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- Comment on Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog 2 weeks ago:
To be totally clear, the UK has been a fucked up place for centuries, I don’t think Meta fundamentally changed the culture.
Having said that, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc are tools that enable political influence over the population at levels that were previously unimaginable. Look into Cambridge Analytica a bit or borrow Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie from your local library for details.
Starting as early as 2012 we have evidence that Facebook was pivotal in stoking racial tensions in Myanmar, leading to a genocide.
There’s evidence that Meta was a major factor in Brexit, which more specifically relates to my claim with respect to influence in the UK.
The US election in 2016 was clearly influenced by Meta platforms, including taking Russian money to stoke racial tensions in line with the Russian Manifesto, The Foundations of Geopolitics.
I’m currently reading through Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, which is a memoir about how these systems were conceptualized and built at Facebook, and so far I’d recommend it.
Obviously Meta isn’t the only problem, Tiktok is clearly a problem of similar size and scope, and other social apps have their own challenges (X being owned by the richest man alive and actively influencing the algorithm, for example), but in many ways Meta is the OG, and blazed the trail for others.
- Comment on Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog 2 weeks ago:
Meta happened. UK, US, all over the world there is a correlation between the adoption of Meta’s products and the corrosion of basic human rights.
- Comment on ‘Invasive, deceptive, and unlawful’: Texas says your TV is tracking you illegally, and is suing to stop the dreaded Automatic Content Recognition 2 weeks ago:
You should try asking people about the last EULA they read the next time you’re at a party. You’re gonna be blown away.
- Comment on It just keeps getting worse - Firefox to "evolve into a modern AI browser" 2 weeks ago:
But how could the trolls enrage well meaning people into moving to a less privacy respecting browser if the post wasn’t designed for performative outrage?
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 1 month ago:
A buddy of mine works for a fortune 500 company that started giving out MacBooks as the standard hardware this year. Apparently you need to jump through a bunch of hoops if you want to run Windows. I was shocked to hear it but Microsoft deserves to be humbled.
- Comment on Local hero: 'DC sandwich guy' found not guilty of assaulting officer with sub 1 month ago:
Nothing gets me ready to oppose fascism like some jury nullification in the morning. Should be part of every complete breakfast.
- Comment on 3 months ago:
Literally everything you said is just dumb hater bullshit. You added nothing to the discussion.
- Comment on AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America 3 months ago:
It’s too bad there isn’t a way to use something like a flipper zero to compromise the cameras and simply disable them, or insert malicious video files into their network…
- Comment on AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America 3 months ago:
Oh I agree that you won’t be able to fire your shotgun in a large urban area, but if you’re someplace less densely populated I can imagine being able to drive up from behind in the middle of the night…
It’s too bad there isn’t an easier way to deal with this problem, especially in the instances where the cameras are being installed without consent.
Akin to having foreign adversaries set up a spy network within our borders, and instead of being punished for it, many law enforcement agencies are choosing to buy the subscription plan!
- Comment on AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America 3 months ago:
Anyone have any intel on how well these cameras hold up against buckshot?
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 3 months ago:
What do you think the letters LLM stand for, pal?
- Comment on The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made 4 months ago:
This is the clearest explanation for Disco Elysium I’ve ever read, thank you.
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 5 months ago:
Lovely, thanks for the reminder on massgrave. I made the switch to Linux and haven’t looked back, but there are some games that require root kits that I’d like to play so I was considering virtualizing Windows and this would be perfect.
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 5 months ago:
Discord… Still isn’t public?
They’re certainly talking about it but they haven’t announced a date yet.
Having said that, element and matrix are both more privacy respecting so I do agree with the recommendation in general.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 6 months ago:
No. I want to make my voice loud enough for me to stop at a red light and ask the guy behind me if there is a proctology emergency or if they could stop riding my ass, and savor their expression as it dawns on them what is happening.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 6 months ago:
Yeah this is exactly what I have in mind. I want to feel like Smokey the Bandit calling people out for bad behavior with a receiver that has a coiled cable attached to it, at a minimum.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 6 months ago:
Since we’re all throwing random ideas out here, I want to equip my vehicle with an annoyingly loud external speaker so that when someone near me does something dumb, I can personally shame them.
- Comment on Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates 6 months ago:
Okay Verstappen calm down there
- Comment on What AI Thinks It Knows About You | What happens when people can see what assumptions a large language model is making about them? 7 months ago:
Great article, thanks for sharing it OP.
For example, the Anthropic researchers who located the concept of the Golden Gate Bridge within Claude didn’t just identify the regions of the model that lit up when the bridge was on Claude’s mind. They took a profound next step: They tweaked the model so that the weights in those regions were 10 times stronger than they’d been before. This form of “clamping” the model weights meant that even if the Golden Gate Bridge was not mentioned in a given prompt, or was not somehow a natural answer to a user’s question on the basis of its regular training and tuning, the activations of those regions would always be high.
The result? Clamping those weights enough made Claude obsess about the Golden Gate Bridge. As Anthropic described it:
If you ask this “Golden Gate Claude” how to spend $10, it will recommend using it to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and pay the toll. If you ask it to write a love story, it’ll tell you a tale of a car who can’t wait to cross its beloved bridge on a foggy day. If you ask it what it imagines it looks like, it will likely tell you that it imagines it looks like the Golden Gate Bridge.
Okay, now imagine you’re Elon Musk and you really want to change hearts and minds on the topic of, for example, white supremacy. AI chatbots have the potential to fundamentally change how a wide swath of people perceive reality.
If we think the reality distortion bubble is bad now (MAGAsphere, etc), how bad will things get when people implicitly trust the output from these models and the underlying process by which the model decides how to present information is weighted towards particular ideologies? Considering the rest of the article, which explores the way in which chatbots attempt to create a profile for the user and serve different content based on that profile, now it will be even easier to identify those most susceptible to mis/disinformation and deliver it with a cheery tone.
How might we, as a society, create a process for conducting oversight for these “tools”? We need a cohesive approach that can be explained to policymakers in a way that will call them to action on this issue.
- Comment on Google's AI now listens to your English language phone conversations 7 months ago:
on device scam detection
I know I’ll be downvoted into oblivion as I can hardly believe I’ve formed this opinion myself, but tbh this is a good application for some of this AI tech.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine grew up well-off; from an immigrant family but their parents were educated and in a lucrative profession so he always went to private schools etc. Fast forward to about 10 years after all the kids moved out; the parents had divorced amicably and his mom had a sizeable retirement along with the payout she had from the divorce. In the 7 figures - she never had to worry about money.
Anywho, mom ran into some medical issues so the kids had to get involved with her finances again, as she couldn’t do it herself. Turns out that over the course of months or years, mom had been getting scammed to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars at a time, to the point where she had actually taken out a mortgage on the home she previously owned outright. They’re still sorting things out but the number he has tossed out in the past is ~$1.4M that got wired overseas and is just… gone now.
So yes, I probably won’t turn this feature on myself, but for the tens of millions of uneducated and inept people out there, this could genuinely make a difference in avoiding some catastrophic outcomes. It certainly isn’t a perfect solution, but I suspect my friend would rate it as much better than nothing, and I would argue that this falls short of being “strictly evil”.
- Comment on Mark Zuckerberg Thinks You Don't Have Enough Friends and His Chatbots Are the Answer 7 months ago:
Yes, the continued consolidation of the economy into everything “Big” is the problem. Survival of the fittest only works as a core component of the economic philosophy if we allow firms to be out-competed and for market shifts to occur.
Ever-increasing profit is not a problem if a consummate increase in service or product quality comes along for the ride. This is how an economy expands. We all want this, even if it creates turbulence at the individual or community level.
Consolidating into entities that are too big to fail is a problem. Give me Zuck Prime. This is literally why we are all on Lemmy, is it not?
- Comment on What would this list look like for your generation? 8 months ago:
Only if they receive the message that the left offers solutions, and not just more chaos.
- Comment on Microsoft rolls Windows Recall out to the public nearly a year after announcing it 8 months ago:
I was in a similar boat and have found modern Linux to be somewhere between Windows XP and Windows 10 in terms of convenience and having it “just work”. However, I reckon I’ve spent less time troubleshooting than I would spend raging at the bullshit Microsoft keeps trying to shove down your throat in Windows. On balance I’m counting it as a win, and I suspect you will too.
- Comment on Blue Shield of California shared the private health data of millions with Google for years 8 months ago:
There’s no PHI noted in the disclosure, so it is more likely that nothing happens. Boring dystopia.
- Comment on Discord is verifying some users’ age with ID and facial scans 8 months ago:
Also don’t forget they’re planning an IPO this year to massively accelerate the enshittification. Surely their investors wouldn’t demand that this biometric data be monetized.
- Comment on Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government 8 months ago:
Oh I see here that those were your
top tiergas station tier graphics. Your eagerness to share knowledge that gets you excited is commendable and people like you are what makes Lemmy worth using. I hope you have a terrific day. - Comment on Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government 8 months ago:
Idk if you made those technical diagrams yourself but I genuinely enjoyed them.
- Comment on Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’ 8 months ago:
When you see people on Lemmy casually joking about eating the rich, they’re talking about you.
- Comment on Black Mirror’s pessimism porn won’t lead us to a better future | Louis Anslow 8 months ago:
The term op-ed is literally short for “opposite the editorial page”, and the idea is that it is an opportunity for opposing viewpoints to be brought into the discussion for consideration. The fact that the author is a moron does not besmirch the quality of the Guardian writ large.
- Comment on France to ban students from keeping smartphones in schools 8 months ago:
Motherfucker how long do you think humans have been around for? Okay, sure, soap has been around for like 6k years, wow, such a long time. Modern humans have been fumbling around figuring shit out like an untrained ai model for the last 60k-160k years. Quick math shows us that for somewhere between 54k and 154k years of our history as a species, no soap. MILLENIA!
Drinking water: you’re making a distinction between clean, as in unpolluted by chemicals and other substances, and cleaned drinking water, which has been processed by humans to make it fit to drink with a lower risk of causing illness. Clean water has obviously been around for eons, but cleaned water, as I believe OP was describing, is a much more modern concept.
Showers: “try skipping a shower for a day”? Motherfucking neckbeard no, shower every fucking day. Try it, people might find you somewhat less repulsive until you open your mouth.