Revv

I have no doubt that China can and does buy data from data brokers. I think it’s unlikely, however that any of the major players are going to be willing to sell all their data on anyone- being able to target ads to individuals is their entire value proposition after all. On top of that, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have fallen pretty heavily out of favor with folks in their teens/early 20s (i.e. the demographic most ripe to be sources of bad OPSEC).

But even assuming that an adversary could buy all the data they could possibly want, doing so could tip off anyone who cared to be watching about the sorts of data they’re interested in. This is generally not something you want as it can reveal your own strategic concerns/intentions.

Having your own app that can collect whatever you want, where you can promote whatever information/view that you want is a pretty big advantage over buying data.

If the argument is about privacy, I think banning tik tok is complete bullshit. If it’s about limiting intelligence gathering and influence campaigns, I think it makes more sense.

Yes and no. Without endorsing them, the arguments for banning Tik Tok are subtler than Chinese = security risk. The fears, however reasonable you may find them, are largely that it presents a danger of foreign information gathering of detailed behavioral/location/interest/social network information on a huge swath of the U.S. population which can be used either for intelligence purposes or targeted influence/psyops campaigns within the U.S. When you look at the history of how even relatively benign data from sources not controlled by foreign adversaries has been used for intelligence gathering, e.g. Strava runs disclosing the locations of classified military installations, these fears make a certain amount of sense.

Temu, et al., on the other hand are shopping apps that don’t really lend themselves to influence campaigns in the same way (though, if they are sucking up data like all the other apps, I wouldn’t be surprised if folks in the U.S. security apparatus are concerned about those as well.

Ultimately, I think the argument fails because it assumes an obligation for Congress to solve every tangentially related ill all at once where no such obligation exists.

It’s worse than that. It’s arguing that her estate and surviving husband can’t sue because he had a trial subscription to Disney+. It’s fucking absurd.

Ah yes, tracingwoodgrains.com- everyone’s source for hard-hitting, unbiased news coverage. 🙄

This story got shot down for the whiny trash it is two days ago. What made you think people would forget?

Aside from driving being an activity that, in my opinion, will require something approaching AGI, there are other issues to consider. Self driving cars will be completely unable to make difficult decisions reliably. How, for example, do they deal with a robbery where you just have someone stand in front of the car to immobilize it and then have the folks inside the car at your mercy? I have to imagine that either you’re producing pedestrian murder machines or serving up passengers on a silver platter.

Personally, I take comfort that the executive will be weakened as it looks more and more likely that we’re about to have a wannabe dictator coming to office.

I think this might want a clean sheet design. At least as I understand it, there are issues with privacy in the fediverse/activitypub vis-a-vis non-public messages. I think it’s also an area where, in order to go the most good, you’d want simple signups and easy engagement (to say nothing of being able to trust that your info has been deleted when you delete it).

Clearly, I’m here and I value the philosophical underpinnings of the fediverse, but I think it might not be the best fit for dating.

That said, if you feel like you can solve those problems, you’d be doing a world of good if you’re right.

Nonprofit versions of vital social tech. If I had the money sitting around, I’d love to start a nonprofit dating site/app. I met my wife on OKC in 2011 before it got bought up and enshittified. It was great and wasn’t geared toward just keeping you engaged (they’re soooooo bad now!). You’d probably have to gatekeep it with a small fee to disincentive bots, but with a relatively small investment, you could create something really useful for folks without preying on anyone’s desperation.

Signal would be a good model for this sort of thing.

Edit: typos

I’m going to say first off that this is kind of depressing. That said, after my initial knee-jerk reaction of “fuck you, Duolingo,” it occurs to me that is might be a better outcome than them pulling out of Russia altogether.

Providing Russian citizens easy access to language learning provides them access to non-Russian media and non-Russian discourse on queer issues.

In my own experience, learning a language as an adult has taken place in ~3 stages: 1. learn from instructional material exclusively, 2. consume foreign language material with native-language support/tools, 3. learn more of the language via context. If having an app available to folks in an oppressive country helps them get through stage 1 and into 2/3, it gives them a chance to escape the hateful discourse of the regime… In theory.

On the other hand, maybe it’s just capitalists being capitalists.

If only there had been another widespread, wasteful prior use of expensive and power hungry compute equipment that suddenly became less valuable/effective and could quickly be repurposed to run LLMs…

Same here. There’s plenty I might like to change here and there in life, but absolutely nothing on this front. Celebrating 11 years in a few weeks, best decision I ever made.

Now, the first time… Well, second time’s the charm, it would seem.

Is there a good reason I don’t know about to prefer this over Aegis?

Since before it was the CIA. Open Source in this context isn’t about software licensing, it’s about gleaning everything you can about an adversary from publicly available information without infiltrating anything.

A non-intelligence example of this would speculating on what products a company is working on based on their job postings.

To bring it full circle, one can glean from this posting that the CIA is looking to hire someone to troll the internet for folks to target for further intelligence gathering. Business as usual.

In addition to all the other reasons offered re: functional analogy, many of the aviation terms themselves come from naval / boating / sea-faring. Pilot is a good example, previously having been used in the sense of “riverboat pilot,” etc.

To me, this reads like “Giant-ATV-Based Taxi Service Couldn’t Exist If Operators were Required to Pay Homeowners for Driving over their Houses.”

If a business can’t exist without externalizing its costs, that business should either a. not exist, or b. be forced to internalize those costs through licensing or fees. See also, major polluters.

Inexplicable.

Seriously, what’s with all the Mozilla hate on Lemmy? People bitch about almost everything they do. Sometimes it feels like, because it’s non-profit/open-source, people have this idealized vision of a monastery full of impoverished, but zealous, single-minded monks working feverishly and never deviating from a very tiny mission.

Cards on the table, I remain an AI skeptic, but I also recognize that it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. I vastly prefer to see folks like Mozilla branching out into the space a little than to have them ignore it entirely and cede the space to corporate interests/advertisers.

The only tablet that immediately comes to mind is the Pinetab. For just reading books and satisfying your ethical requirements and running Linux, I imagine it would do the trick.

I’m my mind, it became instantly irrelevant once it became an insider-only event.