Most insults are scatterological or sexual in nature. But you must understand that the word isn't the thing itself. I don't think anyone has sexual aspirations of Spez
Yeah; I just chalk it up to the fact that humans for thousands of years have been obsessed with sex and poop on a level more basic than language - it's not as surprising then to think our language is riddled with allusions to it.
100% it can, and worse yet, it can be scraped and analyzed like this by Meta, or Reddit, or your nearest fascist dictator.
But that's also pretty much the entire internet in any forum or social media platform, so although I don't like it, I figure that's more or less just part of using the internet.
To me it's much like the whole "There's no expectation of privacy in public."
I hope it doesn't take AI to figure out my attitudes when I regularly proclaim that there are no maga in my life more than required by various pre-existing obligation, Luigi Mangione will be remembered as a folk hero, Trump will one day be shown to be ALL through the Epstein files in all the worst ways (as will many Dems and they should all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law), and most Democratic leadership is 100% owned by the oligarchy too, as evidenced by things such as their support of Israeli genocide and how much more urgently they are fighting Mamdani than they are Trump in many cases.
Most importantly, by using Lemmy you aren't enriching a techno-fascist platform. They can scrape lemmy the same way they used to scrape reddit, but at least my content does not benefit a greedy little pig boy fascist fucknut.
But what's the good thing? Yeah Lemmy might not be doing it but I can do it, and Elon can, and Zuck, and Putin and your grandmom. Whatever you post on Lemmy is as public as it can get.
I think their point is there's nothing stopping Lemmy mods from using the exact same type of AI summarization tools. It may not be built-in, but many instances have their own addons for improving moderation
Corporations have been already making profiles of various types for a while now in the form of adtech, social media, data brokers, people search websites, credit scores, devices and services that harvest sensitive and intimate data (e.g. mobile phone apps, watching habits from smart TVs, driving data from cars).
Our society has been set up for mass surveillance in a thousand different ways as a form of social control and dominance by those who wield power.
It's time people realize that privacy is a right instead of normalizing abuses of consent.
And if anyone doubts this, 15 years ago I had made a tool that created these types of profiles as a proof of concept.
I had scraped tons of subreddits, then you could pass in a user and based on both their subreddits and key words would categorize users across a few axes. That was just using naïve bayes, but worked pretty well.
The AI is just much much better at natural language processing to pull out more detailed info about patterns.
*Have been made long ago and are being constantly updated.
Snowden already warned us about this over a DECADE ago. Their scopes and powers will have increased exponentially. And that was under 'trustworthy' administration. I guarantee there's a type of system in place that flags people before they do anything, just on pattern recognition alone. Of course, they can't use that system as a legal basis for anything, so they don't and use parallel constructions instead.
Anyone who thinks "this is coming" hasn't been paying attention. We're already there and beyond.
I already assumed that all project 2025 purges to date have been done with input from statistical modeling, in a way that removes far more "liberals" who might refuse orders, and retains as many MAGA/fascist bootlickers as possible.
I find the funniest shit ever is how Snowden uncovered the biggest shit show and nothing happened. Probably the starting event for me losing all hope in this pathetic species I now call Homo Merda.
I wonder if being made aware of the extensive NSA spying actually had a suppressing effect on taking action itself. It was kinda scary. Overwhelming. "Best not to think about it" kind of stuff.
It was well over a decade ago that a store figured out a teen was pregnant. The father was livid they were advertising pregnancy stuff to her. He ate his words.
That's probably a massive GDPR violation. Automated processing of extra sensitive data like political beliefs and religion is not outright forbidden but it's subject to extra protections.
I doubt it, since all it ostensibly does is summarize info the user has released freely. How that info is stored and retained exactly might be up for debate though.
GDPR article 9 (1) says you can't play algorithmic guess with people's religion or political opinions unless you gave express permission to the service provider to do it (i.e. it's not covered in the general GDPR boilerplate)
Hard agree with this. Does Reddit even have lawyers, or are they just using ChatGPT? Google, Meta, and Tik Tok already paid PII misuse fines for less than this. everything listed is part of the GDPR extended PII list.
Nah, I think all of it is literally just public data offered up by users themselves. If you didn't want those opinions shared, you shouldn't have posted them on Reddit.
What counts as an algorithm? Surely it can't be the actual definition of algorithm.
Because in most forum software (even the older stuff that predates reddit or social media) if I just click on a username, that fetches from the database every comment that the user has ever made, usually sorted in reverse chronological order. That technically fits the definition of an algorithm, and presents that user's authored content in a manner that correlates the comments with the same user, regardless of where it originally appeared (in specific threads).
So if it generates a webpage that shows the person once made a comment in a cooking subreddit that says "I'm a Muslim and I love the halal version" next to a comment posted to a college admissions subreddit that says "I graduated from Harvard in 2019" next to a comment posted to a gardening subreddit that says "I live in Berlin," does reddit violate the GDPR by assembling this information all in one place?
Meta got a fine of over a billion euros. Google got a bunch of smaller fines, but it's probably way above everyone else in terms of fines. Microsoft got half a billion. Even Apple got an 8 million euro fine, but that was more a tap in the wrist to make them think twice about some data collection.
And besides this, large companies are constantly in contact with the authorities and in smaller violations the general policy is to give a warning and let companies stop the illegal data processing voluntarily.
The screenshot shows an llm summary of a users posting history. Is that what you mean by “determine belief values stance and more” ? Is there more to this? How is that summary different from scrolling through someone’s posting history to see what they post about?
The post title makes it sound like Reddit is doing some sort of automated classification of user politics with some sort of ml technique. But the screenshot does not show that. It shows an llm summary of a users posting history . If the tool was run on a user that posted exclusively to a cat subreddit, the summary would have been about how the user likes cats. Despite the utility or accuracy of llm summaries, what the screenshot shows is far more anodyne than what this post’s title implies is happening.
How is that summary different from scrolling through someone’s posting history to see what they post about?
How is reading the Clif notes/summary different from reading the book? Time and effort taken, as well as a much shallower understanding of the material (assuming your summary is even relatively accurate).
It's an easy way to get an instant opinion of someone so you can make a determination on whether you like it without having to tax your poor brain into actually thinking, and you can let something decide your opinion before you even know what you want to know. A summary provided by a product that is notoriously frequently wrong or lies and makes shit up out of whole cloth.
We (smart people) knew this was the end result of ai and why the far right and ccorporations love it. But holy fucking shit this is dangerous and people should be terrified of this. Stop using these platforms (I know it doesn't matter the platform, we're all fucked, but still)
My concern is that Reddit can sell their profiling algorithm to other companies, who then can federate with Lemmy, mastodon, etc. to build profiles against users.
It's getting to the point where I may need to go back to cycling usernames every few years.
It's getting to the point where I may need to go back to cycling usernames every few years.
You should definitely do that anyways, you never know when some crazy is going to try and dox you. Changing usernames won’t really protect you from advertisers though, software will link the two identities together.
Let this be a reminder to anyone with an account with over a thousand comments: time for a new one.
Facebook can figure out all of this about you just from what you like and what links you click. Now imagine what a fucking goldmine a few years of your post history is to a deep learning algorithm – let alone someone who’s been using the same Reddit account for two decades. I bet they know those people better than they know themselves.
Spez will fuck with Reddit's userbase and make the platform absolute bullshit to use, yet 90% of redditors will still keep sucking his dick over and over again.
"LeMmY iS tOo HaRd To UsE!! wTf Is An InStAnCe???"
I think a lot of people on reddit forget that it's a forum. They see reddit as this special thing, when in fact it's not. My best description to people about Lemmy is it's a bunch of reddits that all can see eachother and none are owned by some corporation looking to harvest your info. It's like reddit, but better. As for which instance? Roll a dice and pick one, it doesn't matter all that much. I'm on lemmy.world and I don't even know half the time I just surf around. Other than that anything that makes reddit better then Lemmy is purely due to the fact it has a larger and longer established user base.
I just try to describe it like email. "You've got your gmails and your outlooks and your yahoos and whatnot, you pick one you like, but they're all email and it won't stop you seeing emails from outlook guys if you're a gmail guy."
I think that on the first wave of users when we had 200k active users Lemmy was in a very different state in terms of usabilities. So much has improved and if we get another event like that I'm sure we will retain way more users.
"I can imagine a future where a lot of people really trust ChatGPT’s advice for their most important decisions," Sam Altman said. "Although that could be great, it makes me uneasy." Me too, Sam.
I like Tiktok for funny and helpful videos, but I deleted it because I realized the algorithm was controlling too much of what I was seeing. I realized it was starting to shape my opinions and split.
Their algorithm is a drug and spreads propaganda just like Facebook. Stay far away.
Good on you for making that realization. Most TikTok users I encounter do not have that level of self-reflection. I‘m not sure if I would have it if I ever installed it. I mean when you‘re constantly surrounded by the algorithmic equivalent of yes-men on TikTok, any opposition outside your bubble must look like a glitch. It seems pretty tough to break out of that.
Andreste mai in vacanza prenotando il vostro alloggio in strutture che, mentre scegliete il vostro soggiorno al mare o in montagna, propongono case vacanze e appartamenti nei territori occupati illegalmente in Cisgiordania e Gerusalemme Est? Se la ri…
interessante, qualche anno fa avevo fatto un articolo simile (forse è da aggiornare ora): lealternative.net/2020/07/17/a… tutte queste realtà hanno pochissimo seguito e adesioni, io ho provato ogni tanto a usarle ma non erano praticamente mai presenti nelle città in cui mi servivano e quando trovavo qualcosa era a dei prezzi spesso inaccessibili.
Attualmente forse la cosa più efficace è cercare su Booking e poi, una volta trovato il posto giusto, cercarlo su internet per vedere se affitta le camere anche senza Booking ma con un proprio sistema di prenotazioni. Spesso facendo cosi si spende però di più perché, da quanto so, gli alberghi che si associano a Booking non possono mettere sul proprio sito stanze a prezzi più convenienti.
Infatti devi contattarli direttamente via mail o telefono e a quel punto ti fanno il prezzo che gli pare, non sono legati a niente. Questo vale di sicuro per Airbnb, dove ormai trovi non solo affittacamere occasionali ma anche agriturismi o affittacamere veri. Sinceramente booking per me non esiste neanche. Di conseguenza il mio suggerimento è usare Airbnb per avere un minimo di garanzie e qualche recensione e poi cercare il posto direttamente. Airbnb guadagna lo stesso e sta al gioco senza problemi, booking è più old-style stile tassisti ormai
eh si, l'unica è quello. Purtroppo dipende un po' dal tipo di viaggio, non sempre è semplice. Se si fa un viaggio singolo in una sola città si può provare a fare, ma già se si inizia a fare un viaggio itinerante con più alberghi/posti per più giorni inizia purtroppo a essere difficoltoso riuscire a organizzare e contattare tutti correttamente soprattutto se si va in posti dove non si parla la lingua locale...
At the very least my most played game ever isn't supported and never will be.
So if I go full linux i will just have to stop playing a game I played for almost 10 years and a game that was owned by a small game dev studio when I started playing. It sucks. I couldn't guess some Epic games would buy this game and then officially make sure it won't run on linux.
I tried it a few months ago and couldn't get it to work. May just have been me, but even if I, a semi tech literate person has problems with it, good fucking luck getting the broader population to use Linux. It is simply too hard for regular people to do stuff, that just works with windows.
Sure windows has it's issues, but they're issues 95% of people will never encounter. Instead they'll have an easy time installing software, and don't have to look at a database to figure out wether or not they can even play a game.
The only games that won't run are Battlefield and Cod, LoL, etc
Oh really ?
That's a bold statement.
Also I suppose it's my own fault for wanting to play competitive multiplayer games online on Linux ?
It's impressive because you probably hope for the same thing as me for gaming on linux but you are toxic as fuck and only think your type of games should be supported.
We are supposed to be in the same team but you shit on the games I want to play instead.
Honestly fuck you.
Edit : My god I shouldn't have watched your comment history. That AOSP comment my dude...
But dual booting still means using Windows even if it is just for gaming. Which is exactly what I fucking do.
I use W10 and PopOS as dual boot and play all I can on linux. I even just setup everything for secure boot to work properly on both OS.
But no I'm such a masochist for wanting to just continue ln playing a game like rocket league with my friends online. What a madman.
And it's also my fault if some big dev studios bought a game I liked and then said that linux players have too many cheaters and that they block this platform.
And then there is you on the sideline, all sneakering and enjoying the fact that another cannot play the games they love on their linux platform. So yeah I repeat it, fuck you for hoping the games I play dont get support.
From an organizational standpoint, it doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
The group will be split into four smaller groups, according to a New York Times report. One group will focus on AI research, another one on infrastructure and hardware projects, one on AI products, and another one on building out AI superintelligence, a hypothetical AI system that could outperform human intelligence on any and all scales.
I mean, they have different skillsets, a fair bit of that is going to be on decoupled timelines, they have different levels of risk, and the technical expertise is going to differ. One succeeding or failing isn't tightly coupled to another doing so. Sure, they all relate to one thing or another to something that has been called "AI", but that's a pretty broad group.
Under this scenario Russia would have military and economic control of occupied Ukraine under its own governing body, imitating Israel’s de facto rule of Palestinian territory seized from Jordan in 1967.
...
Witkoff, who is also tasked by Trump with bringing peace to the Middle East, is understood to support the idea, which the Americans believe circumvents barriers in the Ukrainian constitution to ceding territory without holding an “all-Ukraine” referendum.
I assume that also means that Russia would then send in state-sponsored terrorists in the guise of "settlers" to murder the Ukrainians and incrementally steal their land, and send in the army to slaughter them if they dare to fight back.
It isn't a question of stupidity. It's a question of power.
Without Western arms and armor to hold territory, both Israel and Russia can just seize the land and kill anyone who objects.
Ukrainians can know it's bullshit in the same way the Palestinians (or Armenians or Tutsis or Rohingra Muslims) can know they are getting a raw deal. But what are they going to do about it, except eat lead?
I haven't heard about thermodynamic computing before, but it sounds pretty interesting. As IEEE Spectrum explains , "the components of a thermodynamic chip begin in a semi-random state. A program is fed into the components, and once equilibrium is reached between these parts, the equilibrium is read out as the solution. This computation style only works with applications that involve a non-deterministic result ... various AI tasks, such as AI image generation and other training tasks, thrive on this hardware." It sounds almost like quantum computing to my layperson ears. [edit: fixed link]
A new era in computing is here! Thermodynamic computing, akin to probabilistic computing, harnesses noise for efficient problem-solving. Imagine a world where physics-based ASICs tailor solutions to specific needs.
If it makes AI cheaper then great because AI is a massive fucking waste of power, but other than that I am grossed out by this tech and want none of it.
"If we cannot produce them (hundreds of transissions) in Germany, we will relocate these volumes to a different plant, for example to the U.S.. This might take maybe 8 to 10 months, but, if there's no move forward, we will do it because we have this business," Sagel said.
Anyone with a conscious would say. "Okay cool, if you so desperately want to cooperate with convicted war criminals, then do it elsewhere". Maybe it should even go further and this type of blatant law dodging should just be directly criminalized with the ones in charge facing some nice prison time?
Sorta like how corporations pushed recycling onto the public to deflect from their own culpability for pollution. Why would we regulate the companies building huge data centers when we can get average people to absorb the cost? It's not like they're making obscene profits while laying off untold thousands.
I mean, if that was the case, sure, let's have them pay to clean up the waste they generate. But have you seen NVIDIA, Microsoft, or Meta lately? These companies are barely staying in business. Their CEOs can hardly afford to ride the bus to work. Let's cut them a break.
TLDR: It's your fault the earth is dying because you horde emails.
OP hit the nail on the head. This is once again shifting the blame (and guilt) onto individuals who even collectively have fuck-all impact on the problem in question.
The worst of it is, some people will believe this shit.
What’s even more infuriating is the numbers of people who fail to recognize that all of these companies sell these goods and services to consumers and it is those consumers who can reduce the demand.
In the case of AI, even if consumers actively try and avoid products with AI, it's difficult. There are studies showing customers are generally less likely to buy a product if it's described as having AI features, so the overall market demand is already for consumer products to have less AI. The demand companies are catering to is from investors, who don't need to care about whether it's viable to sell anything until after the bubble pops.
There was/is a demand for slavery. Should we wait for these people to realize that maybe owning slaves is not okay and morally wrong? Or should we just outright ban slavery and not give two fucks how "the market forces" view such action? You tell me.
Your argument is, correct me if I'm wrong, that the demand for product X always necessetates its production/supply and that supply will cease when there is no more demand.
A valid argument based on basic market economic principles.
I argue that there are times, when the demand for something does not outweigh the cost incurred (by the society) from the production and supply of a product. Meaning there are cases, such as this one, when it is almost impossible to decrease demand and thus influence the production which in turn would decrease the cost incurred by the society. In my view, the State has to protect foremost its citizenry, not ginormous enterprises. If this protection means going against "market forces", then so be it.
Both "products" cause harm to society while only a few benefit, so no, it was not a false equivalence.
But then again, I could be mistaken and feel free to correct me on anything. 😀)
It's virtually impossible to exist online these days without generative AI bullshit being shoved in your face with no means to opt-out. It's clearly not consumers driving this so-called "demand," because savvy people don't want this to begin with and never did. Rather, it's the desperate speculative hype around this dumb nonproduct that's causing big businesses to set electricity and money on fire with AI slop to no tangible benefit.
A saner response from the UK government would be to tell these companies to either power their AI datacenters with renewables or get out, rather than trying to guilt trip individuals over, of all the goddamned stupid things, undeleted emails.
That's not the take-home here. We should regulate large companies, but as ever, individual choices both have direct effects on the environment, and indirect effects which influence the behaviour of a small number of more powerful organisations. Also important is that individual choices in the political realm influence what regulations get made, so we're never absolved of a responsibility to the environment.
The take-home for me is that the government is using long-discredited statistics relating storage to water usage. Stored emails don't increase water usage by an appreciable percentage.
More processing might result in more water use, but storage? It makes no actual sense. Having more stuff sitting in your storage isn’t making your computer hotter.
In fact, I guess creating a guideline for servers to use more efficient processors would do much more for that.
tape storage is for offline storage, and any data storage on it would also be redundant
writing and reading tape archives takes a lot of computing. usually you have your tape library server and a server hosting the app and then the tape sled. tape takes a lot of energy
so deleting it electronically is going to take a more energy
it's more efficient to overwrite it or use a degaussing device to wipe the tape
the people who thought of that example are ignorant of how data centers work
Almost all politicians are ignorant about tech, yet we let them regulate it. In the worst ways. And fail to regulate it where it ought to be regulated.
I'll say it again, because I think the idea is a practical solution to the issue: electricity and water usage should be charged at reverse volume, the more you use, the more expensive it becomes.
This would actually incentivise companies to reduce their usage, to question if they actually need that new AI data centre that will eat up all the gains in renewable electricity production and require fossil fuel plants to continue running, it'll reduce the crypto miners as well, and encourage everyone to try to reduce their usage.
The knock on effect of this is that electricity actually becomes cheaper for everyone.
I think UK government has no idea what they're doing. First the stupid age verification which will eventually result in massive leak of private information, now this.
If they wanted to save the environment they should push for mix of nuclear and renewable energy sources. But that requires effort...
Nell’affollato teatro tradizionale di Chengdu, un importante evento storico viene presentato al pubblico, enfatizzando le capacità di un personaggio che sfuma nella leggenda.
Roskomnadzor, Russia’s state censorship agency, has officially confirmed it is restricting voice calls on the “foreign” messaging applications WhatsApp and Telegram, a move it clai...
Real criminal organizations literally have their own software. That software has proprietary encryption, and masquerades as regular internet traffic. Frequent updates are made to change the patterns it uses so it remains undetected.
Both chinese vessels attempted to ram the stern of the fillipino vessel. They missed and collided with each other. The chinese coast guard cutters bow ended up smashed in. They were fortunate they did not sink. The filipino coast guard cutter offered aid to the damaged vessel.
There is also a vast amount of space between a normal human body and the bodies that most Americans now have. That has nothing to do with the unrealistic beauty standards in media (which is also a thing)
Obesity is bad, and it annoys me when people start defending it as being beautiful. It's not, it will kill you in loads of unpleasant ways.
Nobody in the thread above mentioned obesity. Nobody is saying you have to be attracted to obese people. Or disputing that it's unhealthy.
It remains true that there is a lot of space between this extreme and the extreme portrayed in media. Body weight is not the only standard, it's one of many.
... Nobody mentioned obesity but we're talking about body weight... I mean, it's on topic, y'know.
And while body weight is not the only standard, it is a good indication of health. If you're twice overweight, you will die sooner and likely in a not so comfortable way. Handhaving that away with "well, it's one thing but there are others too" feels a bit disingenuous.
Yeah, there are loads of ways to die but this one is very preventable
I've read that American food is particularly bad, and you are right, but the factor contributing most is the metabolism with which you are born, other things important are levels of stress, ability to sleep well.
Exercise is important, yes. Eating right is as well. Just keep in mind that some things are outside your control, and if you think your health is your own achievement, that might not be entirely correct.
The factor that matters most isn't your metabolism. If that were true we'd have sever overweight issues since thousands of years but we haven't. The overweight pandemic is caused by too much food, period.
Want to lose weight? Whatever your metabolism is, eat less, eat healthier. It's that simple.
Yeah, exercise a lot, that's healthy and needed. It won't make you think though unless you really exercise a lot (3+ hours a day, every day)
Easiest way is to just eat less. Eat smaller portions, stop eating processed foods, cut your sugar intake.
There are some super interesting videos of a physicist / chemist going over the basics of the chemistry involved and implications of it, I can send those if you're interested
There are some super interesting videos of a physicist / chemist going over the basics of the chemistry involved and implications of it, I can send those if you’re interested
The Russian leader will say he wants peace as long as it serves his interests – and play on the president’s desperation to ‘make a deal’ quickly, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr
Matrix.org Foundation - a non-profit UK Community Interest Company, incorporated to act as the neutral guardian of the standard on behalf of the whole Matrix community.
A small data center has been estimated to use upwards of 25 million liters of water per year if it relies on old-school cooling methods that allow water to evaporate.
So pass a law banning evaporative cooling systems from all industrial and commercial applications (or single out data centers), give them 6 months to comply and start handing out fines every day past the deadline.
straight up not feasible for many serious and necessary facilities like powerplants and refineries, unless you prefer very warm lake or river nearby (which also cools down by evaporation later)
It's very feasible to create the law, collect the fine, and raise the price on energy sources or industrial process that require the cooling.
It's a formality, you could do it in an afternoon. Costs a bit of ink and a piece of paper.
"But then it gets more expensive!" and "This might push corporations out of the city/country." is the consequence the people / the government / the country have to have the balls to endure, if they want to stand by things like "having enough water" or "living on earth in the 22nd century".
If the free market is something you believe in, you should love this, because it makes water a more scarce resource and the market will be able to find another optimal solution to that new scarcity problem.
If evaporative cooling is the only solution then the market will adjust to the new cost by moving power generation towards the coasts or just increase the price, if there are other solutions they’ll become the economically more viable. Either way more water is conserved and you can always balance the cost benefit by adjusting the fine/tax to find a good balance.
There are many solutions to this problem. Evaporative cooling is just the cheapest. But it's only cheap because we don't charge these water users market rates for water. If they're threatening drinking water or agricultural water we should just charge them for water usage the same as you pay for drinking water at home. That's fundamentally what they're taking when they drain the rivers dry. That way they compete directly on the water market instead of bypassing it.
Depending on local climate, season and proximity to cities or industrial customers, this is often done, but you'll still have to dump lots of heat in the summer when space heating is off
cool. and watch the entire right wing go mad over “net zero wokery” and “stealth taxes choking our economy to death.” then watch reform win with a landslide and bulldoze the entire net zero agenda and see where we end up.
sensibly managing the economy and balancing the need to achieve reduced emissions with the need to maintain a functional economy is not capitulating, and indeed being seen to carefully maintain that balance might be key to election victory in four years time.
They're already saying our plan to tackle climate change is going to hurt the economy. But we know that doing nothing will hurt the economy worse. Being scared of them saying what they're already saying is weak and cowardly. Toughen up and do the right thing.
LOS ANGELES—Responding to escalating clashes between civilian activists and militarized immigration authorities, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass publicly urged protesters Monday not to give the Trump administration any pretext for what they’re already d…
To be fair, those automated air pumps require upkeep (e.g. compressors fail after awhile and aren't always super cheap to replace when factoring the cost of the part and labor to fix). So that's what your money was paying for, not the air itself. But, I agree it is a bit ridiculous.
As a side note, I highly recommend those portable air compressors that can plug into your car's aux port. Super convenient in the winter time when your tires' air pressure drops.
So this doesn't sound like a big deal after all. Maybe just stop pulling water from those "stores of freshwater" for cooling purposes and get your own from the ocean.
Yeah, let them figure it out. It's their problem after all. If it's more expensive, then let them increase prices for their "data serving" activities. If it's too expensive for some people, they might reconsider their usage of said services which in turn might be equivalent of "deleting old files or emails". Instead of asking people deleting files right now before those in charge even tried to fix the problems they created.
Lol, sorry, I meant that for them, not for you. Should have written 'maybe they should just stop pulling water from those “stores of freshwater” for cooling purposes and get their own from the ocean'.
I never heard so much bs in a single article. Those files and emails are stored on cold storage, and is using zero water. I guess it's a good thing to remove old files and empty your trash bin, both in real life as well as digital.
But this article makes no sense at all. Just one query to an AI will use so much more energy and water in comparison with your old email in cold storage. It's a joke.
Ps. By removing your files now, and checking the contents, you are actually moving the files from cold storage to hot. Meaning the server will load the data into memory etc. Which will actually makes this drought worse, not better.
The country is riddled with leaky mains pipes because water companies are more concerned with allocating huge bonuses to themselves than they are with fixing infrastructure.
Now we're courting tech companies to build more data centres that our other shitty infrastructure (electric) isn't even fit to support because magic money tree go brrrrrrr
This is mandated recycling 2.0. Fill supermarkets with products 99% of which come in plastic wrappers, only successfully recover a fraction of that, and then tell the consumer they're the ones destroying the environment.
If they can fit my 5 recycling boxes up their rear, then they can shove this up their arse too.
Cats develop dementia in a similar way to humans with Alzheimer's disease, leading to hopes of a breakthrough in research, according to scientists.
Experts at the University of Edinburgh carried out a post-mortem brain examination on 25 cats which had symptoms of dementia in life, including confusion, sleep disruption and an increase in vocalisation.
The team believe the discovery in cats could help them get a clearer understanding of the process, offering a valuable model for studying dementia in people.
The study, funded by Wellcome and the UK Dementia Research Institute, is published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, and included scientists from the Universities of Edinburgh and California, UK Dementia Research Institute and Scottish Brain Sciences.
To those who have lost, I feel you. Had several cats through the years, cried for 3 days over the last one. She was tiny and sick from the git go, but she was my friend when I was so lonely.
Anyway, after I got a flat tire, I went around the parking structure with my box cutter slashing tires left and right. I figure I could fix my flat tire by testing flat tires in as many cars as possible.
I had a cat with dementia when I was a kid, she didn't make it past 7 years old. Now I have a 16yo cat who is starting to show the same signs. Today she nearly ran out of the house when I got home, and didn't seem to recognize me. It's rough.
She's curled up next to me rn, but I'm still thinking those hard thoughts like when do I make the choice to put her to sleep? I'm not ready for that, maybe never will be, but she's always been a very frightened cat and she doesn't deserve to feel more frightened because of dementia.
If you're afraid you'll be unable to put her to sleep when she needs, one thing I've learned is that having another pet helps, it's not substituting them, it's having someone else to keep company when they're gone. When I put my older dog to sleep, the one year old mut, I hugged her so much and I cried into her fur a lot, but she helped me through the pain and kept me going because I still had to take care of her
Five Al Jazeera journalists were killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza City on Sunday - among them 28-year-old correspondent Anas al-Sharif, who had reported prominently on the war since its outset.
[…]
The targeted attack on a tent used by journalists has drawn strong international condemnation including from the UN, Qatar where Al Jazeera is based, and media freedom groups.
[…]
Israel had previously accused Sharif of being a member of Hamas's military wing - something he and his employer strongly denied. Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a media freedom group, said the allegations against him were "baseless" and called on the international community to intervene. "Without strong action from the international community to stop the Israeli army... we're likely to witness more such extrajudicial mur
How can journalists write about the persecution of their calling so bloodlessly?
These people were more than innocent: they were so-gooders of the kind we all claim to support. They were not only supposed to be protected not only as noncombatants, but especially guarded by their attendance to a sacred mission. They, like aid workers and doctors and nurses and any care giver or person seeking to provide justice is a designated target when the goal of a military operation is extermination.
You've been reading too much polemic instead of real journalism. That "bloodlessness" is a neutral tone that is one of the marks of professional journalism. It allows the reader to get the facts without telling them how to think or feel about them.
I agree with you. I think that what most people think of as "objectivity" isn't a thing that exists in reality, but as an ideal that we can strive towards. In practice, there is no neutral journalism — especially in this topic, my instinct is to be extra cautious of pieces that appear objective at first glance.
The piece you shared is a good example of how the bias in reporting can be found both in the micro-level prose, and the macro level framing of the piece (in this case, the macro framing being that the killing of journalists sets a scary precedent).
I think you're partially right. It was a visceral reaction, but it's true that they have to keep the house style.
I disagree that I'm reading "too much polemic instead of real journalism". I think journalism is in crisis, and that the pursuit of "neutrality" in a post-truth era has severely weakened the fourth estate when it should be armed to defend its existence and fundamental values.
First, it's a myth that news is impartial. Conventional news absolutely has a system of values: it's inherently pro-truth, pro-freedom of thought, and democratic. Assassinating journalists out in the open and decreeing that they're legitimate targets is a direct attack on fundamental principles of journalism and free society. Journalism does not need to be neutral on whether assassinating journalists is wrong to retain their legitimacy.
Sadly, these institutions are not experienced or practiced at navigating the challenge of addressing this kind of story. The real story here is that because the practice of journalism undermines what the ruling coalition considers to be in the national interest, Israel has decided as a matter of national policy that it will no longer abide by Article 79 of the Geneva convention. They have not admitted it explicitly, but there is an obvious pattern of fact that goes beyond hundreds of assassinations all the way to their law against publishing news that undermines "national morale". That, imo, is the story. Really stop and think about what a monumental and newsworthy thing it is for a major world power to so publicly confirm a policy that has been until now a matter of dispute.
But the BBC can't within their current operating guidelines find a way to tell that very vital story. That's a tragedy.
I think you should really consider the main article from the BBC on the topic, which is here: bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ceqyyr… In comparison to this profile, it has a lot more context.
Here the BBC lays out the full facts, including the IDF's accusations, and the reasons why those accusations are to be viewed with skepticism. It relates statements by the IDF three times, compared to 5 separate quotes from Al-Jazeera, the UN and the CJP condemning the killing, plus a letter signed by the BBC about the situation for journalists in Gaza.
In the "post-truth era" we need journalistic institutions which resist the temptation to polarise their coverage, and instead to provide neutral and balanced output that can be trusted by everyone. The tragedy of the post-truth era is the disintegration of a collective understanding of the world. By relating the facts with a neutral tone, an outlet maximises the audience which can gain that common understanding, which is far more important than instructing the audience on how to respond emotionally to a subject. It's not like the BBC are burying the problems of Israel's targeting for their readers: they lay out how the world is reliant on Gaza-based reporters to get the truth out, and quotes the accusation that Israel wants to prevent the world from seeing their crimes.
My question to you when you read the BBC's coverage is: are you not outraged by the facts? I am.
In Vietnam, villagers whose land is slated to be cleared for a $1.5 billion golf resort backed by the Trump family have reportedly been offered meager compensation by local authorities.
Following the intrusion of ultranationalists into these two military bases, the Israeli prime minister merely issued a statement calling for calm. The police made no arrests, despite the fact that the agitators are known.
I really appreciate the work that AP news does. Good communication and reliable reporting.
I wish, in my heart of hearts, they would link the primary sources when they are online and publicly available. As far as I can tell, UN documentation on these abuses are mostly covered here: docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/59/26 (And committee page more broadly is here: ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-… , I think Israel is responding to their more recent report, or something near it.)
(I'm not terribly well informed, do let me know of better sources.)
The policy of rape and sexual abuse has been going on at least since the government of Ariel Sharon, if not to the time of the Nakba. The victims include women, men and children.
The nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution is an intensely researched and debated aspect of the Holocaust. The program evolved during the first 25 months of war leading to the attempt at "murdering every last Jew in the German grasp".[5] Christopher Browning, a historian specializing in the Holocaust, wrote that most historians agree that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time.[5] "It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental."[6] In 1940, following the Fall of France, Adolf Eichmann devised the Madagascar Plan to move Europe's Jewish population to the French colony, but the plan was abandoned for logistical reasons, mainly a naval blockade.[7] There were also preliminary plans to deport Jews to Palestine and Siberia.[8] Raul Hilberg wrote that, in 1941, in the first phase of the mass-murder of Jews, the mobile killing units began to pursue their victims across occupied eastern territories; in the second phase, stretching across all of German-occupied Europe, the Jewish victims were sent on death trains to centralized extermination camps built for the purpose of systematic murder of Jews.[9]
From Wikipedia. Sounds a lot like what Israel is doing now.
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.
South sudan would likely expel them as soon as they arrive, they already have trouble as it is. israel also commiting the equivalent of the Holdomer on palestinians.
"Endlösung, one way or the other. We need to cleanse our society of the Untermenschen to establish a pure ethnostate" seems to be the position of the Zionist entity... 💀
I'm just learning about owncast, is there any way to login or subscribe to people so I can come back to their streams at a later time?
The set name dialog says I can authenticate with a fediverse account via the authenticate dialog, but that doesn't seem to work, at least not with my lemmy account...
But if I succesfully authenticated there's no indication that would let me "subscribe" to a given channel or something though, and that's really what I want
An investigation by the British Army has found some soldiers stationed at a controversial base in Kenya continue to use sex workers despite being banned from doing so.
Soldiers at the British Army Training Unit Kenya (Batuk) used sex workers "at a low or moderate" level, a report said, adding more work was needed to stamp out the practice.
The investigation covered a period of more than two years, examining conduct at the base dating back to July 2022.
It was commissioned in October 2024 following an investigation by ITV into the behaviour of soldiers at Batuk, including allegations some army personnel were paying local women for sex.
The Russian authorities have reportedly decided to ban the calling feature on WhatsApp and Telegram, well-connected media figure Ksenia Sobchak reported on Tuesday, citing sources in the telecommunications industry.
The decision “has already been made at the very top,” the sources reportedly said.
“They’ve banned calls ‘under the guise of fighting terrorists,’” one source told Sobchak’s Telegram channel. Final consultations on the issue are expected to wrap up this evening, according to a government source she cited.
Sobchak noted that the apps’ messaging and channel features will still remain accessible.
The Russian authorities have reportedly decided to ban the calling feature on WhatsApp and Telegram, well-connected media figure Ksenia Sobchak reported on Tuesday, citing sources in the telecommunications industry.
I will assume that you are saying that people should not be using Signal based on this (e.g. the United States are sliding into fascism and may fuck over Signal).
What would you suggest then? PGP? Ngl I'm happy that GnuPG is introducing post-quantum encryption in the new releases but I'm talking about calling my grandma.
In this particular case literally all I want is to be able to talk to my family members without risking the FSB arresting them for calling the "Special Military Operation" a war in a phone call. If using WhatsApp for texting isn't banned alongside phone calls, that is halfway okay for discussions of that nature, and I'll have to watch my tongue if I call them over the Roskomnadzor-Approved (TM) apps.
The trouble with those of course is that they don't always work well with non-Russian phone numbers (because of course fucking everything needs my number nowadays). And you have to hope they're not megaspyware. I am NOT downloading fucking MAX.
Quit using YouTube directly and proxy your request through an Invidious instance.
Your requests are mixed in with everyone else’s, ad’s are blocked and most importantly only 1 machine touches YouTube directly and that’s the server hosting Invidious.
You see how often growing youtubers complain about more than 85% of their viewers are not subscribed to the channel, or how just some videos have more views than their main content? The issue is that Invidious doesn't have the algorithm Youtube provides to everyone, and that not a lot of people really watch their subscribed page.
You see how often growing youtubers complain about more than 85% of their viewers are not subscribed to the channel, or how just some videos have more views than their main content?
I actually don’t watch a whole lot of YouTube anymore so I can’t really comment on this here.
The issue is that Invidious doesn't have the algorithm Youtube provides to everyone,
But isn’t this what people are trying to avoid when it comes to digital privacy? User data being used in less algorithms?
But isn’t this what people are trying to avoid when it comes to digital privacy? User data being used in less algorithms?
Yes. Invidious and other programs, websites and anything else are useful for these kind of things. When you go to another house and in another computer you want to see some video but not affect the watch history of the user that uses the computer mainly. Or just simply watching some video that you wouldn't normally watch.
But most people who use YouTube actively on their main computer binge-watch. Sometimes they follow creators, sometimes they follow what the algorithm recommends them for the day. Invidious does not have such algorithm, since its a proxy. So, it is really not for everyone.
Some of us made Gmail accounts long before Youtube even existed, and still rely on youtube for tutorials and other things of that nature that aren't found anywhere else.
I wonder what percentage of views are done with a general purpose web browser vs. YouTube apps on phones and TVs. Otherwise, yeah, if you have a web browser it is an option. And since this thread is about browser extensions, I too am wondering what they meant.
Even YouTube? The last time I tried (a couple months ago) on both mobile and desktop Orion it’s totally unusable, most of the time it just gets stuck on a black screen for 10-60 seconds where the ads should be.
As much as I hate to say it, if on iOS use Brave. You can disable the crypto shit, but it’s got the best adblocking on iOS, and paywall bypass built in.
Honest question, but what makes librewolf BETTER? In firefox you can easily toggle off the studies telemetry bullshit in the settings. Librewolf is just firefox with those things ripped out right?
There's benefits to us not tweaking privacy settings. TOR explicitly discourages it. You don't (always) get fingerprinted by a single unique item, it's through an ensemble of data points that companies can identify who you are. There may be 10% of users with your same font library, and 1% who has the same monitor width, and 5% with the same time zone, and voila, when you multiply those percentages, you get close to one in a couple billion, and they've successfully fingerprinted you.
If everyone tweaks their settings from default Firefox, you reveal more information about yourself each time. You may think you're protecting yourself, but the reality is the opposite, you're creating a one of a kind browser config. This is where Librewolf can really reign supreme, if we all just use stock Librewolf, no one will be unique, and everyone will be anonymous.
FreeTube occasionally has issues on videos with preroll ads where the video fails to play because the ad won't be fetched. This can sometimes be mitigated by running an ipv6 rotator script and blocking freetubes access to ipv4. The one I run reassigns my ipv6 address once every 5 seconds to a new randomly generated valid address.
Sometimes even this doesn't block the ads (again causing the video to fail to play) in which case selecting the share icon from the freetube interface and clicking "open invidious link" will open a web browser pointed to whichever invidious instance is set to your default.
The freetube folks are working on implementing DASH, which should eliminate the need for these workarounds once successful.
Tom's Hardware sold out looong ago, sold in 2007 to some faceless consortium. The original "Tom", Thomas Pabst, who is GenX and not a boomer btw, has had nothing to do with the site since.
The editor of this article looks to be a millennial btw.
So my parents use chrome even though I constantly install Firefox and hide chrome. Problem there is they end up with Edge so I stopped doing that. (Didn't windows get in trouble for this kind of market control in the 90's?)
So I had Ublock origin on chrome for them but it's "not supported" anymore and my usual method of ignoring what it says and turning it back on are now failing.
Setup a firewall and black access to websites where they're able to download other browsers. Then change the icon for Firefox to Chrome's icon. For bonus points, you can probably find a firefox theme to make it look more like chrome.
Or if they just really don't like Firefox for some reason they could look into trying Cromite. It has worked pretty well for me and actually does better at blocking ads on sites like adblock-test.pages.dev/ than Firefox with uBlock origin does.
I added a user script to clear some of the URL trackers just in case I copy links anywhere as it like opera doesn't use extensions up front.
But on sites like that Firefox w/uBlock with score a 90 for me unless my Pihole is running, and Cromite will score 100 without it. Opera a 75, but I do like Operas interface on Android a lot.
If they are technically inept, reduce their accounts to limited, lock down the admin account. That will prevent them from installing Chrome, and if the admin sets a shortcut on their desktop(s), they won't be able to remove it. Disable Edge (there are multiple ways to do so), install the necessary extensions on FF, then change FF's desktop icon and text to "Chrome".
I see, but lite is much less effective. google has worked hard to make it lose its capabilities. it may still be effective at blocking youtube ads (though as it cannot use frequently updatable blocklists it probably has a higher delay for fixes when something breaks), but it cannot have specific rules for less popular sites, because of chrome's low limit on allowed filtering rules, and even though it can hide ads, that's not the sole function of ublock origin. ubo is a complex content blocker, with versatile tools to defuse site tracking on lots of websites. lite cannot do that anymore effectively, because both its capabilities have been reduced (e.g. it cannot edit network traffic anymore I think), and the number of filtering rules that it can load.
and even before lite, ubo could not be as effective on chrome as on firefox, because of slight differences in the extension api, with not so slight practical differences.
Just an idle thought... A common UX is users copying the URL in the address bar and pasting it into their fediverse app to load it in their app.
Right now if you copy a NodeBB topic ([code]/topic/12345[/code]) and paste it into something like Mastodon, y
Just an idle thought... A common UX is users copying the URL in the address bar and pasting it into their fediverse app to load it in their app.
Right now if you copy a NodeBB topic (/topic/12345) and paste it into something like Mastodon, you'll get nothing because it is an ordered collection and it doesn't know how to handle it.
But... what if I passed in a preview property a la evan@cosocial.ca's b2b8 and it contained a Note? Maybe a note with a different id? Maybe with a name?
Right now if you copy a NodeBB topic (/topic/12345) and paste it into something like Mastodon, you'll get nothing because it is an ordered collection and it doesn't know how to handle it.
It would be really great if you got something useful when you look up a NodeBB topic in Mastodon!
Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.
There are things that could be done to improve Excel. For instance, fully integrate python and allow it to be used to create custom functions. Then, maybe one day, VBA can ride off into the sunset where it belongs.
Adding Copilot to Excel is not an improvement because Copilot and all other LLM based platforms frequently barfs out totally incorrect information about how to do something in Excel.
"You do that using formula."
No, I can't, you worthless pile of shit because THAT FORMULA DOESNT EXIST.
Lemmy is propaganda against AI at this point. Not sure what paid for it but it has all the markers. Feels like being in the comment section of ny post articles.
Same energy as talking online about immigrants, nuclear energy or marvel
It's using a community to post toxic and dystopian articles over and over again. Lemmy technology communitys are extremely vile. Not sure why it happened but it's turned toxic
No it isn't. There is 100% propaganda and media targeting communities to spread it.
The Gap between peoples opinion towards AI in everyday life vs people on Lemmy is massive and a good indicator that Lemmy is astroturfed to be toxic towards it. People who are influenced cannot see it, outsiders can though. It's like seeing right wingers talk about immigrants. They'll never be able to see how their news and media influence them. That is their truth and it's as true to them as hate towards AI is towards lemmings in places like c/technology
Look at the articles posted, the headlines, the appeals used, the comments. It has all the markers of an Astro turf campaign.
Not where I am. I haven't met anyone irl that has any spite with AI. They think it's interesting. Have tried it a few times. But nobody is out there saying fuck AI.
That was the initial impression of it. Now that we've had more experience with it and learned that it can't be relied on, perception has changed. It is oversold and the costs are not worth what we are getting out of it.
No, I'd definitely agree that AI sentiment overall is pretty negative. I am not such a hardliner, but they are definitely out there. I don't see it as astroturfing at all, to even suggest this is ironic because LLMs are the ultimate astroturfing tool. The institutions capable of astroturfing do support AI and are using it. What institution or organization are you accusing of anti-AI astroturfing, exactly? This question requires an answer for that claim to be taken seriously.
IMO the problem is not LLMs itself, which are very compelling and interesting for strictly language processing and enable software usecases that were almost impossible to implement programmatically before; the problem is how LLMs are being used incorrectly for usecases that they are not suited for, due to the massive investment and hype. "We spent all this money on this so now we have to use it for everything". It's wrong. LLMs are not knowledge stores, they are provably bad at summarization and as a search interface, and they should especially not be used for decision making in any context. And people are reacting to the way LLMs are being forced into all of these roles.
People also take strong issue with their perceived violation of intellectual property and training on copyrighted information, viewing AI generated arts as derivative and theft.
Plus, there are very negative consequences to generative AI that aren't yet fully addressed. Environmental impact. Deepfakes. They're a propaganda machine; they can be censored and reflect biases of the institutions that control them. Parasocial relationships, misguided self-validating "therapy". They degrade human creativity and become a crutch. Impacts on education and cheating. Replacement of jobs and easier exploitation of workers. Surveillance.
All of these things are valid and I hear them all from people around me, not just on the internet.
You really can’t imagine why corporations and political groups who spend billions paying people to manufacture narratives and flood feeds might hate the idea of ordinary people suddenly having their own free, on-demand content factory, fact-checker, and megaphone?
That's on both sides of the political spectrum. These AI tools are not just Google chat. You can build with them rapidly. Is it some revolutionary thing? No
But can it be a game changer in some areas? Absolutely.
They moved rapidly with the media on this. Compare headlines for AI to any other yellow journalistic topic. They're identical
In favour of AI absolutely, against it, no I can't. What group would want to disvalue AI, after all most of the big tech companies are developing their own. They would want people to use AI, that's the only way they make a profit.
You keep providing these vague justifications for your belief but you never actually provide a concrete answer.
Which groups in particular do you think are paying people to astroturf with negative AI comments? Which actual organisations, which companys? Do you have evidence for this beyond "lots of people on a technically inclined forum don't like it" because that seems to be a fairly self-selecting set. You are seeing patterns in the clouds and are insisting that they are meaningful.
You call it “patterns in the clouds,” but that’s how coordinated media campaigns are meant to look organic, coincidental, invisible unless you recognize the fingerprints. Spotting those fingerprints isn’t tinfoil-hat stuff, it’s basic media literacy.
And let’s be real: plenty of groups have motives to discourage everyday people from embracing AI.
Political think tanks and content farms (Heritage Foundation, Koch networks...) already pay for astroturfing campaigns and troll farms. They do it on issues like immigration, climate, and COVID. Why would AI magically be exempt?
Reputation management/PR firms (Bent Pixels, marketing shops, crisis comms firms) literally get paid to scrub and reshape narratives online. Their business model depends on you not having the same tools for cheap or free.
Established media and gatekeepers survive on controlling distribution pipelines. The more people use AI to generate, remix, and distribute their own content, the less leverage those outlets have.
Now why does this matter with AI in particular? Because AI isn’t just another app it’s a force multiplier for individuals.
A single parent can spin up an online store, write copy, generate images, and market it without hiring an agency.
A student can build an interactive study tool in a weekend that used to take a funded research lab.
An activist group can draft policy briefs, make explainer videos, and coordinate messaging with almost no budget.
These kinds of tools only get created if ordinary people are experimenting, collaborating, and embracing AI. That’s what the “don’t trust AI” narrative is designed to discourage. If you keep people from touching it, you keep them dependent on the existing gatekeepers.
So flip your own question: who pays for these narratives? The same people who already fund copy-paste headline campaigns like “illegals are taking our jobs and assaulting Americans.” It’s the same yellow-journalism playbook, just aimed at a new target.
Dismissing this as “cloud patterns” is the exact mindset they hope you have. Because if you actually acknowledge how coordinated media framing works, you start to see why of course there are groups with the motive and budget to poison the well on AI.
The pro-Russia “Operation Overload” campaign used free AI tools to push disinformation—including deepfakes and fake news sites—on a scale that catapulted from 230 to 587 unique content pieces in under a year .
AI-generated bots and faux media orchestrated coordinated boycotts of Amazon and McDonald’s over DEI reversals—with no clear ideology, just engineered outrage .
Social media networks ahead of the 2024 U.S. election were crawling with coordination networks sharing AI-generated manipulative images and narrative content and most such accounts remain active .
Across the globe, AI deepfakes and election misinformation campaigns surged from France to Ghana to South Africa—showing clear strategic deployment, not random dissent .
Because AI expands creative sovereignty. It enables:
It keeps people bypass expensive gatekeepers and build tools, stories, and businesses.
Activists and community groups to publish, advocate, and organize without top-down approval.
Everyday people to become producers, not just consumers.
The moment ordinary people gain these capabilities, the power structures that rely on gatekeeping be they think tanks, PR firms, old-guard media, or political operatives have every incentive to suppress or smear AI usage. That’s why “AI is dangerous” is convenient messaging for them.
The real question isn’t whether cloud patterns are real it’s why shouldn’t we expect influential actors to use AI to shape perception, especially when it threatens their control?
Lemmy isn’t just a random forum it’s one of the last bastions of “tech-savvy” community space outside the mainstream. That makes it a perfect target for poisoning the well campaigns. If you can seed anti-AI sentiment there, you don’t just reach casual users, you capture the early adopters and opinion leaders who influence the wider conversation.
I haven't checked my feed. But good money I can find multiple "fuck AI" posts that sound similar to "they took our job"
Increase in workflow? Like there are more steps to perform the same task? Because workflow isn't work volume or units if output. It's the process that gets the work done.
Did the increase in "workflow" get you more money or more work for the same money?
I mean... they responded in agreement to a comment that said it's not an improvement. So it seems to me that it also would not increase the money they get out of it.
Like I spend less time trying to build formulas and I can create formulas and tools I normally wouldn't with it because I can have a conversations about what I want to do and it provides suggestions.
It can't be ... but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. I remember making fun of Access on StackOverflow circa 2008 and running afoul of some dude there who was like the last living Access consultant on Earth. I've never encountered defensive rage like that before or since.
Fun Access fact, the Diebold-manufactured voting machines that featured prominently in the 2000 presidential election cycle used an Access database as their underlying data storage mechanism. Access DBs did incorporate an audit table - which was manually-editable.
That explains why they didn't want anyone investigating the machines. Did proper authorities finally get access (no pun intended lol) to investigate? Or was that already known?
No, this came out after the election was settled. There was a woman that maintained a website covering all these details called BlackBoxVoting or something like that (long gone now).
Definitely, but sandboxes can be escaped, and you can't protect everything via sandbox. Apparently its all cloud anyway, but if it were local and sandboxed, there are still exploits like rowhammer and spectre that may cause further risks.
Its taken years to get browser sandboxes to where they are, and even they get broken every so often.
They foresaw that. That's because python on Excel doesn't run locally, but in the cloud and then returns the result to you: support.microsoft.com/en-us/of…
Currently only for business customers which probably use OneDrive or SharePoint anyways, so it's not that they need that to exfiltrate data. But for a phishing/hacking attempt? There are probably some nice possibilities.
That's the worst possible solution to that problem. Why can't they just develop their own script that's Turing complete but doesn't have any system calls?
Or just use Lua compiled without the system calls. This is done by many video games. İt's 2025, there is no need to create new domain specific languages.
I did this with my car when I got to that point and sent it to my girlfriend, but I photoshopped it so it said I was going over 100. Anyway I thought it was funny.
Well, there is a use case. I don't know much about statistics. I can (i assume) as the ai questions in natural language that I would otherwise have to research how to calculate. Of course, I may get a result, but I won't be any smarter. If that was the goal, then great.
To waste electric energy. All those power plants produce immense amounts of energy that needs to be consumed. If we didn't have LLMs, the pollution of those plants would be for nothing. At least now, there is an attempt to put it in good use.
OK, I'm not really mad at this. I already used Copilot to design a table for me in Excel and it worked really well. It did everything for me, and I just had to copy-paste the formulas into their appropriate spots. If it's built-in, possibly will work better.
Not everybody needs to be an Excel expert, after all. Having that functionality might be actually beneficial.
I think the concern is that you can come up with a number of formulas that will get correct answers for some combinations of values and not others.
If you do not understand the logic of the formula, and what each function does, how do you verify they are correct and will always give you the results you think they will? Double check every result in its entirety?
Verification is important, but I think you're omitting from your imagination a real and large category of people who have a basic familiarity with spreadsheets and computers, so are able to understand a potential solution and see whether it makes sense, but who do not have the ability to quickly come up with it themselves.
In language it's the difference between receptive and productive vocabulary: there are words which you understand but which you would never say or write because they're part of your receptive, but not productive knowledge.
There are times when this will go wrong, because the LLM will can produce something plausible but incorrect and such a person will fail to spot it. And of course if you blindly trust it with something you're not actually capable of (or willing to) check then you will also get bad results.
There's an old story about the lead developer at Texas Instruments saying "I want a computer that fits in my pocket". And then his staff dutifully measured the pocket to spec before proceeding to perform a feat of miniaturization that would revolutionize the modern world.
I'm trying to imagine one of the techies, from way out in the back, saying "Does it have to get the right answer?" Then getting fired, walking off the job, and walking into Microsoft with 10x the salary the next day.
"Microsoft Excel is testing a new AI-powered function that can automatically fill cells in your spreadsheets."
Every year, Microsoft gives me more reasons to permanently leave their products.
Unfortunately, due to compatibility with financial and other Windows-only software I still need to run Windows, but I am down to two rigs and it might go down to one in the new year.
apparently you should be able to run any windows app with WinApps on linux, but I think they have a bug or something right now because I haven't been able to get it to work.
The problem is that they are still Microsoft applications. You can’t say “I’ll leave Microsoft!” and run their software in a Windows simulator anyway. That would be … inaccurate, to say the least.
Wrong, they already had that with Excel. There were a bunch of functions that delivered wrong returns for years, and none of the users (mostly economists) had noticed.
What, you don't always work with 16 digit numbers that are automatically truncated? What could go wrong? We don't use 16 digit numbers for anything, really./
It's hard to believe that's still a thing but it is!
Obviously you’d be an idiot to use AI to number crunch.
But AI can be extremely useful for sentence analytics. For example, if you’re trying to classify user feedback as positive or negative and then derive categories from the masses of text and squash the text into those categories.
Google Sheets already does tonnes of this and we’re not writing articles about it.
Yeah, it's like complaining that a hammer isn't good at turning a screw. There's a whole trend of Chess content creators featuring games against ChatGPT where it forgets the position or plays illegal moves, and it just doesn't mean anything. ChatGPT was never designed or intended to be able to evaluate a chess position, and incidentally, we do have computer programs that do exactly that and have been better than any human player since the 1990s. So what is even the point?
And what you could do is to enable an LLM to use these tools and reason about their outcome. Complaining that an LLM isn’t good at adding numbers is like complaining that humans aren’t as fast as calculators when multiplying large numbers.
Our kids are in a mental health crisis: Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply in the 2010s. There’s much more we can do to roll back the phone-based childhood. @jonathanhaidt writes about this and much more in his book #TheAnxiousGeneration
From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood
From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood
Promoting a shitty book too. It's the restrictions on youth and the fact that society gives you a lot to be legitimately anxious about. Don't let conservatives like him isolate teens
Air Canada announces a surprising new policy to compensate passengers after a cabin crew strike grounds hundreds of flights. The airline promises to cover transportation costs, but details are scarce. What's the catch?
Air Canada introduces an 'exceptional policy' to cover expenses for passengers impacted by the recent cabin crew strike, including refunds and flexible rebooking options.
😈MedicPig🐷BabySaver😈
in reply to Pro • • •like this
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Pro
in reply to 😈MedicPig🐷BabySaver😈 • • •What does "Fuck" mean in this use case?
I know that people generally use it to express dissatisfaction or disrespect, As intensifier generally.
But Why the Fuck do we have to bring sex into degradation?
What does this serve exactly?
Am I the only one here thinking about this
profane English-language word
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)embMaster
in reply to Pro • • •unphazed
in reply to Pro • • •Echo Dot
in reply to Pro • • •Probably.
Most insults are scatterological or sexual in nature. But you must understand that the word isn't the thing itself. I don't think anyone has sexual aspirations of Spez
TeddE
in reply to Pro • • •Bennyboybumberchums
in reply to Pro • • •Yup
😈MedicPig🐷BabySaver😈
in reply to Pro • • •WizardofFrobozz
in reply to Pro • • •NotASharkInAManSuit
in reply to Pro • • •crapton_america
in reply to Pro • • •cosmicrookie
in reply to Pro • • •StinkyFingerItchyBum
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hisao
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jaybone
in reply to hisao • • •octopus_ink
in reply to StinkyFingerItchyBum • • •100% it can, and worse yet, it can be scraped and analyzed like this by Meta, or Reddit, or your nearest fascist dictator.
But that's also pretty much the entire internet in any forum or social media platform, so although I don't like it, I figure that's more or less just part of using the internet.
To me it's much like the whole "There's no expectation of privacy in public."
I hope it doesn't take AI to figure out my attitudes when I regularly proclaim that there are no maga in my life more than required by various pre-existing obligation, Luigi Mangione will be remembered as a folk hero, Trump will one day be shown to be ALL through the Epstein files in all the worst ways (as will many Dems and they should all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law), and most Democratic leadership is 100% owned by the oligarchy too, as evidenced by things such as their support of Israeli genocide and how much more urgently they are fighting Mamdani than they are Trump in many cases.
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Michael
in reply to octopus_ink • • •There's no expectation of privacy anywhere. This has all been taken way too far.
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WhatAmLemmy
in reply to octopus_ink • • •Kyrgizion
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panda_abyss
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scintilla
in reply to StinkyFingerItchyBum • • •FenderStratocaster
in reply to Pro • • •Perspectivist
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in reply to Perspectivist • • •Perspectivist
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in reply to Perspectivist • • •Perspectivist
in reply to FenderStratocaster • • •FenderStratocaster
in reply to Perspectivist • • •xthexder
in reply to FenderStratocaster • • •ronigami
in reply to Perspectivist • • •cub Gucci
in reply to Pro • • •kipparikalle161
in reply to Pro • • •FenderStratocaster
in reply to kipparikalle161 • • •friend_of_satan
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in reply to friend_of_satan • • •panda_abyss
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Michael
in reply to panda_abyss • • •Corporations have been already making profiles of various types for a while now in the form of adtech, social media, data brokers, people search websites, credit scores, devices and services that harvest sensitive and intimate data (e.g. mobile phone apps, watching habits from smart TVs, driving data from cars).
Our society has been set up for mass surveillance in a thousand different ways as a form of social control and dominance by those who wield power.
It's time people realize that privacy is a right instead of normalizing abuses of consent.
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panda_abyss
in reply to Michael • • •Yep.
And if anyone doubts this, 15 years ago I had made a tool that created these types of profiles as a proof of concept.
I had scraped tons of subreddits, then you could pass in a user and based on both their subreddits and key words would categorize users across a few axes. That was just using naïve bayes, but worked pretty well.
The AI is just much much better at natural language processing to pull out more detailed info about patterns.
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Kyrgizion
in reply to panda_abyss • • •*Have been made long ago and are being constantly updated.
Snowden already warned us about this over a DECADE ago. Their scopes and powers will have increased exponentially. And that was under 'trustworthy' administration. I guarantee there's a type of system in place that flags people before they do anything, just on pattern recognition alone. Of course, they can't use that system as a legal basis for anything, so they don't and use parallel constructions instead.
Anyone who thinks "this is coming" hasn't been paying attention. We're already there and beyond.
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WhatAmLemmy
in reply to Kyrgizion • • •DeathsEmbrace
in reply to Kyrgizion • • •Bilb!
in reply to DeathsEmbrace • • •Pandantic [they/them]
in reply to Bilb! • • •someguy3
in reply to Kyrgizion • • •Dyskolos
in reply to panda_abyss • • •The same problem as with warning-labels et al.
MisterOwl
in reply to panda_abyss • • •bridgeenjoyer
in reply to panda_abyss • • •ViatorOmnium
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Mubelotix
in reply to ViatorOmnium • • •ViatorOmnium
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GreenShimada
in reply to ViatorOmnium • • •Hard agree with this. Does Reddit even have lawyers, or are they just using ChatGPT? Google, Meta, and Tik Tok already paid PII misuse fines for less than this. everything listed is part of the GDPR extended PII list.
Unrelated question: How do I short reddit stock?
magikmw
in reply to Mubelotix • • •basiclemmon98
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ViatorOmnium
in reply to basiclemmon98 • • •GamingChairModel
in reply to ViatorOmnium • • •I don't understand.
If someone writes a reddit post and says "I'm fasting for Ramadan," can I not infer from that public post that the user is probably Muslim?
ViatorOmnium
in reply to GamingChairModel • • •GamingChairModel
in reply to ViatorOmnium • • •What counts as an algorithm? Surely it can't be the actual definition of algorithm.
Because in most forum software (even the older stuff that predates reddit or social media) if I just click on a username, that fetches from the database every comment that the user has ever made, usually sorted in reverse chronological order. That technically fits the definition of an algorithm, and presents that user's authored content in a manner that correlates the comments with the same user, regardless of where it originally appeared (in specific threads).
So if it generates a webpage that shows the person once made a comment in a cooking subreddit that says "I'm a Muslim and I love the halal version" next to a comment posted to a college admissions subreddit that says "I graduated from Harvard in 2019" next to a comment posted to a gardening subreddit that says "I live in Berlin," does reddit violate the GDPR by assembling this information all in one place?
bridgeenjoyer
in reply to basiclemmon98 • • •NoneOfUrBusiness
in reply to ViatorOmnium • • •bridgeenjoyer
in reply to ViatorOmnium • • •ayyy
in reply to ViatorOmnium • • •ViatorOmnium
in reply to ayyy • • •Meta got a fine of over a billion euros.
Google got a bunch of smaller fines, but it's probably way above everyone else in terms of fines.
Microsoft got half a billion.
Even Apple got an 8 million euro fine, but that was more a tap in the wrist to make them think twice about some data collection.
And besides this, large companies are constantly in contact with the authorities and in smaller violations the general policy is to give a warning and let companies stop the illegal data processing voluntarily.
ayyy
in reply to ViatorOmnium • • •axEl7fB5
in reply to ViatorOmnium • • •All of them are a slap on a wrist, even Meta
proton.me/tech-fines-tracker
Big Tech fines tracker | Proton
Protonchromodynamic
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danc4498
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Grostleton
in reply to danc4498 • • •ansiz
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breakingcups
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Passerby6497
in reply to JollyG • • •How is reading the Clif notes/summary different from reading the book? Time and effort taken, as well as a much shallower understanding of the material (assuming your summary is even relatively accurate).
It's an easy way to get an instant opinion of someone so you can make a determination on whether you like it without having to tax your poor brain into actually thinking, and you can let something decide your opinion before you even know what you want to know. A summary provided by a product that is notoriously frequently wrong or lies and makes shit up out of whole cloth.
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Gladaed
in reply to Pro • • •bridgeenjoyer
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CosmicTurtle0
in reply to bridgeenjoyer • • •My concern is that Reddit can sell their profiling algorithm to other companies, who then can federate with Lemmy, mastodon, etc. to build profiles against users.
It's getting to the point where I may need to go back to cycling usernames every few years.
ayyy
in reply to CosmicTurtle0 • • •You should definitely do that anyways, you never know when some crazy is going to try and dox you. Changing usernames won’t really protect you from advertisers though, software will link the two identities together.
ubergeek
in reply to CosmicTurtle0 • • •Grandwolf319
in reply to bridgeenjoyer • • •I think it goes beyond that, stop living an online life is a better advice. Use the internet to get info, not to submit info.
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Perspectivist
in reply to Pro • • •Let this be a reminder to anyone with an account with over a thousand comments: time for a new one.
Facebook can figure out all of this about you just from what you like and what links you click. Now imagine what a fucking goldmine a few years of your post history is to a deep learning algorithm – let alone someone who’s been using the same Reddit account for two decades. I bet they know those people better than they know themselves.
asudox
in reply to Pro • • •Spez will fuck with Reddit's userbase and make the platform absolute bullshit to use, yet 90% of redditors will still keep sucking his dick over and over again.
"LeMmY iS tOo HaRd To UsE!! wTf Is An InStAnCe???"
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innermachine
in reply to asudox • • •Doorknob
in reply to innermachine • • •Fizz
in reply to innermachine • • •sqgl
in reply to innermachine • • •The instance matters: some will ban you if you cite too many credible articles which bring up uncomfortable truths.
No matter what one's stance is on a political subject, there will be some uncomfortable truths. Unlike a Hollywood hero movie.
ksigley
in reply to asudox • • •fluxixx
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in reply to Pro • • •HugeNerd
in reply to Pro • • •Which means the powers-that-be have been using it for years already. Remember when people called us paranoid for believing in Echelon in the '80s?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
signals intelligence collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the UKUSA Security Agreement signatories
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