ago:
Is the wikipedia responsible for you reading an article about a law and then taking that as legal advice?
Is the U.S. House of Representatives responsible for you reading the text of a law itself and then taking that as legal advice?
- Comment on WhatsApp officially names Mullvad and Amnezia VPN as go-to tools for bypassing censorship 1 week ago:
never heard of Amnezia
You said that before though
- Comment on Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader 1 week ago:
Vegas gambling is regulated by the state, but it’s still gambling.
- Comment on Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader 1 week ago:
The insiders make money because the “prediction market” odds don’t reflect reality.
- Comment on Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader 1 week ago:
How did the general public come to adopt the “prediction market” euphemism? It’s crypto gambling, right? Everyone knows that’s true, everyone understands that terminology. Aren’t we doing the casino’s work for them when we adopt their highfalutin’ marketing-speak? Making crypto gambling sound like a game for rich, educated people, rather than a grubby online casino that caters to insider cheating and tax evasion?
- Comment on Southern California air board rejected pollution rules after AI-generated flood of comments 1 week ago:
GPTurfing?
- Comment on Southern California air board rejected pollution rules after AI-generated flood of comments 1 week ago:
That annoys me as well. They call it “astroturfing” because it’s fake grassroots. I wonder if we should call this “cyberturfing.”
- Comment on An upcoming California law requires operating system providers to enforce basic mandatory age verification 1 week ago:
I’ve only skimmed but:
provide an accessible interface at account setup
They don’t even define “account.” They have a definition of “account holder” that makes no sense.
Are all devices required to have user accounts? There was a time when home computers did not have such things.
- Comment on An AI Thought Experiment on Substack Is Sending The Stock Market Spiraling 2 weeks ago:
Then, agentic commerce, coupled with stablecoins, gets rid of transaction fees and upends the business models of payment processors like Mastercard and card-focused banks like American Express.
Oh, sure. Transaction fees. Going away. That happens in every economic upheaval. Of course it does. I don’t know why you’re laughing.
- Comment on Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more 2 weeks ago:
The steady exodus from Elon Musk’s X has benefited smaller, independent alternatives such as … German-developed Mastodon
- Comment on Microsoft's planned new AI trick for Edge will 'automatically open the Copilot side pane' with Outlook email links — and I can feel the hate already 2 weeks ago:
So somebody took a look at the modern web and thought “Hey, this is pretty good, but you know what would make it even better? Even more shit you didn’t ask for popping up in your face with every click!”
- 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 2 weeks ago:
There was a time when Amazon was not full of scummy rip-off products, when it was not playing games with prices, when it was not a cloud-computing powerhouse, and you know what happened?
That’s right, they crushed their adversaries (retail shopping) and earned billions in profits. They won.
But somehow that’s not enough winning, there isn’t enough winning until all the value has been vacuumed up from the world.
- Comment on Mike Hardaker accuses Reddit of holding organic posting ‘hostage’ unless he buys ads, shares email screenshot 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on [PDF] Nicki Minaj’s social media propped up by thousands of bots— Analysis reveals the rap sensation’s advocacy for conservative causes has been amplified by an army of bots and coordinated activity 2 weeks ago:
My first Fediverse account was on Pixelfed. I am nobody, but I immediately attracted a couple dozen followers. All blank profiles, all followed exactly five accounts, all suspiciously algorithmic names. They’ve all gone quiet.
Disingenuous social media participation is everywhere. I think we might call it “cyberturfing.”
- Comment on Trump touts bill that could make voting harder for married women 2 weeks ago:
And who else?
Everyone, actually:
Under current laws, many Americans need to present some form of identification to register to vote. The act would require Americans show additional documents that prove their citizenship, such as a passport or a birth certificate.
You just moved? This little errand, updating your voting registration, just got a little more complicated, a little more likely to be a problem. Or a lot more likely, if you lost your birth certificate in the move somehow. Or if you don’t have the kind of settled life where you’ve got a file cabinet for these documents the government expects you to curate on their behalf.
- Comment on At 87, he can't afford his rent without a roommate. He's far from alone. 3 weeks ago:
What are the cultural imperatives and protocols when your roommate dies? Do you host a wake for him, in the apartment you’re about to be evicted from, since his name was on the lease?
Imagine suddenly being forced to move, at the tender age of 69, when you’re poor enough to require a roommate.
- Comment on Trump touts bill that could make voting harder for married women 3 weeks ago:
Married white women, perhaps? Surely not all married women?
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Comment on America entering its Children-of-Men-Suicide-Pill phase? 3 weeks ago:
So, how often is a person who’s calling an SSA support line expressing these thoughts, exactly? Maybe that’s a problem in and of itself, you know?