Today, we launched our new Mastodon instance. It will ensure a privacy-focused space to engage with and get the latest from our Commissioners, departments, and the official voices of the Commission.
We want to thank @Mastodon for stewarding us and helping us make this possible.
Fostering European digital players is vital to our strategy for a stronger #DigitalEU.
This is a unique opportunity to grow the community even more. Let's get there!
A journey only becomes one when it begins somewhere.
That's why we are grateful to @EDPS for having created and skillfully managed the EUVoice pilot instance.
Your vision has opened new horizons for us and European institutions.
Our new instance will only foster our engagement with this truly amazing community and be a reference for any institution interested in embracing the fediverse and open alternatives.
Hi @nick! Thank you for your questions! Our old instance was created, hosted and managed by @EDPS as part of a pilot project for a Mastodon server. As the pilot project was coming to an end, we decided to build on its success by setting a permanent instance, ensuring the continued and uninterrupted presence of our institution on Mastodon. The new instance is hosted and managed by the European Commission and has no expiry date.
The http://alt-text.org alt text library project needs a new leader, because I have brain cancer.
I would like to connect with the #accessibility dev community, something I have never figured out, probably in part for neurodivergence reasons. I want to hand the project off to a team or a leader if anyone is willing to take it over.
I've made another post with a link to a more shareable and complete description of the project and needs. It also includes descriptions of other smaller projects in need to adoption alongside or separately
It's just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you.
@weirdwriter That is brilliant and scary omg. I read an article recently (maybe through you?) saying that LLMs are inherently insecure because input and commands can't be separated, and evidently there's no way to stop those prompt injection attacks that were in the news.
@weirdwriter Oh yes, there were attacks by researchers that got ChatGPT to disclose people's really sensitive personal information, as I recall. And who knows how many malicious attackers did similar things without making their activities public?😬 I guess rolling out the product for the $$$ and hype was more important than having a secure product!
You did your friend a good turn, like theoretically an attacker could have asked for all details about his financial information and location and personal life, anything that's available in his inbox and... giant yikes all around.
@tjdraper I still have no idea what to use all this so-called "AI" for. I'm happy to use new things if they are useful. This mostly isn't.
Of course, Machine Learning has been around for quite a while and has a lot of use cases. I have used it successfully to enhance video. But the stuff they're pushing out now is 99% utterly useless and only exists to inflate stock prices because we're in a bubble.
Journalist: "So what do you think long-distance air travel is going to look like in 2050?"
Climate Scientist laughs derisively: "By 2050, most long-distance holiday destinations will be uninhabitable, so I expect the majority of long-distance air traffic to be non-existent by 2050."
Phew. Hadn't heard it THAT bleakly during a live interview yet.
"Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers."
The computer, however, will stop you from recording DRM'd content.
Find it fascinating that when faced with drawing safety and security boundaries, the primary beneficiary is not the owner of the device, or the person using it, but random corporations who control the intellectual property rights.
I find it equally fascinating that in order to get anywhere near an integrated computing experience in 2024 we apparently need constant recording and transformer models.
No structured file systems, no permission models, no shared stores, no capabilities - just firehose the display output and hope for the best.
@sarahjamielewis it's infuriating to me that every operating system is full of APIs for rendering text to the screen, only for us to take pictures of that text and scrape it back out with OCR.
@evacide also malware. Infostealers that access local password managers in browsers don’t need physical access, to unlock it or sign in - and they’re a huge problem.
@GossiTheDog@evacide This sounds like employer surveillance ware that can also be abused by any family admin. I can’t think of any reason I would want such a thing, as a user.
Also, if browser password managers are insecure, we should be shouting that from the rooftops.
@akshatrathi ooh wait lemme guess, we are not supposed to pay attention to the rapacious use of limited resources to fuel AI now—the materials sunk into the ocean for “cooling” that are bleaching corals and melting ice caps so that grade schoolers can cheat on their homework— we are supposed to think about how all this sets us up for more efficient solutions in the future when the technology inevitably improves, amirite?
@donw@johnlogic@wxcafe@cstross it’s important to remember that in addition to making it easier to survive, any large corporation where certain departments may be doing good work may still have terminally MBA-brained dipshits attempting to squeeze cost centers like HR to death with junk like this. The quality of the hurdles to get in to a place are not necessarily perfectly correlated with the actual work going on in that place.
@jasonkoebler Perhaps naïve of us to think these companies were going to just bow to the right-to-repair movement without getting a little something for themselves. SMH
Johns Hopkins is doing a long-COVID survey and apparently is having trouble finding controls -- people who haven't had COVID. If this is you, consider giving them some clicks.