Er… duh.

Facebook’s entire business model consists in invading as much of everybody’s privacy as possible and monetizing people’s private data. Its “products” are just honeypots to attract marks to milk for private data. You didn’t really think they turned a profit selling electronic sunshades did you?

If someone is stupid enough to buy a pair of those and put themselves under surveillance by Facebook, it’s their problem. But if I ever see anybody looking at me with those glasses on their face, they’d better remove them pronto when I ask them to or I’ll become bellicose rather quickly.

I am indeed lucky because the company I work for cares about its employees. It’s literally written in the company statutes: the company exists to make money of course, but first and foremost to serve its workforce and the community, and takes decisions to maximize the well-being and the personal growth of the employees and the community.

We took an honest look at including AI in our workflow, but we decided it wasn’t worth the social destruction. Only a few employees use it - mostly the marketdroids to generate illustrations on the sales literature.

I am aware that this is a rare type of company and I cherish that job.

Well, a human being talking random shit won the last presidential election. So why not an AI at this point?

Unsurprisingly, it’s necessary to understand a problem to solve it - just like the proverbial infinite monkey would in theory produce the entire body of work of Shakespeare given enough time, in reality, only Shakespeare managed to write proper Shakespeare the first time out.

AI is the infinite monkey of coding. I, as a senior developer, have spend entirely too many hours of my working life fixing code written by monkeys, and I have already had to correct AI code (thankfully small and generated by a colleague who promptly apologized and decided to do his homework and study the problem at hand instead of winging it with Crapilot).

The morale of the store is, read the release notes to see what’s changing.

You do that, I do that, but most people just click Update. And that’s if whatever wants to update itself lets you even opt out: Windows for example will nag you into submission at best, and more likely simply apply the update without asking your permission, and while you’re in the middle of important work if it wants to.

Same here. But I avoid saying it too often because I always get jumped by a bunch of forced-upgrade lemmings who insult me and tell me I’m a dumbass because I expose myself to immediate and terrible danger from evil hackers in the next 30 seconds. Which of course isn’t true, but most people have been so drilled into blindly updating anything anytime an update is available without even checking what they’re installing that they’ll aggressively confront you if you don’t.

The instance I use (SDF) has stopped fetching Youtube video titles and thumbnails weeks ago. I just add them manually now.
The SDF instance runs 0.19.8.

Maybe they should replace it with Google’s former pledge “Don’t be evil”: it’s free for the taking, nobody’s using it at the moment.

You know you can say “Chinese troll” without hating anybody, yes?

As in “the person is a troll” and “the person is Chinese”. No hate anywhere: it’s just two facts that happen to go together quite well because China is kind of notorious for being the place where you can find internet trolls for hire for cheap.

You need to stop thinking everything in terms of how racist it sounds.

Thank you. That was informative. I didn’t know.

Instead of whining like a 5 year old, why doesn’t he use his obscene wealth to pay an army of Chinese internet trolls to rewrite Wikipedia to his liking? I bet Wikipedia and the regular contributors wouldn’t even have the resources to withstand the assault and correct the untruths faster than they’d be created.

When then announced they’d be selling content for AI training, I went back to my old abandoned Reddit accounts and slightly altered all of my previous posts with actual content to be factually incorrect and misleading in subtle ways. It took me two months to rewrite everything, a few old posts at a time per day.

Now whatever technical or historical stuff I posted on Reddit is false and AI is training on that.

Aren’t you glad you did the work and gave Reddit the content it monetizes for free?

They’re all in the business of exploiting addiction, so no surprise there.

It just brings their BS policy in line with reality. Don’t think for a second that they removed their statement to feel free to use AI for military purposes: they’re already doing that now.

A small company called Stellar Defense & Cyber Intelligence is ready to help by deploying AI technology to identify anonymous, masked pro-Palestinian protestors

And now you know why privacy was important and Big Tech was a threat to democracy. Those of us who know history saw the danger coming, have been warning people right and left and been called crackpots for a quarter century.

And now that democracy is living its final days in America, it’s happening.

And now it’s too late.

Welcome to the dystopian future you complacently let yourself get trapped into.

I note that Nintendo had the good sense not to come after Mangione for trademark infringement…

I’m pretty sure TSMC has the means to hurt the US more than Trump realizes.

Save yourself the bother and just watch Trump on TV for an authentic fascist experience.

Well, it’s not black and white.

Some relevant politically-charged content can slip through even with a no-politics rule. For instance, I moderate a community on disability which has “No politics” in the rules. But I let Luigi stuff through, despite it leading very quickly to debates on US political choices, because it is relevant and it’s emotionally charged for the people involved. But if any Luigi comments devolved into straight politics (rather than focused on healthcare insurance) I’d kill them.

I think a community can have a no-politics rule and still leave room for stuff that’s relevant to the community. But it depends on the community, what the members want and how the moderators enforce the rules. At the end of the day, it’s up to the moderators to set the tone and make sure things stay the way the community wants them to be.