sbv
@sbv@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation 13 hours ago:
Doesn’t Codeberg have private repos? I could’ve sworn I’ve created one.
- Comment on I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C 5 days ago:
Nice!
I enjoyed reading your blog. It’s been a while since I looked at an honest to goodness enthusiast blog. Thanks for writing it!
- Comment on I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C 5 days ago:
Pretty wild that the author didn’t set up app notifications. Getting specific notifications from specific people on my wrist is a big part of the reason I use a smartwatch. But to each their own.
It’d be pretty cool to get a significant use case of my pricey pricey Garmin for ~CAD$40.
- Comment on The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) 1 week ago:
Recognizing from history the possibilities of where this all might lead, the prospect of any serious economic downturn being met with a widespread push of mass automation—paired with a regime overwhelmingly friendly to the tech and business class, and executing a campaign of oppression and prosecution of precarious manual and skilled laborers—well, it should make us all sit up and pay attention.
- Comment on Woman’s memoirs give fascinating insight into life in 17th-century northern England 1 week ago:
That article needs more excerpts. Four volumes and we get two sentences?
- Comment on go to sleep 2 weeks ago:
oh shit
- Comment on Christ, Conquest, and the MDGs (Part 2) 2 weeks ago:
“shall be slaves”
It’s the next line in the song.
- Comment on Why does technology create new problems for each one it solves? 2 weeks ago:
We don’t notice technologies that quietly solve the problem they were intended to solve. I’ve never seen a rage post about light switches. Or wrenches. Or locks. Or pencils.
AI, and a lot of the technologies we complain about, are business models that prioritize value to the producer over value to the buyer or user. They aren’t technology per se, so much as a shoddy product wrapped in unrealistic promises.
- Comment on JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress) - Jono Alderson 3 weeks ago:
Developers wanted to build and deploy apps to end user machines. The round trip for page loads was lousy for usability.
Java applets were too shitty. Flash was too janky and hard to work with. So Mozilla started adding JavaScript as a hack. It filled a need.
a barrier-to-entry that makes it difficult to develop new browsers,
It definitely adds a barrier to entry, but JavaScript was really perfected in chromium, which is a different codebase from the folks who proposed and built js to begin with.
I’m not saying JavaScript is good, but it fills a need.
- Comment on Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us? 4 weeks ago:
In a recent series of experiments, we paid people a few dollars to unfollow the most divisive political accounts on X. After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups. In fact, their experience was so positive that nearly half the people declined to refollow those hostile accounts after the study was over. And those who maintain their healthier newsfeed reported less animosity a full 11 months after the study.
Twitter got a lot better when I unfollowed the peeps whose tweets I hated. But it also got boring, so I stopped using it (this was loooong before Trump, Elon, etc).
There’s probably a lesson there.
- Comment on Cloudflare wants Google to change its AI search crawling. Google likely won’t. 4 weeks ago:
Cloudflare’s customers probably wouldn’t be on board with that. Google’s properties provide a tonne of traffic to businesses. Doing anything to put that in jeopardy would probably have many of Cloudflare’s customers looking for a new provider.
- Comment on What is this new Bitchat scam that crypto-bros think is good? 4 weeks ago:
It just seems like dude is suffering from Not invented here and wants to reinvent the wheel. The only reason anyone noticed is because a tech b-lister is involved.
- Comment on ‘I blame Facebook’: Aaron Sorkin is writing a Social Network sequel for the post-Zuckerberg era 5 weeks ago:
Let’s fucking go
The Facebook Files made – and provided evidence for – multiple allegations, including that Facebook was well aware of how toxic Instagram was for many teen girls; that Facebook has a “secret elite” list of people for whom Facebook’s rules don’t apply; that Facebook knew its revised algorithm was fueling rage; and that Facebook didn’t do enough to stop anti-vax propaganda during Covid-19. Most damningly of all, The Facebook Files reported that all of these things were well known to senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s clear which side Sorkin is taking. “I blame Facebook for January 6,” he said last year. “Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible. Because that is what will increase engagement … There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. It’s just growth.”
- Comment on Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker 5 weeks ago:
Corps are gonna corp.
- Comment on The Trump Administration is Building a National Citizenship Data System; State and county election officials can now check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists. 1 month ago:
That’s a really weird way of looking at it.
That’s how I roll.
Without the database, there’s no central ledger to consult as to whether or not you’re legally a person.
We’re already seeing them do that without a database. 🤷♂️
Other countries are able to maintain internal databases without using them to screw over their own citizens (except when they do). The problem isn’t the database.
- Comment on The Trump Administration is Building a National Citizenship Data System; State and county election officials can now check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists. 1 month ago:
See the UK Post Office accounting scandal, in which a persistent computer error went unfixed for decades and caused hundreds of post office employees to be fired and dragged through courts for corruption that never happened. A good chunk of them committed suicide.
The database is the least important part of the system: the organizational structure, rules, and procedures are way more important, because they actively help or harm people.
- Comment on The Trump Administration is Building a National Citizenship Data System; State and county election officials can now check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists. 1 month ago:
no no, it’s an input to a Palantir database
- Comment on New Google Search Emoji Answer Feature to Replace All Those Copy and Paste Emoji Websites; You Will be Able to Copy the Code for Emojis With a Click. 1 month ago:
- I haven’t seen a built in picker for multi-character emojis, like the ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (on OSX and Android)
- Sometimes the description I’m thinking of and the picker text doesn’t line up, but I’m not sure if Google’s picker will be that smart.
- Comment on New Google Search Emoji Answer Feature to Replace All Those Copy and Paste Emoji Websites; You Will be Able to Copy the Code for Emojis With a Click. 1 month ago:
🤷♂️
- Comment on AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic 1 month ago:
While the stats vary depending on who’s measuring, the story is consistent: web publishers, who provided the content that trained these AI models, face dramatically diminishing visitors, which means lower advertising and subscription revenues, even amid overall growth in search impressions.
- Comment on What happened to the fediverse stats here? 1 month ago:
Hanlon’s Razor is all well and good as a heuristic, but tends to lead to people discounting malice much too often.
There’s definitely scenarios where that is the case.
Also, I really didn’t say we were “under attack”
I would describe a massive influx of spambots as an attack on a social media platform. It’s my characterization. I didn’t mean to imply that you said it.
- Comment on What happened to the fediverse stats here? 1 month ago:
Agreed.
- Comment on What happened to the fediverse stats here? 1 month ago:
Lemmy is a federated system and these stats are self-reported by user maintained systems. Rather than a sudden influx of users (bots or otherwise), a misconfigured system or hiccup in stats collection seems more likely.
Generally, Hanlon’s Razor, add applied to computing: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupidityuser error.There’s a lot of malicious systems out there, but there is little corroborating evidence indicating that we’re under attack.
- Comment on Apple announces iOS 26 with Liquid Glass redesign 2 months ago:
reading text isn’t the easiest with all the colors and blurs everywhere Agreed - I like the look of these things in an abstract sense, but it makes the text really hard to read. I
assumehope there’s a way to disable it in accessibility settings. - Comment on How a Spyware App Compromised Assad’s Army 2 months ago:
I guess that’s why you pay your soldiers.
In the early summer of 2024, months before the opposition launched Operation Deterrence of Aggression, a mobile application began circulating among a group of Syrian army officers. It carried an innocuous name: STFD-686, a string of letters standing for Syria Trust for Development.
…
The STFD-686 app operated with disarming simplicity. It offered the promise of financial aid, requiring only that the victim fill out a few personal details. It asked innocent questions: “What kind of assistance are you expecting?” and “Tell us more about your financial situation.”
…
Determining officers’ ranks made it possible for the app’s operators to identify those in sensitive positions, such as battalion commanders and communications officers, while knowing their exact place of service allowed for the construction of live maps of force deployments. It gave the operators behind the app and the website the ability to chart both strongholds and gaps in the Syrian army’s defensive lines. The most crucial point was the combination of the two pieces of information: Disclosing that “officer X” was stationed at “location Y” was tantamount to handing the enemy the army’s entire operating manual, especially on fluid fronts like those in Idlib and Sweida.
- Comment on Live footage of a lemmy user 2 months ago:
- Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia 2 months ago:
Trolling aside, yeah, being able to explain a concept in everyday terms takes careful thought and discipline. I’m consistently impressed by the people who write Simple articles on Wikipedia. I wish there were more of those articles.
- Comment on Is it a big deal if my phone hasn't had a security update in 5 years? 2 months ago:
This. I’d avoid using it for banking or access to a Gmail account that is registered with your bank. Or receiving 2FA texts.
But scrolling Lemmy and making calls? It’s probably fine.
- Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia 2 months ago:
Is the point of Wikipedia to provide everyone with information, or to allow editors to spew jargon into opaque articles that are only accessible to experts?
I think it’s the former. There are very few topics that can’t be explained simply, if the author is willing to consider their audience. Best of all, absolutely nothing is lost when an expert reads a well written article.
- Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia 2 months ago:
There’s a core problem that many Wikipedia articles are hard for a layperson to read and understand. The statement about reading level is one way to express this.
The Simple version of articles shows humans can produce readable text. But there aren’t enough Simple articles, and the Simple articles are often incomplete.
I don’t think AI should be solely trusted with summarization/translation, but it might have a place in the editing cycle.
