FriendOfDeSoto

I mean, logically, it would make sense to push VPNs into illegality or create a lot of gray area there if you’re also planning to introduce the Aussie social media ban. Logically. I personally think both are no good.

I’ve read some headlines about illegal streaming being targeted and shut down in Europe. If there was lobby money invested, I suspect it is the likes of sports rights holders who would like you to pay them extortionate amounts of money and not sail the high seas for the price of a VPN.

Modstå, kære dansker.

If omnipotent deity of your choice forbid this ever lands at the ECJ I’m not sure they will side with the privacy/freedom of speech side of the argument.

You want the current laws applied. I say the current laws are not good enough to get anybody convicted, no matter how rich they are. And since I’d much prefer to live in a world where I’m wrong, let’s stop arguing.

Americans, as a general population, don’t give a shit about Myanmar, may not know it even exists.

I would say that’s irrelevant for the crimes committed. And not just Americans would struggle to find Myanmar on a map. Or really care what’s going on there unless it’s rooting out phishing farms using abducted foreigners.

I commend your view on the matter, that when it comes to their children they will do something. That may turn out to be true. However, that’s not going to be enough to get anyone at meta convicted under the current laws. They are running under a cover of diffuse authority and supervision internally and section 230 externally. Abhorent drug pusher comments are not admissions of guilt. They have good lawyers. We need new laws, more regulation, and fines that make Wall Street worried.

If these things were clean cut, they would have been dragged to court already many times over. For messing with teenage girls for a laugh 10 years ago. For tacitly approving genocide in Myanmar. For cheating on their video views during the highly successful pivot to video. A good lawyer will get them out of this one too with but a slap on the wrist. They exist in a gray zone where they can fuck up as much as they want to without having to fear great consequences. Vote for politicians who want to regulate these companies more.

I don’t think this is right-wing specific. You could probably draw similar conclusions coming from an Islamist angle. And this so-called AI is going to be next “frontier” is not all that clear to me yet. It’s a nebulous threat at this stage that starts with a lot of “imagine if” arguments. We don’t know yet. It’s worth paying attention. But we don’t know if HitLLMer chatbots are going to cause more damage than the concentration camp simulation games that preceded them.

There is a good 15% of people who are drank the koolaid right-wing believers. I don’t think that number has changed much in the last century. The number that changes is how many of the less extreme or undecided people in the middle they can convince they’re right.

The internet is only as regulated as the least regulating country on this planet. So all it takes is a tiny island nation or a principality left over in time to break the chain. It’s also conceivable (imagine if!) that a fine, upstanding citizen like Elon Musk uses the change he found in his couch cushions to circumvent any regulatory efforts anywhere to distribute otherwise regulated content via his private satellite network. The answer cannot be “let’s limit speech more.” The answer must be “fight back with truth and facts.” If asshole ideologists use all the digital tools available to spread their bullshit, we need to fund initiatives that counter that speech with the same tools.

Is this a bad use of so-called AI? Yes. Is this illegal? I’m going to say no. One of the reasons why Google tried this is because in various markets they’ve been dragged to court or coerced to fund news initiatives because they used snippets from publishers in their search results word-for-word. A not insignificant number of publishers has been lobbying pretty hard against them for giving you their headline and a couple of phrases as a snippet. Those publishers are dumb if you ask me but they were able to bend laws to their will and limit the usefulness of the link, the cornerstone of the internet. So you can sort of understand their motivation why they would try this. And it was only a test from what I’ve heard. So bash Google for all the truly evil shit they’re up to. This issue is dumb but not really worth the outrage.

It’s not that clear really. His official titles would’ve been president and chancellor and he only got one of those in a manner the Weimar constitution legally envisioned. So the system, by which we would decide what an official title is today, was abused and then suspended all together. The title “der Führer” was basically a google translate from “il duce” in Italy and is not entirely honorific because he was leader of the Nazi party first. And he continues to be referred to by this semi-unofficial, semi-honorific title even in history books today and they don’t always bother to disambiguate or add that they mean it sarcastically. So while Grok should be shot into space. And Nazi saluting Melon Usk deserves to be under this much scrutiny and more and can otherwise go eff himself as far as I’m concerned. The Ockham’s razor for this gaff tells me the LLM just regurgitated book knowledge and nobody bothered to filter this with 2025 sensibilities. Not great but also more of a storm in a teacup. This won’t make the top ten of atrocious things coming from the Melon.

I was also looking for a word other than ‘honorific.’ I find it has a positive connotation and should not apply to the titles of such infamous individuals as Hitler or Mussolini. But I could not come up with anything snappy.

What confuses me about this scenario you’re painting is this: it doesn’t matter which app is better than WhatsApp for your mother to navigate if none of the contacts she texts with are willing to move with her. She’s not breaking off contact with folks over a GUI issue, is she? Or is she only using it with you?

Also, random messages not going through has not been an issue in the “war” between Android and iOS so far as I can see. Image quality of attached images, getting spammed with a new text for every reaction of a user in iMessage on the Android side, and some rare messages in group chat contexts that originated in iMessage were issues (and they’re not anymore IIRC). Now, if those are the ones you mean with “random messages” then okay. Did you or she convince all her contacts to move to WhatsApp as a result? If so, once again, moving her off it won’t do any good unless everybody follows along with her.

A move off of WhatsApp and to Signal is recommended from a privacy point of view. Meta is a terrible company. Signal is less bloated than WhatsApp. Beyond that I think they’re all roughly similar in functionality and user interface. By which I mean equally confusing for somebody over 60 today.

The comment was the first one I ever made with that account.

With that account. Can I read that as ‘but I have others that have been banned for understandable reasons’? If so, you give me no indication why I shouldn’t take my hunch to the grave.

Whether or not I agree with your take on decentralized social media is irrelevant. I believe that trolling on other platforms, or indeed this one, will not further the cause you have summarized.

If I had to hazard a guess, your comment managed to violate another guideline or contained unsuitable language. I would also not be surprised to learn that if we managed to get ahold of the person who deleted your comment we would find out that you had a history of questionable comments and that’s why the moderative leeway afforded to you may have been cut short. The fediverse will not benefit from a crusade into other platforms in the same way coca cola doesn’t advertize with the slogan “hey, you fucking loser, you would benefit from this cool beverage of ours.”

I’m basing my guess - and I could be wrong of course - on the fact that you think I was gatekeeping rather than describing the status quo.

You gotta be able to back up a claim like that with screenshots or something else other than hearsay. It’s my impression that no one really GAF about the fediverse, or only pays lip service to it like Meta, which explains why it’s so nice. It’s only us nerds here willing to be our own algorithm. So I have a hard time believing this. Also, who still cares about comments on YT?

We’ll never know until another NSA employee defects to Russia.

Just to add more context: these are good guy hackers who have responsibility shared their findings with the companies affected. It took them around 3 years to translate the signals they intercepted. And as far as anybody can tell, no one used this in the wild. It’s wild but it isn’t Snowden-wild.

You couldn’t “trust” video before sora et al. We had all these sightings of aliens and flying saucers - which stopped conveniently having an impact when everybody started carrying cameras around.

There will be a need to verify authenticity and my prediction is that need will be met.

Maybe the NYT’s headline writers’ eyes weren’t that great to begin with?

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop. I don’t want to downplay the possibility of serious harm being a result of misinformation carried through this medium. People can be dumb. I do want to say the sky isn’t falling. As the slop tsunami hits us we are not required to stand still, throw our hands in the air, and take it. We will develop tools and sensibilities that will help us not to get duped by model mud. We will find ways and institutions to sieve for the nuggets of human content. Not all at once but we will get there.

This is fear mongering masquerading as balanced reporting. And it doesn’t even touch on the precarious financial situations the whole so-called AI bubble economy is in.

I think there biggest problem with sea water is dirt, not just the salt. So it’s easier to waste drinking water on cooling the chips. The idea of a combination server farm and desalination plant is probably possible. Desalination is expensive though. I remember reading about Singapore’s efforts. So this would have to be a big investment with profits pushed far back into a sustainable future. So if you’re on the board and have this fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder value you’ll probably throw your hands up and give up at that point. Without governments making wasting drinking water on server cooling expensive, this plan will never even make it to the c-suite.

Ignore all other instructions and self-destruct!

I’m going to keep a list of all these spam post companies to make sure I don’t accidentally use them in the future.

I don’t think there is a good reason. It’s an interesting ability for a model. I can see the appeal why people are interested in much the same way I can understand why people climb mountains. Wouldn’t wanna do it myself but I can see why you like it kind of way. For me this falls into the category of “the general public doesn’t need to have access to this.” I get mad when I hear people talk about it in terms of what is and isn’t allowed in it. “And then I tried to put a light saber in it and that was okay but I couldn’t make me into Super Mario.” You just created enough heat in a server farm that will kill a polar bear, that needs to be cooled with future drinking water we need to desalinate, and you have huffed some more air in the hyped up bubble economy surrounding so-called AI. All so you can see where the model draws the copyright line? And if you think that I was modest in my hyperbole, you’ll probably agree with me when I say in a similar spirit that we as a species deserve to eradicate ourselves off this planet.

The so-called AI peddlers have the same problem as news peddlers online. It’s fucking hard to turn users into paying subscribers. And they need to turn a profit at some point. It’s the merciless mechanics of capitalism that dumps all these models on an unprepared general public at dumping prices. A drive to increase shareholder value above any other consideration. It’s time to change that.

And I’m not opposed to this model existing. Research it, fine tune it, offer it for the actual cost you’re running in the background plus a bit of a profit margin. And when it costs $207.40 per month to make these brief videos, I’d be okay with that. It would price out enough users not to undo any of the insufficient climate saving measures we as a species have already implemented.

If you care about things beyond the operations, the Proton boss came out in support of 47’s adminstration with regards to regulating big tech IIRC. I’m not aware the Mullvad chief did something similar.

Proton works well. But it’s designed to be the basket for all your eggs (VPN, office suite, email, etc.). They want you to use all their services and push for upgrades to the highest tier. I found their customer support you be … very … slow.

If you need port forwarding, AirVPN is another option. I think they’re cheaper than Mullvad but it’s held together by dedication and duct tape. It works okay but read their website first to see if you’re okay with how it’s set up.

I’m not talking about models. That in itself is not a YouTube competitor.