Just a shit country…

I feel you… my first home computer was an Apple ][

At first glance I thought the story was going to be Putin illegally voting in US midterms to give backing to Trump’s efforts to undermine them. One autocrat doing a solid for another. Trump could probably get Dell or even Tim Apple to hook up a new ‘puter for the Putin’.

They’re also trying to use this as an excuse to strangle open weights models so they can maintain an oligarchy.

That’s a lot of syllables… Don’t strain yourself.

Pretty sure Cory’s pronouns are he/him.

And he’s been consistently spot on from fighting the good fights against DRM, for right to repair, interoperability, anti-surveillance, against enshitification, and his take here today on AI. I was personally happy to read this because it exactly echoes what I’ve said countless times myself and I’m very glad to be in his good company.

He does not even try to present or debate “how” “ai” works. He’s speaking about how it is employed and what the boundaries are around the rhetoric we hear every day in the press that amounts to nothing more than fear mongering.

There’s absolutely a LOT to be afraid about with respect to how “ai” is used to surveil and control our society, but it has nothing to do with intelligent software and everything to do with corporate and government power, enabled by a mystique created around what is really a (admittedly powerful and useful) statistical parlour trick.

confidently diagnosing an essay as dogma while admitting you didn’t even read the thesis is peak internet.

​His mentioning of python being a basic/easy to master language isn’t manipulation, he’s demystifying. It strips the magical hyperbolic framing that has been attributed to AI (and to which those with most to gain from it financially very much wish to feed into!)

​His point about being wrapped in python isn’t a failed attempt to give a lecture on transformer architecture, its to explain that the automation loop is controlled by basic inputs from a user controlled and relatively simple software stack, not some sentient machine with a mind of its own. Its not emergent behavior, it’s optimizing execution patterns embedded in the data it was trained on.

​For my part, I’m just awed how many comments I come across that are just half-assed lazy people who evidently can barely read, but think they’re experts. Calling Doctorow’s work ‘slop’ or quitting reading while feeling so confident proves his point: people would rather buy into hype than actually understand how the tech works.

:::

If you think Cory Doctorow is “slop” you should really consider simply not ever posting anything online again.

Solipsism is real amongst the fediverse shit posters

I think your response is only half right. To the extent the service you wish to access enforces location based rules, in some cases appearing to access from a different location where those rules do not apply, you may benefit.

But for services that are EU specific where ostensibly 100% enforcement of compliance exists, then it doesn’t matter where you appear to come from.

Trivial services like Facebook–you might be able to login from another venue. Important things like your bank, the tax authority, your healthcare, insurance and so forth will be largely domestic and therefore no benefit to VPN’ing.

Exactly my sentiment. This feels like a stunt.

Everybody knew what you meant and it’s what we always called them because it’s made of lightweight t-shirt material. Also, this was how we dressed in the mid/late 90s. By the 2000s I was transitioning from jnco’s to diesel and prada. From the 2010s onward I’ve given progressively less of a shit and everything is just a range of old t-shirts that don’t have too many holes in them or something somebody gave me on my birthday…

I charge my EV using excess solar energy during the day. It’s handy to be able to start and stop charging based on solar output. We also use the app to send map locations to the navigation system. Finally, while I’m privacy sensitive and having a GPS tracker exposing my location through an API I don’t control is dodgy as hell, being able to confirm the vehicle location remotely has come in handy on occasion.

While some neck beards may prefer to live in the 80s, I enjoy using and benefit from modern technology. I just wish regulators would require companies to use open systems. Tech in general isn’t’ the problem. Proprietary tech is the problem.

Of insurance company executives? Yes. (also, not random)

“Her conviction came months after her brother, Brandon Lee Roberts, was sentenced to prison in a separate child sex abuse case” (from another article)

If this was actually about protecting children then they could simply ensure phones had an ability for parents to enable a firmware lock which added these protections to their child’s device. No need for people to provide age verification credentials to the government. Of course, it’s not really about kids it’s about normalizing explicit tracking of adults’ internet use.

Then there’s the massive amounts of heavy metals that get deposited in the upper atmosphere when the satellite datacenters ultimately reenter and burn up. Good bye ozone layer.

Legislators who try to make such laws should be summarily executed.

I need to learn more about what’s OK on federated platforms like lemmy, but Im interested in creating a mirror bot that clones all the posts on Reddit. Just a one-way mirror to help boost content depth. Maybe it would be best to create a dedicated lemmy server for that purpose.

16 year old reddit account. I got a 3 day suspension for “harassment” for telling the mods of a joe rogan sub that their sub is full of “losers”. I was completely censoring myself by being so soft in my critique. Evidently right wing snowflakes are big fans of cancel culture. Deleted the app & here I am!