sbv
@sbv@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker 3 hours 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 days 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 days 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 days 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 week 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 week ago:
🤷♂️
- Comment on AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic 1 week 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? 2 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? 2 weeks ago:
Agreed.
- Comment on What happened to the fediverse stats here? 2 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on “How you design the beep is important.” Behind the movement for calmer gadgets. 5 weeks ago:
I’m pretty sure it’s Whirlpool, but I think they repackage devices built by other companies.
- Comment on “How you design the beep is important.” Behind the movement for calmer gadgets. 5 weeks ago:
I don’t want my fridge to play a melody, but it might help if it oinks.
- Comment on The technology to end traffic deaths exists. Why aren’t we using it? 5 weeks ago:
Have you considered more trains?
- Comment on “How you design the beep is important.” Behind the movement for calmer gadgets. 5 weeks ago:
I enjoy technology that feels like it has a little personality.
- Comment on “How you design the beep is important.” Behind the movement for calmer gadgets. 5 weeks ago:
I’ve disabled notifications for everything except certain contacts. I was all about news notifications for a while, but that was obnoxious.
