GenderNeutralBro
@GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on Dangerous? Signal Blasts Google Effort to Use AI to Scan for Scam Phone Calls 5 weeks 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago:
I came here with exactly this episode in mind. I think it is representative in a few ways:
- It involves an alien of the week.
- The alien species is culturally similar to human societies we, as viewers, are familiar with.
- 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).
- 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? 1 month 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. 1 month 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. 1 month ago:
Or metamorphosis.
- Comment on Transferring ALL data from old phone to new phone 1 month 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. 2 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. 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 months ago:
This requires a whole bunch of mistakes to actually make it into production. Twitter HQ must be an absolute dumpster fire.
- Comment on Star Trek Coffees Launching In May With Several Blends 2 months ago:
$17.99 for a 12 oz bag.
Not crazy expensive for premium coffee (if it is indeed that). But most will probably remain unopened as collector’s items anyway.
- Comment on YSK there is a condition that makes your armpits smell worse called trichobacteriosis that is common and easy to treat 2 months ago:
In a pinch, hand sanitizer or isopropyl alcohol will do wonders. They’ll dry out your skin, so you might want to use some kind of moisturizer afterwards when you have the chance.
If I’m camping or traveling for a long time, hand sanitizer is clutch.
- Comment on Amazon's Just Walk Out technology relies on hundreds of workers in India watching you shop 2 months ago:
I think you are confused about what “AI” means. You are referring to a very small subset if AI.
- Comment on Amazon's Just Walk Out technology relies on hundreds of workers in India watching you shop 2 months ago:
All “AI”
Not even close to true.
- Comment on Court Bans Use of 'AI-Enhanced' Video Evidence Because That's Not How AI Works 2 months ago:
In the context of video encoding, any manufactured/hallucinated detail would count as “loss”. Loss is anything that’s not in the original source. The loss you see in e.g. MPEG4 video usually looks like squiggly lines, blocky noise, or smearing. But if an AI encoder inserts a bear on a tricycle in the background, that would also be a lossy compression artifact in context.
As for frame interpolation, it could definitely be better, because the current algorithms out there are not good. It will not likely be more popular, since this is generally viewed as an artistic matter rather than a technical matter. For example, a lot of people hated the high frame rate in the Hobbit films despite the fact that it was a naturally high frame rate, filmed with high-frame-rate cameras. It was not the product of a kind-of-shitty algorithm applied after the fact.
- Comment on Court Bans Use of 'AI-Enhanced' Video Evidence Because That's Not How AI Works 2 months ago:
There are plenty of lossless codecs already
It remains to be seen, of course, but I expect to be able to get lossless (or nearly-lossless) video at a much lower bitrate, at the expense of a much larger and more compute/memory-intensive codec.
The way I see it working is that the codec would include a general-purpose model, and video files would be encoded for that model + a file-level plugin model (like a LoRA) that’s fitted for that specific video.
- Comment on mOLecuLaR maN 2 months ago:
Sounds like an excellent class. Probably should be a requirement rather than an elective tbh.
- Comment on Court Bans Use of 'AI-Enhanced' Video Evidence Because That's Not How AI Works 2 months ago:
AI-based video codecs are on the way. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it could be designed to be lossless or at least less lossy than modern codecs. But compression artifacts will likely be harder to identify as such. That’s a good thing for film and TV, but a bad thing for, say, security cameras.
The devil’s in the details and “AI” is way too broad a term. There are a lot of ways this could be implemented.
- Comment on Some of the Most Popular Websites Share Your Data With Over 1,500 Companies 2 months ago:
Somehow TV and print media functioned on advertising without such invasion for decades. Online publishing is much much cheaper than print publishing. And some of the biggest companies in the world, like Facebook and Google, make heaps off advertising. I don’t buy this argument at all. The exchange of value is overwhelmingly, unprecedentedly tilted toward advertisers. It is beyond reason.
- Comment on Ultimate Chronological Star Trek Viewing Guide 3 months ago:
This is true for pretty much any franchise. If you’re going to watch it all, you can’t go wrong with release order. That way you have the same context that original viewers did, and what the writers likely had in mind.
That doesn’t mean TOS the best starting point for newcomers, though, since they’re probably not committed to thousands of hours of Trek right out of the gate. They’re gonna bail if they don’t like the first few episodes they watch.
- Comment on El Salvador Will Keep Buying 1 Bitcoin Daily Until BTC 'Becomes Unaffordable' With Fiat Currencies, Says President Bukele – Featured Bitcoin News 3 months ago:
The headline said 1BTC, so I take it to mean “until the price of 1BTC is too high to buy with real money”. They’re not saying they’ll buy $66000 worth of bitcoin per day indefinitely, just 1 whole bitcoin per day, regardless of how the price fluctuates, for as long as that’s viable.
El Salvador doesn’t have its own currency; they use USD and recently bitcoin. I don’t know enough to say whether this makes sense.
- Comment on "How to help someone use a computer.", a guide from 1996 3 months ago:
Excellent point. I often find myself torn between providing all relevant context to get ahead of this, and keeping my posts short enough that people will actually read them.
- Comment on "How to help someone use a computer.", a guide from 1996 3 months ago:
This is all great advice, but I do want to add that it’s mainly for beginners in one-on-one contexts, and not always appropriate when dealing with technical users in a group setting. For example:
Find out what they’re really trying to do. Is there another way to go about it?
It’s frustrating in online communities when someone asks a technical question and is met with an interrogation instead of an answer, on the assumption that they don’t know what they want to do. Not just for the person asking the question, but also for future people arriving at the thread with the same question. In some cases it really derails the conversation.
Hierarchical threads like on Lemmy or Reddit tend to be better for this than flat threads or chat channels, since it’s easier to isolate and ignore red herrings. One reason I hate Discord and Slack for tech support.
- Comment on "How to help someone use a computer.", a guide from 1996 3 months ago:
I can’t confirm right now, but as I recall, macOS’s Spotlight search defaults to giving results from the Internet as well as applications, files, emails, contacts, and all sorts of things. It prioritizes local applications though, at least in my experience, and it returns those results quickly. On my work Mac, I’ve disabled most other options since that’s my primary use case for it. On my test Macs, there’s typically very little on them besides applications so I’m not totally sure how the defaults play out in practice these days.
I’m a few steps removed from desktop support at this point in my career, so I might be a little mixed up or out of date in my understanding.
I think there’s a lot to be said for having a single point of entry for search. Beginners might not distinguish between searching the web and searching local files. That’s a weird idea to me, but I formed my habits in an era before “web apps” and “cloud storage”. To me there’s a bold broad line between local resources and network resources, but for a new user I can see how this distinction would be confusing.
I’ve found KDE’s system for search confusing, since it has two different system search bars as well as the folder search bar in Dolphin. I frequently find myself opening the app search and typing in some simple arithmetic, forgetting that the calculator function is in the other search field, unlike on Mac or Windows. This isn’t necessarily “wrong”, but I do appreciate having one less thing to hold in my brain when I’m working on Mac or Windows, and I think the unified approach greatly improves discoverability.
- Comment on VR Headsets Are Approaching the Eye’s Resolution Limits 3 months ago:
I think it’s significantly higher than the Quest 3, but it’s kind of ridiculous to compare a $3500 productivity headset to a $500 gaming headset in the first place.
It’s hard to get totally accurate numbers without independent standardized evaluation. Calculating pixel density isn’t as straightforward with headsets as it is with regular displays.
There’s an interesting analysis of a bunch of different headsets on Reddit. They put a comparison column for equivalent viewing distance with different common monitor sizes/resolutions. e.g. they calculate that the density of the Apple Vision Pro is similar to a 32" 4K display at a mere 15"/38cm distance, which is definitely close enough to see pixels. These are only estimates, since we don’t know the per-eye FOV, or how exactly it’s warped from center to edge.
Reddit link: reddit.com/…/ppdfocused_table_of_various_headmoun…
Direct spreadsheet link: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/…/edit?usp=sharing
I mean, it’s still really good, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a giant chasm between “really good” and “the eye’s resolution limits”.
- Comment on VR Headsets Are Approaching the Eye’s Resolution Limits 3 months ago:
Oh great, another round of nonsense about the limits of human vision peddled by A) companies trying to trick you into thinking their products are great, and B) fools trying to cope with their buyer’s remorse and envy, and C) people with not-so-great eyesight who, for some reason, think that’s inconceivable.
We are nowhere near the limits of human visual acuity. It is trivial to prove this by experiment.