FaceDeer

To some degree it's hard to be sympathetic, because the people complaining about this are seriously lacking in sympathy themselves. They just wanted to see the content that those users produced for them, they didn't care about the difficulties or preferences of the users themselves. So when those Spez-opposed users took their ball and went home the Spez-friendly people got angry at them for taking their comments away with them rather than at Spez for having driven them to that in the first place.

I must admit, "Linux becomes the refuge of luddites" was never on any bingo card I could have conceived of for 202X.

Given that Google's been talking about switching Chrome to a new plugin format that would limit the ability of adblockers to function on Chrome, and given that Google owns Youtube and profits from the ads Youtube displays...

Nope, I'm not connecting the dots. Not sure why Google would be wanting people switch from Firefox to Chrome at this time.

To be fair, the bug report was utterly useless too.

I would imagine that anything that's in an airtight sealed container, such as chip bags, would be fine. That would also include cans. Your refrigerator and freezer, also, would probably count as a sealed container.

Smoke in a building fire can contain all sorts of weird chemicals from burning plastics and whatnot that could get deposited onto stuff, so even if you can't see any soot in your apartment I wouldn't dismiss all concerns. How tight is your budget?

There are species of seals who actively keep holes open in the ice to use as breathing holes, allowing them to hunt fish even in frozen-over bodies of water.

They're all ocean-dwelling species in the arctic or antarctic oceans, so this isn't the answer to your specific question, but I just think they're neat.

Don't worry, a key part of toxicity is the dosage. If you're following a prescription from an actual doctor instead of taking handfuls of horse medication at the behest of extremist politicians you're fine.

Content warning: this is a rant from a teenager who has strong opinions.

Okay...

However, it holds a monopoly on software.

You don't know what a "monopoly" is.

they could just go “Boop! You’re gone!” and there’s nothing I could do about it other than move forges.

Yeah, nothing you could do about it, other than moving to one of the many other git hosts. Monopoly!

And then after listing off a whole bunch of alternative git hosts...

Centralization is not bad by itself but it’s bad when there’s no other option. There just needs to be ways to contribute to code without having to use Github.

You have plenty of ways to do that, and you know that because you just listed them. Github is not a monopoly.

Also, I don't see the concept of open source mentioned at any point in this rant.

What are these "other country" things you mention? You mean the place where war happens and immigrants come from? I didn't know they had computers there.

Nothing "went wrong" with it. It was simply never possible. Reddit controlled whether those 3rd party apps could function, and Reddit wanted those 3rd party apps to cease functioning.

A lot of users use the official app and are on new Reddit, and the only "disruption" that they noticed was the protests themselves. They have no idea the damage Reddit has done to moderators and may not even notice the resulting decline in content quality as the smaller subset of people who post and moderate the most wander away to newer pastures.

But over time, they will notice. More and more subreddits will become the domain of uninterested powermods and repost bots. It takes time for a giant to fall, Digg didn't turn into Reddit overnight.

Can I bring my dog to that office? Will it have my fridge there, and my kitchen? I'd also want a teleporter so that there's zero commute time.

I think we're a bit beyond just rebelling against the "open office" concept.

I'm betting it's going to be either overrun with protest content and Lemmy advertisement, or it'll be so heavily locked down and curated that it'll be an obvious shell of its former self.

Being invaded by Russia.

Misleading. Ad blocker installations also rose. This isn't people leaving adblocking, this is people changing to better ones.

Chauvin was not sentenced to be stabbed 22 times. As awful a person as he likely is, I would rather not see extrajudicial killing be praised.

Performing extrajudicial killing is what got him behind bars in the first place, after all. Quite rightly so.

A "51% attack" isn't really meaningful for something like the Fediverse because there's no concept of any particular instance or group of instances being "authoritative." There's no special benefit to be had from owning a majority of the instances or users or whatever other metric you want to measure by.

If tomorrow Reddit were to magically federate, it would instantly have the majority of threaded conversation going on in the Fediverse under its control. If the day afterward it defederated again, it wouldn't mean that it had somehow "become" the Fediverse and the rest of us were being shed like irrelevant detritus. It's nothing at all like a cryptocurrency fork, where there's a strong incentive to follow whatever the "majority" fork is doing because that's where the money is.

I feel like that "corporate wants you to find the differences between these two photos" meme. Isn't everyone in those photos, in both the top and bottom rows, white?

Edit: Ah, I see, OP has given this a highly misleading title. The "whiteness" of the faces is not actually particularly relevant. In another thread someone summarized what the article is actually about:

For anyone who doesn’t want to read the paper, they basically took an 60 white men and 60 white women, and showed them a whole bunch of white faces, half of which were generated by AI. It turns out that AI faces were rated as more human-like than actual humans, and they had some hypothesis why. Principally that AI, by its nature, generates images close to “average”, while real people tend to have features that are not “average”. The reason the study focused on white people is that most AI have been trained on white faces, so AI tends to do better with white faces.

I've been seeing this news article circling around the internet all day, and I have yet to see anyone mention what the monoblock actually is. It's starting to feel like some kind of mysterious primal artifact, like maybe the master computer from which all flavors of Linux originated.

Investment companies are often only able to buy other companies like this when they're already declining significantly.

Magazines in general are on their way out. It makes me nostalgic-sad too, but the world is changing and this is one of the ways in which it is changing.

And good luck finding replacement moderators who are knowledgeable and passionate about the subject.

Oh no, we may have to go back to an Internet where people posted web pages because they wanted to share information rather than to make a buck.

This is superficially funny, of course. But I've seen it before and after thinking about it for a while I find myself coming to the defense of the Torment Nexus and the tech company that brought it into reality.

Science fiction authors are not necessarily the best authorities when it comes to evaluating the ethical or real-world implications of the technologies they dream up. Indeed, I think they are often particularly bad at that sort of thing. Their primary goal is to craft captivating narratives that engage readers by introducing conflicts and dilemmas that make for compelling stories. When they imagine a new technology they aren't going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome. The dark side of these technologies is deliberately emphasized by the authors to create tension and drama in their stories.

Tech companies, on the other hand, have an entirely different set of considerations. Their goal isn't just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems. They wouldn't build the Torment Nexus unless they figured that they could sell it to someone, and that they wouldn't get shut down for doing something society would reject. There are regulatory frameworks around this kind of thing.

If you look back through older science fiction you can find all sorts of "cautionary tales" against technologies that have turned out to be just fine. "Fahrenheit 451" warned against the proliferation of television entertainment, but there's been plenty of rich culture developed for that medium. "Brave New World" warned against genetic engineering, but that's turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields. The submarine in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was seen as unstoppable and disruptive, but nowadays submersibles have plenty of nonmilitary applications.

I'd want to know more about what exactly the Torment Nexus is before I automatically assume it's a bad idea just because some sci-fi writer claimed it was.

So now there's a NewNew Reddit? That IPO is getting ever closer, guess they'll be thrashing around all the harder in the lead up to that to try to show some kind of path to profitability.

Every time there's a new technology, one of the first things that people will ask is "can I use this for sex in some manner?"

If the answer is "no", the new technology will probably not see widespread adoption.

This is not a new thing. I'm sure the notion "we could have more and better sex if the cave was kept warm by this new-fangled 'fire' thing while we do it" was instrumental to our rise as the dominant species on our planet.

The AI witch hunt is kicking into high gear. This law explicitly allows burning people that had nothing to do with AI witchcraft in the first place.

How convenient for the witch hunters that this includes people who make parodies about the witch hunters.

We're sick of closed walled-garden monoliths like Reddit! Let's move to an open federated protocol where anyone can participate and the APIs can't be locked down!

...wait, not like that!

Yeah. This is what you signed up for when you joined the Fediverse, the ActivityPub protocol broadcasts your content to any other servers that ask for it. And just generally, that's how the Internet works. You're putting up a public billboard and expecting to be able to control who gets to look at it. That's not going to work. Even robots.txt is just a gentleman's agreement, it's not enforceable.

If you really want to prevent AI from training on your content with any degree of certainty you're probably looking for a private forum of some kind that's run by someone you trust.

We've got LLMs now that can do that. Sorry, you've been replaced. Please gather your things into this box and cheer up.

We believe in open protocols and hate walled gardens!

Except our walled garden!

Ah, so that means the Auschwitz Museum is... checks notes anti-Semitic!

Makes sense.

I don't know, I like reminding everyone that he was a police officer when this sort of thing comes up.

That's still enough to tank an IPO.

It's possible that Musk is good at some things and not good at others, but his success at those things he's good at have caused him to think he's good at everything.

His unwavering support for Israel during their campaign of atrocities is despicable and shameful.

If we're going to get Trump again it's in part because of the absolutely all-or-nothing brook-no-compromise attitude of voters. Like this, for example. Biden's support has not been unwavering, he's criticized Israel's actions. But not enough for you, and so he gets no credit whatsoever for any moderation he might have. And that's why you say he "feels like a Republican" to you, because someone can only be 100% totally on your side or they must be on the other side.

I'd love for there to be a viable fully-progressive candidate who happened to agree with everything I believe in. I'd also love to have a pet unicorn. When elections actually roll around in reality, though, none of the candidates are going to be perfect. And unfortunately in many first-past-the-post electorates the system is set up in such a way that there are only two viable candidates. So pick the one that's closest to your views. Push for better candidates in the primary, of course, but accept that you won't always get everything you want.

Everyone's been dumping on Meta for integrating ActivityPub support, but I wonder if perhaps that's what's precipitating smaller projects like Flipboard and Discourse to be making similar announcements more. Here's hoping it's the start of an avalanche.

Copyright law already allows generative AI systems to scrape the internet. You need to change the law to forbid something, it isn't forbidden by default. Currently, if something is published publicly then it can be read and learned from by anyone (or anything) that can see it. Copyright law only prevents making copies of it, which a large language model does not do when trained on it.

Yeah. The "having PTSD" part isn't what should be punished, it's the "and yet still carrying a gun while putting yourself in a position to have your PTSD triggered like this" part that's egregious.

I just skimmed through the article and it seems like this vulnerability is only really meaningful on multi-user systems. It allows one user to access memory dedicated to other users, letting them read stuff they shouldn't. I would expect that most consumer gaming computers are single-user machines, or only have user accounts for trusted family members and whatnot, so if this mitigation causes too much of a performance hit I expect it won't be a big risk to turn it off for those particular computers.

Mozilla: "We'd like to build a dataset of underrepresented languages and accents so that voice recognition works for everyone. It'll be under an open license."

Most of this thread: "GIVE ME MONEY."

Sigh. As soon as it turned out that AI training data was "worth something" everyone turned into a money-grubbing mercenary.

I'm also surprised that the Terminator series never got a third instalment. Or Aliens, for that matter.