What? They’re just computer programs. Almost all computers have high quality entropy sources that can generate truly random numbers. LLMs’ whole thing is basically turning sequences of random numbers into sequences of less random stuff that makes sense. They have a built-in dial for nondeterminism, and it’s almost never at zero.
I feel like I’m missing your meaning because the literal interpretation is nonsense.
Maybe I’m just tired but this reads like a fucking riddle.
They want to block “app stores” that don’t block “AI apps” that don’t block “harmful content” from kids?
(And of course it’s left lovely and murky what any of those terms actually mean.)
Is it really not as easy for them as saying “hey btw don’t use this distro if you’re in California” and fully expecting nobody to comply? I’m not sure if Ubuntu is based in Cali in which case I can see it being more difficult.
Also this “age bracket” thing seems to have an obvious flaw in that any application that’s running semi-regularly can just poll the API every day and find out the user’s DOB by checking when they roll into the next bracket. It’s actually leaking more data about children than about adults in that case. Brilliant.
Thanks, honestly I had not actually read the bill before coming here to shitpost, and it seems like yeah it’s more well-intentioned than people are giving it credit for.
I still have serious reservations about the broadness, vagueness, and premise that mandatory age signals are a good idea at all – it’s a lateral move at best; weakly attempting to kerb the most overtly predatory parts of the whole “age verification” movement, without opposing the idea itself.
But you’re right, it’s not the blatant data-vacuuming law that I think some people imagine it to be.
My first answer is “WTF is RTK?”; my answer after consulting Wikipedia is “no, they’re separate things”.
RTK doesn’t sound like it broadcasts any data out but I barely understood what I just read. The Wikipedia coverage on this whole topic seems rather poor quality, I don’t think it’s just because I’m dumb.
I don’t but I roleplayed for the bit.
If it weren’t completely, stupidly unenforceable, I might still worry about this idea being exported to the rest of the world though.
What I want to know is: in my own haphazard note-to-self text file cribbed from ArchWiki, is it before or after the disk partitioning step that I’m supposed to add an instruction to “email anthraxx my date of birth”?
Or better yet: at what point in the development of my ad hoc tasking system for an ESP32 do I need to stop and go “shit, guess I’d better add a keypad so 12 year olds can self-report their age and safely be prevented from using the ‘romance’ setting on this lightbulb”?
It’s not as clear-cut as most people here are saying.
In short, GPS itself is just listening to satellites, and nothing is leaked that way, but most modern phones use “Assisted GPS” of some sort. The most common (I believe) AGPS is SUPL, which seems to be used by most phones. This involves sending your approximate location to an Internet server, which returns satellite data based on that approximate location.
To nobody’s surprise, in Android this is a Google server. I’m pretty sure most Android distros don’t give you any control over when it’s used, or which servers it uses. Anecdotally, my phone without Google Play services has a horrible time obtaining a GPS fix, so I suspect without GPlay it’s only using raw GPS, but I’ve not bothered to actually dig into it.
As I understand it, SUPL means even if you’re in aeroplane mode, if you have an Internet connection over WiFi you might still be leaking (approximate) location data when using GPS.
I learned about this from this excellent series of blog posts, which is a very thorough comparison of various Android ROMs’ privacy. It has a background section (search for “Assisted GPS”) in each of the ROM-specific posts which explains it better than I can.
It’s the wall on the right – in the wide version (from felesteen.news) it’s all the same blue colour, and a corner, whereas in the Reddit version it’s a white concrete pillar with no corner.
At the very least, someone’s done some infilling on one of them. My most charitable guess was that someone at the news site decided to “punch up” the image for an article header, but the third version and its timing make me think Occam’s razor is the way to go here.
Your version was posted within 3 minutes of this post someone linked in the comments of the Reddit version. So yeah, all credibility lost as far as I’m concerned.
What I don’t get is why, if this is some sort of coordinated campaign, you wouldn’t just generate entirely new images, rather than AI-daydream variants of the exact same one, which makes it obvious they’re manipulated.
Nice find, kind of damning. That version has a totally different wall on the right side to the version posted here, it also seems to be from a slightly different angle. This screams AI manipulation – if not outright fabrication – of at least one of those images. Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re both fake, but a pretty big red flag.
I was gonna say it on the last thread but, before we start appropriating this image as a political symbol as you’ve done here, should someone… maybe… source it slightly better than “Reddit”? There’s plenty of evidence that the school was blown up, but this specific image – conveniently well-framed and poignant – cropped up very quickly on a few random social media accounts, with no photographer attributed, and as far as I know hasn’t actually been verified at all.
The system is designed to work for most phones released since 2019.
So most phones since 2019 have builtin functionality to blare alarms, show messages on the home screen, and… fuck knows what else… at the sole discretion of the telco?
Curious if anyone here knows more about the mechanism that allows this, presumably it’s some kind of standard? Will custom ROMs work with it or is this another in a long series of fuck yous to anyone daring not to patronise the Bay Area Douche Nexus?
Edit: I see, it’s Cell Broadcast, part of 3G, 4G, 5G, etc. standards. I still wonder about the “un-opt-outable” part; is it just that most phone OSes don’t provide an opt out or is it implemented in firmware somehow? Warning tones I can imagine being wired straight to the drivers, but a visual message seems like it’d have to have OS cooperation.
TMSJ;BI (Too Much Shitty Javascript; Barely Interacted):
Is there some kind of award for “most irredeemably ‘HN’ HN post”? Just spam a bunch of LLM comments to drive the numbers like everyone else, no need to add the whole extra step of making sure anyone trying to actually engage knows exactly how much contempt you have for their opinion.
Also, the website is so vibecoded that the logo has the wrong number of fingers. Can’t make this shit up.
This definition of social media is new to me as well, thanks for sharing it. This sort of clarifies a term I really dislike, and which you’ve used: “the algorithm”. It’s always seemed a little murky to me which algorithms it refers to. It’s like saying “don’t eat food with chemicals in it”.
Lemmy does have “an algorithm”, it’s just a relatively simple one based on communities one is subscribed to plus some vote/comment data for the various sort orderings.
Lemmy also absolutely implements a social graph – the data about who has interacted with whom is all stored by the system. It’s not explicitly stored as a graph structure, but then we’re arguing database schemas.
As I understand it, however, you’re saying “social media” arises when the “social graph” data structure is used as an input to “the algorithm”. That seems like a pretty robust definition to me.
One bit of pedantry: user blocks on Lemmy are, by a general definition, a form of social graph, and they do affect what content people see. So Lemmy could technically qualify as social media by the definition I’ve written here. I’m not sure what a more precise definition could be that avoids this technicality.
This was an interesting read, but it’s only discussing blue light filters as they affect melatonin and thus sleep cycle. It doesn’t say anything about other reasons to use them, which for me are:
Given this the article title seems sliiiightly grandiose, but perhaps most people are really only in it for the melatonin thing.
I’m surprised how many people seem offended by this comic. I found it pretty relatable. That doesn’t mean I “don’t understand context”, or think the writers were bad people, or that the shows aren’t worth watching. It just means I find it personally unpleasant to find these jokes in a work I’m otherwise enjoying.
When kids study older literature and media in school, generally when there’s a slur or racist reference or joke, the teacher will stop and explain the context and get the kids to reflect on it and why it’s probably not acceptable today. Even though I understand this and know it going in, I’m still kind of doing an abridged version of that in my head when something like this comes up in a show – I’ve been following along, laughing with the writers, and then suddenly I’m backing up and distancing myself from one joke or idea. It’s jarring, it pulls me out of the show, and it’s just not fun.
In some cases it also comes across as incredibly lazy and unoriginal. So many sitcoms from that era have “the trans episode”, “the gay episode”, “the lecherous character” – and they all make the same unfunny jokes, and it’s a reminder than a lot of these shows, even in their time, were just not that creative. Plenty of modern shows have the same problem, but they don’t draw attention to it by having large classes of “stock jokes” that simply do not land today.
It’s a screenshot of this report from a review of the UK’s security and terrorism legislation, published in December.
TechRadar article discussing the specific encryption issue here.
I was skeptical given the grammar issues others have pointed out but it seems legitimate.
Interesting, thanks for doing the research!
As an extreme non-expert, I would say “deliberate removal of a part of a model in order to study the structure of that model” is a somewhat different concept to “intrinsic and inexorable averaging of language by LLM tools as they currently exist”, but they may well involve similar mechanisms, and that may be what the OP is referencing, I don’t know enough of the technical side to say.
That paper looks pretty interesting in itself; other issues aside, LLMs are really fascinating in the way they build (statistical) representations of language.
I think this comment is based on an extremely optimistic – bordering on fantastical – outlook.
The capacity and capability to handle the data will grow too.
This is what data analysis is though. Extracting patterns from noisy data. Ignoring outliers. I don’t think anybody is suggesting they’ll just dump a CSV of your web history into ChatGPT and ask it if you’re probably going to a protest this weekend (although does it sound so far fetched that that might actually work?), it’ll be used in combination with existing and constantly improving data mining techniques.
Are you implying data protection laws will not only not be inexorably eroded year upon year by increasingly surveillance-hungry governments, but will actually get a significantly better than their current milquetoast state? I’ve gotta say, that’s seeming increasingly unlikely to me; right now we’re seeing mandatory identity verification being legislated on more and more things by more and more governments.
This has to be a sarcastic reference to Snowden, right? The thing where the entire world found out about the how NSA absolutely is – not “might be” – monitoring your internet and conversation logs, and basically nobody did a fucking thing to change? That was 12 years ago.
Good thing they’re not doing anything crazy to get more computing power, like buying up practically the entire global supply of RAM or building data centres at an exponentially increasing rate.