virtualbri

lauren, 18 days ago to random

I've seen a LOT of horrible tech ideas in my time. But the Microsoft announcement for a Windows feature (apparently enabled by default) to take and store screenshots every few seconds of everything you do on your PC has to be one of the most high privacy risk concepts I've ever seen. Even stored locally on the PC, it's a recipe for domestic abuse, government abuses, and a long list of other nightmares. Microsoft has jumped the shark BIG TIME.

AxiosNews, 17 days ago to random

Vivek Ramaswamy acquires activist stake in BuzzFeed
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/22/vivek-ramaswamy-buzzfeed-stock-news?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Stories by Sara Fischer @stories

GossiTheDog, 18 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

jon, 18 days ago to random

Mastodon usually has a knack of finding the right people, so let's try this... 🙂

Due to a last-minute drop out, my flat in Berlin Neukölln is available to sub-let 26th May - 28th July. Shorter periods negotiable too

85m2, new building, furnished, lots of light, near the edge of Tempelhofer Feld, high speed internet, all utilities and bikes included in the rent. €1650/month, all included

Do send anyone interested my way!

Bedroom. Double bed with a red cover. Window to the right. Chest of drawers to the left.
Living - dining room. Table to the left. Book shelves to the right. Office desk and windows to the middle at the end. Armchairs to the right.
Floor plan of the flat

lauren, 18 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--

virtualbri, 19 days ago to Finance

It's fun to blame Red Lobster going down because of all you can eat shrimp, but no one really emphasizes this bit:

"A private equity firm bought the chain ten years ago from Darden Restaurants.... The firm, Golden Gate Capital, funded the deal partly by selling Red Lobster's real estate.

That meant the chain had to start paying rent. That's now a major financial factor in Red Lobster's bankruptcy filing"

VC again leaving a trail of destruction behind them

#Capitalism #Finance

miekeroth, 20 days ago to random

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.

https://covid-long.com/

joesteel, 19 days ago to random

For the people procrastinating on their Monday work: A blog post about how OpenAI's Sora is a stock footage generator, and contrasting that with Foundry's CopyCat which is an actual creative tool.

https://joe-steel.com/2024-05-18-Full-of-Hot-Air.html

jensorensen, 21 days ago to LGBTQ

Latest comic: The Great Regression

#cartoon #comic #fascism #race #abortion #lgbtq #democracy #uspol

codeandsupply, 21 days ago to Software

#ScholarshipFund awards travel assistance to #software people who are:

• coming to Pittsburgh for a conference, speaking or just attending
• living in Pittsburgh but needing assistance to afford to speak elsewhere in the US

Our funding is purely from individual donors and some small donor-advised funds.

Help us show what #Pittsburgh has to offer.

https://codeandsupply.co/donate

#pyconus

inkican, 22 days ago to scifi

Sci-Friday #209 – The Making of Tron – Scifi Movies - This homage to imagination and innovation is nothing short of remarkable - enjoy! - https://inkican.com/sci-friday-209-the-making-of-tron-scifi-movies/ #tron #scifi #movies #VFX #art #scifiart #conceptart #Disney

dangillmor, 23 days ago to random

As CNN documents, it was outsiders who caused the violence at UCLA, not the students. And it's vital to keep in mind that the police "stood by for hours" -- watching (obviously indifferent if not pleased) as the outsiders beat up protestors and journalists -- and thereby became collaborators with the violent intruders into a peaceful protest.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/us/ucla-student-protests-counterprotesters-invs/index.html

virtualbri, 23 days ago (edited 23 days ago) to random

https://www.bluebrixx.com/en/star-trek/107247/Star-Trek-Tricorder-2260s-BlueBrixx-Pro

Woah, how cool is this BlueBrixx TOS tricorder?

#StarTrek

scott, 24 days ago (edited 18 days ago) to random

We need to stop making sci-fi until tech bros can learn the difference between a warning and an aspiration.

Edit: because this post is doing numbers it’s important to explicitly acknowledge that this is a bad take on a complex and big problem.

caseynewton, 25 days ago to random

With today’s announcements at Google I/O, the web has entered a state of managed decline https://www.platformer.news/google-io-ai-search-sundar-pichai/

jwz, 27 days ago to random

MichaelPorter, 28 days ago to random

I’m seeing this graphic making the rounds withouth attribution - many versions have the info at the bottom cut off. The creator is alienyrox2 on reddit (https://www.reddit.com/user/alienyrox2/).

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/ic1g5o/colors_of_aurora_oc/

#Aurora #CreditYourSources #AltText

cstross, 28 days ago to random

Deeply telling about how far the Overton Window has shifted in 40 years that Ronald Reagan took a harder line with Israel than Joe Biden, never mind Mitt Romney.

(But then, per wikipedia Romney was best buds with Benjamin Netanyahu at university. So this tracks.)

CaramelizedShallots, 28 days ago to random

#aurora

WorkingFamilies, 28 days ago to random

Basically, this is unionizing.

virtualbri, 28 days ago to hulu

"The Contestant" on Hulu, about the guy who spent a over a year in an empty room surviving on only what he could win in magazine contests, is quite good.

Has actually a few turns I wasn't expecting, which is lovely, because it could be a complete downer.

#Hulu #Documentaries #Streaming

freemancrouch, 28 days ago to random

Att'n. #monsterdon #monsterdoners

Raise one for Roger Corman.

I loved his movies as a kid and later, when I went all cinephile and stuff, I loved them even more.

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/roger-corman-dead-producer-independent-b-movie-1235999591/

carnage4life, 28 days ago to random

Trump coming out for crypto while Biden's SEC tries to regulate it out of existence will be the tipping point in Silicon Valley VCs shedding the pretense of being liberal and going all in on MAGA.

A bunch of them have taken baby steps but now it's on.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/10/trump-crypto-biden-00157051

jwillia2, 29 days ago to random

mvsde, 29 days ago to StarTrek

When the Star Trek: Discovery opening credits say “with Tig Notaro” you know you’re in for a treat!

#StarTrek #StarTrekDiscovery