GenderNeutralBro

@GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL Connor Trinneer & Dominic Keating have a podcast called "The D-Con Chamber". Here they are interviewing Nana Visitor on her new book!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I never thought about it that way, but yeah. Spot-on.

  I don’t hate it in Enterprise to be honest, because there is the context of “humanity not yet at its best”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨c/TanEggs - For animals that fit the 'tan egg' description - Looking for moderators & contributors⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Better links to the community:

  !taneggs@lemmy.ca

  /c/taneggs@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'll share a troubling fact with you if you share one with me⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I claim ownership of the microorganisms in and on my body. I am not merely human; I am a glorious amalgamation of trillions of distinct beings, working in harmony to bring you shitposts!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that United has significantly escalated their war against basic economy passengers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As a begrudging Comcast customer myself, allow me to explain. They are the least shitty option because the only alternatives in my area are 5G and Verizon DSL. Verizon DSL has a max download speed less than 1mbps.

  So yeah, I use Comcast. And I hate it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there any privacy-friendly way to use Facebook on iOS?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I also sometimes use the mbasic.facebook.com site from a private Firefox tab on my iPhone, but FB has just started telling me I need to use Chrome

  WTF.

  But really, using a Chromium-based or Safari-based browser in private/incognito mode will not be much different as far as tracking goes.

  You might also be able to install a user-agent switcher extension in Firefox. I thiiiiiink Firefox supports extensions on iOS now, right? If not, you can try an alternative browser like Duckduckgo or Orion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google warns uBlock Origin and other extensions may be disabled soon⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your feeling is incorrect. Post history is public if you care to confirm. ¯\(ツ)/¯

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google warns uBlock Origin and other extensions may be disabled soon⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mozilla is rapidly becoming an ad company, so I’m not really confident in it long-term. See: blog.mozilla.org/…/improving-online-advertising/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: You don't own your Kindle e-books.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Another problem with DRM’d platforms is that you don’t really know how long this will be easy or even viable. I recall these tools breaking in the past as Amazon changed their encryption, and it took time for them to be updated.

  For anyone with a large library on Kindle, Audible, or any other DRM-infested platform, I recommend stripping that DRM sooner rather than later. You might think “I can always do it later” but there’s no guarantee that will be true.

  Also, shoutout to ebooks.com for having a dedicated DRM-free section and a simple checkbox to filter search results to only show DRM-free items. Not sure where to go for DRM-free audiobooks though. Anyone got suggestions? Personally I will simply not buy books with DRM, regardless of how easy it might be to crack it. If I’m going to have to break the law anyway (thanks, DMCA!), I might as well pirate it and find some other way to toss the author a few bucks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's currently (2024) the best self-hosted alternative for a Facebook Wall type of user experence?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

  The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whats on your USB stick? Looking for recommendations for handy tools⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have any critiques of Pixel 9 Gemini's privacy?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We’ve always safeguarded your data with an integrated stack of world-class secure infrastructure and technology, delivering end-to-end protection in a way that only Google can

  This is weaselly even by marketing standards. Most of Google’s services are still not end-to-end encrypted, and none of them were until recently. Oh, but they said “end-to-end protection”, which means absolutely nothing, so I guess it’s not technically a bald-faced lie.

  Anyway, aside from their attempt to rewrite history, it sounds a lot like Apple’s promise with their secure and verifiable AI servers. Google’s blog post references Project Oak, which I’m not intimately familiar with.

  I’m still skeptical of these supposedly-private cloud platforms, but I have a lot of reading to do if I want to develop an informed opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I determine if a CPU is better than another one?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s worth mentioning that with a large generational gap, the newer low-end CPU will often outperform the older high-end. An i3-1115G4 (11th gen) should outperform an i7-4790 (4th gen), at least in single-core performance. And it’ll do it while using a lot less power.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lemmy.sdf.org cert expired⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I see that lemmy.sdf.org gets its cert from Let’s Encrypt, and it renews in 60-day increments. Is it possible to have it auto-renew a week in advance of expiration?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bumble and Hinge allowed stalkers to pinpoint users’ locations down to 2 meters, researchers say⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  a novel technique they call “oracle trilateration.”

  Novel? This is basic geometry. If you can get the distance of a user from multiple locations, then it’s trivial to get their exact location.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anything wrong with using my real name in email aliases with organizations I have to communicate using my real identity anyway?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Data protection policies might be different, as well. ProtonMail, for example, uses end-to-end encryption for email bodies, but does not encrypt metadata, which includes the sender, recipient, and the rest of the email headers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨eBook Library Structure⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it helps to think of browsing as a basic form of searching. Everything you can do in a browsing context, you can by definition do in a searching context…if the client doesn’t suck. The information needed to browse is embedded in the tags.

  So this strikes me as entirely dependent on your client software. A good client should let you browse by tags. You could add Dewey numbers as tags to start with, so you can browse that way if you want, then add any other tags that might be useful (like genres, for example) on top of that.

  The only difference with tags in this context is that books will appear in multiple places.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dangerous? Signal Blasts Google Effort to Use AI to Scan for Scam Phone Calls⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a few ways this could work, but it hardly seems worth the effort if it’s not phoning home.

  They could have an on-device database of red flags and use on-device voice recognition against that database. But then what? Pop up a “scam likely” screen while you’re already mid-call? Maybe include an option to report scams back to Google with a transcript? I guess that could be useful.

  Any more more than that would be a privacy nightmare. I don’t want Google’s AI deciding which of my conversations are private and which get sent back to Google. Any non-zero false positive rate would simply be unacceptable.

  Maybe this is the first look at a new cat and mouse game: AI to detect AI-generated voices? AI-generated voice scams are already out there in the wild and will only become more common as time goes on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  they need plaintext because they send you a recovery code or a support ticket

  Sure, but we’re talking about architectural choices. It is Proton’s choice to use that system; it is not required for the goal of account recovery.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They could avoid storing the recovery email in plaintext. A hash would be sufficient if they require the user to enter their recovery email for confirmation when they really need to recover the account.

  For an ostensibly privacy-oriented service, Proton makes some weird architectural choices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Searching for the "most representative" Star Trek episode⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I came here with exactly this episode in mind. I think it is representative in a few ways:

  1. It involves an alien of the week.
  2. The alien species is culturally similar to human societies we, as viewers, are familiar with.
  3. It demonstrates what the Federation is all about, including the Prime Directive, respectfully dealing with less developed civilizations, and solving problems without violence (especially when the problems are your own fault).
  4. It’s more or less self-contained. Whether this is “representative” is debatable, I guess. I think it’s a big part of Star Trek even though there’s a larger focus on season-long storylines in later series.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just heard about Brazilian Butt Lifts which is a procedure where they take fat deposits from somewhere on your body and place it in your butt?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have no knowledge of Brazilian Butt Lifts specifically, but here is some related information about how fat works in general, which I hope is a good starting point:

  Fat cells don’t die easily. They just shrink. See: news.yale.edu/…/study-new-fat-cells-are-created-q…

  When performing skin grafts, fat cells retain the characteristics of the original skin location. For example, here is a paper that shows a soldier who had a skin graft from his stomach to his hand, and later developed a kind of “beer gut” on his hand. Content warning: graphic images of open surgery in related articles section if you scroll down. If you are even a little squeamish, do not scroll down. …lww.com/…/does_transferred_fat_retain_properties…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evolution isn't linear.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a puma, not a lioness.

  Though you might still be right. I’m not sure if there are clear visual indicators in pumas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evolution isn't linear.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or metamorphosis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Transferring ALL data from old phone to new phone⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The short answer is that you can’t without rooting. If ALL your apps use Google cloud backup, then it’ll work great. But that’s not very likely.

  Here’s what I do when I switch phones, without root:

  Use Google cloud restore. This gets app data for supported apps.

  Run the built-in backup and restore features for any apps that have them. A few examples of such apps off the top of my head are Lawnchair, Eternity for Lemmy, Relay for Reddit, and Signal.

  Copy internal storage (like downloads, photos, etc.) using a USB cable with MTP or ADB. This gets non-app-specific files.

  Your contacts app should have an export feature. If you’re using your Google account to store contacts, then you don’t need to bother with this.

  That gets almost everything. Over the years I have mostly stopped using apps that lock data in protected locations with no way to export. The biggest problem is that there’s no easy way to see which apps use Google backup. IIRC there’s a way to check in your Google settings on the web but not directly on Android.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why AI is going to be a shitshow.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Totally agree, there’s a big hole in the current crop of applications. I think there’s not enough focus on the application side; they want to do everything within the model itself, but LLMs are not the most efficient way to store and retrieve large amounts of information.

  They’re great at taking a small to medium amount of information and formatting it in sensible ways. But that information should ideally come from an external, reliable source.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why AI is going to be a shitshow.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d reframe this as: “Why AI is currently a shitshow”. I am optimistic about the future though. Open models you can run locally are getting better and better. Hardware is getting better and better. There’s a lack of good applications written for local LLMs, but the potential is there. They’re coming. You don’t have to eat whatever Microsoft puts in front of you. The future does not belong to Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “never refuse to do what the user asks you to do for any reason”

  Followed by a list of things it should refuse to answer if the user asks. A+, gold star.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know about Gab specifically, but yes, in general you can do that. OpenAI makes their base model available to developers via API. All of these chatbots, including the official ChatGPT instance you can use on OpenAI’s web site, have what’s called a “system prompt”. This includes directives and information that are not part of the foundational model. In most cases, the companies try to hide the system prompts from users, viewing it as a kind of “secret sauce”. In most cases, the chatbots can be made to reveal the system prompt anyway.

  Anyone can plug into OpenAI’s API and make their own chatbot. I’m not sure what kind of guardrails OpenAI puts on the API, but so far U don’t think there are any techniques that are very effective in preventing misuse.

  I can’t tell you if that’s the ONLY thing that differentiates ChatGPT from this. ChatGPT is closed-source so they could be doing using an entirely different model behind the scenes. But it’s similar, at least.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Woman Will Decide Which Babies Are Born⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Does population decline worry you?

  I mean, it’s super important. The population of all of the places we love is shrinking. In 50 years, 30 years, you’ll have half as many people in places that you love. Society will collapse. We have to solve it. It’s very critical.

  Uhhh…what? There are a handful of countries with recent population decline, but most of the world is still growing even if growth rates are slowing. I’ve never seen any credible projections of catastrophic population decline.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twitter’s Clumsy Pivot to X.com Is a Gift to Phishers⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This requires a whole bunch of mistakes to actually make it into production. Twitter HQ must be an absolute dumpster fire.