Dell computers are complete pieces of garbage, and I'm never getting one again. About a year ago after my PC had to go to the shop, I connected an SD card reader, and it wouldn't turn on after that. I brought it to Best Buy the next day, and they were able to fix it by disconnecting and reconnecting the battery. A couple weeks ago, I attempted to connect my Trek so I could install maps before giving it to a friend of mine, and that same thing happened again. Just like the previous time this happened, Geek Squad was able to disconnect and reconnect the battery, and the computer turned on with no problems. The agent had suggested sending it in, but since I need a computer and it had been over a year since this happened before, I didn't think this was necessary. Today I attempted to connect a capture card that I've had since 2018, and the same thing happened. I'm bringing my computer to the store tonight, but since my Total Tech protection expired, I'm not sure if I want to know how much they're gonna charge me for such a simple procedure. It's bad enough I'm spending $35 one way to get there, but in an emergency situation like this where you need a computer, what are you supposed to do? I've been considering getting a new PC for a while, but I'm not sure what I should go with. The new X-Elite laptops seem like great machines, but I'm not sure if I want to continue using Windows full-time,. Even with all the crap I've been giving Apple recently, I never had something like this happen on my 2014 Mac, and I haven't heard any other Mac users mention this issue. I know people like @FluidEscence, @TheQuinbox, and a few others have said they virtualize, but when I decided to give the M1 Mac a try, I returned it after a couple days because of how frustrating I found VoiceOver. I don't want to get too excited, but a small part of me does hope that this ends up being Apple's year since they announced VoiceOver changes. I hope this means VO will get the attention it's needed for a while. My only thing with going the virtualized Windows route is having to map an NVDA key. I have my mechanical that has a numpad, so VO navigation may be better with that. I'd like to know what everyone thinks I should do. If I don't go for a Mac, I'm considering the Galaxy Book 4 Edge. I'd kind of like to go Windows, but I'm not sure what to do.
Obstacles:
– Mechanisms that prevent competition—e.g., patents.
– People have to change their focus: from low prices & new features to sustainability & repairability.
As always, domestic abuse is the flagship infosec threat model, the one where the victim has the least resources, the least recourse, where they're closest to immediate physical harm.
That this industry has failed at and mostly abandoned the idea of even pretending to try dealing with a threat model that's difficult and unprofitable and mostly hurts women is not news, but this new Windows Recall feature is next-level professional negligence.
@denschub There is a lot of practical overlap between the domestic abuse and law enforcement threat models, in no small part because of how much overlap there is between domestic abusers and law enforcement officers as groups, and it's as shameful as it is grotesque how much the tech industry caters to both.
#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#Film#Movies#Her: "Now, I do see why Altman likes it so much; besides its treatment of AI as personified emotional pleasure dome, two other things happen that must appeal to the OpenAI CEO: 1. Human-AI relationships are socially normalized almost immediately (this is the most unrealistic thing in the movie, besides its vision of a near-future AI that has good public transit and walkable neighborhoods; in a matter of months everyone seems to find it normal that people are ‘dating’ voices in the earbuds they bought from Best Buy), and 2. the AIs meet a resurrected model of Alan Watts, band together, and quietly transcend, presumably achieving some version of what Altman imagines to be AGI. He professes to worrying that AI will destroy humanity, and has a survival bunker and guns to prove it, so this science fictional depiction of AGIification must be more soothing than the other one.
But the weirdest thing to me is that it’s only after the AIs are gone that the characters can be said to undergo any sort of personal growth; they spend some time looking at the sunset, feel a human connection, and Theo writes that long overdue handwritten apology letter to his ex. It’s hard to see how the AI wasn’t merely holding them back from all this, and why Altman would find this outcome inspiring in the context of running a company that is bent on inundating the world with AI. Maybe he just missed the subtext? It’s become something of a running joke that Altman is bad at understanding movies: he thought Oppenheimer should have been made in a way that inspired kids to become physicists, and that the Social Network was a great positive message for startup founders.
Finally, Altman’s admiration is also a bit puzzling in that the AIs don’t ever really do anything amazing for society, even while they’re here."
"This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition. Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.
You can see this dynamic playing out in OpenAI’s content-licensing agreements, which it has struck with platforms such as Reddit and news organizations such as Axel Springer and Dotdash Meredith. Recently, a tech executive I spoke with compared these types of agreements to a hostage situation, suggesting they believe that AI companies will find ways to scrape publishers’ websites anyhow, if they don’t comply. Best to get a paltry fee out of them while you can, the person argued.
The Johansson accusations only compound (and, if true, validate) these suspicions. Altman’s alleged reasoning for commissioning Johansson’s voice was that her familiar timbre might be “comforting to people” who find AI assistants off-putting. Her likeness would have been less about a particular voice-bot aesthetic and more of an adoption hack or a recruitment tool for a technology that many people didn’t ask for, and seem uneasy about. Here, again, is the logic of OpenAI at work. It follows that the company would plow ahead, consent be damned, simply because it might believe the stakes are too high to pivot or wait. When your technology aims to rewrite the rules of society, it stands that society’s current rules need not apply."
So, I know generative AI is supposed to be just the most incorrect thing ever, but I want you to compare two descriptions. "A rock on a beach under a dark sky." And: The image shows a close-up view of a rocky, cratered surface, likely a planet or moon, with a small, irregularly shaped moon or asteroid in the foreground. The larger surface appears to be Mars, given its reddish-brown color and texture. The smaller object, which is gray and heavily cratered, is likely one of Mars' moons, possibly Phobos or Deimos. The background fades into the darkness of space. The first one is supposed to be the pure best thing that isn't AI. Right? Like, it's what we've been using for the past like 5 years. And yes, it's probably improved over those years. This is Apple's image description. It's, in my opinion, the best, most clear, and sounds like the ALT-text that it's made from, which people made BTW, and the images it was made with, which had to come from somewhere, were of very high quality, unlike Facebook and Google which just plopped anything and everything into theirs. The second was from Be My Eyes. Now, which one was more correct? Obviously, Be My Eyes. Granted, it's not always going to be, but goodness just because some image classification tech is old, doesn't mean it's better. And just because Google and Facebook call their image description bullshit AI, doesn't mean it's a large language model. Because at this point in time, Google TalkBack does not use Gemini, but uses the same thing VoiceOver has. And Facebook uses that too, just a classifier. Now, should sighted people be describing their pictures? Of course. Always. With care. And having their stupid bots use something better than "picture of cats." Because even a dumb image classifier can tell me that, and probably a bit more, lol. Cats sleeping on a blanket. Cats drinking water from a bowl. Stuff like that. But for something quick, easy, and that doesn't rely on other people, shoot yeah I'll put it through Be My Eyes. #accessibility#AI#LLM#BeMyEyes#blind
@katanova indeed! I think there needs to be better vocabulary around cancerous tech scaling and organic, long-term, healthy, sustainable scaling.
I'm a big fan of the Viable Systems Model which shows how different small units can interact with each other and their environment. I'm hoping to take that and other things and use technology to make that process easier and enhance our inherent abilities.
Mastodon recently incorporated a 501c3 Non-Profit in the United States, and brought on a Board of Directors to assist in shaping and coordinating this new entity. This has been broadly seen as a big step for the project, but the Board selection is not without controversy and backlash....
Taking my new (to me) ThinkPad 450 out for its first stroll. Using it while waiting for the car to be serviced. #linuxmint, #firefox, #emacs, all working like a charm. Keyboard and touchpad are almost perfect, battery life is super long. Screen is a little dim but hey. For under $100US I'm not complaining. This is exactly why I got it and set it up with linux, etc. Oh, also doing some journaling with #orgmode and it seems to be syncing to my home computer with #syncthing. Just about perfect!
@birv2 This is btw one of the things I like about tech: you can have all the time this feeling of "success!".
Now I'm old, but when young me self-esteem wasn't the highest. Until I learned e.g. BASIC on a PET2001 (not my own, I was too poor. The PET was sitting in a department store, next to typewriter machines ...).
I had success after success. In retrospect only very small things ... but they added up.
The problem is that technology (in all spheres) cannot advance quickly enough that modern management, economics and politics will catch up with and destroy all those advances.
Consider why Boeing, with its incredible technical heritage, can't make safe planes any more, or even a small tech startup gets bogged down in Scrum meetings and OKRs.
Does HIPAA Even Exist for Large Corporations? -- PART 2
Today I got my official reply to my HHS Office of Civil Rights complaint of 5/3/24 against CVS for violating HIPAA regulations. The minor and rather impressive miracle here is that I got a signed letter from an attorney in only 17 days with relevant regulations and interpretations attached. Good so far.
The result was that they are not going to pursue a formal complaint -- instead they are going to "resolve this matter informally through the provision of technical assistance to CVS."
HHS OCR points out that "a covered entity must maintain reasonable and appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to prevent intentional or unintentional use or disclosure of PHI in violation of the Privacy Rule and to limit its incidental use and disclosure pursuant to otherwise permitted or required use or disclosure.... Further, under the Security Rule, with certain exceptions, the use of encryption is addressable; i.e., not mandatory." [red emphasis mine]
HHS further states under Reasonable Safeguards that "It is not expected that a covered entity’s safeguards guarantee the privacy of protected health information from any and all potential risks. Reasonable safeguards will vary from covered entity to covered entity depending on factors, such as the size of the covered entity and the nature of its business."
If HHS OCR actually in fact offers this technical assistance in a meaningful way, that WOULD satisfy my complaint -- not that anyone is asking me. This was almost certainly a stupid screw-up by someone in CVS Info Tech programming the canned computer "after visit summary" process to send out way too much information in unencrypted format to people who received a COVID booster at a CVS. If CVS STOPS doing this, I'm good.
To recap -- I received an after-visit summary not only listing what COVID booster med I received, but also my DOB, home address, and all the answers to my screening questionnaire including my answers to whether or not I have ever had a seizure, a bleeding disorder, am currently pregnant, am immunocompromised (including from cancer), have a history of myocarditis, and many other questions.
I will waste my time writing HHS OCR back to thank them and to remind them that to the best of my knowledge I never signed a release for disclosure (which apparently has no legal bearing here?), and that in this new age of AI every major tech company is incorporating AI into EVERYTHING. If I had a Gmail account, Google would have all my medical information from this CVS after visit summary email and likely would be utilizing AI to monetize it in some way.
I suppose the good news here for small psychotherapy practices is that if this is close to acceptable practice for even a giant company like CVS, then maybe we have little to worry about when it comes to client privacy. Heck -- why not just email client PHI to them without getting releases first? Why have encrypted client portals for communication?
-- Michael
**Does HIPAA Even Exist for Large Corporations? -- PART 1**
I don't care if anyone knows I just got a COVID vaccine. Most people don't care.
However, CVS Pharmacy just sent me an after-visit report across unencrypted Internet to my email address.
The form included such fields as:
-- My Full Name
-- **DATE OF BIRTH!**
-- My Full Home Address
-- Medication Administered
-- Date and Time of Appointment
-- Name of Pharmacist I saw
-- Name of Doctor at CVS overseeing it all
-- Name and Address of my Primary Care Doctor
Also:
-- All the answers to my *screening questionnaire!* including my yes/no answers to multiple medical conditions such as heart problems, immunocompromise, seizures & other brain problems, and pregnancy.
So many things wrong here. This is almost enough information for identity theft (lacking only SSN). It gives away LOTS of my medical information. If I had a Gmail email address, Google would now have all this information. What if I was a pregnant female in the southern USA where Attorney Generals are starting to track state of pregnancy for later prosecution if women go out-of-state for abortions or have a suspicious (to them) miscarriage?
**How does CVS get away with this when smaller medical offices have to be so careful?**
Michael Reeder, LCPC
#AI #EHR #medicalnotes #progressnotes #healthcare #patientportal #HIPAA #dataprotection #infosec @infosec@a.gup.pe #doctors #hospitals #CVS #COVID #sars-cov-2 #longcovid #severecovid#covidisnotover #pharmacy #vaccine
Comm-Ents running aerials in their uppermost branches of their head but nobody can tell ‘cause they’ve made’em blend in. Paranoia’s even harder to pin down when the “trees” can literally be listenin’.
I’m a huge believer in fast-and-loose. I went through a process over the years of seeking increasingly more technical realism in RPGs - from floating clouds of hit points; to damage affecting abilities; to hit locations and affects… eventually, I ended up running games in Phoenix Command. Have you ever played Phoenix Command? We once had a larger group in teams heading across a small town toward each other to fight; it took the better part of a day, and then when they did make contact, nearly everyone involved in combat was taken out in the next 20 minutes. It is a fantastically realistic, and utterly horrible game.
I still prefer a little more than “Balls of HP”, and I know modern D&D addresses this; frankly, I think Traveler nailed it. At one point I made some rules (haven’t we all?) based on the premise of The Last Action Hero: characters are Main Characters, and get a bunch of bonuses; NPCs are extras and don’t. Combat is otherwise more or less as lethal as in real life; it’s just that major characters get saves that turn most damage into superficial wounds. But by that time I had realized the rules matter less than the setting and story.
And that brings us back to Ents with comms tech! Whatever makes things interesting and fun, because it’s a game and not a chore.
It’s probably time to reposition this account if my goal is to ever meet anyone new on the internet again, but it’s not clear to me how because I’m still not really sure what the fediverse is actually doing, culturally
@ricmac Well, I think the fediverse is clearly the right place for the real-name tech stuff I’m doing and increasingly leaning into. It’s this woo woo spirituality stuff that doesn’t feel like it belongs here. At this point I’ve more or less concluded it doesn’t belong on social media at all, honestly, but there needs to be a way to meet the NEW people who will join the small community stuff.
Pundits that say Apple is behind in AI are comparing beta products being shown at a keynote (Microsoft/Google) to rumored products Apple hasn't even announced yet.
@matt It's difficult to parse into a small reply. But basically, the so-called "AI" we've got so far is a preview of what will actually be useful once we nail down accuracy and personalized systems. And I believe Apple will be the one to do it with smaller, localized models.
We're all looking at barely functional beta tools and worshiping them as some kind of victory when they are one of the most embarrassing public launches in tech's history. It would be like releasing an iPhone that only calls the correct phone number 1/10 times. And everyone is just fine with that.
I'll reiterate. The early releases from OpenAI and Google needed to get into the wild to be cultivated, and they are interesting previews of what may come. Apple doesn't do that. But to assume they are behind because they didn't release an unfinished product is very silly.
Zizek’s take on 300 is so good, here’s an excerpt:
it is the story a small and poor country (Greece) invaded by the army of a much larges state (Persia), at that point much more developed, and with a much more developed military technology - are the Persian elephants, giants and large fire arrows not the ancient version of high-tech arms? When the last surviving group of the Spartans and their king Leonidas are killed by the thousands of arrows, are they not in a way bombed to death by techno-soldiers operating sophisticated weapons from a safe distance, like today’s US soldiers who push the rocket buttons from the warships safely away in the Persian Gulf? Furthermore, Xerxes’s words when he attempts to convince Leonidas to accept the Persian domination, definitely do not sound as the words of a fanatic Muslim fundamentalist: he tries to seduce Leonidas into subjection by promising him peace and sensual pleasures if he rejoins the Persian global empire. All he asks from him is a formal gesture of kneeling down, of recognizing the Persian supremacy - if the Spartans do this, they will be given supreme authority over the entire Greece. Is this not the same as what President Reagan demanded from Nicaraguan Sandinista government? They should just say “Hey uncle!” to the US…
The FSF tech team operates sixty-three different services, platforms, and websites. They maintain all the computers and software FSF uses, including obscure things like accounting software, Asterisk telephony software, many websites such as fsf.org, gnu.org, and more. This small team also provides critical services to the GNU System, like email, build servers, release hosting, bug tracking, Git hosting, and servers to various free software projects. Read more: https://u.fsf.org/41z
As overfunded startups and tech behemoths destroy simple, functional products by “adding AI”, the resource constrained companies will deliver quality, focused products.
We saw this in the 80s with PCs vs. IBM (which never managed to profit off the PC)
We saw this in the 2000s when computers in your pocket (iPhone and android) upended computing. Keep in mind, in 2004 apple had a market cap of $22b… 1% of its market cap today.
@chikorita157 Bandwidth is pretty big too, scales with each user and as a small player one wouldn’t have access to <fancy tech that solves that, assuming I don’t have to explain it, but I also don’t know the word for it because I’m tired>.
Streaming is even worse in many ways. Short form videos would be the same.
(I don’t actually dislike short form, it’s just a very different thing. A different mind set. Much closer to zapping between channels but not as shit compared to watching curated “good” videos.)
Kind of curious what tech people own, everything from small to big tech. Assuming solarpanels are a given for a lot of peeps here, or maybe will be in the future. But what other tech do you own that you’re happy with?
It’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to know all the intricacies of their OS unless it’s their job, but I do think people could stand to treat their computer less like an unknowable magic box when they need to work with it and take a few minutes to try any basic troubleshooting at all. An example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, last year, my fan stopped working nearly as well and began making crazy amounts of noise. Could I explain to you how the motor in my fan works? Absolutely not. But I unplugged it, looked up how to disassemble it and got out my screwdrivers and opened it up to see if there was anything that I could see wrong with it. Turns out there was a lot of hair wrapped around a shaft and the base of the blades that built up over the years I’ve had it, and removing that and reassembling it was all it took to get it working fine again.
Plenty of people don’t want to put in even that small amount of time and effort to understand things when it comes to computers, which is also a valid choice of its own, but they tend to annoy me when they attribute being unable to do something to the system being too complicated to understand/use, rather than owning their decision to focus their time and energy elsewhere. There are absolutely complex programs that are not accessible for non-tech people on Linux or the BSDs, but the same could be said for Windows and Mac. In the case of the other two, people just choose the option that works for them, but with Linux, they decide ahead of time that Linux is tough and complicated and don’t even try. It could be something as simple as they want to install Debian and need non-free firmware to use their wireless card, there are people who will declare this to complicated to understand and discard the idea of using an OS entirely over a question that can be resolved in less than 5 minutes with a quick search and nano, all because “Oh, I’m not a computer person, it says terminal.”
For all that it did right, Mastodon made a massive unforced error not realizing that the key to social media propagation was keeping journalists happy. Instead, it alienated 90% of them with grievances and brow beatings about how they were pesky interlopers. BlueSky and Threads merely had to toss them a handful of candy, and promise them others, and it was like flipping a switch that sucked them out of here like runaway ShopVac. But I am convinced that many can be brought back.
as seen in the comments here, many don't want what you (and I) seem to want. the culture was shaped by people who didn't want the standard social media experience. they want small communities where nothing upsets them. they wanted to escape the public forum with people they don't agree with.
it's the best tech to allow everyone to interact freely and the best info, arguments and art to go viral. but for the most invested users here, letting that happen would amount to gentrification.
Chinese, Iranian, and Russian cyberattacks against water utilities across the U.S. becoming more frequent and more severe, officials say (fortune.com)
- Attacks against water provider’s websites aren’t new, but now attackers are increasingly targeting utilities’ operations...
A Primer on Mastodon’s New Board Members (wedistribute.org)
Mastodon recently incorporated a 501c3 Non-Profit in the United States, and brought on a Board of Directors to assist in shaping and coordinating this new entity. This has been broadly seen as a big step for the project, but the Board selection is not without controversy and backlash....
Shadowrun mixes fantasy and scifi, so someone out there has definitely made a Comm-Ent phreaker/hacker character by now.
Comm-Ents running aerials in their uppermost branches of their head but nobody can tell ‘cause they’ve made’em blend in. Paranoia’s even harder to pin down when the “trees” can literally be listenin’.
I'm new (lemmy.world)
OC The Web is Indeed Being Looted by Corporate Fat Cats
Ed Zitron posted another solid article on the state of the web that I think belongs here....
Students’ Leaf Blower Suppressor To Hit Retail (hackaday.com)
OC This is the AlterNet
What the $#@! is the AlterNet?...
What Solarpunk Tech do you own?
Kind of curious what tech people own, everything from small to big tech. Assuming solarpanels are a given for a lot of peeps here, or maybe will be in the future. But what other tech do you own that you’re happy with?
Can You Use Linux Without the Terminal? (How to Geek article) (www.howtogeek.com)