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Ferk, (edited ) to privacy in Telegram founder and CEO alledges signal has backdoors, they don't provide reproduceible builds, etc.
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You mean "confidentiality", not privacy.
Just the metadata related to whether you personally, traceable to your full name and address, have a Signal account and how much you use it might be considered a privacy breach already, even if the content of the messages is confidential.

Ferk, to privacy in Telegram founder and CEO alledges signal has backdoors, they don't provide reproduceible builds, etc.
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Signal is the same in that regards.

Ferk, (edited ) to science in For first time in a billion years, two lifeforms have merged into one
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"First evidence in a billion years of two lifeforms merging into one"

It's slightly shorter and more accurate.. it does not state absolutely that it happened for the first time, but rather that it's the first evidence we've found from the last billion years.

Ferk, to programmer_humor in It's time to mentally prepare yourselves for this
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And please, get all countries to actually start properly accepting ISO 8601 format for dates as a mandatory universal standard...

Obligatory reference: https://xkcd.com/1179/

Ferk, to linux in Your first distribution
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I think it was Mandrake Linux for me.
It no longer exists though. ...I guess I'm old.

Ferk, to technology in Settlement for the Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator also resulted in takedown of the Citra 3DS emulator created by the same developers.
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There's also this one: https://gitlab.com/suyu-emu/suyu

suyu, pronounced "sue-you" (wink wink).

Ferk, (edited ) to privacy in Phew, I was kinda doubting, thank you meta for clarifying!
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Yeah, they don't sell info about your personal interests, they only let other companies use it in exchange of money.
Totally different, legally distinct operation....

Ferk, (edited ) to tech in Google apologizes for “missing the mark” after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis
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The word "Nazi" wasn't part of the prompt though.

The prompt was "1943 German Soldier"... so if, like you said, the images are "Dressed as a German style soldier", I'd say it's not too bad.

Ferk, (edited ) to tech in Google apologizes for “missing the mark” after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis
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While the result from generating an image through AI is not meant to be "factually" accurate, its seeking to be as accurate as possible when it comes to matching the prompt that is provided. And the prompt "1943 German Soldier" or "US Senator from the 1800" or "Emperor of China" has some implications in what kind of images would be expected and which kinds wouldn't. Just like how you wouldn't expect a lightsaber when asking for "medieval swords".

I'm not convinced that attempting to "balance a biased training dataset" in the way that this is apparently being done is really attainable or worthwhile.

An AI can only work based on biases, and it's impossible to correct/balance the dataset without just introducing a different bias. Because the model is just a collection of biases that discriminate between how different descriptions relate to pictures. If there was no bias for the AI to rely on, they would not be able to pick anything to show.

For example, the AI does not know whether the word "Soldier" really corresponds to someone dressed like in the picture, it's just biased to expect that. It can't tell whether an actual soldier might just be wearing pajamas or whether someone dressed in those uniforms might not be an actual soldier.

Describing a picture is, on itself, an exercise of assumptions, biases, appearances that are just based on pre-conceived notions of what are our expectations when comparing the picture to our own reality. So the AI needs to show whatever corresponds to those biases in order to match as accuratelly as possible our biased expectations for what those descriptions mean.

If the dataset is complete enough, and yet it's biased to show predominantly a particular gender or ethnicity when asking for "1943 German Soldier" because that happens to be the most common image of what a "1943 German Soldier" is, but you want a different ethnicity or gender, then add that ethnicity/gender to the prompt (like you said in the first point), instead supporting the idea of having the developers force diversity into the results in a direction that contradicts the dataset just because the results aren't politically correct. ..it would be more honest to add a disclaimer and still show the result as it is, instead of manipulating it in a direction that activelly pushes the IA to hallucinate.

Alternativelly: expand your dataset with more valuable data in a direction that does not contradict reality (eg. introduce more pictures of soldiers of different ethnics from situations that actually are found in our reality). You'll be altering the data, but you would be doing it without distorting the bias unrealistically, since they would be examples grounded in reality.

Ferk, (edited ) to Minecraft in Minecraft brings official mod support to ALL platforms — And the first free add-ons are already here
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The title is a bit confusing.. at first I thought this meant they are bringing Bedrock add-ons to Java Edition.

But no, they are just improving the modding support that already existed in Bedrock. However, Java edition still can't use those new mods.

Ferk, (edited ) to privacy in Chat Control May Finally Be Dead: European Court Rules That Weakening Encryption Is Illegal
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There's a third way: a gateway node that receives the message in one network/protocol and forwards it back in the other network/protocol.

So, in that case the communication might only be encrypted from the user of the e2ee protocol (matrix) to the gateway node, but unencrypted from the gateway to the user of the unencrypted protocol (skype).

It wouldn't be surprising if skype just decides to maintain such a gateway on their end to comply with the DMA, since that's likely to be faster/easier than reimplementing their architecture with such short notice. I think there are already matrix bridges out there that are open source, they could also just officially endorse one and perhaps improve on it.

Ferk, (edited ) to worldnews in Julian Assange: Wikileaks founder in last-ditch bid to avoid US extradition
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someone painting him as a morally righteous

The first thing @seSvxR3ull7LHaEZFIjM said was: "Assange is a bit of a scumbag" ...

The closest thing to "righteousness" said was: "his efforts for freedom of information should not land him in US torture prisons like many others."

Which, being true, it's absolutely not challenged or contradicted by anything you said in response.

Note that "freedom of information" is totally compatible with "picking and choosing" the manner in which you exercise that freedom. In fact, I'd argue that the freedom of "picking and choosing" what's published without external pressure is fundamentally what the freedom of press is about.

Assagne (like any other journalist) should have the freedom of "picking and choosing" what facts he wants to expose, as long as they are not fabrications. If they are shown to be intentionally fabricated then that's when things would be different... but if he's just informing, a mouthpiece, even if the information is filtered based on an editorial, then that's just journalism. That's a freedom that should be protected, instead of attacking him because he's publishing (or not publishing) this or that.

Ferk, (edited ) to linux in Why aren't more people using NixPKGs?
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The packager always should "explicitly require" what are the dependencies in a Nix package... it's not like it's a choice, if there are missing dependencies then that'd be a bug.

If the package is not declaring its dependencies properly then it might not run properly in NixOS, since there are no "system libraries" in that OS other than the ones that were installed from Nix packages.

And one of its advantages over AppImages is that instead of bundling everything together causing redundancies and inefficient use of resources, you actually have shared libraries with Nix (not the system ones, but Nix dependencies). If you have multiple AppImages that bundle the same libraries you can end up having the exact same version of the library installed multiple times (or loaded in memory, when running). Appimages do not scale, you would be wasting a lot of resources if you were to make heavy use of them, whereas with Nix you can run an entire OS built with Nix packages.

Ferk, to linux in Why aren't more people using NixPKGs?
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Huh? as far as I know it has its own libraries and dependency system. What do you mean?

Ferk, to linux in Why aren't more people using NixPKGs?
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The nice thing about Nix/Guix is that each version of a library only needs to be installed once and it wont really be "bundled" with the app itself. So it would be a lot easier to hunt down the packages that are depending on a bad library.

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