Just yesterday here on Lemmy, I mentioned the dangers of violating privacy, and some commenters went on about “what dangers?” Implying there were none…
I remember that from Don’t Take to The Police. Since gotchas I can think of is touching an eagle feather lying on the ground (endangered animals plus a market for poachers). Point being, that it’s essentially impossible to say with certainty that you’ve broken no law.
The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just what particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.
Stephen G. Breyer, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent
It’s used around 4:40 in the Don’t Take To The Police video.
I would like to quote a Hungarian movie classic from 1969 (it was sitting in a box for a decade until it somehow got past the censorship):
Mutasson nekem egyetlen embert ebben a tetves országban, akire ha kell, 5 perc alatt nem bizonyítom rá, hogy bűnös! Magára is, magamra is, mindenkire!
Show me a single person in this flea-ridden country who if needed, I can’t prove in 5 minutes that they are guilty! You, me, everyone!
Other great quotes from the same movie:
Ahol nem vagyunk mi, ott az ellenség.
Where we are not, there is the enemy.
Ezeken lovagol maga? Amit a vaksi szemével lát? A süket fülével hall? A tompa agyával gondol? Azt hiszi, fölér az a mi nagy céljaink igazságához?!
Are you hung up on these things? What you see with your blind eyes? What you hear with your deaf ears? What you think with your blunt mind? Do you believe these are comparable to the truth of our great cause?
Just if you thought that these people are not the same as the commies were way back when. Authoritarians tend to be alike.
At this point, they’ll just say “yeah, but these people did a crime. I don’t do crimes so I have nothing to worry about”. The problem with that mentality, I would hope, doesn’t need to be stated.
I agree with you, but I don’t think I could explicitly state what’s wrong with that mentality. Can you humor me and state it?
Edit: can someone else take a shot at it? Tge parent comment is essentially saying “people will counter with X, but everyone knows that doesn’t make sense”. It’s clear that something is wrong with that mentality, but it obviously would have a very real benefit of stating it’s flaws since the whole premise of this is that some people don’t know what’s wrong with that mentality.
The obvious, unspoken part is: what is legal now isn’t guaranteed to be legal two seconds in the future, and likewise to what is illegal. The law gives you no guarantee of being ethical nor moral, it’s simply a collection of behaviors either sanctioned or unsanctioned by the State.
As a clear example, you may tell me how much you love breathing in fresh air. If, tomorrow, breathing fresh air is made illegal, you’ve just shared with me a confession to a crime.
I guess that can also be extended to things that can accidentally be suspicious. Imagine if Colonel Mustard, who “doesn’t have anything to hide”, let the police search their trunk and found a broken candle stick. Even though he wasn’t being searched for that in particular, now he’s a suspect in Mrs. Peacock’s murder at the gazebo (Clue reference).
Also, there’s no general agreement or scientific pointing of where life and consciousness is started on a fetus so, if the government job is to conserve the life of a individual, a fetus life still matters and shouldn’t be taken by neither the parents or anyone else.
Brazil (ironically enough) has a good constitution about about abortion where’s it is strictly prohibited unless some cases apply like: the baby has developed no brain, the baby has originated from a sexual assault case or the process of giving birth or the pregnancy itself represents a risk of death for the mother. It is simple, states that life’s have the same values as well as showing the individual rights matter.
Why do you think a life created by sexual assault is less valuable than a life created otherwise? Isn’t the resulting life the same?
Thinking this through might help you understand the tradeoffs behind most abortions. Pregnancy is dangerous, childbirth is dangerous, parenting is incredibly difficult.
A child could push a family into poverty and devastate siblings’ futures. How do you evaluate the harm caused by that against the harm caused by being forced to carry a child produced by sexual assault?
It is not less valuable but the way it was created was against the individual rights of the mother.
I agree abortion laws are about trade-offs as I showed in my example and that’s why abortion shouldn’t be legal in the cases I stated. Abortion shouldn’t be legal for anyone cause, if it was in a consensual relationship, the mother assumed the risk of pregnancy.
The only lives that are less valuable are those which deliberately risk or take way the others’ lives.
The only lives that are less valuable are those which deliberately risk or take way the others’ lives.
By choosing to be alive, you’re impacting all present and future generations, causing the deaths of potentially billions of humans and countless other animals. Do you see how your attempted distinction doesn’t actually exist?
Which often means shoving them into massively underfunded institutions, that are full of corruption and abuse, making it a less than ideal alternative.
You’re joking, right? First, abortions aren’t mentioned in the Brazilian constitution - you’d have to look at specific legal codices, such as the Civil Code or the Penal Code. Second, that’s the bare minimum, not “pretty good”.
The objective is supposed to be to find the situations where abortion would be fair a fair trade-off of lives and rights, not to try to speedrun the abortion rank; it makes no sense you’re saying it is bare minimum when the objective is to reduce it as it is inherently bad.
This is the perfect example of why you should be worried. Because your government can turn into a fascist dictatorship at any time and you ain’t getting that data back.
Reading comprehension is hard, so I’ll help you out.
This [event mentioned on the news] is the perfect example of why you should be worried. Because your government can [i.e. has the potential to] turn into a fascist dictatorship at any time [which is unrelated to this specific piece of news, being a hypothetical scenario] and you ain’t getting that data back.
I can read just fine, I’m just wondering how you correlate this with the possibility of the government turning into a fascist dictatorship. They’re 2 completely unrelated things, that’s why I’m confused to why you put them together. You even literally say it’s unrelated to this piece of news…
Are you being serious, or just being a pitiful basement troll yourself?
You’re saying because they did thing A it means you should be wary because thing Z might happen, even though things A and Z have literally nothing to do with each other nor does A happening give any likelihood of Z happening.
People won’t all stop doing something they did just because it became illegal. I wouldn’t stop eating bread if it became illegal, for instance. Much easier to justify a search and witch hunt if there’s evidence of previous action.
Good job ifixit! This should be a cause for outrage. Pretending to support the right to repair while also softwarelocking repairs is not just two faced, but actively harming the consumers.
Ok … so I think false preconceptions are polluting this topic. Apart from the passwords, nothing serious has happened here for your data. As for the DMs … yea there aren’t DMs with any real privacy on the fediverse, they don’t exist … you should presume DMs are public.
The basic story is that the fediverse is all about duplicating what we post all over the place … essentially to anyone who decides to run a server on the fediverse. The FBI could (and probably do?) have a server scooping up all sorts of stuff onto their server and you wouldn’t know about and probably couldn’t do much about it. Google is scraping mastodon (and probably lemmy?) … try a google search for mastoodn content.
This is all public internet stuff, you’re basically running a public blog that happens to be well connected to lots of other public blogs.
As nice as the fediverse is as a nice anti-capitalist-big-corp monopolisation of our social online lives … it is very much born out of the web2.0 era and doesn’t have any of the privacy concerns many of us would now hope for from technologies.
I’ve argued this elsewhere … I like the fediverse and am here out of principle … but in many ways it highlights some of the failings of our world at this time … because it’s about 10 years too late and the future is coming in hot and fast … in retrospect I wouldn’t be surprised if it will make a lot of sense to look back on the fediverse and think that it was effectively redundant at just about the time it gained popularity. An AI dominated internet with massive privacy concerns is here very soon, and the fediverse isn’t ready IMO, it’s still trying to catch up to web2.0 big social circa 2010.
What about 2013 seemed more favorable to the fediverse than now? Twitter, reddit and Facebook were pretty useful at that time - I don’t think I’d have left.
Principles. That the whole internet and all of the freedom and diversity it can harbour was being monopolised by big giant corporations that had no interest in embracing an open web. Instead, they were convincing the world, especially those growing up in that/this era that the internet had to be constrained to the few walled gardens of big platforms.
These principles were as obvious and relevant then as they are now. Unfortunately convenience is a helluva drug. And, in the “Google” era of the internet (~2005-2020 ?), there was a certain naive optimism about big-tech and the internet, which no doubt lulled us in by its being “free”.
In reality, we all really thought that good and useful world-changing stuff was just going to be made for us for free. That the internet was going to inexorably make the world a better place. It was dumb and naive IMO and marks very well the failings of the Millennial generation (to which I belong FWIW). Unfortunately, it’s a lesson we had to learn the hardway. There were probably only a handful of people in the world that understood what the new industry was actually doing and was actually about and that had the philosophical will and ability to think it through and communicate to the masses what the choices we were actually making.
If the fediverse represents the soon-to-be-replaced web 2.0 of the past, what do you see replacing it and why do you think that will be incompatible with the fediverse apps?
I could see some block chain security/authentication features added to federated apps, and hopefully end-to-end encrypted DMs will be enabled by that same technology too. I’m just having a hard time imagining something “new” that will replace this completely.
There will probably be several TikTok-like entertainment platforms, likely filled with ad-friendly AI generated content that is 100% under corporate control and costs almost nothing to produce, but that type of platform attracts a different audience than what we have here.
I don’t think the fediverse necessarily needs to be replaced. We still have, afterall, Twitter going hard and strong after nearly 20 years! THe fediverse may very well go strong for many years to come, and that’d be a good thing … it’s nice!!
In an ideal world … what would replace this? IMO, technology that basically gives every person a secure home on the internet in the same way that (most of us) can have a secure home in real life. Control, ownership and privacy over what you consume and publish and how. That technology would need to involve a number of things on a number of levels, but I’d bet it’s quite viable today, it just needs buy-in and people to have the time and resources to build it.
The blockchain’s use of decentralization is pretty much a security measure. If you want to rule out the blockchain entirely, you’d still need to address the immutable and transpartent components. Only using one block once published moving forward is quite different than the fediverse. Then there’s smart contracts too. It’s a massive improvement to various current online platforms, to say it’s merely decentralization is highly misleading.
Possible doesn’t mean easily doable, unfortunately. Technically speaking, I don’t know how hard it would be for the fediverse. I get the sense that overall it’s been a mismanaged aspect of the ecosystem for a long time.
It touches on a broader issue of to what extent the software ecosystem enables users to exist on the fediverse at large as a single user or through a single interface. At the moment, it’s basically not really a thing. Arguably, if the fediverse wants to make any claim to being an actual “federated universe” rather than just separate FOSS decentralised platforms (there is a big difference IMO) … then it should definitely be a thing.
In relation to DMs, then, in a “true fediverse” the answer would be simply something like integrating matrix into your interface such that you and I could easily start a space on matrix and start chatting there if we wanted to.
I’ve come to the conclusion that for this to happen it needs to happen at the UI/client/app level. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens in not too long a time. An app that understand and works well with all of the major platforms and gives you a single and well designed interface for working with all of them from a single space. This way the platform developers can focus on their specific funcionality and backend while the app/client developers can focus on the UI and the challenge of bringing things together. I see it as similar to the way we all have email apps that easily bring together multiple email clients.
That’s the only way. I don’t think there’s any other solution that would allow for you being able to be sure that the instance you are on doesn’t have a way to acess your data - any other e2e encryption integrated into Lemmy UI would not and cannot be reliable, because an admin can just rewrite the code as he sees fit.
Only solution to this is to just encrypt the message manually before it touches anything Lemmy UI.
thanks for the link, explains it very well. how bout my activity, like IP address, up/down votes, clicks on links, favorites and whatnot, is that federated around or how does that work, i.e. who has access to it?
As far as I know (which isn’t too far, because I’m not a Beltway bandit anymore), the Fediverse isn’t on the FBI’s radar in any meaningful way. It /might/ be on the radar of the information contractors they hire for bulk data gathering and analysis (Palantir, ZeroFox, Dataminr, probably others these days) but none of me have heard anything specific.
is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
has the most used video platform online, with no close second (unless you count porn, but i’d still argue its not close)
has the biggest share of devices relying on its platform worldwide (android)
has the most used search engine worldwide.
Alphabet has to be split up. Alphabet alone is deciding what shape internet will take in the future.
is the developer the most used browser (chrome) and its open source skeleton (chromium) on which most of all of the other browsers are based on (edge, brave etc)
Which was branched from Apple’s open Webkit base, but let’s all also forget about that.
They take the IP of others, spin it a bit and then block everyone. Burn them down.
They totally do though. You can ONLY use webkit on any iOS device. Chrome, Firefox, etc. they all are forced to use webkit on iOS. Neither Google or Apple are treating the web nicely, but at least you have a choice to use a different browser. Apple makes that effectively impossible.
Also you can’t really use Apple TV properly without an Apple device. Same with iCloud. Actually really any service they make only works properly with their full stack.
They didn’t do anything of the sort. We don’t need to endlessly recite the history of everything developed. If you want to call attention to it go right ahead but they didn’t give Apple a pass.
The inevitable fate of any useful software that’s not GPL.
When will people learn???
Edit: Ironically, KHTML was originally LGPL. So modifications to KHTML were required to be open source by the license, but Chrome itself isn’t required to be open source (at least as far as I understand it, I am not an expert here). Nevertheless, if it were stronger GPL, then it probably wouldn’t have been impossible to write features like DRM in chrome. So I would have been a bit of an idiot to say that KHTML isn’t GPL (because LGPL is a weaker version of GPL), but in effect, the outcome is the same - all because of that big fat L at the beginning.
This is why we need piracy/open source scenes. I’m sure the Nouveau people wouldn’t encur a copyright strike if say someone forked their driver and implemented it outside of the Nouveau dev team to then publish it somewhere it won’t get taken down.
I think we need illegal source code because of how the right of ownership has been steadily dismantled by industries at large and set as an industrial precedent in hardware.
Hell yeah! I think the public should have the right to inspect any software at any time. If you want it to go into my computer I think I should know if your sloppy ass spaghetti code is going to open me up to security vulnerabilities.
It’s funny how small incremental changes over the years felt like nothing big was happening and then at some point we all woke up to a world where the largest advertising firm in the world basically is the internet for the vast majority of people. Everyone uses chrome and rarely types in a web address, they just type the name of the thing into Google and trust mommy to show them what’s appropriate. They’ve back doored the entire population into basically what AOL was trying to be 20 years ago.
“we are going to help protect your privacy” from WHO Google? Is it from you? Because it seems like we need protection from you most of all. Constantly being gaslit by mega-corporations is the new American dream. It’s okay because they love us, deep down, and we know that even though they don’t show it.
It’s funny how small incremental changes over the years felt like nothing big was happening and then at some point we all woke up to a world where the largest advertising firm in the world basically is the internet for the vast majority of people.
In a microcosm of the same kind of creeping normalcy, Bethesda charging a few bucks for horse armor in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was once a reach too far, until it wasn’t.
Now we have Star Citizen levels of grifting as well as ActiBlizz “buy a currency to get a currency that is leveraged as currency to get credit toward a currency in a battle pass” layer cake grifting.
Can you expand on the last paragraph? I am not a gamer, so although I understand most words in that sentence I really have no idea what you’re referring to.
Well, to put it simply there are these things called microtransactions, basically you want items in a game or extra lives or something like that, you can pay for them instead of earning them, sometimes they make it so that certain items can only be paid for, worse they make it so that certain items can only be paid for and will only be offered for a limited amount of time. If you miss the window to buy them now you will never be given another chance. Normally this is something cool like a tie in with a new movie that came out or something of that nature. Fortnite does this a lot, hope you got those Marvel characters when they were offering them cuz you’re not getting them now.
But as if that wasn’t bad enough there was another layer to it, one of the things you can buy with microtransactions, using real money, is a form of money that can only be used in the game.
So, what you give them a dollar, they give you 100 coins, and there isn’t even exchange rate? Of course not
There are various bundles where you can buy the premium currency as it is often called. Typically the more expensive bundles give more, and it’s not tiered properly, so let’s say $5 gives you 800 coins, but $10 gives you 2,000 coins, it’s to goad you and to always buying the higher amount, even if you only want that one item.
But it can get worse, they can set the prices so that you can just barely afford the item you want with that $10 tier, so the next year is 5000 coins for $20. And with that you can get enough coins to buy the item you want and have just a little left over, but not enough for you to do anything with unless you buy a lot of coins to supplement that amount, which can trick you into thinking that you’re getting a good deal when you are actually being fleeced pretty hard.
Fortnite is so bad because despite it being a good game, it does all of the above and targets to children who don’t know anything about money.
There are cases where you can buy one form of Premium currency with real money, so that you can buy a higher tier of Premium currency with the premium currency you bought with real money, forcing you to pay even more.
And this is one reason why modern games suck, the other reason is that everyone is using the same Engine.
That’s fascinating, it’s like microtransaction recursion. I actually want someone to say fuck it and pull the wool off and just create a legitimate gambling first person shooter… I would love that. I used to play counter strike a long time ago and love poker. Just have like an ammo buy in cost that forms the prize pool. Make it tournament style with a bounty a top 3 and just rake part of the pool for profits and all that money your going to have to pour into cheating detection.
I imagine one day these practices will be cracked down upon when the European Union comes out for blood, the European Union is actually pretty good at getting us new laws that help regulate the internet and Technology.
I don’t have a problem with a game that is based on gambling, I just don’t think one should be targeted to children, and I definitely believe that you need to be upfront about what you’re actually doing.
Sadly the European Union is a case of, the wheels of Justice move slowly, but they are moving. Only recently did they make loot boxes illegal, but loot boxes had already been abandoned by the industry in favor of something far worse, the battle pass.
Basically you pay a fee, and then you can unlock various features by doing certain missions, but if you don’t claim everything by the time the battle pass goes off of sale, then tough luck, and if you don’t get that battle pass, you are likely never getting a chance to get those features. So not only does it encourage you to buy a battle pass, but to play the game obsessively to make sure you unlock everything from the battle pass in time. And all that time there are bombarding you with ads for various other products that you can buy with micro transactions. It is Devious.
I play World of Tanks which has frequent battle passes. I used to try and grind earlier but then came a moment where I said fuck it, this feels like work and not fun. So now I just treat the base game as what I get. Any other reward is just a bonus. This change in mindset has worked quite well for me.
They gotta their digital peasantry, I mean users, from other feudal lords, I mean corporations, to maximize their power over them and ability to exploit them, I mean … No wait that’s right.
small incremental changes over the years felt like nothing big was happening and then at some point we all woke up
I (and many others I presume) has been saying Chrome is shit since the beginning. It didn’t feel like nothing was happening, it felt like we were slowly getting to the old days of IE and Netscape.
There are always a few that see this stuff coming, but they usually get looked at like a crazy person shouting about the sky falling.
It also feels like they really push a lot of the terrible on mobile first, get people used to concepts with the “that’s just how mobile is, it’s a different world” and then when most are accustomed to it they move to regular pc enshitification.
I do not like how websites prioritise the mobile view over desktop view even when it is on a desktop. You have a widescreen and want to waste all that horizontal space? Just ridiculous!
Yeah yeah, I understand it is less maintenance from a developer point of view, but still it is infuriating as a user.
I can’t read German, but we have a similar legal system in the Netherlands.
Most likely, these people committed some crime during a previous protest, such as illegally entering private property or vandalism. Often they will get sentences that are conditional.
If there is evidence to believe they are conspiring to commit a similar illegal act, then the conditional part of the sentence gets triggered.
Nope, it’s actually only that the police has reason to believe that they might commit a crime.
No need for them to be prior offenders or anything. The police can arrest anyone at any time if they believe you might commit a crime. And even comparatively minor things like blocking traffic counts.
It doesn’t sound like it. Conspiracy means there’s documented evidence of a plan and motive to commit a crime. This doesn’t seem like it meets that standard.
Thanks. I have no clue about German law. Oddly even though America has a large German population historically, our laws are based on English, French and Spanish laws.
The difference in regards to a conspiracy charge is that you don’t need a conspiracy behind it.
In Germany, there are actually 18 different laws regarding this, since that part of the law is federated. So each state of Germany (plus the federal police and the federal criminal police) has it’s own law regarding under what circumstances they are allowed to arrest someone before they committed a crime and for how long.
Originally, these laws had two purposes:
Stop someone from committing a serious crime
Stop someone from doing harm to themselves
And as such, these laws used to have tight limits on when they can apply and for how long people are allowed to be arrested.
A case could be made for these laws. E.g. if someone announces online that they are going to shoot kids at a school, it would be totally justified to quickly bag that guy before he kills children. Waiting for a court order might not be fast enough to save the would-be victims.
But then they started to expand the reasons why someone can be arrested and for how long.
In Bavaria, for example, it’s enough that someone carries items that can be used for criminal purposes. And there they can jail people for up to two months without a charge.
There have been cases where someone was put in jail for two months for carrying items like crowbars or ropes in their backpacks.
It’s really something for the lawyers but it could be considered “Nötigung” (§ 181 StGB) and/or “Gefährlicher Eingriff in den Straßenverkehr” (§ 315b StGB).
Pretty sure if it’s in the StGB it’s a “crime” (Straftat).
In English, at least for the US, there are typically only misdemeanors and felonies, and both are crimes. There are also violations, but those are usually civil, not criminal (parking tickets, for example).
Yeah, in English (in the US, generally) we’d call that a civil violation. Or a civil action where a lawsuit is brought by a private citizen, like suing someone for damaging your property. It’s against the law, but probably not going to be prosecuted by the government.
But this is in fact how the police argues. Climate protests are terror attacks (since they disrupt traffic) and therefore this is justified.
Pretty sure the Bundesverfassungsgericht (basically our supreme court) will shut this practice down – just like all the other times Bavarian laws have been ruled unconstitutional – but Bavaria doesn’t care. They scrap the law and replace it with a similar unconstitutional version and wait 2 years until the Bundesverfassungsgericht rules it unconstitutional and so on.
It’s basically our texas or florida, depending on your pov. It’s a place with great nature, interesting culture but also very crude beliefs and you either like the culture or you dont. Most importantly, police is said to be a pot rougher over there and politics is pretty conservative as well.
Kind of. Iirc it’s a very controversial practice and whenever the police pulls it out in a public case it gets protested again (for good reason). Also, even if the practice is legal right now, there’s a lot of limitations to it. Obviously it’s nudging the ethical boundaries of police work either way.
Maybe they should arrest everyone that might protest against this before they arrest the other people that might protest against climate change. But then people might protest against that too. I guess everyone is under arrest! You’re all under arrest. Get in the hole!
I left Firefox for Chrome about 12 years ago because Firefox had a major RAM leak. I went back to Firefox about 5 years ago after verifying they fixed the big and have never regretted it. People should use Firefox.
This seems really short-sighted. Why would I go to How Stuff Works when I can just ask the LLM myself?
Maybe there’s just no possible business model for them anymore with the advent of LLMs, but at least if they focused on the “actually written by humans!” angle there’d be some hook to draw people in.
This reminds me of the short story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” by Roald Dahl. In the story a machine is invented that can write great stories, but it’s creators go around buying the naming rights of authors so people will actually not their books.
I think I meant buy. I’ve edited the comment. That said, after rereading the story last tonight, the reason they buy the rights to authors names is to eliminate competition and maximize profits.
Humans aren’t much different. 99.9% of what we create is just a remix of existing parts/ideas. It’s why people spend 12-20 years pre-training on all the existing knowledge in the field they’re going to work in.
The thing is, the LLM doesn't actually know anything, and lies about it.
So you go to How Stuff Works now, and you get bullshit lies instead of real information, you'll also get nonsense that looks like language at first glance, but is gibberish pretending to be an article. Because sometimes the language model changes topics midway through and doesn't correct, because it can't correct. It doesn't actually know what it's saying.
See, these language models are pre-trained, that the P in chatGPT. They just regurgitate the training data, but put together in ways that sort of look like more of the same training data.
There are some hard coded filters and responses, but other than that, nope, just a spew of garbage out from the random garbage in.
And yet, all sorts of people think this shit is ready to take over writing duties for everyone, saving money and winning court cases.
It could be AI sport when we actually have an general purpose AI. That based on people working on llm and gpt, would take between 6 years and never happening.
It’s not easy to create a super ai who’s realistically smarter than humans in every aspect.
Yeah, this is why I can’t really take anyone seriously when they say it’ll take over the world. It’s certainly cool, but it’s always going to be limited in usefulness.
Some areas I can see it being really useful are:
generating believable text - scams, placeholder text, and general structure
distilling existing information - especially if it can actually cite sources, but even then I’d take it with a grain of salt
AI tools can be very powerful, but they usually need to be tailored to a specific use case by competent people.
With LLMs it seems to be the opposite, where people not competent for ML are applying it for the broadest of use cases. Just that it looks so good they are easily fooled and lack the understanding to realize the limits.
But there is a very important Usecase too:
Writing stuff that is only read and evaluated by similiar AI tools. It makes sense to write cover letters with ChatGPT because they are demanded but never read by a human on the other side of the job application. Since the weights and stuff behind it serm to be similiar, writing it with ChatGPT helps to pass the automatic analysis.
Rationally that is complete nonsense, but you basically need an AI tool to jump through the hoops made by an AI tool applied by stupid people who need to make themselves look smart.
generating believable text - scams, placeholder text, and general structure
LLM generated scams are going to such problem. Quality isn’t even a problem there as they specifically go for people with poor awareness of these scams, and having a bot that responds with reasonable dialogue will make it that much easier for people to buy into it.
The thing is, the LLM doesn’t actually know anything, and lies about it.
Just like your average human journalist. If you ever read an article from not specialist journal on a topic you are familiar with - you know. This seems actually where LLM are very similar to how human brain works - if we don’t know something, we come up with some bullshit.
But yeah, the quality of what is passing as journalism now is often ridiculous. But the only way to combat this is by having editors that are knowledgable about topics. But it seemed editors were the first people laid off, when internet articles became a thing.
24 hours news cycle of online media creates junk journalism on new level. Good journalism needs time and can’t spit out news articles every minute of the day. Editors won’t help, because it’s just not possible to do good journalism on that scale. But jeh - in general with AI, the jobs will shift more to editing. Which will be extremely soul-draining, going though tons of AI generated bullshit
Even medium human writers can comprehend their work as a whole, though. There is a cohesiveness even to the bullshit. The LLM is just putting words down that match the prompt. It’s rng driven, readable Lorum Ipsum.
If the results were still edited afterwards, there may be some merit to the output, but any company going full LLM isn’t looking for quality. They want to use it to churn out endless content that they simply can’t get from even a team of humans. More than could be edited even if they kept editors on staff.
but any company going full LLM isn’t looking for quality.
That is true for 24h news cycle of online media, regardless LLM.
Yes, that was my point. Setting up your company to put out more content than can possibly be processed by humans is a glaring sign of their values - ie quantity far above quality.
I’v read writing worse than GTP. I had to help someone write an essay - and I just wrote it for him in the end, because he absolutely lacked the skills to write a long meaningful text. At at the same time - genius of a percussionist.
Ok, so do you wanna talk about your terrible writing partner in school? Or “yellow press”? Or maybe the topic of the article, which isn’t journalism in the slightest? Or how about my point, which was, again, that even bad writers have context, as opposed to an LLM which is just filling in the arbitrary patterns it’s programmed to delineate. Readability is not what I’m talking about.
Dude, what’s with aggression? We just having a conversation that floats along. I’m talking about general LLMs capabilities to write text - which are in my opinion comparable to human writing, since again - a lot of people lack the same things LLMs generated texts are lacking. And I had some examples. No idea what made you so upset.
You brought up several different, unrelated topics and pretty much ignored anything I said to disprove something I never claimed. That is frustrating to deal with.
Except you are the one who responded to me. And if there is a point you made I overlooked - I will gladly answer it. I also didn’t disprove anything - just voiced my opinion. I’m not interested in a debate club and winning arguments, just sharing opinions and trying to understand others.
The top comment is about how LLMs don’t comprehend what they’re writing, and your first comment (as I read it) was about how LLMs work how human brains do. My point was that they don’t and why, not about how good or bad humans or machines are at writing, which is what you kept bringing up, hence the frustration.
My first comment is, that there are enough humans out there that don’t really comprehend what they are writing and often also make shit up as they go. I was not talking about the underlying mechanism, which is rather speculative since we have little idea how complex functions of the brain - like text generation, work. Just making a humorous light hearted comparison.
Our conversation is a nice illustration how, maybe we as humans aren’t as good at understanding text - as we might think. (Again - that is a light hearted comment and not some profound complex observation).
To be clear, I’m not talking about underlying mechanisms, either, but the approach to the task. A human writer, even one bad at writing and not understanding the topic, will approach the writing with a goal and write to that goal and topic. They can even research if they so choose, but even if they are just making things up, there is intent and context there.
An LLM doesn’t have any of that. It literally just generates words that match certain patterns, with no actual purpose or goal. It may have been programmed with a goal in mind, but it doesn’t have one of its own. It can’t reason, it can’t research, it can’t make decisions. I think that is an important distinction that people who are just saying “Who cares? It’s all bad writing anyways” are missing.
To be clear, I’m not talking about underlying mechanisms, either, but the approach to the task. A human writer, even one bad at writing and not understanding the topic, will approach the writing with a goal and write to that goal and topic. They can even research if they so choose, but even if they are just making things up, there is intent and context there.
You never made an experience of having to writer for a topic you genuinely don’t care about, where you just string along words, vaguely related to the topic to make specific word count? I’m not arguing that all human writing is like this - people are definitely capable of writing text with purpose and context, at least some. But that is not all human writing.
It literally just generates words that match certain patterns, with no actual purpose or goal.
And exactly that was my point, that humans often do the same. Not all the time. But it definitely happens, especially in professional writing where you maybe have to write about a topic you don’t understand or care about.
It can’t reason, it can’t research,
And again, there are tons of people out there that can’t do this things either. It’s like a very intelligent chimpanzee is smarter than a very dumb human. So are LLMs better at generating text than quite a lot of humans.
I mean I would say maybe “regurgitating their training data” is putting it a bit too simple. But it’s true, we’re currently at the point where the AI can mimic real text. But that’s it - no one tells it not to lie rn, the programmatic goal of the AI is to get indistinguishable from real text with no bearing on the truthfulness of the information whatsoever.
Basically we train our AIs to pretend to know, not to know. And sometimes it’s good at pretending, sometimes it isn’t.
The “right” way to handle what the CEOs are doing would be to let go of a chunk of the staff, then let the rest write their articles with the help of chatgpt. But most CEOs are a bit too gullible when it comes to the abilities of AI.
I’ve graded papers from students who obviously used chatGPT to write them. They were a pass at best. Zero critical synthesis of ideas and application of them to the topic. I’m sure chatGPT has its uses but people really overhype its writing ability. There’s more to writing than putting words in the right places.
It doesn’t know the limits of it’s knowledge or indeed know anything. It just “knows” what an answer smells like. It even “knows” what excuses are supposed to look like when you call it out.
2- the more content you have the more organic traffic you’re likely to attract from Google;
3- displaying ads on your website makes you money.
Websites full of LLM generated content are just the natural continuation of MFAs (Made For AdSense) and there were lots of tools on sale back then in the 2006~2008 period that promised to automatically create websites for you and fill them with randomized content that is optimized for AdSense.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't AI generated content not copyrightable? Therefore nothing is stopping someone from taking all their content, rebranding it as "how stuff really works" or something, and then start stealing their business & ad revenue.
People are getting all upset at Facebook/Meta here but they were served a valid warrant. I don’t think there is much to get mad about them here. The takeaway I get is this:
Avoid giving data to others. No matter how trustworthy they are (not that Meta is) they can be legally compelled to release it. Trust only in cryptography.
There is of course the other question of if abortion being illegal is a policy that most people agree with…but that is a whole different kettle of fish that I won’t get into here.
Good luck with that. The way voting works in the US basically guarantees a 2-party race. With only 2 parties you end up having policies grouped into these huge bundles, so making an actual decision on any particular issue is incredibly difficult. (Unless you are a billionaire and want to lobby a party for a law)
A valid warrant that was only possible to get information from because of Meta’s policy of “opt-in” for encrypted messages. They are still at fault imho
There are several other issues how these two handled this situation.
Court and police records show that police began investigating 17-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mother Jessica Burgess after receiving a tip-off that the pair had illegally buried a stillborn child given birth to prematurely by Celeste.
Don’t discuss this or involve anyone else.
The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger, which prompted the state to issue Meta with a search warrant for their chat history and data including log-in timestamps and photos.
Why are they even talking to police? Lawyer up, even if the lawyer is free.
(E2EE is available in Messenger but has to be toggled on manually. It’s on by default in WhatsApp.)
Facebook messenger and text message is the absolute worse way to discuss things like this. They should’ve at least turned on E2EE but they already admitted fault and their devices would’ve been taken away anyway.
They seem like they together. They should’ve just discussed this in person.
Granted, I’m lucky enough never to have been arrested or questioned about a crime. I don’t know how difficult and manipulative interrogations are outside of what I’ve seen on TV. Even still, I’m amazed by and critical of people who talk to the police without a lawyer present.
Even if you think (or know) you’re guilty, that doesn’t mean you should let the system have its way with you.
This is an older story, and 5 months later Meta announced that they’re rolling out full E2EE encryption to Messenger, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Are they doing it out of the goodness of their hearts? Probably not, they’re a corporation, but this does show that global backlash actually works for something.
Use end to end encrypted messaging apps, and, if you’re in a situation like this, know what they can be forced to share via court order. For example, while WhatsApp has full E2EE and messages can’t be turned over, IP addresses can, which can be used to track location, so don’t connect to an abortion clinic’s wifi for example. Probably just a good rule in general, as law enforcement could subpoena router logs if they have a suspicion.
Ideally use something that can hand over less metadata like Signal if you’re in this sort of situation, they don’t even keep IP address, but this is a lesser known app that also relies on the recipient using Signal.
On one hand - yes Meta followed the legal requirement, but the bigger picture is that people always say “so what it’s <insert deficiency> just don’t do anything illegal”. But that’s only fine when legality matches morality. And the disparity has been growing lately.
I understand what you are saying but I don’t think that having every company coming up with their own definition of morality is the right solution. The only goal of these companies is to create profit, and I doubt that their definition of morality will be overall beneficial.
The problem is that private messages should be private, meaning Meta should’ve had no ability whatsoever to share those messages even if served a warrant. Those messages should be E2E encrypted.
I haven’t trusted Meta since they IPO’d. I deleted my account sometime back in 2015 or so, had to recreate it when I went on-site as a contractor for a week, and promptly deleted it again.
But it’s good that they have E2E, it should be on by default and not able to be disabled. Regardless, they probably have anything encrypted indexed anyway so they don’t lose that little bit of info about you.
Clickbait headline. What Google did was add a new tab for web results (only) in their search page, similar to images and news.
I do find it interesting/funny that Google felt the need to actually provide this, as a sort of acknowledgement that their main search “results” page is so full of random info boxes and generated content that people can’t find actual links anymore.
Web results only? As compared to what? AI results? What’s in the first tab? You’re… searching the web for results. What else would be in the first tab??
Edit: I haven’t used Google in a while. I just searched “who is Dr dre” on mobile. That’s a lot of boxes. Wikipedia box, albums box, songs box, people also search for box, videos box, you really gotta scroll down before you get to the results. Google doesn’t really link you to the answer anymore, it just answers you. Wow.
Yep, very little of the main page is links anymore.
The article actually does make an interesting argument that the web is becoming a legacy format in favour of generative AI and social media interaction, and takes this as an example of that trend.
I hate this change. While these features are neat if I just want a quick answer for something like if I wanna know some random fact about a person, it makes it so much harder to do any level of actual research on something anymore because you have to dig through so much garbage to find the real content.
And Google isn't alone in this. Bing and pretty much all of the big search engines are doing the same thing now. And while there are definitely alternative search engines out there, they lack the reach and rank sorting that Google and the other big players have already perfected.
So my options are either spend extra time with every search I perform by switching to various tabs and scrolling past auto-generated nonsense and sponsored results to find the answers I need, or use an objectively inferior product which may not even be able to point me to what I need within the first few pages of results. Neither option is a particularly great experience these days. The internet sucks so much lately.
They took the guy who led the legendary team that made the search not only work instantly at a previously unimaginable scale, but also freakishly well from a "finding exactly what you wanted based on almost any query," back in the late 2000s, if you remember... that guy, when he started pushing back against the people who wanted to fuck up search results to boost imaginary metrics that were theoretically (and, probably, not really) going to make more money from ads, they pushed him out.
This absolutely excellent article goes into detail about the exact moment, if you had to pick one, when Google stopped being a legendary tech company and simply became yet another behemoth coasting on its past successes until the market changes under it and it can't adapt, fades, and takes its place with all the others, all the way back to IBM and DEC. Nothing's changed in a big enough way for it to get knocked back into that obscurity yet, but it clearly will at some point.
Yea, sounds like the familiar managerialist games enshittifying everything once again.
But I guess the progression focus along engineering -> sales -> finance of corporate lifecycles as markets saturate and profit margins are squeezed, particularly now in competition with high interest rates.
Well thanks, that explains why my search suddenly went to shit last week. The web tab is all the way to the right so out of sight. I don’t suppose there’s a firefox extension to auto select web… i know nothing about these things
I’m sure there will be in the coming weeks. It’s just a brand new change, so no one has published an extension yet. I did learn you can block the ai results with uBlock origin, however, so that’s huge.
I got ublacklist and got rid of tiktok and instagram immediately but i still dislike the whole format. Tried a bunch of other search engines and they all seemed pretty similar.
Most normies will never pay for a search engine. I’ve tried and tried to show them the advantages of Kagi but the value just isn’t there for them. I ditched Google for Kagi long ago and I couldn’t be happier.
I do find it interesting/funny that Google felt the need to actually provide this, as a sort of acknowledgement that their main search “results” page is so full of random info boxes and generated content that people can’t find actual links anymore.
Personally, and In principle at least, this makes sense. About half of my web searches are looking for a quick answer to a question (what’s the per pound cook time for a frozen turkey?), so having that answer highlighted and summarized alongside the source is very useful. It’s actually the minority of the time that what I really want is a link to an external resource.
The effectiveness of that implementation and the accuracy of the summarized info is a whole other topic…
No. It’s a Kickstarter that might ship next year. The headline should have been “Bike tires made from NASA’s bizarre shape-shifting metal might be available to buy next year if the crowdfunding campaign isn’t a scam”
No. It’s a Kickstarter that might ship next year. The headline should have been “Bike tires made from NASA’s bizarre shape-shifting metal might be available to buy next year if the crowdfunding campaign isn’t a scam”
The second I see the words “kickstarter or indiegogo” I already know whatever I saw may as well be unobtanium
If it makes its way to a storefront then I’ll consider it, otherwise I’ll just move on and keep my money
Tbf if it’s indigogo, it’s a scam. If its funding is flexible, you might as well just throw your credit card into the trash bin. If it’s on kickstarter, you might at least get some product an few years late (or it’s just a normal pre-order with some extra steps and more expensive)
I never looked at their campaign, but did just read over it for fun. I didn’t do any further research and just assume no lying in the parts that can be checked without having knowledge about their specific products / industry.
First things first: It’s kickstarter, not IGG. It’s not using flexible funding (as that’s only on IGG, if they still allow it). They have a working prototype. That’s nice!
Having won all these awards is nice, but without knowledge about the specific awards, this information is useless. They seem to have a contract with NASA which gives them access to materials and technology. That’s a plus. They also seem to have a real working prototype.
$25k as a target is very low for product development. But they may be an established company and may get extra funding from other sources, so it might be a campaign to check the market and do some PR. Remember how I said many Kickstarters are essentially preorders? They’re not quite there yet in the product development cycle, but this might explain it with other funding besides kickstarter. But this should be researched further before backing.
The whole campaign feels more PR and sales as I’ve seen with the last campaigns that I actually backed (or at least checked because of an interesting “product”). I can’t help but it somehow reminds me of something…
Also after all this talking about space technology, they say it wouldn’t work on earth and needs to be adapted (so no space technology anymore, but still space technology?). I get that they need to do this and that its a bit unfair to point at it, but did chuckle when I read that. Especially when they continued talking about space technology right after.
I was wondering the whole time, whether their tires really last “the whole lifetime of a bike”. I usually change tires, because they’re worn out and the profile is low. Modern tires are quite good at preventing a flat. So the upside of this tire for me would be… no checking if I need to refill some air. They prevent this by making this part of the tire exchangeable (and if it works, $10 is fine as it’s still cheaper than a regular new tire). But then… it lasts the lifetime of your bike, but not specific parts of the product.
How easily can you get access to these spare parts after the campaign? How much trash are they really saving? And as they’re saying their approach is more environmentally friendly - did they research all the new materials used and their production?
So, for me it’s a product I wouldn’t back on KS. It’s a product, that would require me to get spare parts to be used meaningfully. It needs to be established on the market for that. Otherwise it’s nice in the beginning and then it was a waste of money.
Oh, speaking of money - I didn’t check yet how much id have to pay for a ti… WHAT? $500 for two of them? 2 Full wheels are starting at $1,300 and can be up to $2,300 $5,000 depending on your choice of material?!
I can get a fully featured, brand new luxus eBike for that!🤯 Nah, not gonna happen. Talk about the environment as much as you like. A full set of good tires with anti-flat technology for my bike starts at around 40-50 bucks (non US, but shouldn’t be that different in the US?) and lasts a while. I can get 10 sets of tires for the price of this starter set and I’d probably get a few more when I have to pay for a few Tread replacements in between. Talk about the lifetime of a bike. LOL.
This is just Kickstarter scam #362646683 that takes people’s money and then… well, profit that’s it. They won’t ship products because they don’t have products, they don’t have anything
The year is 2245. The heirs finally locate a working, antique reader that can handle the ancient USB key, hoping to find great-great-grandpa’s crypto-wallet or the pin-code to a long-lost Maltese bank account.
Instead, they find a 4-bit, VGA-quality scan of Miss October.
Do you know how this works? I understood if you have Instagram a threads account is already created for you, but is it the App Store location you downloaded from or IP or user set location?
i imagine it’s just very straightforward based on your app store region, because if you spoof that then you’re probably already breaking some ToS so you have no legal ground to stand on
Is the law based on your geographical location or your citizenship? If I’m an EU citizen and travel to California, can these companies store/sell that California data differently? Also say while in Cali I download Threads. Does that mean they can continue to store my data when I return home to the EU?
Yep. One reason might be that FB just took a biiiig blow on their entire business model from the highest court in the EU (which came in front of court after an action by in turn the biggest sub-market (Germany)'s anti-trust watchdog bureau got active against them):
No we’re past that point. I’d much rather call it X and have the people left on that awful network swallow the jagged X pill instead of kidding themselves into thinking they are still on Twitter.
I still get emails from my dormant account, and according to my Gmail, the sender is, “X (formerly Twitter),” so I don’t think we’re done with that yet.
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