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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: October 2nd, 2020

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  • the PR and lawsuit risk

    what risk? facebook & others conducted illegal human experiments. this is an enormous crime and was widely reported yet all fb had to do from a pr perspective was apologise.

    as we all know, fb even interfered with with the electoral process of arguably the world’s most powerful nation, and all they had to do was some rebranding to meta and it’s business as usual. this is exactly how powerful these organisations are. go up against a global superpower & all you need to do is change your business name??? they don’t face justice the same way anyone else would, therefore we cannot assess the risk for them as we would another entity - and they know it.

    So, while i personally disagree for above reasons, I can accept in your opinion they wouldn’t take the legal risk.

    simpler metrics are enough

    when has ‘enough’ ever satisfied these entities? we merely need to observe the rate of evolution of various surveillance methods, online, in our devices, in shopping centers to see ‘enough’ is never enough. its always increasing, and at an alarming rate.

    local processing of the mic data into topics that then get sent to their servers is more concerning is not much more feasible

    sorry i didn’t quite understand, are you saying its not feasible or it is feasible? from the way the sentence started i thought you were going to say it could be, but then you said ‘not much more feasible’?

    Voice data isn’t

    voice conversations are near-universally prized in surveillance & intelligence. There hasn’t been any convincing argument for any generalised exception to that.

    I am not sure they could write it off as a bug

    it’s already been written off as a bug. i didn’t follow that story indefinitely but i’m not aware of even a modest fine being paid in relation to the above story. if it can accidentally transcribe and send your conversations to your contact list without your knowledge or consent (literally already happened - with impunity(?)), they can 1000% “accidentally” send it to some ‘debug’ server somewhere.

    Are they actually doing it? It ofc remains to be seen. Imo the fallout if it was revealed would roughly look like this

    • A few people would say “no shit”
    • Most people would parrot the “ive done nothing wrong so i don’t care” line.
    • A few powerless people would be upset.

  • If they truly wanted to have mic access, they could for a long time

    agreed

    and it would have been known

    are you sure?

    The reality is it is too expensive

    imo this commonly repeated view has never been substantiated.

    we’ve yet to see a technical explanation for why it’s “impossible/too expensive” which addresses the modern realities of efficient voice codecs, even rudimentary signal processing and modern speech-to-text network models.

    and risky

    how so? previously invasive features are simply written off as “a bug”. they barely even need to issue some b̶r̶i̶b̶e̶s̶ fines (typical corporate solution to getting caught), that is the level we’re currently at:

    “whoops it was a bug, we’ll switch it off”

    “whoops another update switched it on again” (if caught, months/years later)

    “whoops some other opt-in surveillance switched itself on again, just another bug ¯_(ツ)_/¯”

    as long as they have deniability as a bug, there’s almost zero repercussions and thus virtually zero risk. that is perhaps why a company out and talking about it openly is such a no-no. discussing intent makes ‘bug’ deniability more difficult.

    in my experience when reading past the “they’re not listening” headlines, and into the actual technical reports, noone has been able to conclusively rule it out. if you know of conclusive documentation, please post.

    then there’s the “they have enough data already” argument. which is entirely without foundation, as we all know very well: nothing is ever enough for these pathologically greedy entities. ‘enough’ simply isn’t in their vocabulary. we all know this already.

    [i didn’t downvote you btw]






  • The planet does

    The planet which happens to be where we live and borrow atoms from to make our physical bodies?

    Poisoning the planet is poisoning ourselves.

    Where do you think that CO2 is even coming from? It doesn’t magically teleport into the air. It’s coming from the very pollution sources we’re talking about. In one year ~89% of CO2 pollution came from emissions sources which are harmful to us and other life.

    Stop poisoning ourselves == stop poisoning the planet.

    The mentality that we can somehow magically separate one from the other suits the polluting industries very well.


  • Notice how public discourse goes round & round in a lively show, but never seems to get anywhere?

    This is strawman public discourse, and its largely by design.

    Stop thinking, worrying and especially talking about climate change.

    Instead talk about pollution & poison

    Everyone can see it. It can’t be denied or handwaved or debated away.

    STOP POISONING OUR AIR, WATER AND SOIL.

    WE NEED THEM TO BREATH, LIVE AND GROW OUR FOOD. (duh)


  • When you work in an industry where the entire collaborative workflow of everyone is based on software that doesn’t run on Linux, then not running that software is equal to not being able to work in that industry.

    there’s no denying that’s true, though ofc it has alot to do with microsofts very agreessive and anti-competitive practices.

    though its all a bit tangential, the main issue i think comes down to what someone means when they say “everything”. certainly if someone said “you can do everything”, i’d expect them to qualify what is (should be) obviously a slight exaggeration as parlance. they don’t literally mean “everything” they just mean most everyday things. i think its fairly common in everyday speech for someone to be able to work out thats what they meant.

    in the few rare cases when someone literally means absolutely everything, then yes that silly statement would be incorrect. and if strictly intended with that meaning would certainly qualify as misinformation.



  • aye exactly. since voting is apparently a big thing now, if we have to work within it, some ideas might help such as mentioned above where hackernews prevents downvoting replies to you.

    some other ideas

    • permit upvoting but downvotes require a textbox reply (imo downvoting without a valid explanation is just noise, and we want signal over noise right?)

    • self posts not being upvoted (all posts start at 0)

    • i really like how lemmy shows both up & down rather than final value on alot of sites

    • no voting until you ‘earn your stripes’. not perfect, but somewhat helps at keeping voting within domain expertise.

    eg. i ‘fucking love science’, but just because an answer feels nice to me on nuclear rocket surgery doesn’t mean my vote should count. let alone be equal to someone with expertise


  • how so?

    check here for some basic examples. eg. it can be used to leak info from one context to another.

    there’s ofc legit uses for it too, which is why i argue for user intervention.

    chromium based browsers behave like that if I’m not mistaken

    i may be wrong? but my understanding is they’ll currently limit resources, but execution still takes place? that’s definitely useful, but my argument is for for an option where CPU resources be limited to 0 in background (without user intervention).


  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlWe chose... poorly
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    14 days ago

    Yeah I don’t know. Just see how the modern world is shaping society to the negative I just don’t see where we are close to utopia But right now we are on a different path

    That was essentially a big part of my point. We could be close to a utopia by now (from the perspective of technological possibilities).

    Instead, as I said

    for some suspicious reason we took a very different road, and here we are

    That said I don’t currently believe technology itself is inherently bad.

    Like all tools, it depends what you do with it.

    Is a general purpose tool like hammer good or bad? It has the capacity for both. And therefore it’s up to the user which is which.

    And that’s the issue really, what are we doing with our wonderous technology?

    This might be a bit of a radical take. But in that ~125 year window i was refering to, alot of machines we’ve invented are actually weapons.

    Weapons to destroy eachother physically (conflict/threats of violence etc).

    Weapons to destroy nature (deforestation and probably most mining).

    Weapons to destroy the mind (social media etc, actually most media now).

    What if we’d had 1+¼ century of building a collective utopia instead of all these weapons?

    afaict from the technical perspective it’s not really unfeasible, its the non-technical problem: the user and what they use the tools for.

    Another clue for us is probably the term appropriate technology, which is a vibe i think eg. solar punk is helping to cultivate.

    Anyway we’ve done ALOT of misuse. That’s why i don’t blame technology itself.

    I still think it’s more about what we’ve done with it.


  • background/defocused tabs are ‘paused’ by default.

    paused meaning no runtime execution of scripts or anything else.

    firstly, there’s always some security and plenty of privacy mischief around focus.

    secondly, it’s almost always wasting cycles, so its just wasteful of resources and energy.

    ofc with some option for you to eg. right-click on a tab and mark it as ‘runtime in background’ or something, for webmail or messengers etc which you do want runtime.

    but it should essentially be whitelisted.

    i’ve actually played with this in the firefox debugger and it essentially appears feasible so really hope this feature comes oneday - or i finally get some time to look into making an addon for it.


  • probably an unpopular view but tbh i think voting has ruined modern forums

    firstly its much much easier to game, and for big platforms to fake

    but more to the point, voting makes excellent sense when the topic is something with a clearly provable right/wrong answer. eg. technical questions are ideal for voting, where the wrong information does belong at the bottom because its simply wrong and in most cases most people can easily verify if it works or doesn’t work.

    instead we get voting for everything now, so it merely becomes a poll of opinions not facts, but unfortunately our monkey brains sees the numbers and somewhat equates emotions with facts.

    oldschool forums ALREADY HAD a poll feature, so when we wanted a poll we could get one. now everything is a poll, and when everything is a poll nothing is especially meaningful.



  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlWe chose... poorly
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    16 days ago

    necessary decline in our quality of life

    i’m not refuting your core premise.

    but on the note of this issue, not sure i can agree.

    have a look at this public infrastructure technology from 122 years ago:

    Youtube/Invidious

    imagine if we’d spent the last 1+¼ century collectively working towards the utopia this kind of project hinted at - instead of developing new machines to destroy?

    typically they say utopian dreams scatter in the face of increased technological awareness. have to say my experience has been the opposite.

    the more i learn about technology, the more i realise we could probably be very close to a near-utopia by now. for some suspicious reason we took a very different road, and here we are.