BoredomFestival

GottaLaff, 7 hours ago to random

👀👀👀Via Kyle Griffin:

New: Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse are requesting a meeting with Chief Justice John Roberts to discuss "the Supreme Court's worsening ethics crisis" and have sent a letter imploring Roberts to "take appropriate steps" to ensure Samuel #Alito recuses himself from 2020 election and Jan. 6 cases.

GottaLaff, 1 day ago to random

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called on Supreme Court Justice Samuel #Alito to recuse himself from Jan. 6 cases after news that, according to The New York Times, a second flag of a type carried by Jan. 6 rioters was displayed outside Alito’s home.

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-flag-stop-steal-alito-trump-1842c40b833637c981c59c3f39bc4669

ayoub, 1 day ago to random

So what do you call this level of hatred? This fanatical desire to annihilate an entire civilisation?

Image description: Israeli occupation soldiers set fire to Gaza’s Al Aqsa University library and took photos of themselves doing it

rbreich, 1 day ago to random

I can't believe I even have to say this, but it is not normal that the Supreme Court is taking its sweet time to decide if the president can incite an insurrection to overturn an election and maintain power. This should have been decided already. The answer is no!

squaregoldfish, 1 day ago to Facebook

I got a notification on #Facebook that #Meta plans to use my posts etc. for training #AI and said they were using the Legitimate Interest justification for doing it.

I sent in an objection stating that using data for training AI doesn't fall within the remit of what a user might reasonably expect the company to do with my data on the basis of the service being provided: https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimate-interest/

They have upheld my objection and will not use my data. So you can do it too!

thomaswilburn, 22 hours ago to random

The reason we used to call it web surfing was because you'd click a link from Yahoo! or whatever and end up going down a rabbit hole for a couple of hours. I think that's kind of the salt in the wound of Google's brainworm AI search results--we've lost so much of the indie publishing side of the web to social networks, but also lost the idea that the journey of discovery might be worthwhile or fun in and of itself.

tess, 1 day ago to random

Amused at how Altman helped himself to a woman who denied him multiple times, because he was fond of her*, and despite the fact that she was literally the only person in recent history to sue Disney and win - and that no one else in his circle tried to dissuade him (or had enough pull or made enough effort to be successful).

Says a lot about the people at the helm of the "AI revolution".

• or perhaps I should say, "Her"

BartWronski, 1 day ago to random

Ugh, I really liked Kind Bars, but they are canceled. :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lubetzky

"In May 2024, Lubetzky was one of a group of billionaires and business interests who privately pressured New York City Mayor Eric Adams to deploy police on pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University"

RepShontelBrown, 1 day ago to random

The GOP Farm Bill includes billions in cuts to SNAP, a program that people across OH-11 rely upon. It reflects a bad process, bad faith, and a bad bill.

video/mp4

rbreich, 2 days ago to random

The Appeal to Heaven flag isn't just tied to Jan 6.

It's a Christian nationalist symbol.

Christian nationalists believe that the law of the land is not the Constitution, but instead the law of God as they interpret it.

Do you see the problem with Alito flying this flag?

ChrisBoese, 1 day ago to random

Our Dred Scott Racist Supreme Court! Dear god, bring back the original Voting Rights Act in its original form with the mandated monitoring of historically racist states.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/us/supreme-court-south-carolina-voting-map.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

carnage4life, 2 days ago to random

How it started versus How it's going

image/jpeg

gimulnautti, 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago) to Ukraine

Good comment on #Ukraine by Timothy Snyder:

”This isn’t 1939, this is 1938 but Czechoslovakia has chosen to fight.” …

”In that world where Czechoslovakia resists, there is no second world war.” ..

”There would have been a conflict, but there would not have been a second world war.”

We are in 1938, and we can prevent World War Two by helping Ukraine win!

#NAFO #SlavaUkraini

https://youtu.be/hsaD_ZvLrF8?si=_Y5GPVu2-YmA3iA6

darwinwoodka, 2 days ago to random

STOP. WATCHING. FOX NEWS. THEY LIE.

Fucking uniformed Americans. Quit being stupid, dammit!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/poll-economy-recession-biden

capital, 3 days ago to random

Microsoft recall is fucking insane.

Recall snapshots are kept on Copilot+ PCs themselves, on the local hard disk, and are protected using data encryption on your device and (if you have Windows 11 Pro or an enterprise Windows 11 SKU) BitLocker.

Your doing what? Microsoft wh-

Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds. [...]

[...] The default allocation for Recall on a device with 256 GB will be 25 GB, which can store approximately 3 months of snapshots. [...]

WHAT WHY NO ST-

Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry.

Microsoft please... th-the tech support scams... think about what happens if this gets bre-

Recall also does not take snapshots of certain kinds of content, including InPrivate web browsing sessions...

Oh, okay I guess that's san-

...in Microsoft Edge.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

It treats material protected with digital rights management (DRM) similarly; like other Windows apps such as the Snipping Tool, Recall will not store DRM content.

Ah, but of course. The DRM is protected...

FeralRobots, 2 days ago to random

World Sailing is banning trans people from a sport that doesn't segregate competitors by gender.
Help me understand what the rationalization is for that.

GossiTheDog, 3 days ago to random

For those who aren’t aware, Microsoft have decided to bake essentially an infostealer into base Windows OS and enable by default.

From the Microsoft FAQ: “Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers."

Info is stored locally - but rather than something like Redline stealing your local browser password vault, now they can just steal the last 3 months of everything you’ve typed and viewed in one database.

video/mp4

molly0xfff, 3 days ago to ai

"it's all stored locally" is not a panacea for these alarming privacy-invading products!

what exactly is stored locally? what data is extracted from that local data and sent to the company's servers? is that local data being backed somewhere?

#AI #privacy

georgelakoff, 3 days ago to random

Trump is telling us exactly what he plans to do if he gets another term. He is framing his return to power as an authoritarian effort, and he is overtly using Nazi language and symbolism to drive home the point.

This wasn't a mistake. It isn't a joke. American freedom and democracy are on the line in 2024. The main headline in Trump's ad asks: "What's Next for America?" Trump's answer: authoritarianism and fascism.

More at FrameLab: https://www.theframelab.org/unified-reich-trump-campaign-goes-full-nazi/

lauren, 3 days ago to microsoft

#Microsoft also notes that beyond Edge Browser "private" sessions and DRM-protected content (like movies, natch!) and such, their new full-time spying feature will record essentially all activity on the screen at five second intervals and store it by default for several months. Including, MS notes, personal information (e.g. visible passwords, account numbers, you name it). You couldn't design a system more vulnerable to abuses if you tried. But hey, MS has the talent.

lauren, 3 days ago to microsoft

You know what's gonna happen don't you? Parents buying new PCs are going to be clueless that #Microsoft is taking screenshots of PC activity every 5 seconds and storing it for months or longer. Kids will be far more adept at leveraging this than most parents will be. Rather than parents using this feature to monitor their children, it's the children and teenagers who will be leveraging this feature on every PC they can get their hands on to spy on the adults. As they said in "Quantum Leap" -- OH ... BOY!

sjvn, 3 days ago to ai

You don’t really think you can depend on answers pulled from the likes of self-appointed Reddit experts, do you? https://www.computerworld.com/article/2114681/what-happens-when-genai-vendors-kill-off-their-best-sources.html by @sjvn

#AI vendor answers come from stealing. If they don't start paying creatives, they'll collapse with garbage data.

lauren, 3 days ago to google

***** Lauren's Blog: Generative AI Is Being Rammed Down Our Throats *****

https://lauren.vortex.com/2024/05/21/generative-ai-is-being-rammed-down-our-throats

The technical term for what's happening now with Artificial Intelligence, especially generative AI, is NUTS. I mean it's not just #Google, but #Microsoft too, with OpenAI's #ChatGPT. The firms are just pouring out half-baked AI systems and trying to basically ram them down our throats whether we want them or not, by embedding them into everything they can, including in irresponsible or even potentially hazardous ways. And it's all in the search of profits at our expense.

I'll talk specifically about Google Search shortly, but so much of this crazy stuff is being deployed. Microsoft wants to record everything you do on a PC through an AI system. Both Google and Microsoft want to listen in on your personal phone calls with AI. YouTube is absolutely flooded with low quality AI junk videos, making it ever harder to find accurate, useful videos.

Google is now pushing their AI "Help me write" feature which feeds your text into their AI from all over the place including in many Chrome browser context menus, where in some cases they've replaced the standard text UNDO command with "Help me write". And Help me write is so easy to trigger accidentally that you not only could end up feeding personal or business proprietary information into the AI, but also to the human AI trainers who Google notes can also see this kind of data.

OK, now about Google Search. For quite some time now many people have been noticing a decline in the quality of Google search results -- and keep in mind that Google does the overwhelmingly vast percentage of searches by Internet users. So Google has recently been rolling out to regular Google Search results what they call AI Overviews, and these are AI-generated answers to what seem like most queries now, that can push all the actual site links -- the sites from which Google AI presumably pulled the data to formulate those answers -- actually push them so far down the page that few users will ever see them, and this potentially starves those sites that provided that data from getting the user views they need to stay up and running.

Some of the AI overview answers have links but often they're dim and obscure and almost impossible to even see unless you have perfect 20/20 vision and very young eyes. On top of that many of these AI Overview answers are just banal, stupid, and often just confused or plain wrong, mixing up accurate and inaccurate information, sometimes in ways that could actually be unsafe, for example when they're wrong about health-related questions. This is all very different from the kinds of top of page answers that Google has shown for straightforward search queries like math questions or definitions of words or when was a particular film released that they've provided for some time now.

These AI Overview answers are showing up all over the place and like I said, much of the time their quality is abysmal. Now of course if you're not knowledgeable about a subject you're asking about, you might assume a misleading or wrong AI Overview answer is correct, and since Google has now made it less likely that you'll scroll down the page to find and visit sites that may have accurate information, it's a real mess. There are some tricks with Google Search URLs that I've seen to bypass some of this for now, but Google could disable those at any time.

What's really needed is a way for users to turn all of this generative AI content completely off until such a time, if ever, that a given user decides they want to turn it on again. Or better yet, these AI features should be ENTIRELY opt-in, that is, turned off UNTIL you decide you want to use them in the first place.

So once again we see that fears of super intelligent AIs wiping out humanity are not what we should be worried about right now. What we need to be concerned about are the ways that Big Tech AI companies are hell-bent on forcing generative AI systems into all aspects of our private lives in ways that are often unwanted, confusing, irresponsible, or even worse. And the way things seem to be going right now, there's no indication that these firms are interested in how we feel about all this.

And that's not going to change so long as we're willing to continue using their products without making it clear to them that we won't indefinitely tolerate their push to stuff generative AI systems into our lives whether we want them there or not.

--Lauren--

lauren, 3 days ago to microsoft

Imagine what an anti-abortion red state or a fascist Trump administration (or some other future evil administration) would do with features like #Microsoft's "recording everything you do on your PC" and the #Google and Microsoft plans to listen in on your private phone calls.

I don't give a damn if these firms claim the data is stored on the devices. Devices can be confiscated, stolen, or courts can order pretty much anything done with that data.

These firms are selling us all down the river with this stuff.

wendypalmer, 3 days ago to linguistics

When people tell me they read one of my books and found it “quite good”, I like to assume they’re from the US where “quite” apparently means “very” 😊

As opposed to the UK/Aus, where “quite good” is just damning with faint praise.

Unless you say it was “really quite good”. That’s when you mean “very good”.

If you say “quite good, really”, that means you’re surprised it was any good.

And if you say “Oh, I say, that is quite, quite remarkable”, you’re an 18th-century Earl confronted by a tempestuous highland beauty who is tossing her raven-black locks and flashing her sapphire-blue eyes at you because you’re enclosing her commons 😉

#WritingCommunity #linguistics #quite