Before I even read the article, let me guess:

1. it keeps Google under control of everything, giving it power to kick out competitors on a whim
2. it claims it’s “to protect those disgusting pieces of shit called users from causing themselves harm”
3. it claims Google did nothing wrong

Now, reading the article…

• “Google has denied any wrongdoing throughout the closely watched litigation.” - that’s #3 right off the bat
• “Under the new proposal, Google would allow users to more easily download and install third-party app stores that meet new security and safety standards.” - who decides those standards? If Google itself, that’s #1
• Sameer Samat, Google’s president of Android Ecosystem, said, opens new tab on Tuesday the proposed changes maintained user safety - #2.

*Yawn*

Yeah, the terminology is currently a mess. Not just due to language changes, but also synchronic variation - different people using the same words for different meanings, at the same time. But for me, it’s a mix of motivations, methods, and morality:

• hacker strictu sensu - like a kid who dismantles toys to see how they work. Sometimes they break things, but they want knowledge the most. Usually grey hat, sometimes white hat, only rarely black hat
• cracker - like a kid who bashes toys with a hammer. Not interested on the knowledge itself, except when it allows them to bully other kids. Almost always black hat.

Raccoon
RACOON PLEASE
WHAT ARE YOU DOING
We’re mammals you silly. We don’t go through carcinisation, we evolve into anteaters.

It’s more than that: they’d need to have desires, aversions, goals. That is not automatically granted by intelligence; in our case it’s from our instincts as animals. So perhaps you’d need to actually evolve Darwin style the AGI systems you develop, and that would be way more massive than a single AGI, let alone the “put glue on pizza lol” systems we’re frying the planet for.

My guess:

Coverage roughly follows money, and that money comes the top of the hierarchy. However, the top is too far from the production to actually get that 1) automation is nothing new, and 2) AI won’t help as much with it as advertised.

The middle of the hierarchy is close enough to the production to know those two things, but it’ll parrot them because doing so enables the inefficiency they love so much, under the disguise of efficiency.

Then you got the bottom. It’s the closest to the production, but often suffers from a problem of “I don’t see the forest, I see the leaves”, plus since it has no decision power so it ends as a “meh who cares”. So it’ll parrot whatever it sees in the coverage.

As such, who’s actually going to get screwed here? The answer may surprise you.

All three. However not in the way people predict, “AI is going to steal our jobs”. It’s more like suckers at the top will lose big money on AI fluff, and to cut costs off they’ll fire a lot of people.

Setting aside “and how will it do that?” as outside the scope of the topic at hand, it’s a bit baffling to me how a nebulous concept prone to outright errors is an existential threat. (To be clear, I think the energy and water impacts are.)

Ditto.

Interestingly enough, not even making them actually intelligent would be enough to make them liable - because you can’t punish or reward them.

…gimme five bags of that, please.

No problem - miscommunication happens.

Yes, this should be illegal, but it’s already common practice. I’m just hoping that enough of this will eventually get people to stop buying these products, and hopefully we can start seeing some real legislation against it in some countries.

Problem is, people won’t stop buying them. Often “smart” products are sold comparatively cheaper, because the business expects additional profits through ads; and if Samsung is going this way (ads on your fridge), it’ll do it.

The “crackers” part of this confuses me. Samsung is a Korean company. The chairman’s name is Lee Jae-yong (이재용). Samsung NA’s CEO is Yoonie Joung. Maybe I’m misreading this?

By “crackers” I mean “black hat hackers”. The sort of people who’d love to drop some ransomware into your fridge and then say “if you don’t want me to brick your fridge, pay me a few bucks”.

(After some websearch, apparently Americans use it as a derogatory term. I wasn’t aware of that.)

However, Samsung is giving users the option to turn off ads.

For now, like the author herself mentions later on (“The bigger issue is that of trust. […] that’s today.”)

[Higby] “This pilot further explores how a connected appliance can deliver genuinely useful, contextual information. The refrigerator is already a daily hub, and we’re testing a responsible, user-controlled way to make that space more helpful.”

What Shane Higby is saying here boils down to “we’re trying to help the user”. But if he said so, in clear words, every bloody body would call it bullshit, because it’s common knowledge companies smear ads on your face for their own sake - not yours. But if you hide it behind fancy words, like “further explores” and “deliver” and the likes, it’s harder to call the bullshit.

I’m getting real tired of this shit.

[Higby] "…future promotions will depend on the feedback and insights gained from the program.”

Translation: “we’re just testing the waters now. Let’s see if the suckers swallow it or spit it.”

This is similar to the justification Panos Panay, Amazon’s […] He said it was looking to be “elegantly elevating the information that a customer needs.”

Emphasis mine. You can always trust Amazon in one thing: belittling the user.

The problem here isn’t just the ads themselves (although they are a problem); it’s that they are being added to the device after it’s in my home.

[Warning, IANAL.] Fight this shit. Seriously, fight it. On legal grounds. What they’re doing should be outright illegal in most countries; it’s equivalent to changing a contract unilaterally after both parties signed it.

Additionally, I’d strongly advise against buying any sort of “smart” device, unless you’re pretty sure the benefits of connecting your toaster to the internet outweighs all the risks. Including corporations and crackers taking control of it, harvesting your data, spamming you, building kill switches into it, etc.

I’m not the only one, either. I think the only people left are those who see Nintendo as video-game iPhones and autopilot into a purchase, and the diehards who have dedicated Amiibo rooms.

And even those might suffer some causalities, depending on how things go:

• the ones treating games like luxury goods are a bit too susceptible towards popular attitude. If Nintendo goes from “wow, you got a Nintendo!” to “you got a Nintendo? Cringe. Even Twilight is a better love story.”, they’ll be quick to ditch it too.
• diehard fans tolerate more abuse than reasonable fans, but that amount if not infinite. And Nintendo has been rather abusive when it comes to the Switch 2, including remote bricking it for spurious reasons.

This was fucking hilarious! I’ll never play the game but hey, entertaining let’s play.

Side thought/my own ramblings here: Has there ever been hosting where the information is scattered across the world rather than one localized spot? That seems like it might be helpful, but I honestly don’t know enough about site hosting

In a certain sense we are using a system like this, due to federation. I don’t think the exact same model would work well for Wikipedia, but it could try something similar.

“What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians, were just pushed out,” Sanger said. “There is a whole…army of administrators, hundreds of them, who are constantly blocking people…that they have ideological disagreements with.”

“Oh noes, people in Wokepedia aren’t willing to accept my opinion that gravity doesn’t work on Fridays!”

“Wikipedia is losing its objectivity @jimmy_wales,” Musk posted in 2022.

If you’re really, really invested on 2+2 being five, then 2+2=4 becomes “subjective”.

In my opinion Wikipedia being hosted in USA is a liability. Or even being hosted in a single place, whichever it is.

If a megacorporation could profit nine zillions and fifty dollars, and instead it’s profiting only nine zillions, its shareholders are already screeching at the CEO “YOU INCOMPETENT FOOL, YOU’RE ROBBING US FIFTY DOLLARS!”.

This was damn cute.

I’m checking the steam reviews, apparently it wasn’t the only factor; players are complaining even the so-called 1.0 version still feels like a beta.

Even then, for cloud storage; cryptography is an additional layer of protection, but all this data should be kept offline as much as reasonably possible.

It’s a feature when you use it, but a bug when your competitors do it.

If I were in charge of the defence department of a government, there’s no way I’d ever allow closed source software to even touch machines with sensitive data. Or even pre-compiled software. Because the problem is not what you see, like personnel; it’s what you don’t, like bribery and backdoors.

Let alone use “cloud” computing. Come on… it’s someone else’s computer.