GenderNeutralBro

@GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming on Linux, How openSUSE Stacks Up for Gamers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The experience of installing and updating GPU drivers can be very different across different distros. Especially if you use secure boot. This was such a pain point for me on Tumbleweed that I just pinned my kernel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla's New AI Detector Add-On for Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see any mention of whether this uses local models or cloud models. I’m not interested in sending anything I care about it into the cloud.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Alex Kurtzman Gives Live-Action Comedy Update, Says Star Trek Can “Broaden”⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Spot on.

  SNW is good but I don’t think we’ll ever see a return to the old TV format of 20+ episode seasons. You can’t do random episodic stories all that well in 6-12 episodes. Short seasons have no room to breathe.

  Even Futurama has this problem with the two new Hulu seasons, and that’s without the burden of an overarching plot to keep moving forward.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook flags Linux topics as 'cybersecurity threats' — posts and users being blocked⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you think this isn’t related to human rights, then you’ve missed the point.

  People have the right to use technology, and indeed we effectively need technology to exercise our right to free speech. You cannot have one without the other. Not anymore.

  The right way to think about this that they are arbitrarily banning a topic of discussion simply because it is not dead-center average. This isn’t even a legal issue, and the justification is utter nonsense (Facebook itself runs on Linux, like >90% of the internet). No government has officially asked them to do this, though the timing suggests that it is unofficially from the Trump administration.

  This is about exerting control, establishing precedent, and applying a chilling effect to anything not directly aligned with their interests. This obviously extends to human rights issues. This is a test run.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨wondering about those commercial stalkerwarw stuff and mitigations? kinda curious about the subject⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This will be highly platform-dependent, and also dependent on your threat model.

  On PC laptops, you should probably enable Secure Boot (if it’s not enabled by default), and password-protect your BIOS. On Macs you can disable booting from external media (I think that’s even the default now, but not totally sure). You should definitely enable full-disk encryption – that’s FileVault on Mac and Bitlocker on Windows.

  On Apple devices, you can enable USB Restricted Mode, which will protect against some attacks with USB cables or devices.

  Apple devices also have lockdown mode, which restricts or disables a whole bunch of functionality in an effort to reduce your attack surface against a variety of sophisticated attacks.

  If you’re worried about hardware hacks, then on a laptop you’d want to apply some tamper-evident stickers or something similar, so if an evil maid opens it up and tampers with the hardware, at least you’ll know something fishy happened, so you can go drop your laptop in an active volcano or something.

  If you use any external devices, like a keyboard, mouse, hard drive, whatever…well…how paranoid are you? I’m going to be honest: there is a near 0% chance I would even notice if someone replaced my charging cables or peripheral cables with malicious ones. I wouldn’t even notice if someone plugged in a USB keylogger between my desktop PC and my keyboard, because I only look at the back of my PC once in a blue moon. Digital security begins with physical security.

  On the software side, make sure you’re the only one with admin rights, and ideally you shouldn’t even log into admin accounts on a day-to-day basis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tawny Newsome Says Live Action Star Trek Workplace Comedy Will Explore Life Outside The Federation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Totally agree.

  I’ll watch whatever Tawny Newsome does next. Lower Decks earned a ton of goodwill. It was a breath of fresh air.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Technologist: 'Fining Big Tech isn't working, make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree that the models themselves are clearly transformative. That doesn’t mean it’s legal for Meta to pirate everything on earth to use for training. THAT’S where the infringement is. And they admitted they used pirated material: techspot.com/…/101507-meta-admits-using-pirated-b…

  You want to use the same bullshit tactics and unreasonable math that the RIAA used in their court cases?

  I would enjoying seeing megacorps held to at least the same standards as individuals. I would prefer for those standards to be reasonable across the board, but that’s not really on the table here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Technologist: 'Fining Big Tech isn't working, make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess the idea is that the models themselves are not infringing copyright, but the training process DID. Some of the big players have admitted to using pirated material in training data. The rest obviously did even if they haven’t admitted it.

  While language models have the capacity to produce infringing output, I don’t think the models themselves are infringing (though there are probably exceptions). I mean, gzip can reproduce infringing material too with the correct input. If producing infringing work requires both the algorithm AND specific, intentional user input, then I don’t think you should put the blame solely on the algorithm.

  Either way, I don’t think existing legal frameworks are suitable to answer these questions, so I think it’s more important to think about what the law should be rather than what it currently is.

  I remember stories about the RIAA suing individuals for many thousands of dollars per mp3 they downloaded. If you applied that logic to OpenAI — maximum fine for every individual work used — it’d instantly bankrupt them. Honestly, I’d love to see it. But I don’t think any copyright holder has the balls to try that against someone who can afford lawyers. They’re just bullies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord’s New Age Verification uses AI and Your Face!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why? This cannot possibly have any legal weight. Some adults look young. Some kids look old. The very idea is broken from the outset.

  I can’t tell if this is incompetence or malice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the info. I was not aware that Bluesky had public, shareable block lists. That is indeed a great feature.

  For anyone else like me who was not aware, I found this site with an index of a lot of public block lists: blueskydirectory.com/lists . I was not able to load some of them, but others did load successfully. Maybe some were deleted or are not public? I’m not sure.

  I’ve never been heavily invested in microblogging, so my first-hand experience is limited and mostly academic. I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, though. I would not have realized this feature was available in Bluesky if you hadn’t mentioned it and I didn’t find that index site in a web search. It doesn’t seem easily discoverable within Bluesky’s own UI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you think this is a systemic problem, or just the happenstance of today? Is there something about Bluesky’s architecture or governance that makes it more resilient against that (particularly in the long term)? Or will they have all the same problems as they gain more users and enable more federation with other servers?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open source projects drown in bad bug reports penned by AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d rather have something like a “code grammar checker” that highlights potential errors for my examination rather than something that generates code from scratch itself

  Agreed. The other good use case I’ve found is as a faster reference for simple things. LLMs are absolutely great for one-liners and generating troublesome (but logically simple) things like complex xpath queries. But I still haven’t seen one generate a good script of even moderate complexity without hand-holding. In some cases I’ve been able to get usable output with a few shots, saving me a bit of time compared to if I’d written the whole darned thing from scratch.

  I’ve found LLMs very useful for coding, but they aren’t replacing my actual coding, per se. They replace looking things up, like through man pages, language references, or StackOverflow. Something like ffmpeg, for example, has a million options and it is always a little annoying to sift through the docs manually when I just need to do one specific task.

  I’m sure it’ll happen sooner or later. I’m not naive enough to claim that “computers will never be able to do $THING” anymore. I’ll say “not in the next year”, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Intelligence is for the Stupid Ones⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just marketing nonsense. There are three ways to present AI features:

  1. A generational improvement on things that have been available for 20+ years. This is not sexy and does not make for good advertising. For example: grammar checking, natural-speech processing (Siri), automatic photo tagging/sorting.

  2. A new type of usage that nobody cares about because they’ve lived without it just fine up to now.

  3. Straight-up lie to people about what it can do, using just enough weasel words to keep yourself out of jail.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI reportedly takes aim at Chrome with new browser⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d be surprised if it were anything else. No way in hell OpenAI is going to develop their own browser engine from scratch. Mayyyyybe they go with Gecko? Might make sense if OpenAI is trying to eat Google’s lunch long-term.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL Connor Trinneer & Dominic Keating have a podcast called "The D-Con Chamber". Here they are interviewing Nana Visitor on her new book!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I never thought about it that way, but yeah. Spot-on.

  I don’t hate it in Enterprise to be honest, because there is the context of “humanity not yet at its best”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In theory, an “AI PC” (please imagine giant eye-rolls along with the scare quotes) has the hardware to run models locally instead of shunting stuff off to OpenAI or Anthropic for processing. So in theory, it’s more private and secure than similar functionality on a “traditional PC”.

  In practice…wtf knows what Windows is doing anyway? Or what it will do with the next OS update? Same for macOS. On the Mac side, Apple keeps talking about their local AI and private cloud AI, and yet they’re still partnering with OpenAI for ChatGPT integration. I don’t want to use anything that even has the capability to send my shit to OpenAI, for the same reason I don’t like to put poison in my fridge no matter how clearly labelled it might be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wait, isn’t it the other way around? You should arrive in NY earlier than you left London, since NY is 5 hours behind London. So if you leave at 8:30 and arrive 1.5 hours later, it should only be 5AM when you arrive.

  You might need a third breakfast before your elevenses in that case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting read, thanks! I’ll finish it later, but already this bit is quite interesting:

  Without access to gender, the ML algorithm over-predicts women to default compared to their true default rate, while the rate for men is accurate. Adding gender to the ML algorithm corrects for this and the gap in prediction accuracy for men and women who default diminishes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We find that the MTEs are biased, signif-icantly favoring White-associated names in 85.1% of casesand female-associated names in only 11.1% of case

  If you’re planning to use LLMs for anything along these lines, you should filter out irrelevant details like names before any evaluation step. Honestly, humans should do the same, but it’s impractical. This is, ironically, something LLMs are very well suited for.

  Of course, that doesn’t mean off-the-shelf tools are actually doing that, and there are other potential issues as well, such as biases around cities, schools, or any non-personal info on a resume that might correlate with race/gender/etc.

  I think there’s great potential for LLMs to reduce bias compared to humans, but half-assed implementations are currently the norm, so be careful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Slop Is Flooding Medium⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  After all these years, I’m still a little confused about what Forbes is. It used to be a legitimate, even respected magazine. Now it’s a blog site full of self-important randos who escaped from their cages on LinkedIn.

  There’s some sort of approval process, but it seems like its primary purpose is to inflate egos.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Slop Is Flooding Medium⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It was an SEO hellhole from the start, so this isn’t surprising.

  Do Forbes next!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why 'free' proprietary software will always end in tears⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. If it uses a cloud service, they’re probably going to squeeze you, pull a bait-and-switch, or go out of business. The only exceptions that spring to mind are services with significant monetization in the corporate space, like Dropbox. And I’m not really confident that Dropbox’s free tier will remain viable for long, either.

  Even non-cloud-based apps are risky nowadays because apps don’t remain compatible with mobile OSes for very long. They require more frequent updates than freeware/shareware generally did back in the 90s. I remember some freeware apps that I used for 10 years straight, across several major OS versions, starting in the 90s. That just doesn’t happen anymore. I’ve been using Android for over 10 years and I don’t think there’s a single app I used back then that would still work.

  Single-purchase apps are basically dead, at least on mobile platforms. Closed-source freeware is dead, too. If it’s open-source, if push comes to shove someone can always pick up the torch and update it. It’s very rare for an open-source project to be completely abandoned without there at least being a viable open-source alternative available.

  At this point, I don’t even look at Google Play. It’s F-Droid or bust.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Latex programming socks and latex dress⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I…I did not know that. That’s wild.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Latex programming socks and latex dress⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Latex is more of a markup language than a programming language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why wordfreq will not be updated - AI spam⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m certain that if someone did collect data from the Fediverse; it would become a hot topic

  I’d assume bad actors (or at least chaotic neutral actors) are slurping up the entire fediverse already. It is trivial to do, and nobody would know.

  I mean, the whole point is that anyone can spin up a server and federate with others. I could start my own server, which would by default federate with almost all other servers. That means I wouldn’t even need to write a scraper. All that data would be sent straight to my server. All I need is access to my own database at that point. With Lemmy, I’d even get users’ upvote/downvote history, which is not visible in any clients AFAIK. The only barrier would be to subscribe to communities on different servers to kickstart federation.

  As long as you don’t run obvious spam/bot accounts, nobody would block your instance.

  Alternatively, if you want to write a scraper, that’s also pretty easy. Most servers are publicly accessible. Every community has an RSS feed. You don’t even need an account in general. Again, the whole point is to be open and accessible, in contrast to closed-off data-misers like Facebook, Reddit, and X.

  The fediverse is friendly to users, with very little regard for what those users might do. I believe this is the correct philosophy, but I won’t pretend that it doesn’t leave us open to bad behavior.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Misinformation: Russian money was funneled to U.S. right-wing creators through a pro-Trump media outlet, prosecutors say⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What part of this is misinformation, exactly? Seems pretty well-supported.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I keep seeing this claim, but never with any independent verification or technical explanation.

  What exactly is listening to you? How? When?

  Android and iOS both make it visible to the user when an app accesses the microphone, and they require that the user grant microphone permission to the app. It’s not supposed to be possible for apps to surreptitiously record you. This would require exploiting an unpatched security vulnerability and would surely violate the App Store and Play Store policies.

  If you can prove this is happening, then please do so. Both Apple and Google have a vested interest in stopping this; they do not want their competitors to have this data, and they would be happy to smack down a clear violation of policy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Was browsing through the Immich cursed knowledge library. This is quite interesting.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree completely.

  I understand the motivation here — apps that lack location permission shouldn’t be able to get backdoor access to your location via your camera roll. That makes sense, because you know damn well every spyware social media company would be doing that if they could.

  But the reverse is also true: apps that legitimately need to read photos and access all their metadata shouldn’t need to be granted full location access.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FTC bans fake online reviews, inflated social media influence; rule takes effect in October⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For sure. It’ll never be enforced completely, but it gives teeth to go after some big offenders.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The linked article focuses on Mastodon. I’d be interested to hear more about how this relates to Lemmy in your experience.