XLE
@XLE@piefed.social
- Comment on CEOs blame AI for layoffs, but an MIT professor says it fits a long-running pattern to find a cover story. ‘They’ve been saying that for 20 years’ 1 week ago:
The original post mentions them as things that demonstrate bad journalism - I was indeed facetiously mentioning them here because I’m impressed this article is excellent because it avoids every one of them and does the exact opposite (e.g. “don’t quote an expert”, immediately quotes an expert to rebut the claims)
- Comment on Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal 1 week ago:
From a business standpoint, this doesn’t sound like the worst idea. OpenAI figured out how to make people addicted to their chatbots, after all, and they successfully implemented the strategy of “harm people, apologize later.”
- Comment on CEOs blame AI for layoffs, but an MIT professor says it fits a long-running pattern to find a cover story. ‘They’ve been saying that for 20 years’ 2 weeks ago:
This article breaks almost every rule of proper "CEO said a thing" journalism!
There are, in my mind, a few rules for “CEO said a thing!” journalism if it’s to qualify:
- You can never directly challenge anything the CEO said, even if the CEO has a long history of false or misleading promises and claims.
- You can never include any useful historical context about the company or executives’ past statements, even if they’ve been proven repeatedly wrong. The CEO’s comments should always exist in a magic vacuum.
- You should never, under any circumstances, actually take the time to talk to, and quote, an objective expert or academic in the field you’re writing about, especially if they’re inclined to criticize the CEO. This can slow down publication time and impact the quest for news-cycle ad traffic.
- You can never return back to the claims to inform your readership whether they were actually true (this is especially true of CEO promises made before giant, pointless, disastrous mergers).
- Comment on A Value Critique of AI & Tech Worker Opposition 2 weeks ago:
Open source tools are neat and all, but in my personal experience they always deliver inferior audio and video streaming.
If the ethical superiority of these tools is truly paramount, you can always simulcast onto them. I don’t think anybody’s stopping you from bridging it yourself.
- Comment on Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes 2 weeks ago:
Ironic that the only phone that will support Graphene OS will be a Motorola.
You know, if that materializes, and if it’s available outside of business customers.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 8 comments
- Comment on The AI fight brewing inside The New York Times 2 weeks ago:
One of the AI tools, called DX, advertises itself as an engineering productivity tool that lets companies track employees’ output, generative AI use, and efficiency
Burn tokens to determine how many tokens the people have burned
- Comment on HP customer claims firmware update shoved printer off support cliff 3 weeks ago:
“Buy a Brother printer” was bound to only be good advice for so long. If I’ve learned anything from watching competitive tech markets, it’s that the best competitor eventually starts diluting their own offering in favor of profit.
- Comment on Laid off workers at Meta contractor Covalen to mount strike action following loss of 700 jobs 3 weeks ago:
It is also seeking the removal of restrictive ‘cooling-off’ periods that prevent workers from accessing future employment within the sector.
wtf, why is this a thing
- Comment on Samsung reportedly set to distribute up to $26.6 billion to staff in AI-driven semiconductor bonuses after last-minute union deal — average payouts could approach $400,000 per chip employee 3 weeks ago:
Samsung had planned to pay generous bonuses to 27,000 staff making memory chips – at least six times more than its workers making other chips, and electronics. The union said that 23,000 workers who were making less advanced chips… should not be left behind.
Thoughtful worker solidarity.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Recording is what Flock cameras do to you, citizen, not what you do to the local Lord.
- Comment on Google Chrome Might Have Installed an AI Model Onto Your Device Without You Knowing 5 weeks ago:
Thankfully many FF forks prevent you from dealing with these shenanigans and annoyances to begin with. The easiest one is probably Waterfox, but there are several others with their own benefits.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
The wheels are supposed to disconnect. This is so it can turn into a boat. Liberals don’t want you to know this.
- Comment on AI Assistants Are Leaking Your Conversations 5 weeks ago:
I wonder how close we are to getting our details leaked to LLMs because rubes with our contact info are just dumping them on those servers. Kind of like how Facebook maintains a social graph of you even if you don’t use it.
- Comment on OnlyOffice invokes AGPLv3, says Nextcloud must restore removed logos in Euro-Office fork 1 month ago:
I agree with the FSF; I’m just a little worried Onlyoffice will seek some vindictive retaliation. I don’t know what that’ll look like, but I certainly wouldn’t have predicted this response from them either.
- Comment on OnlyOffice invokes AGPLv3, says Nextcloud must restore removed logos in Euro-Office fork 1 month ago:
It’s pretty funny on its face ("If you want to use a different logo, then use different code too"), but I have the feeling that this schism is just going to make open-source office projects worse in general.
- Comment on ‘An element of exploitation’: the world of TikTok child skincare influencers 1 month ago:
Interesting how this flies in the face of Techdirt’s “Nothing to see here on social media!” article from just yesterday
- Comment on Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago 1 month ago:
What was at the 1862 World Fair then? That pesky word you used…
Your beliefs rest on
- This clearly conceived thing not being conceived
- An implied assertion Marx wouldn’t be aware of specific large events
If you could prove either, I guess you’d be in the clear, but for some reason you’re insisting upon both.
- Comment on How The U.S. Will Track EVERY Vehicle from Space: SAR GMTI/AMTI 1 month ago:
Anybody got a FOIA request template set up for people to request their vehicular movement?
- Comment on Africa pours $2 billion into controversial Chinese surveillance tech 1 month ago:
American surveillance companies upset they didn’t get there first.
- Flock Goes Global: How a $7.5 Billion Surveillance Company Found Its International Partner in South Africa’s Most Controversial Camera Network
- Palantir co-founder invests $11.8m in Nigerian drone firm
At this point Chinese companies are winning the surveillance imperialism race just because they’ve got more competent leadership.
- Comment on The Kids Are (Mostly) Alright: New Pew Study Deflates The Social Media Panic 1 month ago:
This is a really weird article about social media. I’m sure there’s some panic, and I definitely don’t want regulation to jump to unnecessary conclusions where there are problems, but it’s also worth noting that TechDirt’s editor-in-chief is on the board of a huge social media company.
With that in mind, take this section:
Separately, Pew also asked parents how much time their teens spend on these platforms — and the disconnect between what parents believe and what their kids report is massive:
28% of teen TikTok users report spending too much time on the site, and that jumps to 44% when parents were asked about their teen’s use of the platform.
Parents think their teens are spending too much time on TikTok at a rate nearly 60% higher than the teens themselves report. That gap is the entire moral panic, distilled to a single data point: worried adults constructing a portrait of a crisis that the people supposedly living it mostly don’t appear to recognize.
If somebody has an addiction, like an addiction to drugs or social media, people around them may be more able or willing to point it out than the person with the addiction themselves. But for some reason, TechDirt takes this as a smoking gun of moral panic, that children are inherently the reasonable ones self-reporting correctly, while adults are unreasonable and over-involved.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Okay, but don’t go complaining if one of them slices through you want its way to the good timeline!
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I don’t know if they deserve a third dimension if this is how they handle two
- Comment on Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago 1 month ago:
And those looms inspired Chuck Babbage to build the Difference Engine, which was at the 1862 World’s Fair. Years before Marx started writing Capital.
So again, when you say these machines are inconceivable to Marx…
- Comment on Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago 1 month ago:
“Marx could not conceive of
thinkingprogrammable machines” - Comment on Mastodon says its flagship server was hit by a DDoS attack 1 month ago:
It’s worth noting that while people criticize Mastodon for being too centralized, the wording here is so different from when Bluesky (another supposedly decentralized service) went down.
That’s probably because Mastodon users who aren’t on the main network can still exist without the flagship server, not so true about Bluesky
- Comment on Memory shortage set to run until 2027 as chipmakers focus on AI 1 month ago:
So regarding this shortage, have 40% of chips actually been purchased? Or are they just making consumer electronics more expensive in the meantime?
Because last time I checked, these supposed contracts were nothing but a gentleman’s agreement and AI companies have been breaking those left and right.
- Comment on Amazon won’t release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymore 1 month ago:
There’s some inherent value of having competing companies trying make their Smart Stick an option on any TV. Amazon is more likely to sue, I don’t know, Samsung if their TVs forced you to log into a Samsung account before using the Amazon stick. The average consumer sure won’t be able to sue.
(I don’t know how restrictive smart TVs are, though, and at this point I’m afraid to find out.)
- Comment on Why Do We Tell Ourselves Scary Stories About AI? | Quanta Magazine 2 months ago:
I think more people would like this article if they took the time to read it. The entire thing can’t be summarized easily but this line was great
After talking to experts, I was convinced there’s no reason to fear AIs developing a will to live, and then tricking or destroying us to avoid shutdown and take over the world. Unless, of course, we tell them to.
And
The chatbots, in these experiments, sound fairly normal. The humans, on the other hand, sound a little unhinged.
So it’s all roleplaying experiments. (I swear in another article, I read AI getting told to be a better roleplayer would have a positive effect, while telling it to be a better mathematician would make it roleplay harder but work worse.) And that’s the real danger: people being dumb about the parlor trick
There’s a lot of magical thinking about AI. But it must be said that if you let these systems loose in the real world and they have access to your bank account, even if they’re just role-playing, it could still have catastrophic effects.
- Comment on Microsoft admits its recent server-side "update" broke vital Windows 11 Start menu function 2 months ago:
QA is when you vibe code tests, right
