davehtaylor
@davehtaylor@beehaw.org
- Comment on Chatbot that caused teen’s suicide is now more dangerous for kids, lawsuit says 1 month ago:
If a HumanA pushed and convinced HumanB to kill themselves, then HumanA caused it. IMO they murdered them. It doesn’t matter if they didn’t pull the trigger. I don’t care what the legal definitions say.
If a chatbot did the same thing, it’s no different. Except in this case, it’s a team of developers behind it that did so, that allowed it to do so. Character.ai has blood on their hands, should be completely dismantled, and every single person at that company tried for manslaughter.
- Comment on Please ban data caps, Internet users tell FCC 1 month ago:
It also makes no sense with the bandwidth you’re given.
For example, if you have a 1 Gb/s connection, that’s 0.125 GB/second, which comes out to about 320 TB/month if you fully use that bandwidth. Giving you a pipe that can download 320 TB but then limiting it to, say, 1 TB/month makes no goddamned sense whatsoever. You’re giving people a sports car and telling them they can’t drive over 15 mph.
- Comment on Godot fork- Redot emerges after recent events within the Godot project. 2 months ago:
Seems like OP just wants to give these bigoted shitstains more of a platform
- Comment on Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible 2 months ago:
What remains as methods of protest after this?
Deleting your account and leaving the site. Reddit clearly doesn’t care about the users, and hasn’t for a very, very long time. Remaining there justifies their actions.
- Comment on Horizon Zero Dawn Dev Addresses Criticism Over Aloy’s Remastered Look 2 months ago:
They did the shitty misogynistic tweet:
- Comment on The burning of the Library of Alexandria for fandoms 3 months ago:
I would disagree. Bluesky has no algorithm and it’s growing quite rapidly. And I think that a large part of that is just having the people there that one might want to follow, and fosters community and conversation. A place like Threads absolutely does not do that. Mastodon is just an impenetrable mess from a UX perspective. The average user doesn’t care about federation and needs a solid and understandable entry point. Bluesky is federated but 90% of the people there have no idea what that means.
but trying to sidestep it completely like Mastodon is is just going to result in a network that never hits the critical mass necessary to start exponential growth
If keeping algo-gaming engagement bait off the platform is a price a platform has to pay, then I’m happily willing to accept that.
- Comment on The burning of the Library of Alexandria for fandoms 3 months ago:
Its the absolute lack of algorithm
“It’s the absolute lack of a way to game the system with engagement bait and reward rage-posting”
Fixed that for you.
It’s not a matter for average users, it’s a matter for the people who farm engagement and post 300 times per day. Having a space that isn’t dominated by accounts like that is a good thing. It’s why Threads is such a miserable place. The algo there is aggressive and heavily rewards this kind of shit. Accounts like that provide no value and create toxic spaces full of rage and misinformation just to keep the waters churning and keep a constant flow of vapid “content”. It’s gross, and we are so much the better if we lose a ton of them.
- Comment on Shein Is Suing Temu For Copyright Infringement 3 months ago:
letthemfight.jpg
- Comment on Kim Dotcom to be extradited from New Zealand to US 4 months ago:
Anyone who holds up Kim Dotcom and/or Julian Assange as political prisoners or targets of wrongful prosecution and persecution is absolutely not someone who should be trusted for any kind of opinion
- Comment on Forum User Returns After 100,000 Hour Ban to Continue the Same Argument That Got Them Banned in 2013 5 months ago:
SA is just 4chan in a tuxedo. Both are cesspits.
- Comment on 4chan Is Using TikTok Owner ByteDance's Hidden AI App to Generate Porn 5 months ago:
You seem to not understand the scale at which these things operate. We’re not talking about niche tools that only incels and creeps will use to jerk off to CP, we’re talking about tools that can be used to manipulate, spread mis- and disinformation, and imitate actual people doing things they wouldn’t normally do, and can do so at a scale that is exponentially greater than anything we’ve ever seen.
Go take a look at Facebook. Log out of YouTube and look at the front page. Try to do a Google search. Look at the absolute flood of AI generated shit. I know a lot of authors of short fiction, and the publications that they submit to that normally see a couple hundred to a couple thousands of submission per month have been flooded with hundreds of thousands of submissions per month, all AI garbage.
Now imagine it becomes so good that it’s indistinguishable from the real. Pics, vids, articles. The scale and speed at which people can create society-level harm and destroy lives is incomprehensible. This is not a “think of the children” thing. This is an inflection point where you will never know if the video you just saw of a political candidate calling for the extermination of X group is real or not. But the harms and consequences will be real. You will see revenge porn not just of nudes, but of videos of people seemingly doing horrific acts, and having their lives ruined because of it. And it will happen so fast and in such a flood that nothing will be able to stop it or counter it, because no one will see the truth buried in the inundation.
Again, we could do some of this now, but not at the unimaginable scale or speed that AI generation allows for.
This is not a good thing. And if this is the world you want, then there is no reasoning with you. You are truly lost.
- Comment on 4chan Is Using TikTok Owner ByteDance's Hidden AI App to Generate Porn 5 months ago:
Hang on. Are you actually saying that making fake porn of teenagers without their consent is a good thing because it teaches valuable skills?!
- Comment on 4chan Is Using TikTok Owner ByteDance's Hidden AI App to Generate Porn 5 months ago:
This right here.
I’m so fucking sick of the “it’s just a tool” or “sO YoU wANna BAn EvErYthiNG?!” bullshit. It’s all bad faith garbage that people hide behind because they want the results of these “tools.” They want the AI porn fakes of teenagers and celebrities (because they’re pathetic creeps and incels with no concept of dignity or consent). They want to be able to rip off actual artists so they can pretend like they’ve done something “creative” so they can get social media clout. They’re completely unserious people who can’t be reasoned with. They need to be shunned and shamed.
- Comment on Is social media fuelling political polarisation? 5 months ago:
On a policy level, if we are to bring about a more harmonious Internet (and civil society), we will likely have to tackle wealth inequality and make our political institutions more democratic.
Really burying the lede there.
Another big factor is a lack of moderation, as well as the things that get platformed. People sit and stew in a broth of violent, hateful rhetoric all day long because platforms not only allow that kind of content, but massively profit from it. We seriously need social media companies, podcast apps, YouTube and other video hosting sites, etc. to step the fuck up and deplatform misinformation, disinformation, bigotry, hatemongering, and ragebait. Do not give it light. Do not give it oxygen. Smother it. Ban it. And be extremely aggressive about it. You wanna cry about censorship? Go ahead. But the first amendment doesn’t apply to private companies, and you are also free to setup your own website/service/app/whatever and spew your own bile there.
We further need social media companies to change their algorithms to prevent them from rewarding inflammatory posts. People want to have millions of followers and be big stars on the web, and ragebait, lies, and misinformation are perfect ways to do that. It’s gets you to the top of the heap because there’s no such thing as a “bad” click. You still watched it. You still replied (even if to refute it). And that gave it a boost. That shit has to stop. The entire social landscape is built on top of this inflammatory foundation.
- Comment on A New Study Investigates 'The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter' To Mastodon 6 months ago:
I definitely agree Bluesky is the best alternative right now. It feels like twitter used to, but with much better moderation and no Dorsey (or Musk). And I love things like Aegis, and Feeds.
Threads’ algorithm is extremely aggressive and just viewing a single post will send your entire feed into reccs for that kind of thing. It constantly refreshes, making discovery and finding things extremely difficult. And it’s just Instagram-y. It’s not about building community, it’s just there for throwaway “content.”
But I do agree that Bluesky is doing federation in a way that simplifies it for the users. Non-tech users can just be there and don’t even have to think about it. In fact, most people there (at least across my feeds) have no idea what Federation even is or means. If others want to federate or hang somewhere else and have the knowledge to do that, they can. So they make it much more frictionless.
- Comment on A New Study Investigates 'The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter' To Mastodon 6 months ago:
Because federation is a mess, and doesn’t really solve the problem. There’s no quick elevator pitch that non-technical people can understand, on-boarding is painful, and even if you as the publisher understand it, your audience may not.
- Comment on OpenAI says Russian and Israeli groups used its tools to spread disinformation 6 months ago:
Exactly.
Gods this whole “if we outlaw AI only outlaws will have AI” bullshit is so so tiresome and naive
- Comment on OpenAI says Russian and Israeli groups used its tools to spread disinformation 6 months ago:
You mean to tell me that the purpose-built disinformation machine that you developed has been used by malicious actors to spread disinformation?!
- Comment on German carmaker Volkswagen says forced labour in one of its sub-supplier's plants in China was not identified as 'no full supply chain transparency exists' 6 months ago:
WTF are you talking about, “trapping” you?
If you can’t give a full-throated condemnation of a company using slave labor, then I don’t know what your position is supposed to be.
- Comment on German carmaker Volkswagen says forced labour in one of its sub-supplier's plants in China was not identified as 'no full supply chain transparency exists' 6 months ago:
Wait. We’re talking about making sure a company isn’t using slave labor in their supply chain, and creating consequences for them doing so. And that’s a problem for you? You think it’s fucked up that a company forced to abide by rules preventing them from using slave labor?
- Comment on German carmaker Volkswagen says forced labour in one of its sub-supplier's plants in China was not identified as 'no full supply chain transparency exists' 6 months ago:
Yeah I think I agree. The law should be: if you can’t positively confirm it’s clean, you can’t use it.
We should have standards for the treatment of people, and strive not to participate in or reward those who treat people in unacceptable ways.
Totally agree.
It’s not good for a country to create an unfair marketplace. And it is an unfair marketplace when rules which acutely affect only certain people drastically for the good of all, are implemented too quickly to adapt to without major setbacks.
Just saying it should be phased in, to minimize local economic tearing.
Totally disagree.
Fines/tariffs/etc. are just cost of doing business for big business. Slowly enforcing regulation gives companies time to hedge, shuffle, and deflect without actually doing anything. Consequences should be hard and fast. Economies be damned. If an economy can’t stand on its own without companies acting ethically, or with them being punished for it, then it shouldn’t stand at all.
- Comment on German carmaker Volkswagen says forced labour in one of its sub-supplier's plants in China was not identified as 'no full supply chain transparency exists' 6 months ago:
Yes, that’s exactly what I expect. If you can’t verify with 100% certainty that your supply chain isn’t using slave labor, then you stop using that supply chain. And if that costs the company an entire market, or even causes the company to fail, then so be it.
- Comment on Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track 7 months ago:
And that’s the problem. The average person isn’t looking for it, and will absolutely not see it. As long as it’s good enough, that’s all that matters. A plausible enough video of Joe Biden talking about rounding up Christians into internment camps that gets shared on Facebook, or something like that which panders to right-wing bigotry, is enough to get people going. Even real images and videos that are misconception are enough, and even when a link is there that disproves the caption.
People seriously underestimate just how horrifying the possibilities are with this shit. And as high stakes as this election cycle is, and the state of politics in this country, the tendency for people to latch on to anything that affirms their preexisting ideals creates a fucking minefield
- Comment on It’s the End of the Web as We Know It 7 months ago:
- The largest code contributors to Linux are corporate contributions
- Regular people who contribute to OSS do so as a passion project, as a hobby, and have other unrelated jobs that pay the bills. Those people still have to make a living, they’re just not doing it from their software contributions. Journalism isn’t a hobby and you can’t work a day job and still be an effective journalist. News orgs don’t come together as hobby projects.
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
Am I misunderstanding, or is ActivityPub just reinventing RSS?
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon all need to be broken up into a thousand different companies, same as we did with AT&T.
And unlike with AT&T, after divestiture there needs to be an order in place that perpetually prevents the divested companies from ever merging or buying each other up. At this point AT&T has almost completely re-formed from the companies it was broken into, and that should never have been allowed.
And for fucks sake we need to make the fine for white collar crime that extends state lines to necessitate the forfeiture of the entire C-suite’s and board of directors assets, both domestically and internationally, upon threat of seal team 6. Empty their bank accounts and leave them with nothing
Absolutely this. We need to abolish corporate personhood, and hold company leadership directly responsible for the company’s behavior. Since it is the people who are doing these things. The “company” isn’t some autonomous entity that has a will of its own. People drive it, and those people should be held accountable.
- Comment on AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO' 7 months ago:
while websites just repeating the search phrase over and over with no answer in sight are at the top
A decade or so ago, this was a really bad problem, especially with sites like Experts Exchange et al. Content farms just grabbing your query and puking back to you. Or, sites that would take a thread on one forum, and then replicate it across 10 other sites as though they’re different forums, but it’s the exact same posts. But it’s gotten so, so, so much worse in the last year or so. Google searches these days are like wading through a septic tank trying to find a microgram of gold.
- Comment on AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO' 7 months ago:
SEO disgusts me
Gods yes. It basically steamrolls everything and you end up with two situations: people who knowingly game the algorithm for malicious intent and pollute search engines and media platforms, or you have people who are earnestly playing to the algorithm to help their “content” get noticed because that’s the only way it will get noticed. It creates this homogeneous landscape where everything looks the same, everyone’s doing and posting the same things, everyone is chasing trends and virality, and no one is doing anything interesting or creative anymore because novel ideas that aren’t SEO’d to death don’t get noticed.
So what we end up with is our current situation: a toxic landscape of “influencers”, “content creators”, content farms, ad farms, bots, etc. polluting everything, and people with genuine passion and interesting ideas getting buried under a sea of engagement bait, rage-bait, and disguised ads.
- Comment on [deleted] 8 months ago:
I absolutely agree we need this. But the problem stated in the article
The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
is the crux of it all, and without violence or extreme governmental measures forcibly breaking up big tech companies, the banning of selling personal data, etc. (all of which would also require violence because our government absolutely will not do these things) this simply isn’t going to be fixed. Politely asking billionaires to give up their captive revenue streams, and the power they wield with their platforms, will never produce results. And “well, what if we all just delete Instagram/Facebook/et al?” isn’t an answer either. “Content creators” are tied to these platforms for their own revenue streams and livelihoods, and they’re not going to give that up either. And for the most part, a large part of the population simply does not care enough.
The rise of smartphones in the late 2000’s really heralded the beginning of this downfall. There are walled gardens to be found all up and down the pipeline: the phone OEM, the OS devs, the apps and their platforms, the app stores, the service providers, etc. And you now have a device in your pocket that has always on internet connection either through wifi or cellular, a GPS radio, accelerometers, cameras, microphones, NFC, bluetooth, and all of these way to track literally everything about your life: everywhere you go, every app you use, every website you visit, listen to everything you say, and watch everything you do. And because it’s all so convenient, we willingly allowed ourselves to accept this unprecedented level of invasiveness and control.
The people who have that kind of power will not give it up willingly. And our government is too invested and has its fingers too far into all of it to do anything about it. I truly do not believe we’ll see something come along the way FB killed MySpace. Nothing is going to do that to Meta now. They’re too big and have too much power. There’s no market solution. There’s no regulatory will.
Nothing short of violence would ever be able to fix this. And I don’t see any kind of critical mass on the part of average folk to rise up against big tech to fight back, no matter how much information you show them, or how much you explain the dire need.
- Comment on Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions 8 months ago:
“Question every narrative, but don’t question these things. Don’t show bias, but here are your biases.” These chuds don’t even hear themselves. They just want to see Arya(n) ramble on about great replacement theory or trans women in bathrooms. They don’t think their bile is hate speech because they think they’re on the side of “facts” and everyone else is an idiot who refuses to see reality. It’s giving strong “I’m not a bigot, really is like that. It’s science” vibes.
