MountingSuspicion

@MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an translated excerpt from the article:

  The man decided to download the files. Police told the man to stop this and delete the files. The man indicated that he would only stop and renounce it if he ‘would get something in return’. Therefore, the police have decided to arrest the man and confiscate his data carriers to secure the files again and prevent distribution.

  If you are sent a download link, while you know you should get an upload link, it is clearly told not to download and choose to download the files anyway, then you may be guilty of computer breach. The recipient can reasonably assume that the download link and the files shared with it are not intended for him.

  The police have no indication that the files are further distributed. The protocol surrounding a data breach is followed. Police are conducting further investigations.

  It does not seem like a power imbalance allows them to just roll up and arrest him. It seems like they have a legal ability to ask him to remove the files and since he did not they have a legal right to charge him/confiscate the files. I generally don’t want to assume public sentiment, but I personally think it’s understandable that some government documents (those pertaining to open investigations) are subject to protections that other documents might not be. For what it’s worth, if someone sent me their digital information they wouldn’t have to ask me to delete it because I would not have saved it in the first place and I certainly would not have asked for payment to delete it if I somehow accidentally downloaded it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit's human content wins amid the AI flood⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Reddit had a lot of really friendly “femme leaning” communities. Especially the smaller ones. If you were only going to Reddit for nail painting and wedding inspiration it was actually really wholesome. Those communities tended to be 1) very well modded 2) “easy” to mod 3) not fun to troll. There’s a little grey area on if someone is offering good faith critique, but if you’ve commented twice and neither have been positive you lose the privilege to comment. It can create a bit of a hugbox, but it’s much preferred to the opposite.

  I really like my experience with the fediverse so far, but I really miss the experience of those positive “femme” spaces. It’s a very different feeling and I haven’t gotten it from the fediverse yet. Not that we’re not empathetic, just that it’s a different space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The wrong he did was the extortion. If you feel like people being extorted should not be able to charge people attempting to extort them because they created the conditions for extortion then I think we fundamentally disagree on how law and order should function. Doing something bad/illegal is wrong. Extorting someone for doing something bad/illegal is also wrong. I don’t think you should be able to blame someone for making it easy to extort them as a defense for extortion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a little unfair. If I leave my door open while I’m gone and someone comes in and makes copies of my personal documents I guess that’s somewhat my fault, but they did something they knew they shouldn’t have. The guy is basically extorting the police and asking for taxpayer money to delete information he was informed he should not have. It seems like he was notified and given time to comply but chose to demand money. I don’t know the exact content of the files, but there’s a lot of potential harm that can come from certain documents being public. I’m not pro police, but the guy seems to be clearly in the wrong here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Spotify says its best developers haven't written a line of code since December, thanks to AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Is the idea that they’re somehow reviewing the code on their phone during their commute? Or are they just pushing to prod without even glancing at it? Why bother with the middle man. Just have the AI push it. What a stupid admission.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I used this library all the time. Glad to see they’re keeping the bar high. Extremely concerning that this happened, but the HN comments bring up a good point that the hit piece was probably not an autonomous decision by the AI. The human likely directed it to do that. That seems especially true when you see that a human later tried to make the same change and was pretty salty about it being rejected and their overall GitHub seems suspect. The best part about the whole thing in my opinion is that the “blog” the AI started has a copyright attribution to the AI. I know that’s just a thing blogs have, but it’s funny to see considering we all know AI cannot hold a copyright and the output cannot be copyrighted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI agent writes blog post to shame a developer after he refused it's code contribution.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s… not a thing? A human cannot “replace the human aspects with pure OpenClaw.” What would that even mean? A human can take credit for things AI has done, but that doesn’t mean anything other than that they took credit for something. They’re not bootstrapping or a cyborg, just irresponsible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI agent writes blog post to shame a developer after he refused it's code contribution.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Damn. Couldn’t be me. Maybe I’m a bad contributor (yes) but I will definitely pop in to fix something that’s bugging me and then never contribute again. I’m not adding new features though, so maybe my contributions are just never significant enough for me to feel any ownership of. I think it’s a lot to expect people to continue to contribute just because they did so once. That would potentially make it less likely people contribute when they can. I’m certainly not going to address an open ticket if it makes me responsible for rewriting the feature when people decide to port or refactor the whole project two years later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A new survey of 3,335 public servants across 10 countries found that 70% say they use AI, but confidence lags⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This was put out by a lobbying group that happens to be pro AI, just for everyone’s information.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Apple is being terrible here, but Walmart now has an amazon-like storefront where third parties can list their own products basically entirely apart from Walmart but using their site. Not sure what the percent cut Walmart takes is, but Walmart might never actually buy from a company selling on their site.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Windows 365 goes down the day after Microsoft celebrates 'reimagining the PC as a cloud service that streams a Cloud PC'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why did you need a shitty AI image for this?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That was an interesting read, but I am not convinced that they understand the “problem” they are trying to address. That would also explain the vagueness of the title. Clearly they think something needs to change because of AI, but they have not explained why, or defined what, or the parameters for a positive change. It makes it feel arbitrary.

  At one point he suggests that telling people who are taking the exam after you what specifically is on the exam is not cheating, though his students seemed to think it is. If telling people is encouraged then people taking the test first just have a more difficult task and their results are more likely to reflect their knowledge of the subject. At that point just give people the exam questions early. I had a professor that would give out a study guide and would exclusively pull exam questions from the study guide with the numbers changed. It was basically homework, but you were guaranteed to have seen everything on the exam already and that was such a great way to ensure 1) people fully understood the scope of the test 2) relieve stress about testing. If they don’t see a problem with only certain people knowing exact questions and answers ahead of time, then I’m not sure they understand what cheating is.

  Unrelated, but they also blame outlook for why young people hate email. I had to use outlook for a bit and it does suck, but my hatred for email is unrelated.

  I’m glad they are experimenting with different methods for testing, but without really knowing more about the class itself this comes off as though this is just a filler class in a degree program and that the test doesn’t really matter because their understanding of the subject doesn’t really matter. In another blog he refers to the article about how AI failed at running a vending machine which was making the rounds a bit ago. In it he laments that we’re going to have to “prepare for that stupid world” where AI is everywhere. If you think we can still fight that, I don’t think accepting AI as a suitable exam tool is the way to do it, even if you make students acknowledge hallucinations. At that point you’re normalizing it. 2/60 is actually not bad for using AI, as he said there will always be those students, but the blog makes me question the content of the class more than anything else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Verizon carriers start switching to 365-day device unlock policy, up from 60 days⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They should be banned from having any unlocking restrictions after they were found to have violated the initial FCC mandates placed on them. Absolutely disgraceful. No accountability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Linux is currently easier to use than Windows. Claim in dispute

  People who think otherwise are Windows users who think different equals worse. In this case different is worse. If you’re used to a restaurant that serves carrots and I serve you peas you can argue that it’s not worse it’s just different. If you’re used to a restaurant that serves carrots and I tell you I don’t know what carrots are and I don’t have any alternative suggestions, but if you can find a store that provides what you’re talking about, appropriately transport that to my location and teach me how to cook them I will do that, then I think it’s fair to say I’m just a worse restaurant. What’s not comparable is easy of use. If you don’t understand how a lack of plug and play affects ease of use then there’s nothing I can say that will fundamentally bridge that gap.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not the person you’re responding to, but if I have headphones or speakers or a mouse that aren’t plug and play on Linux which is what I’m used to on windows, I think it’s fair to say that my experience with Linux is less easy than with windows. The average user is not going to consider that a hardware issue, and it isn’t a hardware issue. If it’s a driver issue, I’d call that a software issue. Im glad to hear your grandma is not having issues with Linux, but as a Linux user I have to agree with the other commenter. A not insignificant amount of people will run up against some issues with Linux that the average user is likely not equipped to solve. I’m not saying that it means Linux is bad, but it really isn’t helpful to act like that’s a complete fabrication.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hooded Horse ban AI-generated art in their games: "all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think training on all public information is super ethical regardless, but to the extent that others may support it, I understand that SO may be seen as fair game. To my knowledge though, all the big AIs I’m aware of have been trained on GitHub regardless of any individual projects license.

  It’s not about proving individual code theft, it’s about recognizing the model itself is built from theft. Just because an AI image output might not resemble any preexisting piece of art doesn’t mean it isn’t based on theft. Can I ask what you used that was trained on just a projects documentation? Considering the amount of data usually needed for coherent output, I would be surprised if it did not need some additional data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hooded Horse ban AI-generated art in their games: "all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you acknowledge the problem with theft from artists, do you not acknowledge there’s a problem with theft from coders? Code intended to be fully open source with licenses requiring derivatives to be open source is now being served up for closed source uses at the press of a button with no acknowledgement.

  For what it’s worth, I think AI would be much better in a post scarcity moneyless society, but so long as people need to be paid for their work I find it hard to use ethically. The time it might take individuals to do the things offloaded to AI might mean a company would need to hire an additional person if they were not using AI. If AI were not trained unethically then I’d view it as a productivity tool and so be it, but because it has stolen for its training data it’s hard for me to view it as a neutral tool.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Librarians Are Tired of Being Accused of Hiding Secret Books That Were Made Up by AI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe I got into a conversation on Lemmy where I was saying that there should be a big persistent warning banner stuck on every single AI chat app that “the following information has no relation to reality” or some other thing. The other person kept insisting it was not needed. I’m not saying it would stop all of these events, but it couldn’t hurt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not the person you’re responding to, but “most likely, we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn’t necessarily want to do at that point” indicates to me that optimization was not a top priority. It’s not unusual for people to optimize after a proof of concept or something, but I imagine in gaming (I don’t do game dev admittedly) you don’t want that too late in the process. If they’re not planning on having it in early access, then their early consistent user base will be more worried about other things. If min spec is 8 then people with 4 won’t get it or won’t complain about poor performance because technically it’s their machine that’s the issue. Lack of complaints about that and feedback about other things further shifts the priority away from optimization. Plus, anyone who’s worked in dev spaces or probably any kind of deliverable knows that there are things that just don’t happen despite your best intentions. Things like optimization are the first to go in the dev space, so by openly admitting to putting it off, it does feel like an admission of “we were probably just not going to get around to it”. In my experience, the further out you plan to optimize, the more man hours you end up wasting, so I don’t see a company investing heavily in that at any point, but doing so post early launch seems wasteful if they legitimately cared about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “Oh don’t worry, you won’t have to actually load spreadsheets anymore, just give our AI full access to your files and it will do whatever you ask :)”

  Ideally, you’re correct though and companies start investing in optimization. I don’t see it going that way, but a girl can dream.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As a dirty commie, I agree, but unfortunately under capitalism it is just an avenue for exploitation. Large companies are deciding what we can or cannot have access to and setting the price for it in a manner completely divorced from what they’re offering.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Or more realistically be used as an excuse for always online cloud based services a la office 365. “We would let you download the app, but most users don’t have the computing power so instead we’ll just make this a helpful subscription!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think one of the big issues is it often makes nonhuman errors. Sometimes I forget a semicolon or there’s a typo, but I’m well equipped to handle that. In fact, most programs can actually catch that kind of issue already. AI is more likely to generate code that’s hard to follow and therefore harder to check. It makes debugging more difficult.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple hit with $115M fine for “extremely burdensome” App Store privacy policy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You are suggesting a user configurable setting, but that’s exactly what they had. Apple had a user wide setting, and then individual apps could ask to override that setting. I have personalized ads off in my general settings, and though I would never turn them on, if for whatever reason I did want to, the best way to get me to do that would be to ask in the specific app I wanted to give access to that. Absolutely no way I would change my overall settings just for the benefit of one app. Others have noted that a second layer of consent was only needed if you did not use the Apple provided ad option, because Apple already has your opt in/out on file. I hope this causes Apple to also display the pop-up for those using Apple ad options. Most people probably just agreed to the tracking when setting up their phone, so forcing Apple to show the pop-up even if an app is using Apple as their ad distributor is ideal in my opinion. Users will be much more likely to opt out even if their overall setting is opt in. This will ideally make Apple and non-Apple advertising options on an even playing field and is better for users. If anything, it’s probably worse for developers because had they just chosen to use Apple ads before they were probably more likely to get targeted ads from the user since Apple would bypass the pop-up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple announces more ads are coming to App Store search results⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The “auction” is not a realtime auction that you might be used to IRL or anything, and these brands likely have AI already doing that. They likely have certain bid strategies and ad budgets. So they may be willing to pay up to $X to be in that spot for a user with demographic/behavior profile A and pay up to $Y for a user with profile B then the have an overall budget for that ad spot of $Q per day. All of those parameters are likely set by a specialized AI that monitors bid strategy over time. The AI might see that users with profile B download the app via the ad more often so they will spend more to capture that audience. It’s possible companies have their own internal strategies, but most ad platforms have at least some of that analysis built in and will regularly offer recommendations based on the data and have had that available for years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, thank you! My timing was wrong (I’m getting old lol), but this was the exact thing being discussed. Glad other people were able to find the info.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes! Thank you for the link! I can’t guarantee it but this seems like the exact thing we had been chatting about. The age puts it in time to have made the rounds but still be tech relevant at around the time of discussion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yea. I didn’t call it AI because I’m not sure the exact method of generation. It may have been AI or maybe some other generation method.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I may be hallucinating now, but I swear I remember nearly a decade ago there was a paper or articles about how CG PCBs were using some electrical tricks that were non standard to minimize space or something. The design purposefully had arcs or short circuits or something. Maybe it was a temperature thing? I did a more than cursory search and couldn’t find much, but I vividly remember having conversations about it. Anyone remember anything like that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Your library card is probably a golden ticket to free streaming, e-books, and audiobooks.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a lot of users tagged as AI/uses AI, but I don’t have this one. Did you have them tagged from before or are there obvious AI signs I’m missing in the post?