Same with Google allowing literal malware to advertise themselves posing as legitimate apps that show above the actual app’s website.

They even let ads spoof the display domain name to match the official website (and do no checks for whether they actually own the display domain despite literally having the infrastructure to do that in their SEO tools) while redirecting to a different domain when you click the ad.

John Hammond video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnuk8W2A0Y (also a good video to send to anyone who still thinks Macs “can’t” get malware)

Even if this is genuine incompetence and not malice, they’re so disgustingly incompetent that they don’t deserve to exist just the same as if it was malice.

Yeah the malware is called Windows 11

Run it in a VM? Maybe even one of those fancy ones that make it appear as a normal window in your Linux DE. Doesn’t solve the problem of the spyware existing but at least it’s contained and can’t touch your Linux apps.

“Hey Gemini write me a React app”

Academic tradition requires you to cite works…

Yeah looks to me like scaling artifacts from shrinking the image. AFAIK AI isn’t that consistent especially with high contrast shapes.

An extra hard drive for offline backup of my home server. Just knowing I have a cold, unplugged copy of my data in my drawer has made me less paranoid about accidentally “rm -rf”-ing my computer and taking all the mount points with it or my dog getting her paw caught on a wire (she likes to run around haphazardly and is pretty clumsy) and dragging the entire hard drive enclosure down with it.

Ideally I wouldn’t keep that drive in my house but I don’t have anywhere else to put it. Maybe someday I’ll get a safe deposit box or something but then my lazy ass probably wouldn’t bother to retrieve and sync my data nearly as often.

Man, I bought proper earbuds after using bottom shelf specials all the time and I realized there were sounds in my favorite songs I’d never heard before.

Now I’m just hoping they last more than a year. The last time I bought expensive brand name earbuds one stopped connecting in literally a few months while the cheap knockoffs seem to last forever.

Because .world definitely uses Cloudflare? https://checkforcloudflare.selesti.com/?q=lemmy.world

Weird. Didn’t notice because Cloudflare blocks my real user traffic because I have the audacity to use a VPN and Firefox with privacy extensions that block like maybe two of their arsenal of fingerprinting tools.

Just make sure you choose rich parents when getting conceived smh

This could have been an extension downloaded by only the people who want it and no one would have complained. Nothing like developing a full featured extension system and promptly not using it for a feature they know for a fact people have very polarized opinions about. What is it called when software ships with random shit nobody wanted or asked for and can’t be removed? Oh right! Bloatware!

“Oh just disable it” yeah just like the Android apps that came with my phone which have disable instead of uninstall in settings. A nice big middle finger to the user that makes it clear they don’t want them in control of their own devices.

If I wanted an “AI browser” or a browser with every feature under the sun related to web browsing or not, I’d be using Edge. Nobody is choosing Firefox because they want the same experience as a big tech corporate browser, they’d choose an actual big tech corporate browser in that case.

Induced demand. Having it there means people will use it, doesn’t mean they wanted to or asked Firefox to add it.

OK, face of Karl Marx then. The German guy who never even set foot in the USSR.

Oh wait you think that’s bad too.

What about Mao-no.

What about Che Guev-no.

Ho Chi-no.

Venez-no.

What about the Paris commune? No? Still bad in your mind?

Marxist Austria? Nah I’m sure the army that put an end to that is preferable according to you. They called themselves socialist with none of the Soviet imagery after all!

Even if we completely rebranded socialism you’d make it your mission to add the Soviet imagery back in and remind everyone of it. Like y’all do for decidedly capitalist bandaids like student loan forgiveness or food stamps that don’t even have anything to do with socialism.

You’re a hypocrite for asking me not to or pointing it out.

No? I’m definitely what people like you call an “authoritarian seeseepee tankie” who supposedly loves suppressing speech for sport. My comment was perfectly inline (get it? cause I toe the party line?) with the totalitarian dictatorship aspirations I definitely totally have.

An AGI wouldn’t need to read every book because it can build on the knowledge it already has to draw new conclusions it wasn’t “taught.”

Also, an AGI would be able to keep a consistent narrative regardless of the amount of data or context it has, because it would be able to create an internal model of what is happening and selectively remember the most important things more so than things that are inconsequential (not to mention assess what’s important and what can be forgotten to shed processing overhead), all things a human does instinctively when given more information than your brain can immediately handle. Meanwhile, an LLM is totally dependent on how much context it actually has bufferered, and giving it too much information will literally push all the old information out of its context, never to be recalled again. It has no ability to determine what’s worth keeping and that’s not, only what’s more or less recent. I’ve personally noticed this especially with smaller locally run LLMs with very limited context windows. If I begin troubleshooting some Linux issue using it, I have to be careful with how much of a log I paste into the prompt, because if I paste too much, it will literally forget why I pasted the log in the first place. This is most obvious with Deepseek and other reasoning models because it will actually start trying to figure out why it was given that input when “thinking,” but it’s a problem with any context based model because that’s its only active memory. I think the reason this happens so obviously when you paste too much in a single prompt and less so when having a conversation with smaller prompts is because it also has its previous outputs in its context, so while it might have forgotten the very first prompt and response, it repeats the information enough times in subsequent prompts to keep it in its more recent context (ever notice how verbose AI tends to be? That could potentially be a mitigation strategy). Meanwhile, when you give it a very large prompt as big or bigger than its context window, it completely overwrites the previous responses, leaving no hints to what was there before.

I mean, compared to what? Picking your nose on transit? The people sitting across from you is probably a bigger source of “spying” (and judgment) than the cameras in that case. IMO if you’re okay with being spied on in your car you really don’t have much more to worry about on a train or in a station.

I further submit that cars, being your personal space but still very much “in public,” give you much more of an illusion of privacy while in most cases being just as if not more invasive than transit.

Also, if we’re talking only the transit or road system and not the spying at your destination, driving gives much more precise location data than transit. They’ll know which exact house or building you pulled up to compared to which train station or bus stop you get off at. And if you do consider all surveillance, then they can figure out where you’re going even if you walk because there will be cameras at your destination.

So do roads, and your metal cage literally has a code on a plaque tied directly to your government ID, with a retroreflective background and each character carefully engineered to be machine readable from any angle and lighting. Hell, a good number of the cars you pass have 360 degree camera arrays pointed directly in your windows, or if you spring for a higher end model with all the features, you get the privilege of a camera pointed straight at your face and at your passengers’ faces.

Also, you can cover your face on transit with something like a medical mask and sunglasses. If you try covering your license plate you’ll literally get arrested.

The irony being that the boomers who say the “builds character” shit had a vastly easier life compared to their parents and grandparents, who fought literal world wars. They think all societal change before them was good (including stuff like colonialism which they see as “civilizing” the savage natives) but any progress after them is the devil because it means they might have to change their behaviour or worldviews, hell, or even the idea that people they think are less than them getting less disadvantaged and oppressed than before which I guess make them jealous or something?

anarchist erasure

You know you can just repost this with the anarchist symbol pasted over the hammer and sickle in response right? Like you think the OP presumably did to your symbol. If you care, there’s nothing stopping you from erasing us tankies right back, we can handle it. You could even snarkily title it “Perspectives about life (fixed)” or something. Go crazy, this is literally the meme community.

Also, ironic that an anarchist is protesting someone covering up their symbol to express a different thought. No kings or masters or hierarchy but an abstract symbol on a shitpost is sacred and can’t be touched?

how can I improve my privacy when buying a modern car?

Buy a train ticket with cash? Not guaranteed to be fully “private” in the cyberpunk shithole we live in but presumably more private than a car.

On that note, fuck every transit agency (including TransLink in Vancouver) who make it more expensive to buy tickets with cash compared to a transit card. And especially fuck you if your transit card system is a P3 with the data handled by a private company (again, including TransLink). You’re probably paying the money they thought they could have made selling your commute data to advertisers.

Bonus non privacy related rant: TransLink, the Earth and our decedents also say fuck you for using plastic RFID cards even for single journey tickets that will get promptly thrown in the trash when they expire in 90 minutes instead of a simple piece of paper that can biodegrade. They even waste more resources to wrap the plastic in paper to give the illusion of the ticket being made of paper when it absolutely is not. Yeah make single use microcomputers and antennas why don’t you? Can’t have transit being too eco friendly after all. They’re not futuristic, future generations will curse us for being so barbarically wasteful of precious resources while digging those RFID tickets out of landfills to extract silicon and metal from. Just print QR codes on normal paper tickets for god sake since the RFID cards probably only store a single unique ID that needs to be looked up against a database anyway, or better yet, just have coin slots on the fare gates and skip giving you a ticket altogether. Oh wait, but then they wouldn’t able to know which station you get off at and refuse to let you out until you’ve paid the upcharge for having the audacity to ride a fully automated train system even one station outside your home city.