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DdCno1

@DdCno1@beehaw.org

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Shopping app Temu is “dangerous malware,” spying on your texts, U.S. lawsuit claims (arstechnica.com)

Temu—the Chinese shopping app that has rapidly grown so popular in the US that even Amazon is reportedly trying to copy it—is "dangerous malware" that's secretly monetizing a broad swath of unauthorized user data, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday....

DdCno1 ,

Unsurprisingly, defenders of dictatorships always have to resort to whataboutism to defend the indefensible.

As per usual, this whataboutism is lazy and inaccurate as well.

DdCno1 ,

I mean, one of the core ideas behind these things is that these are highly capable devices that are receiving updates for several times as long as normal tech, so you can just keep using them for ages.

Apart from the very latest codecs, what else should they do that they aren't already doing?

DdCno1 ,

To illustrate your point, my old GPU, a GTX 1080 from 2016 (basically ancient history - Obama was still president back then) remains a very useful for ML-applications today - and this isn't even their oldest card that is still relevant for AI. This card was never meant for this, but thanks to Nvidia investing into CUDA and CUDA being useful for all sorts of non-gaming applications, the API became a natural first choice when ML tools that run on consumer hardware started to get developed.

My current GPU, an RTX 2080, is just two years younger and yet it's so powerful (for everything I throw at it, including ML) that I won't have to upgrade it for years to come.

DdCno1 ,

Even first gen ones from 2015 are still being used. I don't think these die all that often. They will be obsolete at some point, but even this takes far longer than with other tech. As long as you make sure it doesn't overheat, it should last for a while longer.

DdCno1 ,

Because that's where the audience is. Peertube is deader than the lemmyverse. You are essentially making the silly "but yet you choose to live in society" argument.

DdCno1 ,

It could be regulated into oblivion, to the point that any commercial use of it (and even non-commercial publication of AI generated material) becomes a massive legal liability, despite the fact that AI tools like Stable Diffusion can not be taken away. It's not entirely unlikely that some countries will try to do this in the future, especially places with strong privacy and IP laws as well as equally strong laws protecting workers. Germany and France come to mind, which together could push the EU to come down hard on large AI services in particular. This could make the recently adopted EU AI Act look harmless by comparison.

DdCno1 ,

They've been told to do this for decades and they are proudly ignoring these requests.

DdCno1 ,

"But what about" * 5. It's always whataboutism with sycophants of autocratic regimes.

DdCno1 ,

The thing is, floating windows were absolutely useless in the age of 13 - 17" CRTs. On modern ultrawide or even just conventional widescreen displays, they make far more sense.

DdCno1 ,

They might just as well sell PC power supply to USB adapters then.

DdCno1 ,

I was about to say, you could do serviceable OCR on a 486, which illustrates just how little processing power is needed for conventional approaches compared to this hallucinating AI nonsense.

DdCno1 ,

I meant OCR of arbitrary printed or faxed text, which really only became feasible for home users in the 1990s. There were professional, but often very limited, solutions earlier than that, of course.

DdCno1 ,

I meant, the "no ads" thing was only feasible in the very beginning, when they were solely funded by venture capital.

DdCno1 ,

No, they are not. There are certain high technologies, especially litographic equipment, that China can not produce and can not catch up to, because it's a moving target and they will be perpetually lagging behind. The end result will be the exact same issue that Eastern Bloc computing suffered from during the Cold War.

Car makers BMW, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Volkswagen (VW) used parts made by supplier with links to Chinese forced labour, U.S. probe says (www.bbc.com)

BMW, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Volkswagen (VW) used parts made by a supplier on a list of firms banned over alleged links to Chinese forced labour, a US congressional report has said....

DdCno1 ,

Why do people who degrade themselves by defending China always resort to whataboutism? It's almost as if what this murderous dictatorship is doing is entirely indefensible, so they can only come up with clumsy ways of pointing fingers at others.

DdCno1 ,

This makes this platform next to impossible to recommend to users outside of the US, since credit cards are very uncommon in e.g. Europe.

DdCno1 ,

BRB, gonna learn Estonian.

DdCno1 ,

I'm the kind of person who reads the source code of software I'm using at least some of the time (and modifies it on occasion), but I'm no genius and not qualified to notice a well-hidden backdoor or potentially fatal software bug - let alone issues with the design, construction or implantation of the hardware. I would never ever trust a brain implant or any device that interfaces directly with my brain.

DdCno1 ,

Does this look like ending three years ago?

https://imgur.com/K84UYxX

DdCno1 ,

I've seen far more convincing deepfakes, to the point I couldn't tell until I was told. I've experimented with this myself. After a bit of trial and error, almost anyone can easily create shockingly convincing deepfakes. One interesting method is using 3D rendered characters with deepfake faces.

Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps (www.404media.co)

Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...

DdCno1 ,

I don't know about you, but I started to notice that not everything that was printed on paper was truthful when I was around ten or eleven years old.

DdCno1 ,

You are free to invent a better system. So far, nobody has.

DdCno1 ,

Less worse.

DdCno1 ,

What kind of economic system does the author of this book propose?

DdCno1 ,

Both of you need to read up on the phenomenon called hallucination.

DdCno1 ,

Have you met the people of the land?

DdCno1 ,

At this point, it works more reliably than playing Youtube videos in a web browser.

The free Delta game emulator for iPhones is live on Apple’s App Store (www.theverge.com)

Caveat: It isn't available in the app store in the EU, and is instead only available via the developer's marketplace, AltStore¹. As far as I can tell, this genuinely isn't because of greed, but because of a little detail in Apple's EU rules (possibly wrong):...

DdCno1 ,

Yeah, about that:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/apples-hypocritical-defense-data-privacy/581680/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/23/apple-user-data-law-enforcement-falling-short

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/05/apple_apps_privacy_study/

The correct choice would have been a custom ROM for an Android smartphone, without any Google apps and services.

DdCno1 ,

How did you solve the issue of adblocking?

DdCno1 ,

It was kind of inevitable that sooner or later, their impressive robots would fall deep into the uncanny valley. I suspect they knew this particular aspect about the new Atlas robot would be the most controversial, which is why they posted it separately to judge reactions and for it not to distract from the main video showing its other capabilities later on.

DdCno1 ,

Always check the source. This is Boston Dynamics' YouTube channel - and they are not in the business of faking things.

DdCno1 ,

An alt-right LLM (large language model). Think of it as a crappy Nazi alternative to the text part of GPT-4 (there's also a separate text-to-image component). It's probably just a reskinned existing language model that had Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries and Stormfront added to its training data.

DdCno1 ,

He was inspired by Stalinist practices, but as shown by this example and many others, far-left and far-right autocrats are very similar in this regard.

DdCno1 ,

This is an economic model known most commonly as feudalism.

Hahaha, that's not how feudalism works at all. You are twisting yourself backwards through your legs to come up with some kind of nonsense that makes Stalin not far-left. It's hilarious.

DdCno1 ,

I've used forums that had these things 20 years ago. This isn't new.

DdCno1 ,

I should add that it wasn't the norm back then either.

What's kind of funny is that all of the debates around these systems are exactly the same today as back then, like for example that you should use the voting system to reward quality comments, not use it as an agree/disagree button.

DdCno1 ,

Agreed. This is a superficial history lesson masquerading as an article. While nothing lasts forever and Steam has its issues, the examples being cited are not supporting the not outrageous prediction that Steam might get worse in the future. It's just not very insightful.

Anyone who, unlike the author, actually had to deal with early versions of Steam can attest to the fact that in most ways, the platform has dramatically improved.

DdCno1 ,

Not just cheaper, but the vast majority of Indie games need the platform for exposure, despite it being so crowded. Those first few hours on the front page are when most sales are happening, especially given how abysmal to nonexistent the marketing of most small games is.

Developers seem to be under the impression that a few social media posts shortly before or after release are enough, whereas in reality, they need to create a community that is eagerly waiting for the game beforehand, spend at least as much time on marketing and community management as on the game itself.

Then again, the majority of games - and this is something few people are willing to admit, least of all their developers - have absolutely no commercial value, no chance of ever making any money, no business being on any store front and even, in the majority of cases, no business even being distributed for free other than among close friends and family. Over 12000 games were released on Steam last year. Does anyone believe that more than a few hundred of those are even worth looking at, let alone being purchased and played?

Nobody is waiting for the billionth card game or sidescroller with unattractive amateur art. Nobody is waiting for an ugly looking game with a poorly written store page that costs 15 bucks and is coming from a new, unknown developer while similar, better games are routinely on sale for a fraction as much. I've received outraged reactions from both developers and gamers for comparing some first marketed at release titles with other games out there. Almost every time, they were trying to sell their games through sob stories like "I worked seven years on this solo, surviving only on ramen and tears", as if anyone actually cares. Those stories are bonus trivia that you look up and are impressed by after having played a game and caring enough about it to read its Wikipedia article. I'm not buying your terrible time management skills and unrealistic expectations, I'm spending my limited disposable income on entertainment and escapism - and if your seven year amateur project can't keep up with a two year project by an experienced team of fifteen people even at the very first glance at the first screenshot of the typo-ridden store page, then you're out of luck - and I like weird "auteur" Indie games. Those 12,068 titles are not just competing with the other 12,067 released that year, but the entire catalogue on Steam (roughly 73,000 at the beginning of this year), as well as older games, games on other platforms and other types of media.

One has to assume that most people brave enough to dive head-first into Indie games development are either ignorant of these facts or hopelessly optimistic. We kind of need this optimism, without it we would have never gotten gems like Stardew Valley (which did not make any of the mistakes listed above though) or the equally amazing and divisive interactive art that studios like Tale of Tales have produced, but it's still frustrating to witness it pan out very predictably every time. Every single Indie success I've observed from the start was clearly on a winning path and every failure was obviously going to be a failure. I'm shocked how predictable it is, which is what gives me hope. At least success in this sphere is based on clear rules.

DdCno1 ,

Isn't it trivial to install boot camp on this thing?

DdCno1 ,

This looks like a problem with your system to me. Run a few checks on your RAM and storage devices. I had files corrupt on my NAS and a PC of mine, because both had defective memory. I only noticed it, because installers and 7zip began to produce errors.

DdCno1 ,

Most users are blindly accepting any and all requests by apps.

DdCno1 ,

Normal users can quickly hide it with a taskbar setting, power users (or those who can Google) can disable the feature entirely through a group policy.

DdCno1 ,

Because most employees can't just install random software on their machines and because compatibility between Libre Office and Microsoft Office is nowhere near perfect. You don't want to send your boss a file that ends up looking mangled on their screen.

What non-FOSS software have you been unable to quit?

For me, Google video search, Google books (Internet Archive is good, but doesn't always have the same stuff), Adobe InDesign (but in the process of learning LaTeX), and Typewise. As for the Google stuff, I liked Whoogle a lot, but almost all their instances seem to have been blocked or shut down. Also, apologies if this is...

DdCno1 ,

Signal does, by the way.

DdCno1 ,

They aren't just targeting the far-right and they are not just spreading far-right lies. There's misinformation for everybody and of every color on that platform.

DdCno1 ,

Nation doesn't want major social media site controlled by the enemy. More shocking news at 11.

DdCno1 ,

Not sure why you think that what China does isn't affecting you in Canada as well:

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/there-may-be-more-chinese-police-stations-canada-minister-says-2023-05-14/

DdCno1 ,

Same here, but the house is a few decades younger, has brick walls and thick reinforced concrete floors. Early WiFi was rough, let me tell ya. At one point, I improvised a directional WiFi antenna out of Styrofoam and precisely cut wires, which actually worked. I tried three generations of DLAN after that, all of which were horribly unreliable and had nowhere near the advertised performance. I'm now moderately happy with a meshnet, which is so reliable that I forgot how to log into it to configure it.

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