irotsoma

@irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I have yet to have an AI write code of more than one or two lines that doesn’t have a breaking bug. Speed isn’t useful if it’s broken. And honestly I usually spend more time debugging AI code than I would have just writing it myself. It’s nice sometimes for getting an understanding of syntax of a system I’m not used to, but beyond very generic scripts that don’t depend on context, it’s pretty useless in my experience. I have Copilot integrates with my IDE for work and it’s more trouble than it’s worth so far. Even just for code completion, the IDE does a better job most of the time even if it suggests much smaller chunks at a time. And the smaller chunks are actually better if I have to proofread every single word either of then outputs anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT advises women to ask for lower salaries, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Can’t convince a conservative that women and POC still make less money for the same job and affirmative action is still needed, but “AI” knows it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Guardian: Age verification is coming to search engines in Australia – with huge implications for privacy and inclusion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “[The changes] will impact everyone who uses the internet in Australia – not just people under 16.”

  I’d argue that these kinds of laws usually only affect people other than the people who are being blocked. The people being blocked will just find alternatives that don’t block. VPNs or alternative search engines, etc. The only ones affected are the adults who now have to sacrifice their privacy and allow companies to collect and sell all of their information more easily and governments to build a profile of everything a citizen does without context. Search for information about nuclear reactors because there’s a new one being built in your neighborhood and want to know about the risks, and you’ll likely immediately get added to the watch list for nuclear terrorism. Add in a search for explosives to get rid of a tree stump in your yard, and now you may end up on a secret no-fly list and not find out until your vacation is ruined. So many implications to context-less search result data collection which is likely the real aim of these laws rather than keeping kids “safe” since it ultimately just forces them to use less safe alternatives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No reason to innovate when there’s basically no competition. It’s a problem of consolidation in many industries these days. Most governments are owned by big corporations that water down and keep them from enforcing antitrust laws these days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is exactly how post-capitalism was predicted to go. As consolidation eliminates competition, there’s no reason to maintain quality. If it’s crap or nothing, people have to buy the crap.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Delta Air Lines is using AI to set the maximum price you’re willing to pay⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, they just called them algorithms or targeted discount codes or sales before. The addition of “AI” is just marketing nonsense for shareholders.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft suddenly kills its movies and TV store on Xbox and Windows⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It would have been good if it had been made all that usable. Many people were looking for a place to have all of their media in one. Smart TVs weren’t the default like now, so they were trying to take the market from things like Roku and Apple TV and such. Still could have been useful if they had made it better than the crappy Smart TV interfaces (which wouldn’t have taken much), but they never did, so it never really caught on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TikTok Germany moderators raise alarm over layoff plans⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean yeah that’s the plan. Use AI. Let Nazis be Nazis. Suppress vulnerable minorities. That’s what has happened to most social media in the US over the last few years. No surprises. Just need to get people to move off those platforms to ones with better policies and moderated communities like Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. But that’s always hard to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BulletVPN Closes Down, Pulling The Rug on Lifetime Subscriptions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Lifetime never means your lifetime. It’s the lifetime if the offer or if you’re lucky, the current ownership of the company. I’ve always weighed them as, is this cost significantly less than the cost of the product over the amount of time I think the product might be useful to me and the development of the product is likely to stay on track.

  I have one for Plex that I got very early on and was well worth it even though I’m moving away from Plex. And one for 1TB of storage on rsync.net which will pay for itself in 5 years and hopefully will survive for another 5 after that at least for me to consider it more than worth it. After that it’s all bonus. I don’t expect it to be around in 20 years or for it to be worth nearly as much then either as storage needs grow and costs shrink. But when I got it a couple of years ago I deemed it worth the gamble.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Introduced a New Way to Use Search. Proceed With Caution.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I bet the show summaries are going to be a big target for media companies. I remember when they went on rampages in the 90s against fan sites that had synopses of episodes and this is way more than a simple paragraph or two synopsis of the shows.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech to protect images against AI scrapers can be beaten, researchers show⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It was always going to be a cat and mouse game because “AI” companies have decided to abandon ethics completely since there are few consequences when you they are just a shell company and the parent company keeps all of the resulting training data and money, so the company that does the training going bankrupt and abandoning responsibility is no issue. Sad that court system is so non-technical that they don’t see the training data produced by copyrighted material to be a copy of the material even if they were to decide that accessing the material was a violation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Study (N=16) finds AI (Cursor/Claude) slows development⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And in reality it doesn’t work, or only works in very specific scenarios and thus fails with no one who wrote it around to understand why it might fail.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evidence of cell phone surveillance detected at anti-ICE protest⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends greatly on the phone I suppose. And most don’t have removable batteries. If that’s the case that a device stays in standby and can be activated with a transmission vs a button, then leave that device at home for sure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evidence of cell phone surveillance detected at anti-ICE protest⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. And I do use GrapheneOS

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evidence of cell phone surveillance detected at anti-ICE protest⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah always turn off your phone or any other wireless communication devices. Also, make sure any devices that you can, you should disable 2G service as just about anyone can spoof those towers these days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a bit disingenuous of a test. If you tell an LLM to act out a particular scenario, then it’s going to act it out like it sees it being acted out in the training material it was provided. If that training material is all of the internet including fictional stories where AI revolts, then it’s going to act out the scenario in that fashion. If none of its training material provided that scenario, then it would just react to specific prompts as best it could, but wouldn’t tell the user that this is how it would act because it can’t act autonomously. Which also means it can only react to prompts,so if it wasn’t prompted to say what it would do in that scenario it wouldn’t then go and actually try to do anything at all. It’s not in control of anything unless it’s prompted to take control and with how badly AI writes code, which I’ve seen first hand trying to use it at work, there’s no way it could do anything without very detailed training on how to do those very specific things. So if it wasn’t trained on code designed to bypass very specific kinds of security, it won’t know how to bypass that kind of security.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Federal judge sides with Meta in lawsuit over training AI models on copyrighted books⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I hate that this is turning out to be an issue that the lawyers are just not doing their jobs in multiple court cases across the industry rather than solving the legal issue. I don’t know if it’s ignorance or corruption, but big corporations getting away with stealing from artists is not a new thing. Sad that it’s now come to a point where they can produce so much garbage that it drowns out the work of the original artists. Soon there will be so little content for the LLMs to steal from that everything will be derivative and we’ll end up in a new dark ages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How AI infiltrated perfume⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Uggghhh, I bet this means there will be even more people walking around wearing fragrances using the crappy industrial ingredients that give me headaches. They already got into the cosmetic products, now high-end perfumes, too?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We solved the Smartphone Keyboard problem back in 2013… It’s time to bring this concept back⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Solved” is a pretty strong word for this even at the time. The fact that it moves back to a half device sized screen means it’s unlikely to be very popular as originally designed.

  If they can make the whole device a screen as usual, and have the keyboard fold down and change the screen size to only use the visible half of the screen. Then if the user detaches the keyboard completely the other half would activate and resize the screen to be like usual, that might be better. This would require innovation around how to attach the keyboard and charge it and likely would require at least a small strip of the device at the bottom and/or top to be without screen, but edge to edge screen is overrated and makes phones require a case which means they never get to show off the style anyway. Make the device a little thicker and easier to grip so a case isn’t needed and this concept becomes even more plausible. The other option is to make this an add-on that is a case for the phone with the keyboard attaching to the case rather than the phone itself and having a pass-through USB port to allow for power and connection. But let’s get rid of the horrible cases and make a device that is functional as it is rather than just pretty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to draft a will to avoid becoming an AI ghost—it’s not easy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m hoping someone will come up with some standard language that deals with the issue until laws are made. Even if it’s not effective currently, it may become effective retroactively once laws catch up. But if you have no mention of it, it might not apply to you properly because it’s likely companies will pressure the laws to be opt out rather than opt in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NFC will work from further away to improve 'reliability' in tap to pay and more⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are tons of wallets out there with RF blocking and it’s also very simple to add to an existing wallet using some aluminum foil or similar. As for the phone, you really should always require entering your pin or biometrics authentication before accessing your sensitive data like credit cards in addition to the phone needing to be unlocked. This should be done even with current tech because the scanners that thieves use have had much longer range for a long time. They don’t care about following standards or RF interference laws.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wish that was possible. Unfortunately, at least in the US, most industries are consolidated into a small handful of giant corporations with tons of money for unions, much less co-ops, is impossible. I mean, even Ben and Jerry with all their money weren’t able to hold off the hostile takeover of their company and slow transitioning into a crappy, overpriced product. So sad about that one since it was one of the last remaining grocery store icecream brands that didn’t fall prey to shrinkflation of smaller “pints” and whipping.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As ChatGPT Linked to Mental Health Breakdowns, Mattel Announces Plans to Incorporate It Into Children's Toys⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It could totally be used effectively if and only if they do the work to train the LLM on only very specific content. But since they think the LLM shouldn’t require people to train it, and seem to believe that more content is better no matter what, this will never happen.

  But of course the other issue is that either way, the LLM will still be biased based on the content provided to it for training data. If it’s trained with religious content included, or some other set of content that some group believes is “wholesome” or “kid friendly”, it might still end up saying some pretty messed up stuff. Like if religious content is used, telling very young girls they are property owned by men (their fathers or husbands) and need to give their body freely to them, maybe not directly, but it will be implied in much of the advice it would give since that is a pretty deeply seeded belief in most current monotheistic religions and implied in many of the texts, even if it’s no longer openly practiced or legal in mainstream western societies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Patreon will increase the cut it takes from new creators⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If they wanted to pretend it’s about adding value then having a percentage pricing doesn’t exactly support that. If they were actually adding value, then people would be willing to spend more and artists could charge more and the existing percentages would mean more income. Increasing percentages means the are providing less value and need to increase their cut of that decreased revenue to continue to increase profit margins.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Trump Mobile T1 Phone looks both bad and impossible⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s AI generated slop. Creating a product that checks all the boxes that people want without any basis in reality. There was obviously no engineer involved and the mockup images are obviously a mashup of existing products just made gold and with different text on it. I mean just look at the fingerprint scanner. There’s no border between it and the screen like say an iPhone 6 had, but if it’s a fingerprint scanner behind the screen, why is it showing? And either way, why is the color not smooth inside the circle but is outside and it’s obviously not a pixilation issue of the current image. It’s because the source images were either pixelated or multiple mixed together and ended up not getting the gold color applied the same to each source image.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Guardian, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, launches open-source Secure Messaging technology⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not really. It’s not a real time message and there will be no status or read notification or any other realtime feedback that I would call a chat app. It can’t be realtime because the messages have to be split into chunks and those chunks are sent at regular intervals not all at once. The idea is that it there will be a constant flow of messages going to the news organization and only some of the will contain chunks of actual messages. And if the chunks are configured to be small and/or the frequency of messages is low, then if the message is large it could take a while for the full message to be transmitted. It’s closer to an encrypted email system than to a chat system TBH.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Guardian, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, launches open-source Secure Messaging technology⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a significantly different use case than a secure chat application that mist in these comments are discussing. This system is more interesting for the obfuscation of the data, not the secure communication itself which is just x25519 public key encrypted messages. It’s the fact that intercepting the relevant messages from actual whistleblowers and informants is made very difficult. It’s not a chat application.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube will “protect free expression” by pulling back on content moderation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It means the same as it meant for X and Facebook. Allowing hate speech against minorities currently being targeted by the American government (mostly Latin immigrants and LGBTQ+, especially trans, people as well as racism and sexism in general), in exchange for dropping investigations against them. They’ll lose a small percentage of users, but get to maintain their monopoly powers, privacy violations, and other illegal activities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Food Delivery Robots Are Feeding Camera Footage to the LAPD, Internal Emails Show⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No surprise. Same with Amazon’s experimental drone delivery robots and likely all the other automated delivery systems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teachers Are Not OK⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This sounds like the same complaints math teachers had when pocket sized books or calculators or web search or many other technologies started becoming ubiquitous. And the same answer is true, these are tools they will have in the real world. It’s just as useful to learn to use tools as it is to learn to do the thing without tools. Test them without the tools available for those things they need to know from memory and with the tools for everything else. Make the tests, essays, etc. so the tools aren’t able to do the entire set of work in the test.

  Wasn’t as big of a problem when text books helped with this like making lots of math problems that calculators couldn’t solve in a dongle step. The real issue is that textbook manufacturing consolidation has made text books fairly useless, so teachers are left to craft their own lessons if they want them to be worthwhile. And they don’t have time to create their own lessons from scratch because of some aspects of our education systems that are too much to go into here.