FriendOfDeSoto

Eight minutes can seem very long though.

This is about timelines. In the short-term it’s a win, in the medium-term it’s a threat, in the long-term it’s potentially catastrophic. They need money now.

This sort of scenario assumes that these companies will always be in a stronger position. I don’t think that’s a given. The companies that plundered all data everywhere, torrented what was available, and reluctantly bought what couldn’t be stolen to train their models are being passed on the right by companies that just look to steal or copy their stuff (e.g. China is inferencing the hell out of them). The hostility towards data centers also forces more development away from centralised servers onto local environments. At the same time, stuff is also being released as open source. I think there is a big chance that the big companies and their models today will be mentioned in the first chapter on the history of this technology but will fall by the wayside rather quickly. Their market position is underpinned by a belief that in the future they will be raking in the dough on subscription fees once they get the dirty work of being started here financed, no matter how. That’s a mighty big bet. Not only is a bubble economy a problem, there is no guarantee to protect their “IP.” It’s really like investing in very expensive tulip bulbs.

Also, we don’t fully understand this technology. A lot of the experts don’t either. Anybody who says they’re pretty sure they know where this road will take us in the next five years has ulterior motives.

That’s a bit harsh. A lot of the pictures you see on menus are not what they cooked in the kitchen. Because cooked food doesn’t look sexy enough. Or only when it’s hot and then steam coming off it makes it look worse in the image. So they use glue to gloss things up, replace entire ingredients (e.g. motor oil for maple syrup), etc. Food photography is serious business. And expensive.

The numbers 47 and 42 are sacrosanct. The former is Trek where it shows up a lot, the latter is the answer to everything. Pick a different number, ChatGPT!

Do you mean off Drive or Photos? Images saved from Drive should be ready to go once unzipped. If they came from Photos each image is divorced from its meta data, which comes in a separate file. So you need to check if the new service or software you’re using can reunite those two or you need to find a tool online to do that first. They make it deliberately a pain in the posterior to leave Photos.

I think if I was caught like this, the last thing I’d want to do is talk to the media about it. Not even under a pseudonym. But this story is probably not here to make Google feel bad and return some of the money. This is a reminder for parents everywhere to review payment and parental settings on anything their kids use online. You can be smug enough to say my 8yo doesn’t stream on Twitch or whatever because why tf would you let them anyway. But you’re deleting the credit card off of Google Play because you forgot it was there because parenting makes you forgetful at times.

This sounds similar to Google search results getting worse so you need to make more searches or look at more results pages so they can sell more ads on every extra clicked page.

The difference is this though. Google was doing this shit as market leader by a country mile in a saturated market. These so-called AI fuckers are trying to operate on an open heart while the hospital is still being built. What you are doing as a user is helping them get better. Eventually. At the same time they have financial difficulties. So the aim to be the best Skynet runs into operational hurdles, like not having the money to do what needs doing or their models being caught doing questionable stuff. That includes all the cases where human ignorance or hubris is so blame, like the Hugging Face case. That’s not good PR and the surgeon in my metaphor above is forced to switch gear while the half built hospital is being moved to another location yet again.

To the outside, they need to present themselves as trustworthy companies that do good. Internally, we will learn in time they are a fucking mess of competing interests, of which greed will eventually win over any other concern. If a model is getting worse it’s because the conditions of the surgery have changed again. And they will change again. In the long term, the only way is up. In the much shorter term, development will be much more volatile.

I’m so glad I don’t need to use any of that. Especially for work.

They are a bit vague on this but I suspect all of these attack vectors start with LEOs having physical access to the unlocked phone. They then set up a trusted desktop without the phone owners knowing.

Which is clever, to be fair. Whether or not that’s legal is already a court case. The law is so frightfully grey.

Delightful. Tardy is an excellent musician that just won’t die, will he.

If you listen very closely, you can hear the world’s smallest fiddle being played in the distance.

Which is it?

There are few feces filled salvoes flung at Melon Usk that I would object to. This is not one of them. The question I have though is this: do we need a new Twitter? It had its time in the sun but most people look back at it through rose tinted glasses. Before the takeover by the son of South African emerald mine owners, Twitter was in deep trouble. It had cultural relevance but was a financial flop. It benefited from being the first service of its kind with sufficient reach. I don’t think Twitter would have survived without the Nazi saluting shithead either. Its decline would have been more graceful by comparison. It would have done it without the bullshit tsunami emanating from the top, it wouldn’t have had the money to digitally undress people or other adventures in so-called AI, but I believe it would have faded anyway. People have split up from the one consensus platform to many different ones and making people switch is hard. So coming back now with a new Twitter is like announcing we will electrocute another Topsy next week. That turned heads more than a century ago but we have moved on.

I don’t like the direction Google is taking Android. I’m not in favor of this enforced developer registration.

“Seems to” is not the same as “did.” With a couple of LLMs and a bit of time others could’ve dropped these rave reviews as well. It isn’t far fetched that it is Google. But from a PR point of view they’d be stupid if it was them. They gain nothing but bad headlines from a stunt like that. So we probably need a bit more proof than some screenshots.

But now they want a court to treat that click as though an 8-year-old knowingly negotiated away her right to have these issues heard. It’s insulting.

In the court of public opinion, sharpen your pitchforks, light your torches, and move on Roblox HQ. This is objectively a silly argument.

Made in a court of law. Where lawyers play by different established rules. Where they are often compelled by those rules to pursue every possible avenue to get the best result for their client. Where they may be held accountable when mishandling their case. Where company execs push their own moral compass out of the way not because they believe this argument but out of a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. It’s a clusterfuck of obligations.

My gut feeling is they probably know this argument won’t hold up in court. But it may just knock whatever punishment awaits them down a peg or two.

We also share half of our DNA with bananas. Therefore, we are also siblings of bananas.

Call me cynical but I do think an outlet called oil price dot com may not be entirely impartial when they report on this. That is not to say what they wrote here is wrong; I wouldn’t know. It just has a touch of pot and kettle about it.

Since the power networks are linked and European countries import and export electricity, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that next to renewables power from gas stepped in to fill the nuclear gap. And the price for natural gas is often linked to a certain other commodity price.

Sad.

I get she was frustrated. I get this was a joke. You don’t make bomb jokes in line at the TSA either.

She may have overestimated the degree of privacy her DMs had. That’s also on her. Other e2e encrypted services are available to make the crass jokes. But if one of the three recipients had also failed to get the joke, a Signal chat would’ve sufficed to get those deputies showing up as well.

And one shouldn’t expect that a company, even of dwindling importance as Snapchat, won’t do everything in their power to cover their asses. Imagine if this teacher did go amok and they flagged it but did nothing.

If you can’t (or won’t) cut down on having firearms freely available, and if you cannot (or will not) do more on the mental health side of prevention, and you have already invented bullet proof whiteboards, doors like battlefield tanks, and implemented a system of metal detector entry checks and maybe deployed an armed guard, then this is an almost good idea. It’s the blinking light in the window and an alarm system sticker on the window that may deter a thief but for school shootings.

I’m not sure about pepper spray. Is a blind shooter unloading their AR-15 magazine an improvement over a fully sighted one? Why aren’t they equipping them with tranquilizer darts? Cross promotion potential for zoos as well.

What are the odds that we get coordinated school attacks and we find out one part-time student at the control center can’t fly 5 drones in 5 different high schools at the same time?

If you are something like 4chan or a descendant of that type of website, the answer is as easy as that. If you are Xwitter or Facebook it is not. You’re too big. You may have opened an office in the country, either because it was a legal requirement to continue operating in the country or because you collect money through it. So throwing your hands up and saying eff you we just don’t serve your country any more comes with a cost. Your ad money now needs to be paid abroad, which comes with the danger of increasing the cost for advertisers who now need to pay in dollars rather than pounds. And the representative in the local office, which you may want to close now, may find themselves in court for all the infractions that occurred before you threw your hands up (something that happened in Brazil IIRC). Also, you want the people who make the laws continue to use your platform to give it relevance. A Melon Usk Xwitter hissy fit may finally drive the rest of the politicians away. Loss of relevance will translate to loss of money.

The internet is multilaterally interdependent and scale matters.