sbv
@sbv@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress) - Jono Alderson 1 day 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? 1 week 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. 1 week 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? 2 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 2 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 2 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. 3 weeks 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. 3 weeks 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. 3 weeks 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. 4 weeks 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. 4 weeks ago:
🤷♂️
- Comment on AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic 4 weeks 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? 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks ago:
Agreed.
- Comment on What happened to the fediverse stats here? 5 weeks 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago:
- Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia 1 month 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? 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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.
- Comment on Developer Builds Tool That Scrapes YouTube Comments, Uses AI to Predict Where Users Live 1 month ago:
“I decided I launched [sic] these tools in the first place as a project to build the tool that could be use by LEAs [law enforcement agencies] and PIs [private investigators.]”
According to the developer, they’ve provided the tool to cops in Portugal, Belgium, and “other countries in Europe.” They told 404 Media that the website is meant for private investigators, journalists, and cops.
It sounds like they’re actively peddling it to cops.
- Comment on Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it 1 month ago:
My kids aren’t really interested in the movies I like. They actively avoid the music I listen to. I’ve gotten them copies of the books I love and they give up after a few pages. They get bored with the games I played as a kid.
My dad loves Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the Whole Earth Catalog, and Bruce Springsteen. I do not. If he wills me his copies, I will keep some out of guilt and then my kids will have to throw them away.
- Comment on Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it 1 month ago:
Yeah - I’m totally for full, real, actual ownership of digital stuff, and we should be able to give it away.
But I’d be surprised if my kids would be interested in more than a tiny fraction of it. Or anyone else, for that matter.
- Comment on Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it 1 month ago:
I’m trying to curate a few hundred photos for my kids. I’ve written a couple of bios of relatives. I’d like to record something like a story for them. If they want to trash it, that’s fine, but at least there will be something meaningful for them if they want it.
Assuming it survives the climate wars. 🫠
- Comment on Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it 1 month ago:
Doesn’t archive.org provide that?
- Comment on Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it 1 month ago:
Nobody wanted my grandparents collected crap. Or their photos. Or their books. I tried giving them away. I tried consignment. I tried posting them on Facebook. Most ended up in a landfill.
- Comment on Most of us will leave behind a large ‘digital legacy’ when we die. Here’s how to plan what happens to it 1 month ago:
Keep in mind that your descendents probably won’t care about a huge majority of what you leave them. Photos annotated with a date, time, people in them, and an explanation, maybe, but generally my generation hasn’t given a shit about the tonnes of books, music, photos, furniture, knick knacks, and antiquities bequeathed to us. It would be bizarre if our kids didn’t maintain that tradition.
- Comment on The technology to end traffic deaths exists. Why aren’t we using it? 1 month ago:
