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admiralteal

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Amazon used an algorithm to essentially raise prices on other sites, the FTC says (apnews.com)

The new excerpts unveiled Thursday allege executives at the e-commerce giant intentionally deleted communication by using a feature on the popular app Signal that makes messages disappear. By doing this, the FTC said Amazon “destroyed more than two years” worth of communications from June 2019 to “at least early 2022”...

admiralteal ,

Genuine question since the article doesn't mention it -- how does the AP know conversations were destroyed? I would assume a properly-designed, E2E encrypted app like Signal wouldn't leave obvious evidence of shredded conversations.

My guess is it is based on testimony from some of the involved parties that they had these conversations and then later the chat histories were gone? But I'd like to know more.

Moreover, do we know the conversations were destroyed AFTER they were ordered to preserve them and not just routinely destroyed?

admiralteal ,

Meanwhile western nations are falling over each other to deliver military aid to Israel, a nation that clearly does not need it and is using those tools to manufacture fresh child skeletons as part their religious war.

admiralteal ,

UK and Germany, for two.

Hamas official says they will repeat Oct. 7 attacks (news.yahoo.com)

Quote: “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it again and again. The Al-Aqsa Deluge [the name Hamas gave its 7 October onslaught - ed.] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are...

admiralteal ,

There's no peace for the region so long as the Palestinian identity continues to exist. Everyone knows it, none less than the Israelis.

Even if Israel were truly of mind to "make peace", far too many Palestinians remember the deals reneged on from the previous generation between Israel and the PLO. The origin story of how al-Mujama transitioned into the militant Hamas. When the best possible treatment Palestinians could get from Israel was wage slavery, settlement, total dependence on foreign aid, and not even having the right to travel freely. Second-class residents, not even citizens, in their own homelands. And the idea that anyone would have more faith in Benny than Peres or Shamir is sort of laughable.

The outcome of this may as well be carved in stone. Israel will do to Palestine as was done to so many other victims of colonialism. Corner and oppress the people who were of the land until none of their childrens' children can remember a time when it was their land. Turn any injustices into notes from history, to be discussed and studied but never repaired.

But hey, the planet is dying either way I guess.

admiralteal ,

That's not what the word "apologist" means.

To apologize for something is to defend it. It's indefensible. Israel is going to wipe these people out, systematically, just as they've been doing since before nearly any of us were alive. There's only one thing Israel could do to lead to lasting peace in the region and that is give back the land. Anyone who thinks that is going to happen is delusional.

Anything less than returning people to their homelands is just going to lead to continuing violent resistance.

admiralteal ,

I never understood why so many from the more techbro political alignment find this argument so convincing.

It doesn't really matter whether the original data is present in the model or if it was reduced to such an abstract form that we cannot find it anymore. The model only can exist because of the original data being used to make it, and it was used without proper license. It doesn't matter how effective nor how lossy your compression is, mere compression is not transformation and does not wash away copyright.

The argument that it is in some way transformative is more relevant. But it's also got a pretty heavy snort of "thinking like a cop" in it, fundamentally. Yes, the law protects transformative works, so if we only care what the written rules of the law says, then if we can demonstrate that what the AI does is transformative, the copyright issues go away. This isn't a slam dunk argument that there's nothing wrong with what an AI does even if we grant it is transformative. It may also simply be proving that the copyright law we have fails to protect artists in the new era of AI.

In a truly ideal world, we wouldn't have copyright. At all. All these things would be available and offered freely to everyone. All works would be public domain. And artists who contributed to the useful arts and sciences would be well-fed, happy, and thriving. But we don't live in that ideal world, so instead we have copyright law. The alternative is that artists cannot earn a living on their works.

admiralteal ,

Does literally anyone scan an RFID chip from a business card?

I just... don't believe that is a thing that happens. Seems like a way to look "high-tech" that an actually high-tech person would never bother with.

Business cards are for reading a name, title, business name, phone number, email address, and MAYBE a business URL. What the heck are we even doing here.

Whatever business use is being achieved with these paper RFID tags... if it isn't for some kind of security gate to prevent shrinkage, a barcode would work just as well and is dead reliable.

admiralteal ,

One would think that it is important for a ship's counselor to remain pretty detached from the day-to-day decision-making of the crew. That it would be a very bad idea for the counselor to be regularly fraternizing with what are basically her patients.

I wonder how this works in, for example, the Navy.

admiralteal ,

A classic: The Life and Times of a Holodeck Janitor

admiralteal ,

A big part of this is also that the auto industry is increasingly steering people to buy big, expensive, profitable trucks over smaller, saner, more reasonable vehicles (that they earn less profit on).

It's not just that consumers "want" these vehicles. Consumers are being pushed to want them.

There's a reason Kei-style trucks basically do not exist in the US -- because they're cheap and useful and the automakers thus dare not allow them.

admiralteal ,

If you're curious, it is because wagons are classified as passenger vehicles and SUVs are classified as light trucks. Wagons are held to higher emissions/safety standards than SUVs, making them less profitable to produce in the US. So most automakers steer clear. They don't want to accidentally compete with their own most profitable products by selling a less profitable one that better-matches what consumers need.

Also fuck Tesla.

admiralteal ,

The dumbest thing is if you look at actual crash test statistics, SUVs don't actually perform better than passenger cars, by and large. Maybe a bit, but definitely not enough to justify the huge difference in size and cost. Smart cars are a great example -- they actually perform super well in crash testing in spite of being so tiny.

People get so confused about the whole relative size thing. They think being in a bigger vehicle makes them inherently safer -- but that isn't really true. Being in a SAFER vehicle makes you safer. Big SUVs with their poor suspension and stiff frames, in many kinds of common accidents, perform very poorly.

The confusion comes because people forget there are two vehicles involved in the kinds of accidents they are scared of. They think that if their vehicle is bigger, it means the other vehicle is smaller. And of course, if the vehicle you're in a collision with is smaller, you will be safer. But it doesn't matter that it be smaller than you. It needs to be smaller in absolute terms.

And in a crash with a stationary object or rollover, being in a one of these trucks is pretty much universally worse.

Of course, the entire appeal to "safety" is nonsense anyway. US roads are just not safe. They are not designed to be safe. Safety is not a priority. Level of service is the priority. We can and happily do sacrifice safety for the sake of reducing congestion all the time. Just look at how nearly-universal right on red and sliplanes are, or how often we put in expensive urban signalized intersections instead of all-way stops.

admiralteal ,

Consumers are not dumb, they're just nearly powerless.

admiralteal ,

You should read the article because this isn't about phone prices. It's about stuff that you actually can only buy from them.

We're backsliding from a world where you could have just one or two streaming platforms and basically get access to everything to one that's even worse than old cable packages.

admiralteal ,

Except... the article still wasn't about phones, or any device/OS. Just more people who didn't read it.

admiralteal ,

Yeah, I encourage this wholeheartedly.

admiralteal ,

Consumers literally do not have a choice to buy the services the article was discussing -- apple's media streamers -- from someone else. Apple monopolizes that content.

RTFA. It is not about phones.

And even for phones, to get a functionally-acceptable product, your choice is one of maybe 5 manufacturers who all tacitly collude to keep prices up and keep unprofitable consumer choices far, far away.

admiralteal ,

Cool, cool.

The article is talking about Apple services you can use on Android or Windows or even regular Linux PCs, though. There's no "free computing" alternative to Apple+ , other than the high seas.

admiralteal ,

Just barge on talking about something entirely irrelevant to the article you didn't read. Don't look back or doubt yourself for even one moment.

admiralteal ,

The (R) is a hint. No one sincerely concerned with the wellbeing of the nation would be willing to have that next to their name in this day and age.

admiralteal ,

A badly-made show with good writing can survive and succeed in spite of it all.

A well-made show with bad writing has a forever uphill battle.

Yet the budget for writers is the first thing that always seems to get cut.

admiralteal ,

The DMCA is so fucking contradictory about these subjects too. For example, per the DMCA, a party that misrepresents themselves in a takedown claim:

shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.

This should mean you can sue the person for absolutely every bit of damage you suffered + whatever legal costs you encouraged in the process when you are delivered an illegitimate takedown. Reality is though, when regulatory duty is foisted onto private actors like this, that's just making it harder to get access to your rights.

The DMCA limits liability for platforms that host infringing content so long as the platform does not have knowledge the content infringes... but it provides NO guidance for how the platform should ascertain that an infringement claim is legitimate -- and waives their liability for making an erroneous determination.

It mandates a counter-notification process, but in this process the content will stay down for 10-14 days -- which in the world of social media can be an absolute death sentence. In no small part because the service provider's own algorithms will now bury that content when it is restored. And of course, DMCA has zilcho recourse for algorithmic burying (of course the writers weren't even aware of these potential effects).

And you cannot have an anonymous of pseudonymous counter-notification. Must be your full name, address, and phone number on it. Which will theoretically get handed off to the person that put in the fake claim against you as part of the process! Fucking madness! I don't know if this is enforced as written, but as written this is what it says.

There's probably a lot more to be said, but christ it is a poorly written law. And this is all from Section 512, which is often viewed as the only "good part" of the DMCA.

admiralteal ,

What are you claiming is untrue about what I said? The part where I directly quoted the statute, or something else? Fuck off with this "not remotely true" bullshit.

I mentioned the counter notification process. Extensively. It's a bad process.

There IS an obligation for the host to do something with the counter-notification, by the way. Their liability waiver for damages goes away if they do not participate in the process. But same as other parts, it puts the legal onus on the victim, meaning little guys get fucked.

Exit polls show Swiss anti-immigrant party on track for record election showing (www.politico.eu)

The Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which centered its campaign on anti-immigrant rhetoric, is projected to win 29 percent of the vote, up from 25.6 percent four years ago and higher than pre-election polls. It has been the country’s largest party since 2003.

admiralteal ,

Does Switzerland even have meaningful immigration to be concerned with banning it?

Isn't this the country where communities vote on their neighbors' citizenship applications?

admiralteal ,

Might be a valuable thing to do if not for the fact that Amazon reviews have basically zero quality control. If Amazon themselves didn't have corrupt motivations to host illegitimate reviews that mislead their own consumers into buying low-quality products.

But if you listen to Amazon reviews at this point, I have an off-brand bridge to sell you.

Is it illegal to con people into thinking you have a perfect ability to pick football games by emailing out two lists: one picking one team, and the other picking the other team, and only sending... (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

…the next pick to the people who saw you pick the “winner”. Now half of those people see one team, the other half see you pick the other team, and whoever saw you pick the winner thinks you’ve got a 100% accuracy rate over two games. You could do that for a while and then offer to sell your pick for the Superbowl....

admiralteal ,

...what do you think is going on here, in this thread?

It's talking about taking peoples' money based on your (fraudulent) ability to predict the outcome. There will be victims in the form of the people whose money was taken. Some of those people will see that the result didn't match. The fraud will be evident to the defrauded victims.

admiralteal ,

Chatbots don't have physical bodies that require food and shelter. So even if you could prove their creativity was identical to real human creativity and not a crude imitation more akin to assembling random collages, they still don't deserve the same protections as real artists with physical bodies that need food and shelter.

Which isn't even approaching the obvious retort that their creativity is a crude imitation of real creativity.

Copyright doesn't exist because there's some important moral value to the useful arts. It exists to keep food in bellies.

You're bending over backwards to protect bots as deserving identical rights to humans. For what purpose should they have those rights? The only benefit to treating the bots this way is to ensure the rich tech oligarchs that already have undue power and influence in our society get even richer and get even more influence.

admiralteal ,

As long as they don’t actually violate copyright in the classical sense of just copy pasting stuff...

As far as we know, that is exactly how they work. They are very, very complex systems for copying and pasting stuff.

And collages can be transformative enough to qualify for copyright

Sure, if they were made with human creativity they deserve the protections meant to keep creative humans alive. But who cares? They are not humans and thus do not get those protections.

admiralteal ,

That claim doesn't prove your premise. I get that it feels clever, but it isn't.

Just because they're very good at reproducing information from highly pared down and compressed forms does not mean they are not reproducing information. If that were true, you wouldn't be able to enforce copyright on a jpeg photo of a painting.

admiralteal ,

I think there's a lot of Dunning–Kruger here.

The simple fact is that they aren’t able to reproduce their exact training data so no, they aren’t storing it in a highly compressed form.

See: jpeg analogy. You've described here lossy compression not something that is categorically different than compression. Perhaps the AI models are VERY lossy. But that doesn't mean it is original or creative.

But the reality is, we largely do not know how these chatbots work. They are black boxes even to the researchers themselves. That's just how neural networks are. But the thing I know is they are not themselves creative. All they can do is follow weights to reproduce the things human classifiers evaluated as subjectively "good" over the things they subjectively evaluated as "bad". All the creativity happened in the training process -- the inputs and the testing. All of the apparent creativity outputted is a product of the humans involved in training and testing the model, not the model itself. The actual creative force is somewhere far away.

admiralteal ,

Even if I grant your premise that their produce is novel -- I don't, that is fundamentally not how they work -- the copyright would be held by the bot in that case, not the person who used it.

No more than a person who commissions a painting has copyright for the work. That's not how creativity, LLMs, nor copyright law works.

admiralteal ,

Exactly. Which is how we know that calling what it does inherently creative/novel is absurd and must be wrong. Glad you came around.

admiralteal ,

The one thing Reddit is great for, and for which substitutes do not yet exist, is its crowdsourced information. Especially product reviews. And finding those from within Reddit is impossible because their search simply does not work.

Appending "Reddit" to a Google search remains the best first-past method for making certain kinds of decisions where you need concrete, good-quality answers. Even for that, it's a bit of a minefield. Especially post-mod-purge, a lot of the once-great enthusiast subs have gotten pretty blase. Still better than all those consumer advertorial "BEST OF 2024" lists that you find everywhere full of extremely mediocre and likely corrupt reviews, but nothing compared to the straightforward buying guides you used to find.

On top of that, the "new" sight is a million times less usable than old.reddit.com and search engines shoot you in through that terrifically terrible gateway to experience confusingly-organized and incomplete content. Orders of magnitude worse on mobile, too.

If Reddit is de-indexed, I'll simply never be there at this point. Though I admit, I'm already there extremely rarely.

admiralteal ,

As I understand it, detecting an adblocker is a form of fingerprinting. Fingerprinting like this is a privacy violation unless there is first a consent process.

The outcome of this will be that consent for the detecting will be added to the TOS or as a modal and failing to consent will give up access to the service. It won't change Youtube's behavior, I don't think. But it could result in users being able to opt out of the anti-adblock... just that it also might be opting out of all of YouTube when they do it.

admiralteal ,

The idea that Amazon will not replace every job they can regardless of unionization status is preposterous.

If they can automate the job, they already have every incentive to do so. This is not going to crack the whip.

Workers should unionize, period. The company is coming for them either way.

admiralteal ,

You shouldn't even need to explain this, but thanks for doing it. That shit you replied to was a Ben Shapiro level of disingenuous bullshit argument.

admiralteal ,

Conceivably, to increase the performance of the humans WITHOUT making them lose their jobs.

These warehouses all act like they're perpetually short-staffed and under intense demand. If they boost overall performance, one reasonable outcome would be easier working conditions for the same workers, or shifting workers from jobs robots can do to other areas that were short-staffed.

It won't be because fuck the workers. But that possibility should exist.

admiralteal ,

The dumbest timeline is indeed the one we have -- living in times of nearly boundless plenty yet letting people starve and go homeless.

Amazon's not doing this to enrich and improve society. They're doing it to enrich and improve themselves. Fighting to keep bad jobs is what we do when the entire economic system has entirely given up on serving the needs of the public rather than private wealth.

It's not that we should force Amazon to not use robots to replace jobs. It's that we should force Amazon to contribute at least as much value to their communities as they extract, through any means possible. Unfortunately, in this idiot society, we think "being an employer" is the only reasonable way a company can contribute to its community.

admiralteal ,

The human number is ALREADY vastly higher than the non-human number.

The only reason Amazon hasn't replaced them yet is that the technology has not been developed. Every dollar left on the table by workers right now will never be recouped.

admiralteal ,

Doesn’t remove ads (take money from subscribers or advertisers, not both, also print media)

Tell that to all the advertorial content from e.g., the fossil fuel industry on The New York Times. Print news has been accepting money from advertisers while charging users since before internet ads were a thing. They just hide the ads in more insidious, corrupt ways.

admiralteal , (edited )

Basically, this argument is "yes the rich get richer, but the poor also appear better off so it's actually a good thing." Of course, it's confusing a correlation with a causation.

The reason the poor are better off isn't because the rich got richer -- it is because society stepped in, insisted on pro-social policies to lift up the poor like public schools, minimum wage, social safety nets, worker rights, equal protection under the law, and all manner of things.

The Luddites have over and over again been proved right by history. When machines take over, the machine owners benefit and the workers are hurt. When the workers are being crushed under heel, they are more likely to show solidarity and form social movements that force society to give back more, and thus they are lifted up. The idea that the automation itself is CAUSING that lifting up is a fallacy of broken windows.

It's flatly obnoxious that anyone is claiming that the rich are the reason the workers are better off when really the WORKERS are why the workers are better off and the rich are, at best, neutral bystanders except when they directly block the path of progress.

The argument in favor of the creative destruction of capitalism is used to thought-kill anyone advocating for social reform. Workers speak out that they are being hurt by a new technology and need support and instead of hearing the pain and considering what support would be fair, they're instead painted as being anti-progress and told they should just lay down and get run over because the overall economy will still be fine in the end (and who cares if a few people are flattened in the process).

admiralteal ,

We'll have self-driving cars in the next decade.

Disregard that this has been true for over a generation.

By the time self-driving cars are a thing available to the average person, we need to have already fundamentally changed our urban design to one that doesn't put the car at the center. For reasons of city financial sustainability, for environmental reasons, and for general "multi-modal cities are better to live in for nearly everyone" reasons. The cool thing is, the more changes like these we make, the easier and safer it will be to design self-driving cars. Safer roads are safer for everyone, even robots.

admiralteal ,

Right, that is the exact straw-man argument I was referring to.

admiralteal ,

Nowhere, not once, did I say we should stop tech from taking jobs. I didn't even imply that outcome. I would even say I directly contradicted that. Yet you introduced it as the easy-to-dunk-on premise and then proceeded to dunk on it.

It's a textbook strawman. Not only that, but it is the exact one I referenced in my post, so I guess I'll just copy and paste:

Workers speak out that they are being hurt by a new technology and need support and instead of hearing the pain and considering what support would be fair, they're instead painted as being anti-progress and told they should just lay down and get run over because the overall economy will still be fine in the end (and who cares if a few people are flattened in the process).

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible | Nieman Reports (niemanreports.org)

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of...

admiralteal ,

Does the "social media bump" definitely exist, especially for Twitter?

Even this article seems to indicate it didn't. Less than 2% of their page views were coming through Twitter. That's practically a rounding error, in spite of them at the time having quite a huge account.

Do people really click links and leave the site in any meaningful numbers? Click through, linger, read articles? Or do they just read the headline preview and then go off on their opinions? Especially for a serious, careful news organization like NPR, I really doubt it.

You're on Twitter to Tweet, not click links and read articles.

Twitter's value, I feel, was always in news discussion -- not article reading -- and nonsense. There's really no good reason for any major news agency to be actively posting their content to it.

admiralteal ,

This joke is backwards.

YouTube is the one trying to kill an infinitely adaptable adversary they stand no chance of defeating.

admiralteal ,

Man, what kind of universe am I in where a Wolf 359-truther is getting favorites.

admiralteal ,

... Already happened.

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