HarkMahlberg
@HarkMahlberg@kbin.social
- Comment on What are your complaints about Lemmy? 7 months ago:
Ever since reading about the challenge of deleting an image from your profile, a GUI for that. It should not be an API call, not should you have to contact your instance admin to do it. It should be completely self-service from your profile page.
- Comment on YouTube now requires creators to disclose when AI-generated content is used in videos 8 months ago:
Wouldn't this enable, for example, Trump claiming he didn't make the "bloodbath" comment, calling it a deepfake, and telling Youtube to remove all the new coverage of it? I mean, more generally, what stops someone from abusing this system?
- Comment on Vudu’s name is changing to “Fandango at Home” 8 months ago:
"We have Fandango at home."
Fandango At Home at home:
- Comment on Controversial benchmarking website goes behind paywall — Userbenchmark now requires a $10 monthly subscription 8 months ago:
The value-add is the comedy of a man pretending an Intel Q6600 is better than a Ryzen 3600X.
- Comment on Controversial benchmarking website goes behind paywall — Userbenchmark now requires a $10 monthly subscription 8 months ago:
Yeah that's the guy. Hilarious to see he thinks his garbage biased opinion is worth any amount of money.
- Comment on started to feel headaches and such from headphones, measured how many microteslas it emits or whatever, is this safe? 8 months ago:
I love my Grados for that exact reason
- Comment on Taliban Shuts Down 'queer.af' Domain, Breaking Mastodon Instance 9 months ago:
For what it's worth, I guess they saw this coming.
- Comment on Taliban Shuts Down 'queer.af' Domain, Breaking Mastodon Instance 9 months ago:
Oh I'm not giving you grief, I just think it's funny.
the article is on a CO site
🤌
- Comment on Taliban Shuts Down 'queer.af' Domain, Breaking Mastodon Instance 9 months ago:
The irony of this being crossposted from ML.
- Comment on Sony is erasing digital libraries that were supposed to be accessible “forever” 9 months ago:
Probably not without some tinkering, but DRM can always be defeated.
- Comment on Sony is erasing digital libraries that were supposed to be accessible “forever” 9 months ago:
Sony won the case against Universal that allowed people to record TV shows with their VCR. I wonder how they'd feel if I pointed OBS at their streams.
- Comment on Smaug-72B-v0.1: The New Open-Source LLM Roaring to the Top of the Leaderboard 9 months ago:
What a catchy name.
- Comment on Police departments are using AI to review bodycam footage, and police unions are not happy about it 9 months ago:
Man, you said everything I wanted to in less than half the words. Shoulda just linked to your comment lol
- Comment on Police departments are using AI to review bodycam footage, and police unions are not happy about it 9 months ago:
And shareholders
He couldn’t have imagined the drama of this week, with four directors on OpenAI’s nonprofit board unexpectedly firing him as CEO and removing the company’s president as chairman of the board. But the bylaws Altman and his cofounders initially established and a restructuring in 2019 that opened the door to billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft gave a handful of people with no financial stake in the company the power to upend the project on a whim.
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-bizarre-structure-4-people-the-power-to-fire-sam-altman/
Oh! Turns out I was wrong... "a handful of people with no financial stake in the company" doesn't sound like shareholders, and yet they could change the direction of the company at will. And just so we're clear, whether it's four faceless ghouls or Sam Altman, 1 or 4, the fact that the company is beholden to so few people, who themselves are not democratically elected, nor necessarily law experts, nor necessarily have any history being police officers... their AI is what decides whether or not to hold a police officer accountable for his misdeeds? Hard. Pass.
Oh, and lest we forget Microsoft is invested in OpenAI, and OpenAI has a quasi-profit-driven structure. Those 4 board directors aren't even my biggest concern with that arrangement.
- Comment on Police departments are using AI to review bodycam footage, and police unions are not happy about it 9 months ago:
It’s fine to not understand what “AI” is and how it works
That's highly presumptive isn't it? I didn't make any statement about what AI is, or the mechanics behind it. I only made a statement regarding the owners and operators of AI. We're talking about the politics of using AI to aid in police accountability, and for those intents and purposes, AI need not be more than a black box. We could call it a sentient jar of kidney beans for all it matters.
So for the sake of argument - the one I made, not the one I didn't make - what did I misunderstand?
Unreliable
On June 22, 2023, Judge P. Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York released a lengthy order sanctioning two attorneys for submitting a brief drafted by ChatGPT. Judge Castel reprimanded the attorneys, explaining that while “there is nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance,” the attorneys “abandoned their responsibilities” by submitting a brief littered with fake judicial opinions, quotes, and citations.
Judge Castel’s opinion offers a detailed analysis of one such opinion, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd., 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019), which the sanctioned lawyers produced to the Court. The Varghese decision is presented as being issued by three Eleventh Circuit judges. While according to Judge Castel’s opinion the decision “shows stylistic and reasoning flaws that do not generally appear in decisions issued by the United States Court of Appeals,” and contains a legal analysis that is otherwise “gibberish,” it does in fact reference some real cases. Additionally, when confronted with the question of whether the case is real, the AI platform itself doubles down, explaining that the case “does indeed exist and can be found on legal research databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis.”
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/artificially-unintelligent-attorneys-sanctioned-misuse-chatgpt
Regardless of how ChatGPT made this error, be it "hallucination" or otherwise, I would submit this as exhibit A that AI, at least currently, is not reliable enough to do legal analysis.
Beholden to corporate interests
Most of the large, large language models are owned and run by huge corporations: OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, Microsoft's Copilot, etc. It is already almost impossible to hold these organizations accountable for their misdeeds, so how can we trust their creations to police the police?
The naive "at-best" scenario is that AI trained to identify unjustified police shootings sometimes fails to identify them properly. Some go unreported. Or perhaps it reports a "justified" police shooting (I am not here to debate that definition but let's say they occur) as unjustified, which gums up other investigation efforts.
The more conspiratorial "at-worst" scenario is that a company with a pro-cop/thin-blue-line sympathizing culture could easily sweep damning reports made by their AI under the rug, which facilitates aggressive police behavior under the guise of "monitoring" it.
As reported by ProPublica, Patterson PD has a contract with a Chicago-based software company called Truleo to examine audio from bodycam videos to identify problematic behavior by officers. The company charges around $50,000 per year for flagging several types of behaviors, such as when officers use force, interrupt civilians, use profanities, or turn off their cameras while on active duty. The company claims that its data shows such behaviors often lead to violent escalation.
How does Truleo determine what is "risky" behavior, what is an "interruption" to a civilian? What is a profanity? Does Truleo consider "crap" to be a profanity? More importantly, what if you disagree with Truleo's definitions? What recourse do you have against a company that has zero duty to protect you? If you file a lawsuit alleging officer misconduct, can Truleo's AI's conclusions be admissible as evidence, and can it be used against you?
(1/2)
- Comment on Police departments are using AI to review bodycam footage, and police unions are not happy about it 9 months ago:
Let's not confuse ourselves here. The opposite of one evil is not necessarily a good. Police reviewing their own footage, investigating themselves: bad. Unreliable AI beholden to corporate interests and shareholders: also bad.
- Comment on Google Search is losing its 'cached' web page feature 9 months ago:
All those racks of hard drives is taking up the space they need for racks of Nvidia GPU's.
- Comment on [deleted] 9 months ago:
I moved from Vivaldi to Firefox during the crackdown, signed out all of my Google accounts, and immediately noticed the problems went away. Sorry Vivaldi...
- Comment on [deleted] 9 months ago:
Seen plenty of people talking about the crazy ads they see on Youtube. Right wing propaganda, blatant grifting, scams... Folding Ideas has done not one but two videos talking about the ads he saw and picking them apart. Surely the people complaining about these ads know adblockers exist right? Why don't they use them? I'm sure there are several reasons but, it's been a known quantity for decades that you have the power to control how many and what kind of ads you see.
- Comment on [deleted] 9 months ago:
May also indicate that users were shopping around for a blocker that worked against Youtube. Maybe some of those users actually just settled with AdGuard coming from ABP, or uBlock, or whoever.
- Comment on Any suggestions for overcoming addiction to capitalist big tech social media and streaming etc? 9 months ago:
my android phone, which I’ve paid off completely
I think this is about where I realized your anxiety has more to do with your financial situation than your technology situation. Your worries are about the way you spend money, how much you spend, what you spend it on, and how corps try to part you from your money. Like another commenter said, all the free and open technology in the world isn't going to magically balance your checkbook... though of course, it will help!
Yeah installing Ubuntu is great, learning to code is great, these are valuable endeavors if for no other reason than just to learn and try new things, but you don't need to learn programming to "convert your chromebook to Ubuntu."
I have no idea what to do about Amazon or Amazon Prime. ... things that, in a small town with a particular disability keeping me from driving, I can only get on Amazon.
If using Amazon is unavoidable, then it is what it is. There's no shame in using them to get what you need. If you're concerned about, say, your habit of impulse buying (not an accusation, just an example), you could try setting up a secured credit card with a spending limit so you can only use it for exactly what you need.
death consciousness of mindlessly scrolling through Facebook
Block Facebook in your router settings (or get a Raspberry Pi, install Pihole, and set up a block rule there). If you need Facebook to communicate with friends and family, could you rely solely on Messenger? That way you don't need to see anything on Facebook other than your DM's.
If your mental health is dire enough that all that's not enough, you probably need a therapist. You can even get it through some tele-health programs (YMMV). Hope this helps!
- Comment on Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not 9 months ago:
Always happy to see Simon Stalenhag's work lol
- Comment on Big Tech Won’t Let You Leave. Here's a Way Out - WIRED 10 months ago:
And fuck the rest of the world?
Where do you think every website in the entire world is hosted? It's America, obviously. We're the only country with a Constitution after all!
- Comment on Does technology actually add value to the world? 10 months ago:
When I started working I went in with a plan to upgrade and modernize everything I touch. I still believe that to be the case, or like… my “purpose”(as an employee not a person).
I mean this with as much respect to you OP as I can possibly put into words, and if your therapist has already touched on this, absolutely ignore everything I say and listen to them.
I have been both been this person and dealt with this person. Believe me when I say that this behavior engenders little love from management and coworkers alike. You can quickly gain a bad reputation by trying to modernize everything you see. That reputation can be (meanly) described many different ways, from try-hard to kiss-ass.
- Developers like all human beings are subject to emotions and projection. They see you running around trying to replace the things they built, and they may conflate that with trying to replace them. They feel insecure, then they project that insecurity onto you - it makes you look insecure trying to prove yourself to the company.
- Managers begin to think that if they let you replace all their developers' tools, they will have to rely on you and you alone to support all those tools. They may worry you try to gatekeep your tools, or become a bottleneck for new development. So you slowly lose their trust.
Don't let your career suffer for this. There are few reasons to risk your reputation, your chance at promotion, the goodwill of your peers, and more: "using the latest and greatest" is not one of those reasons. Sometimes, following the crowd is fine.
Springboot apps, create-react-apps, codebases in c and c++, no kubernetes, little to no cloud.
Now, speaking as a developer instead of an armchair psychoanalyst, I don't see why these traits or lack thereof make for bad software. Nor does it make you a lesser developer for working with them. It entirely depends on your industry, the applications, the users, security interests, available recruitable talent, and many more factors.
- Comment on It is essential to stop using Chrome. Under the pretense of saving users from third-party spyware, Google is creating an ecosystem in which Chrome itself is the spyware. 10 months ago:
As true now as it was then.
- Comment on New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion 11 months ago:
Yeah, looks like the default “word_wordnumbers” usernames that reddit gives you if don’t change them.
This change is when I knew Reddit was going down the shitter. Automatically handing out default usernames instead of requiring you to pick your own. The only people that could possibly help are a) people with absolutely no imagination whatsoever, b) bots, and c) people making a dozen alts to puff up their main.
- Comment on 7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp 11 months ago:
Ah, I misunderstood. My mistake then.
- Comment on 7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp 11 months ago:
I know this is wildly off topic, but didn't you move from Beehaw to Tumblr?
- Comment on The salaries of Wikimedia executives are sparking an online debate about tech sector wages 11 months ago:
It's not his audience I'm worried about (not in this context anyway). I'm worried about the people who aren't aware of who his audience is.
- Comment on The salaries of Wikimedia executives are sparking an online debate about tech sector wages 11 months ago:
Everyone is pointing out the comparison of Wikipedia's salaries to other tech companies, but they're missing the point that the person they're arguing with is NOT coming from a good faith position. They are hoping to feed on your distrust of the rich and powerful, in an attempt to convince you to work against your interests and the common good.
They hope their calls of "Wikipedia owners make too much money!" leads to "We should dismantle Wikipedia by boycotting donations!" and then to "We should sell Wikipedia to the last surviving Koch brother!"