Top tip for anyone that needs to be on #LinkedIn for work/business reasons, but wants to be left alone as much as possible.
Adding a ⭐ or other unexpected character to your name in your profile will break the #bots and datascrapers that harvest contact information and use it to spam you on the site.
I've tested this over a few years and it definitely makes a huge difference.
LOL, p*rn bots over on the birdsite have suddenly started randomly replying to posts about who you should seek financial advice and get financial planning help. I think they're supposed to change their profiles BEFORE hawking a new line of products...
"Wait, why is this skimpily clad woman who was telling me to subscribe to this site full of dirty pictures now trying to recommend I sign up for a financial planner and wisely spend my money?"
(went over there to check on a quote from a meteorologist who has not come over here :-(
If you are a developer that uses these to automatically close issues that have been valid for months and conveniently rely on a response from ONE person in an ocean of other responses, please reconsider your life choices. If there were no other responses? Fine. That's on the person to reply. But the bot should immediately eject itself from the conversation the moment someone else chimes in. Closing issues like this seriously hurts discoverability for developers and users alike.
I was quoted in this mediakompetent.de article, in German, which also talks a bit about my project @botwiki.
"The online platform botwiki.org documents that bots can also break up hardened discussions in comment columns and make people laugh . [...] The source codes for some of the more than 2,000 bots listed are freely available, so you can use them for your own projects"
Here's the full quote, to expand a bit on one point I was trying to make:
"It is definitely good to be aware that some of the social media accounts you might come across, or even interact with, may be automated. But you won't necessarily be able to tell if the information or a meme is shared by a bot, or a real human being, who's either paid or doesn't engage in good faith. So focusing on the message itself is very important."
Ever ask your #twitter slash #birdsite friends "why"? Like, why are you still on a service constantly overrun by #bots every post trying to make you buy the latest #shitcoin, the place is more toxic than ever, "suggestions" for following #farright#activists constantly ... it's kind of weird, isn't it? It's an #addiction at that point... right?
"We present a dataset of 1,353 such accounts and show that they are used to spread scams, spam, and amplify coordinated messages, among other inauthentic activities. Leveraging a feature of GAN-generated faces -- consistent eye placement -- and supplementing it with human annotation, we devise an effective method for identifying GAN-generated profiles in the wild. Applying this method to a random sample of active Twitter users, we estimate a lower bound for the prevalence of profiles using GAN-generated faces between 0.021% and 0.044% -- around 10K daily active accounts. " #disinformation#cybersecurity#AI#bots#spam
I like working on projects that enable marginalised persons to take back their autonomy on and offline. I subscribe to #diy and am a voracious #autodidact. I make #bots for #mastodon and the #fedi. I'm building a replacement for #bandcamp and #spotify.
Updating #Python libraries, yay. I came across a library that converts a Gregorian calendar date into a Bahá'í date, which should fix the issues I've been having with @bahai posting incorrect dates. Watch this space, as one does. #bots
Wordpress advertises that you can customize the look of email newsletters, but I couldn’t find settings for that — so I wrote support. They replied and said actually, no, there are no settings for that.
But first, their AI Support Bot took a crack at an answer — and absolutely, confidently hallucinated two settings that don’t actually exist. I thought I was losing my mind because they just weren’t there.
That feels worse than just not replying at all, right?
Because when I have a problem, I just want to cut the bullshit and get some #TechLiterate on the phone which does care and doesn't belittle me by saying "Have you tried to turn it off and back on again?"...
Impressive overview of bots crawling the web, collecting content. For most we do not know exactly what they are used for which illustrates for me the futility of blocking OpenAI access to your website. If you don't want to be crawled or used as training data for AI, don't publish on the publicly available internet I would think. https://darkvisitors.com/agents #bots#crawlers#AI
WhatsApp ist für mich wohl die letzte App, die absolut nicht in Ordnung geht, die ich aber immer noch benutzen muss um Kontakt zur Familie zu halten....
Wie wird man WhatsApp und Co. los?
WhatsApp ist für mich wohl die letzte App, die absolut nicht in Ordnung geht, die ich aber immer noch benutzen muss um Kontakt zur Familie zu halten....