XLE
@XLE@piefed.social
- Comment on ‘We’re plausibly close to crossing the line’: are warnings of uncontrollable AI coming true? 5 days ago:
It’s almost suspiciously convenient that politicians are being lobbied into demanding “killswitches” for the one thing that already has a killswitch built in, but not for the things that actually need them
- Comment on ‘We’re plausibly close to crossing the line’: are warnings of uncontrollable AI coming true? 5 days ago:
I remember when GPT2 was “too dangerous to release” back in 2019. Funny how Sam Altman released it anyway.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@beehaw.org | 6 comments
- Comment on Mozilla launches ad blocking for Firefox on iOS 1 week ago:
Safari has uBlock Origin Lite.
iOS also has Brave, which apparently created the adblock engine Mozilla borrowed (and weakened)
iOS also has an independently developed browser with true uBlock Origin support. It doesn’t have official App Store support, but Mozilla could lobby for it.
- Comment on Gold miners are having a better month than chips did in years 1 week ago:
This is a very funny graphic to have in the middle of the article
- Comment on New Twitter launches, says Musk’s X gave up the name 1 week ago:
Regardless of what people think about AI, must be a real slap in the face to go to that homepage and see AI-generated copy, go to the “pay $40 for early access” page, and see AI-generated logos for the various paid tiers.
Looks like let another cynical attempt to cash in on old IP. The last one was Digg, which was just as disappointing, but it’s actually operational and you can see it suck (read: repost Twitter tweets) in real time.
- Comment on Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform 1 week ago:
Yet another article written by Mike Masnick, tech reporter with a huge conflict of interest (he’s a Director at Bluesky, a social network).
The classic case with Meta is that many of its efforts to study how to make its platforms safer were used against the company as proof that “they knew!” their platforms were unsafe!
The lesson for the rest of the tech industry is grim and unambiguous: never study whether your own platform is causing harm. The mere existence of the research will be turned into Exhibit A that “they knew,” both in the court of public opinion and in actual courts.
What strange framing.
Meta wasn’t learning about safety out of the kindness of their hearts. They were identifying harmful features and keeping them. They were identifying addictive features and focusing on building them.
We don’t know this because Meta wanted us to know. It’s whistleblowers who testified about it.
there are some oddly specific requirements:
Meta SMPs will disable Teen Users from applying Cosmetic Procedure Filters to their content.
The agreement clarifies that this means:
… any digital filter or augmented reality (AR) effect that distorts, sculpts, redefines, or idealizes a user’s face in a way that cannot be achieved without cosmetic surgery or extreme makeup techniques.
And, sure, I can understand why such content might be unhealthy for teens. But it is, in fact, Constitutionally-protected speech.
This is such a reach. The best argument Mike can give in favor of face filters is that they’re free speech, apparently, which is dubious (we’ve already decided that under-13s don’t get any social media “speech” at all). Maybe Mike is in favor of removing that caveat too.
- Comment on Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk: Why Jeff Bezos once called it ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ 2 weeks ago:
Ironically, according to the article, the underpaid workers had actually started using it. Seems like Amazon got a taste of the future they advertised, and decided they didn’t want it themselves.
- Comment on All AI Data Centers Under Construction Could Emit as Much CO₂ as 24 Million Cars 2 weeks ago:
The article talks about the emissions of cars on the road i.e. actively polluting, not cars in existence (for people who didn’t was the article 😉)
- Comment on Anthropic expected to tell investors it sees over $30 trillion in potential revenue, WSJ reports 2 weeks ago:
Anthropic already shifting from monthly annualized revenue announcements, to speculative revenue announcements… That’s a good sign, right?
- Comment on Logging In Was Never Supposed to Be This Complicated 2 weeks ago:
There are so many downsides to this method compared to a password manager too. There’s no encryption, email itself is a minefield when it comes to decent security practices, and I’ve often been stuck waiting for a login link to arrive before I can actually use whatever I was trying to manage.
- Comment on YouTube Premium is getting yet another price hike for users across the globe 2 weeks ago:
€13.99 to €15.99 is $16.33 to $18.66. Is Google providing either of those numbers in value?
- Comment on Apple lays off staffers ahead of CEO change 2 weeks ago:
From the same URL:
The Big Apple has a new claim to fame. According to a recent report, New York City has overtaken Silicon Valley to become North America’s top market for tech jobs. The report, by commercial real estate firm CBRE, found that the New York metro area had 394,000 techies at the end of last year, while the San Francisco Bay area’s total dipped to roughly 375,000.
Congratulations to New York, the better Apple
- Comment on Is Vine back? Short-form video-sharing app Divine opens to public 2 weeks ago:
Nostr was made by cryptobros (including Head Bro Jack Dorsey) basically for exchanging cryptocurrency.
Everything @Sxan@piefed.zip said about it, I agree with
- Comment on There's No Reason to Buy a New Phone Anymore 3 weeks ago:
Globally, the size of the industry could reach $153.4 billion this year…
For reference this is the “Second-hand Electronic Products Market”; I’ve never heard it referred to as an industry but I guess it is. And good. It’s deserved. Phone manufactures certainly don’t deserve credit for mediocre devices.
as Nabila Popal, a senior director at the International Data Corporation, reminded me, prices reflect demand: If people keep buying up the used gadgets, those prices are bound to shoot up, too.
Hopefully it’ll be less extreme than with desktops/RAM, though. Phones are at least single units that aren’t so easy to be hoarded or cannibalized for the most expensive parts in them. Most people who want a good phone won’t go out and buy 4-8 mediocre ones. Most people who want a good phone can settle for a popular flagship across several years manufacture, which might have been leased out previously.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Facebook users are the parents, aunts, uncles, and technologically illiterate friends of uBO users :)
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Website seems kinda sus (via Reddit)
My experience with StackSocial is mixed. Yes, I did buy MS Office Professional 2021 from them, and successfully downloaded the software, and the product key worked for me. The software functions as expected. However, I started getting massive amounts of spam, mostly from east European countries, in my inbox. I had to block the spam country codes on my email provider’s webpage (Yahoo) and route the email from Stack Social, which they send out multiple times per day, to my Junk folder automatically. It took a while to get rid of most of the spam. I still get an odd one here and there after 2 years.
I’d take the deal if I knew it was basically a donation towards whoever’s maintaining the filters, I’m just not sure about where that cash is going.
And in a case like this I’d want to use a disposable email address and disposable card for the actual purchase. Which I have (hooray) but most people may not
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
I don’t like this thought process for all the reasons I listed above. I hate Facebook, but I have friends who either appreciate it or need it for things like work.
But even if you consider all Facebook users to be inferior by nature, this blocking won’t stop on Facebook. If it works, why would it?
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
It’s a small team, they do great work and keep the internet functional for a huge chunk of us, and they’re burned out. It’s a defeat.
Putting work into blocking any ads is phenomenal, and tackling Facebook as long as they did is heroic, full stop. I’m a little bummed that there seems to be no way to donate to the uAssets team.
However no one who uses adblock should be using Facebook either, it’s a garbage platform that is literally 97% ads.
I hate Facebook with a burning passion, but I believe it’s important to keep blocking ads on it because
- Philosophically, ad blockers aren’t just for niche websites, they are supposed to be general-purpose content blockers for literally everybody, which is part of the purpose of web browsers: to be a user agent. (I saw a lot of people use this point back when Google was contemplating implementing Manifest V3, which ultimately prevented as users from using a browser the way they chose)
- I bet a lot of people who use content blockers are not nearly as invested in privacy technology as us, which is perfectly fine, especially if it provides a gateway into being more aware.
- The more normalized content blocking is (e.g. if it’s even for Facebook boomers who don’t care about privacy), the harder it is for it to be written off as some niche activity.
- Comment on Judge rules Meta caused "public nuisance" and must fund mental health treatment 4 weeks ago:
Meta said it will appeal the ruling, telling media outlets, “We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content.”
Meanwhile in the real world:
According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2018 an engineer in charge of one of Facebook’s community integrity teams, David Erb, found that “the most frequent way adults found children to prey upon” was People You May Know. The Journal also reported that a few days later, Erb found that Meta was planning to add encryption to Facebook messages, something that would prevent the company from fixing the problem, threatening to resign in protest. He was placed on leave not long after, eventually leaving.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 39 comments
- Comment on Ford's affordable EV pickup is named Fathom, and it will start at $28,350 4 weeks ago:
frunk trunk (frunk).
- Comment on The size decrease of fast-food over the last 5 years. 4 weeks ago:
It’s basically a synonym for “calories”
- Comment on The offline messaging apps challenging internet shutdowns 4 weeks ago:
Thank you so much for the Columba recommendation! I played around with it enough to connect two devices over Bluetooth LE, and I assume if I had the extra hardware, I’d be able to use a LoRa radio with it too (looks like the option to flash it is simply built into the app).
I might need to look into the privacy implications of turning on a Bluetooth radio at a local event when a lot of recommendations say you should leave your phone at home, but this at least seems promising if somebody had a second device specifically for these things.
- Comment on The offline messaging apps challenging internet shutdowns 5 weeks ago:
I want to like it, but
- the learning curve
- the extra hardware requirements
- the state of the software ecosystem
- the (lack of) reliability in my experience
- schisms with even choosing how to communicate
all make it feel to me like a project for comfortable hobbyists at hackathons, not a serious protest communication tool.
- Comment on AI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study finds 5 weeks ago:
I think you’re taking the doomer narrative a bit too seriously, especially with that final paragraph. The prominent pushers of said narrative usually have something they want to sell, or a real-world issue to distract you from. Some (Yudkowsky) from their cults, some (Altman, Amodei) to enable monopoly or drive profits. Short stories do not an AI apocalypse make.
Sources need to be vetted and held to account when they are wrong or make unfalsifiable statements.
- Comment on AI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study finds 5 weeks ago:
I like how story pair #1’s AI just took the prompt and basically kept repeating “yeah, them’s fish” over and over without any attempt at significance
- Comment on Microsoft CEO Touts His Own DIY AI Project To Wall Street and His 20 Million Followers 5 weeks ago:
Satya, I don’t think you can use the AI as a scapegoat for collecting sensitive data, when you’re on video bragging about being the one plugging it in.
- Comment on OpenAI finds evidence other AI agents escaped containment as it widens hacking probe 5 weeks ago:
“Anthropic is getting all the news cycles about their agents breaching containment*, quick let’s leak some more stories too!” - Sam Altman probably
* there was no containment to breach, the chatbots had full internet access to begin with
- Comment on Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests 1 month ago:
How can I give you a billion dollars fast enough?
