AmbitiousProcess
@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
(all links are an alternative frontend to Twitter for both privacy, and because they often block users who aren’t signed in from viewing posts)
I can’t find the original person that quote tweeted it with “update”, but I did find the original 6ixBuzz post, and in the comments you can see this guy saying "Here’s what they will look like 10 minutes later in that neighbourhood" and saying “of course it’s AI” in the comments to someone. Seems like he probably was the one to generate the image.
Other people are now AI generating videos of specifically black teenagers stealing from them, and claiming the image is an example of a "government plan gone awry". 🤦
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Holy shit, I didn’t even notice 💀
Looks like the service itself is real: https://equip.sport/
But maybe someone just wanted to farm outrage using it?
- Comment on brains on autopilot 1 week ago:
Super cool comment zloubida
- Comment on my own personal Chatgpt 1 week ago:
Phenominal satire.
- Comment on YouTube Premium Lite 1 week ago:
Who wouldn’t want to be a “pro” at having a machine think for them? Sign me up!!!! /s
- Comment on YouTube Premium Lite 1 week ago:
the main perk is not that it removes ads but that there will be slightly less of them.
It does remove ads in most videos, just not in Shorts, or on music videos. The whole deal is they’re essentially un-bundling a music subscription from YT Premium, which makes it cheaper, and is then better if you, say, watch YouTube, but already use Spotify for your music.
Essentially, you don’t see any ads when you watch videos, AKA no midrolls, but you might see a small banner ad above the list of next suggested videos to the right of the video player, and if you constantly scroll shorts they might toss some ads in there as well.
Personally, as someone who doesn’t use YouTube for music, and doesn’t like scrolling shorts, I see this as perfectly reasonable as a way to reduce the cost, especially when you can click the Theater mode button on any video to block out the majority of the suggested videos area by default before any sidebar ad would even make it on your screen.
- Comment on ICE agent threatens teenager for filming his vehicle, and pointing out that it illegally has no license plate. 1 week ago:
Imagine being so insecure that not only do you work for ICE to deport brown people because they scare you, but you get so scared when a literal teenager gets within a few feet of your fully enclosed metal vehicle that you have to charge at him while reaching for your gun 😂
- Comment on Toothbrush heads 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, one of the few electrified versions of traditional products that genuinely has a good reason to be electrified. There’s a lot of evidence showing they’re way better at cleaning your teeth than a regular toothbrush.
- Comment on Samsung's SSD warranty policy scammed me so I'm taking them to court. 4 weeks ago:
Yup.
Pull some strings to keep stories out of traditional print media about it? The stuff on social media has already been clipped and reposted a billion times.
Buried the plaintiff’s legal team in paperwork? Here’s another video on your obviously scummy tactics that clearly indicate to most average people you’re not acting in good faith and probably have something to hide/defend that’s unjust, making even less people trust your company going forward.
Know you won’t get sued for that much because it’s just one claimaint? A ton of people who watched the videos now want to sign on to a class action.
The only solution if they’re truly in the wrong is to fix the problem, or pay up in court.
…
Or hope it blows over because people’s memories are notoriously short so that sometimes works too 💀
- Comment on Samsung's SSD warranty policy scammed me so I'm taking them to court. 4 weeks ago:
I love it. Does more than just a lawsuit on its own since it simultaneously does public awareness and advocacy work, plus it’s kinda just entertaining to see people have beef with corpos
- Comment on YouTube now 1 month ago:
They used to, and they currently do too, but the current one isn’t meant to be an alternative to the like/dislike button like this portrays.
It’s most often in your feed, where occasionally it’ll show a video to you, then give you a tiny light blue box beneath it saying “how good of a recommendation is this” or something along those lines, then you rate it so they can both make the algorithm better overall, and fine-tune yours even if you don’t want to watch the video. (e.g. I might say “5 stars, this is a good recommendation,” but never watch it just because I don’t have the time. YouTube knows I like that topic now, just that I might not watch videos that are that long.)
- Comment on Would it be unnecessary or annoying if I put "boycott israel" post it note on a sodastream at Lidl? 2 months ago:
But will Lidl actually listen? That’s the real question.
They might not care if one person tells them that, or even if many of them do, especially if they make the calculus that those people will probably still be buying other things at Lidl anyways.
If sales for the product drops because people are putting sticky notes on them, knocking them over or hiding them behind other products, etc, then Lidl has a reason to not bother with the hassle.
- Comment on Would it be unnecessary or annoying if I put "boycott israel" post it note on a sodastream at Lidl? 2 months ago:
It also benefits movements through the radical flank effect. (e.g. when white people saw the Black Panther Party carrying guns to protect their community, MLK Jr’s fairly peaceful sit-ins seemed not that bad in comparison, and when having to make a choice on whether or not to give black people rights, it was easier to justify doing so if the perceived alternative was “black people in the streets with guns")
In this case, the options then become “buy products that always have random sticky notes and are telling me I’m a bad person” vs “grab the product that doesn’t have the sticky notes”.
If it becomes increasingly annoying to buy products which support Israel because there’s constantly little sticky notes/stickers, people pushing things further back on shelves or flipping products around, etc, then it becomes a lot easier to justify just… not bothering buying the products that are being boycotted. (and it also saves people the hassle of looking up which products are being boycotted, which just makes the lives of anti-Zionists easier)
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
without knowing there’s a deeper meaning to it.
Honestly I dunno if that’s necessarily the “actual” meaning behind it. (not that it can’t be the way someone technically means it, though)
You can genuinely just be saying “you’re lucky to be together with someone you love”, without also saying “I find that person you’re with attractive and want to have sex with them”
what else am i supposed to say when a friend finally gets a GF?
“Congrats, happy for you!” “You two look cute together!” “I’m glad you two hit it off!”
Don’t sweat it. Most people are fine with just a simple congratulatory statement. Doesn’t have to have any deep meaning or anything, but hey, “you’re a lucky man” doesn’t have to have a deeper meaning either.
- Comment on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Price Update - Xbox Wire 2 months ago:
I don’t think they’re shitting on “pricing coming down”. They’re shitting on “company raises pricing, faces backlash, promises not to do it again after clearly having no qualms about screwing over consumers”.
The point isn’t that “prices going down = bad”, it’s “prices going down ≠ company won’t screw you over later”
- Comment on Free resources 2 months ago:
I thought the same thing when I first read it!
- Comment on Free resources 2 months ago:
We call ‘em ALPRs (Automated License Plate Readers) here, but yeah it’s essentially the same thing.
Their cameras are regularly abused by police officers to stalk ex’s, have begun to be used outside their original scope, can be used illegally by one agency on behalf of another that shouldn’t have access, and have been used by Flock employees to, without permission from local authorities and against their own public statements, watch children in a gym for hours while partially erasing audit logs.
They also use Flock to monitor protestors, and track abortion seekers, all while lying about their effectiveness in preventing crime, threatening people who follow their actions, and leaving countless cameras publicly exposed without password protection, covering up vulnerabilities, and lying to city officials about Flock officials watching cameras, like the ones spying on children.
They’re really fucked up, and it’s my stance that the CEO of the company and any of the employees watching footage without consent should be criminally charged for espionage, and defrauding the public, among other things.
- Comment on Good luck figuring it out since it also doesn’t come with man pages 2 months ago:
Mozilla uses “they’re” to refer to Kit, but other than that there’s no explicit statement at all.
Kit is a companion, not a commentator. They’re not here to deliver punchlines. Kit shows up as a small signal that Firefox is working for you, then steps back so you can keep moving.
- Comment on Strange are afoot at the Walter Reed 2 months ago:
What are we even doing, man…
- Comment on Strange are afoot at the Walter Reed 2 months ago:
- Comment on Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website 3 months ago:
On the plus side, this kills the SEO market.
IMO this doesn’t kill the SEO market, it just brings it in-house, just like Google has tried to do with all kinds of other things. If you’ve ever seen the little dropdown question options in Google’s search results page that give you the answer right from the website without you having to visit it, you know what I’m talking about.
Just like the dropdowns, which simply take the website and use it as a way for Google to show you the answer rather than the site itself, this doesn’t kill the market for SEO, it just allows Google to decide how to “optimize” the results from their search engine to you, rather than the site itself, and earn more of a profit from it as a result.
- Comment on Spicy spicy 3 months ago:
For the love of god please do not diagnose yourself as being “neurospicy” based solely on if you like stacking coins by size 😭🙏
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 3 months ago:
You couldn’t make it look like an actual person without changing some of the details from the original.
I think it could have at least done without literally plumping up her lips and changing their shape, don’t you?
Sure, it looks more realistic, but it still alters how the character is intended to look within the game’s environment and story.
Hell, even the entire environment just… gets brighter. You can genuinely just see more in the shadows, fog becomes less apparent, etc. This, again, alters the original artistic intent, and changes how the game appears and plays relative to the original.
Plus, if you don’t like it, it’s 1 click away from just turning dlss off.
I am upset because:
- NVIDIA is wasting time and money developing something most people don’t want, rather than a form of DLSS that would genuinely improve people’s experience
- I do not want a world where every single game I play requires me to repeatedly disable this version of DLSS just for it to look the way the developers intended
- While I will certainly disable this (assuming they can even run it on just 1 GPU since it currently takes 2), a lot of people simply won’t, because they won’t realize it’s on, only that the game “feels off”. For a widespread, real-world example of this, take motion smoothing on TVs. Most people dislike the way it looks overall, but just assume it’s either how their TV is, or how the films are. The same effect will no doubt happen with games. People will just assume it’s something with their GPU, their monitor, or the way the developers built the game, all the while having that feeling that something is just a bit off or not as good as it should be. The uncanny valley effect is very real, and it’s what most people have a problem with here. It just reeks of “AI image trying to look like a person” rather than “video/photo of a person”
I am not upset because I think I personally can’t disable it. I don’t believe the world revolves around me, so I don’t judge something’s effects solely on how it will affect me and only me.
Just like motion smoothing, this will just be widespread, enabled by default, and something that claims to make things look “better”, while producing odd visual artifacts and an uncanny valley effect that many people won’t realize the root cause of, and will perpetually have a worse gaming experience from as a result. That is why I believe this is a problem.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 3 months ago:
Look closely at the images, what do you notice about the face?
Darker eyebrows, more pronounced eye bags, deeper red, more pronounced, and slightly more cracked lips, and accented shading and slight tweaks to facial shape to fit more traditional beauty standards.
It’s not just making it “more realistic”, it’s passing the artist’s original intent through a filter that actually changes the way the character looks. Using the traits I described earlier, you could assume different things about the character than was intended. Darker and larger eye bags could imply worse sleep. The cracked lips could signify worse health, but the color could imply better health. The shape and shading on her face overall also changes how attractive and average/unaverage she’s expected to appear in terms of looks.
Plus, when you think about how this is applied, it’s not just some static application to a character model. It’s effectively a full filter over your game. These traits could all change by the second as lighting or angle changes even slightly, which only makes it harder to determine the actual intended state and appearance of characters or an environment.
Things like this are visible in other images from the article, too.
For example, the older woman holding a wand. the wrinkles on her face darken and become so much more visible that you could be forgiven for thinking it was meant to be her like 5 or 10 years later, and on the image after that in the compare tool, the lighting on the dude’s face entirely changes to make him more front-lit.
This is fundamentally altering the way things look from the intent of the artists and developers.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 3 months ago:
It’s like when people look at a film deliberately animated with a particular framerate, see the version where someone had AI interpolate the frames to make it like 120 FPS, then say it looks objectively better than the original, because the only metric they can value a piece of media by at that point just seems to be “I need more frames”
Like In Into the Spider-Verse, when Miles is animated at 12 FPS, and the (more experienced) Peter Parker is animated at 24 FPS, but after Miles improves and gets a better hold of his skills, he gets animated at 24 FPS, too. The lower framerate subconsciously makes us interpret his movements as more choppy, inexperienced, and imprecise, on top of his existing animated movements, to even better sell the plot point of his inexperience.
Meanwhile, many people’s TVs have motion smoothing, which entirely destroys this effect and makes the film fundamentally less communicative as a result, even if on the surface people just say “It’s smoother so it’s better.”
- Comment on FADED. 🥴 3 months ago:
Yeah, normally I can at least understand what they’re trying to say, but here I just… I don’t know anymore 😭
- Comment on Aaaand it's gone 4 months ago:
To be fair to the massive multibillion dollar megacorporation…
It’s a private credit fund, where you invest money specifically to loan it to corporations at high interest rates, hoping they’ll pay it back, while a lot will just kind of go defunct. Loan sharking for corporations as an investment asset. It’s meant to be semi-liquid, not like a regular bank.
It’s often used for things like when a private equity fund wants to do a leveraged buyout of a company, where the company gets saddled with a ton of debt in exchange for the investors getting to milk it dry. Including companies I know you’ve heard of like Red Lobster, Toys R Us, Joann Fabrics, and a lot more.
Again, loan sharking, but for corporations. Can’t exclude them from exploitative financial mechanisms!
- Comment on Can some please explain to me why it is that your health insurance can deny you medication, even if your doctor says you need it? 4 months ago:
The insurance company is going to have a doctor who said you don’t need it.
To add on to this, my psychologist told me that he’s had antipsychotic meds denied by a urologist before, because the insurance companies often don’t actually care what field the doctor is in. All they care about is getting to say “a doctor” reviewed it.
- Comment on LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy 4 months ago:
This is something we’re gonna see a lot more of, and I don’t mean specifically “LLMs doing privacy violations”, though that’ll probably be a lot of it.
LLMs are really good at taking unstructured data (e.g. all your social media posts, usernames, aliases, writing style, hints about your location, time of activity, etc) and turning it into structured data. (e.g. name=this, city=that, political preference=them, etc). Why do you think most early uses of LLMs that were quickly deployed were just article summarizer tools? Unstructured data (articles) > Structured data (bullet points)
This is really good for surveillance, because it means they can take all your activity and condense it down into something that’s easier to parse and correlate. Other tools have existed to do this for a long time, (mostly in the hands of intelligence agencies) but this just makes it more accessible and easy to use, and adds some complexity to how it can operate.
I think we’re gonna see a lot more use of LLMs for things like this. Taking something unstructured, and making it structured, because hallucinations and things like that are a lot less common when the task is just reorganizing existing information, rather than coming up with something new. (though of course, hallucinations will never go away, and are still gonna be pretty prevalent)
That could be deanonymizing your accounts, or it could just be things like looking through all your files to sort them into better predefined categories, or things like what Mozilla does with their tab groups where you can have it suggest other tabs that would fit into that group, and a local model figures out which tabs belong in which topic (with pretty good accuracy in my experience.)
Unfortunately, companies have very little interest in making your life easier by doing things like sorting your files for you, because they already are quite disinterested in making their systems easy to use if it doesn’t directly generate a profit (cough cough- Microslop), and have a much larger interest in doing things like tracking you to sell you some new crap.
- Comment on Most Of Billionaires’ $7.6 Trillion Has Never Been Taxed - Americans For Tax Fairness 4 months ago:
LVT is the best tax.
LVT is a pretty good tax, but you don’t use it in isolation. It exists to make property taxes more progressive, not to make taxation as a whole more progressive.
To do that, you need to replace regressive taxes like the sales tax with progressive taxes like wealth and income taxes, and have rising tax brackets (or sloped steadily increasing taxes) that effectively account for less and less of people’s acquired wealth being necessary or good for society as the amount grows larger.
There should be a minimum tax on unrealized capital gains.
Totally agree, though I think to a degree there should be some limits, (e.g. under $1m in assets, adjusted for inflation, it doesn’t apply) so regular people don’t have to worry about things like managing how much assets they’ll have to liquidate to pay their taxes each year, which would make planning for retirement very difficult.
Most of the stock market is owned by the ultra wealthy anyways, so the tax would still account for most capital gains while making everyone else’s lives much easier.
