This is an issue that I would love to see fixed, so when on mobile I could click an X or swipe and remove the alt text view. Long descriptions obliterate the image they’re meant to describe. I can read the cartoon description, but I can’t really see it.
To be clear, I add alt text routinely. This isn’t a complaint about alt text, just how it renders on a smaller mobile screen.
@KatM@jensorensen@philip_cardella Where are you encountering this? It says your post was published using Toot! for iOS, is that what the screenshot is from? That is a third party app. The official Mastodon app does not have this issue.
When we warn the real threat of AI is how it’s used against people in the present, not the fantasies that some day computers might think for themselves, this is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about: health insurers using AI to deny care.
The thing about #tech#layoffs that people who haven’t been through it often don’t understand is that morale never recovers. The employees who remain will never have the same relationship with that company, bosses or peers.
Watching people you respect pack their stuff and crying on the phone with their spouses is something that never goes away. When I survived a layoff in my 20s I became a “do exactly what the ticket says” person. I stopped suggesting ideas, providing feedback, believing anything a manager told me.
If you are a company considering layoffs, especially a profitable company, you should approach it as “this department will have 100% turnover”. The second I got another job offer I left that company and six months later nobody who had been there at the time of layoffs remained.
@matdevdug the first time I went through a #tech#layoff I really struggled with “what did I do wrong?” It took me a long time to recover from that.
My first time as a manager having to lay people off was one of the toughest days of my 35 yr career. A year after that there was 100% turnover in that team, including me.
My current place has had a round of layoffs. We learned to manage employee growth in a way that we haven’t had to do it again. We’re now profitable and have an amazing team.
@troublewithwords@matdevdug
I was told that senior management was trashing me behind the scenes because I was finding and reporting too many bugs in our new e-commerce system. So, I stopped reporting them, let the customers find them, and took a package when it was offered. I heard that the new, multi-million dollar system was trashed as unfixable within two years.
The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.
If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!
If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!
And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.
Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.
@ajsadauskas@technology@music@music I don't think you understand the problem.
You see, companies have long struggled due to piracy.
They have to come up with solutions to piracy, and implement them. That is hard work and doesn't do a thing against piracy, and heck it even didn't lower their revenue, because it was proven that those that pirate stuff, also buy stuff.
Therefore, it only makes sense that if you have a lot of money, you don't have to pay...
As Hyperloop One shuts down, we need to remember that the Hyperloop was never meant to be built.
Elon Musk’s goal was never to transform transportation for the masses, but to stop or delay high-speed rail from reaching North America. Sadly, he succeeded — and we all lost as a result. While the rest of the world moved forward, the US remains stuck in the past.
@parismarx Capitalizing on buzzwords like "pods" or "vacuum tunnels", he played the pipers flute to captivate the techbros.
Whats really needed is a public transportation of trains, trams and buses that's publicly managed with subcontractors, not a corporation with monopoly. A system that gets priority over all car traffic that people can rely on to just work.
Like red blood cells transporting oxygen in a body, not the blood clot that is induced demand car traffic. #urbanism#walkablecities
@parismarx Hyperloop - the big version of old department store pneumatic tube systems - was always obviously beyond stupid.
What was surprising was not Musk proposing it (he's rather more of a circus side-show huckster than a technologist) but, rather that so many seemly intelligent people went for it and wasted $$ trying to build this highly foreseeable tecno-disaster.
"I deleted keys generated by our TV for 5 straight minutes. 5 Minutes of like 200BPM clicking. I restarted. Everything worked again. I laughed so hard I cried. I felt like I'd solved a murder."
@Lizette603_23 I’m guessing this is a bug, and not malicious. Thinking it’s specific to the HiSense branch of Android and not an issue with Samsung. I could be wrong of course. What I know is what I got from the article.
The Hyperloop was never meant to be built. Elon Musk admitted it was all about fueling opposition to California’s high-speed rail project so it would get canceled.
He never planned to improve transportation; he just wants to keep people trapped in cars.
The Luddites weren’t backward technophobes. They saw factory owners using tech to degrade their livelihoods and they fought back — first by trying to negotiate, then writing to Parliament, and finally smashing the machines.
As workers today organize and strike over bosses using digital tech to upend their industries, there’s a lot we can learn from the Luddites’ story. I was thrilled to dig into it with @brianmerchant!
@kierkegaank@parismarx@brianmerchant > It’s like how everybody expected the Spanish inquisition in actual real life because they sent out letters of notification well ahead of time.
TIL, huh.
Granted I never much looked into how they actually operated.
Yesterday Justin Trudeau revealed that agents of the Indian government murdered a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. When Canadian Sikhs went to post about it on Facebook, the platform removed their posts as a violation of Indian law.
African AI workers, mostly from Kenya, released an open letter to Joe Biden this week asking him stop US tech companies from “systemically abusing and exploiting African workers” and to end the “modern day slavery” they’re subjected to.
“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”
@parismarx Storage and processing power are increasing exponentially, but I'm afraid that use is increasing still more quickly. Maybe taxing data center use (won't ever happen) would incentive efficiency.
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
Unless the public puts literally billions of dollars into funding and expanding public libraries to catalog all this video media into numerous publicly owned gigantic server farms that maintain the capacity to upgrade digital storage indefinitely, all video media is doomed to stay with privately owned capitalistic multinational corporations that are influenced by foreign governments to censoring various things at will, and all video media is destined to die forgotten and overwritten by future shitty memes and useless influencer garbage.
@shekinahcancook@ajsadauskas@pluralistic@technology I have cancelled my family #YouTube premium membership and am migrating away from YouTube video, podcast and music. I want to echo the voices here mentioning #peertube. For #music, I'm trying to pay the creators and download #mp3 instead. I'm listening to #audiobooks in #mp3, paying a higher price and getting a narrower selection. I have #libretube on Android which circumvents the algorithm, the ads, and supports downloads of YouTube videos.
Google’s vision for the future of search shows how generative AI is all about increasing corporate power.
Instead of sending you to different websites, Google has scraped the open web to generate plagiarized answers to keep you looking at ads on Google. We need to stop being distracted by AI hype and fantasies about intelligent machines, so we can push back on the real threats before it’s too late.
@parismarx From a practical viewpoint, I don’t want to visit a dozen websites myself to research information. If an AI bot gives me a good answer from a thousand sources instead, I’m all for it. Elicit is already saving me hours of research today and I just discovered ResearchRabbit. These wouldn’t exist without GPT and GPT wouldn’t exist without all the data on the net.
And I am still paying for three newspapers, there is still a profitable market for good journalism.
@NatureMC Yes, they are. They aren’t hallucinating information, rather intelligently interpreting and linking scientific papers and literature, allowing you to find papers based not only on the abstract but also on the full content. It goes way over what Google scholar can do.
NEW: WhatsApp will soon make it possible to chat with people who use other messaging apps. It's revealed some more details on how that will work.
— Apps will need to sign an agreement with Meta, then connect to its servers.
— Meta wants people to use the Signal Protocol, but also says other encryption protocols can be used if they can meet WhatsApp's standards
— WhatsApp has been testing with Matrix in recent months, although nothing is agreed yet. Swiss app Threema says it won't become interoperable