Sir Arthur V Quackington

Actually a disturbing amount of those have basically come true.

Every transaction you make on your card is tracked and is sold to advertisers by your credit card company.

Your phone’s GPS is not mandatory to send to the government, but once again your OS reports that back and that data is then grouped and sold and then de-anonymized through identity brokers.

Walking is not illegal, but letting your children walk places is. You, honest to God, will run into trouble with police if you allow your small child of, let’s say, four to eight years old walk two blocks down the road to the park that you live near. And notoriously, pedestrians are absolutely second class citizens in the US.

They are attempting to make ID mandatory to vote, which is one of the rights you have in the United States from birth. Many states also have stop and identify laws that require you to turn this over to officers even if they have no reason to suspect you and you’ve committed no crime. This is inconsistent across the U.S. but has been ticking up.

And as for the gays getting married, the exact argument they used to fear-monger about the gays is the same argument they are using to fear-monger against trans people very successfully right now, and there is rampant talk of undoing gay marriage as part of the next year’s objectives for the GOP. But this one is not really like the other ones. This is an obvious red herring that was made in bad faith even at the time, not really founded on any of the behavior or history of the group in question like the other statements you made.

The sad part about most of this is not that there is a slippery slope, so to speak, but that rights and privacy are eroded so omniscientally through contracts and terms of service today that you may not think you’re giving up very much when you say yes to check out using Stripe or to manage something in cashapp. But the truth is that these services are then de-anonymized by industries whose entire job is to collect these profiles together, tie them back to the identifiable user metrics and IDs, and build a profile on you that can be sold, and the buyer can be the US government, which is a legal loophole that they technically did not spy on you, but just bought a complete dossier from an information broker.

This isn’t tin foil hatchet. Cops do this regularly now. And it is insanely unethical and should be illegal. But as of this date, it is not. And famously, this also applies to the private camera systems that run the license plate reading across state lines, and officers have clearly used these systems for other tracking purposes, including stalking exs and attempting to track down people for actions that may be a crime in their state but are not a crime in the state in which they live.

“If”

They will. Once the age check at an OS level is implemented, the next level is to enforce that this check then use a verification service. And then to make this information available to sites upon access.

DNS over HTTPS could be using the Google DNS services.

FUTO Keyboard might be willing to share data. Its another open Open source keyboard. License purchase optional but encouraged.

The real ethical question here is, is there only one round of trolleys?

Because if this is a one and done question, then obviously I go for the one person.

But if it’s possible at any point somebody comes along and has to run the experiment again after me, then if I leave an infinitely expanding number on one side, all it would take is one sadistic person to wipe out a incalculable amount of life.

In which case, I take the track with two people. And again, it is a question of repetition whether or not doing it once means that it won’t happen next time or if this will continue with every cycle.

Its great until something overloads the USB bus or you just have a random driver reset cause it to reload, and you hear that disconnect/reconnect noise while something was writing to the array.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that we’re going to suddenly have a people’s revolution that topples Google. Google is so entrenched that it is near inescapable. The fact that there is no antitrust action means that they dominate entire segments of the market with no competition and no ability for anyone to rise to that level.

Even though I loathe Google, I am not fully capable of cutting them out of my life. They are at my job. They’re running tons of my friends and families, email, which by proxy they control the email delivery for an insane number of people. They own the most popular browser in the world, which they heavily, heavily promote. And on and on and on.

I think the contingent of people that are pretty sick of Google shit is actually pretty large, but being sick of their shit doesn’t mean that you can even remotely remove them from your life. I had family members who were separately given the nagging harassment that they must sign up for Google One or lose all their photos because they were approaching the maximum storage Because Google had silently activated backups on their phones in the background. And both of them separately signed up for Google One accounts when they could have shared a household account between the two of them. Google extort my less tech-savvy relatives. They double dipped on the extortion.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg and I’m hardly alone. But so many people are like my relatives that you just wind up trapped. If you don’t know how to do a full Google takeout and then process the Google takeout and filter that down into something you can use to migrate off of their platform, then you are really stuck.

So yeah, I’ll be loud and bitter and fucking mad at Google until something happens. Not that I expect anything will. Losing an anti-trust did nothing. At this point, I feel like they could create a search engine that does nothing but ai generate child pornography and somehow get away with it. “We’re only committing this crime to train our models.” Worked for Facebook.

I ditched Google Chrome years ago. I’ve been using Firefox and now Zen. And despite all the bitching, duck duck go is 99% as effective for most searches.

At most, you have to go through one or two more pages. Which nowadays is about the same you would have to do on Google. Only the entire time you were bombarded with advertising lies in AI slop. While also feeding their ad machine.

I cannot, in my lifetime, think of another company that had such overwhelming, positive public opinion and momentum and squandered at all so effectively and thoroughly to the extent that they are seen as almost a villain by huge chunks of the world globally.

I think the craziest thing is that someone in their company actually allowed them to get rid of their don’t be evil motto. Even if they were going to do all the evil shit they already are doing, just keeping the motto around was such an easy PR win in slam dunk to deflect concerns to and say, oh no, we’re always keeping in mind not to be evil.

I don’t know if that was the day that Google’s fortunes turned. But it definitely feels like it was a tipping point for the history of the company. And now, even though I’m posting this from an Android phone, they just announced plans to make Android shittier in one year by locking down the ability to install apps from online downloads even further. And here I am trying to think of how I can get a custom ROM installed on my phone again for the first time in over a decade. Not because I want new features or cutting edge technology. But because I just want that fucking company as far away from me as possible, and the “year of the Linux phone” is not here yet. So figuring out some kind of way to put Google Apps into a jail and lock them out of my life except when I need them is the new goal. (Probably GrapheneOS)

The fact that they lost their antitrust case and were declared a monopoly and then were hit with basically no punishment whatsoever other than sharing a tiny bit of the data with other super corporations, just makes me livid beyond belief.

Companies like this and the CEOs and executives that run them should not exist.

There will be physical labor to get done. For a few decades at least until someone figures out the roomba of automatons.

So there must be some labor force. It will just be a much larger unemployed and underemployed contingent. And with extreme overabundance, horrible downward pressure on wages.

And so what labor remains gets squeezed, and the rest battle for the job of garbage man, or babysitter.

Honestly real economies have many factors, but I’m really just saying that absent controls, the system by design approaches a hellscape at lightspeed.

With every dime they can scrape together.

Then with debt and labor.

Then with lifelong debt.

No hyperbole, by design the system is setup to bleed people dry for every penny, not to create thriving nations or economies with many wide participants. We have been hacking away at hard won safeguards for 4 decades now, and the consequences are coming.

If enough of the people with the means own a majority of the assets, have little to no regulation to stop them, eventually you will be getting paid in WalmartCoin and redeem it exclusively at WalmartTown where the goods are all priced so you can never afford enough, just barely enough to get by.

We did it 100 years ago, and had to trust bust and outlaw it. But I guess we’re in for a do over.

They just have all the money, and charge you to extract infinite interest on all the assets they now control.

VC is buying up as much water rights and housing as it can by the way.

Just an unrelated detail.

Set up a recurring donation. Lemmy and Mastodon are great and I want them to stick around.

Wait, didn’t they just pay an exorbitant amount of money to get rid of the old Mozilla logo and replace it with that new stupid pixelated one that looks like something from the 90s?

And they did this before moving the primary product to a different website that will never feature that logo?

Are the people running Mozilla just taking acid and throwing darts at their keyboard?

Jesus Christ. We need regulations on corporate LLM use NOW.

Ingesting all the artwork you ever created by obtaining it illegally and feeding it into my plagarism remix machine is theft of your work, because I did not pay for it.

Separately, keeping a copy of this work so I can do this repeatedly is also stealing your work.

The judge ruled the first was okay but the second was not because the first is “transformative”, which sadly means to me that the judge despite best efforts does not understand how a weighted matrix of tokens works and that while they may have some prevention steps in place now, early models showed the tech for what it was as it regurgitated text with only minor differences in word choice here and there.

Current models have layers on top to try and prevent this user input, but escaping those safeguards is common, and it’s also only masking the fact that the entire model is built off of the theft of other’s work.

There is nothing intelligent about “AI” as we call it. It parrots based on probability. If you remove the randomness value from the model, it parrots the same thing every time based on it’s weights, and if the weights were trained on Harry Potter, it will consistently give you giant chunks of harry potter verbatim when prompted.

Most of the LLM services attempt to avoid this by adding arbitrary randomness values to churn the soup. But this is also inherently part of the cause of hallucinations, as the model cannot preserve a single correct response as always the right way to respond to a certain query.

LLMs are insanely “dumb”, they’re just lightspeed parrots. The fact that Meta and these other giant tech companies claim it’s not theft because they sprinkle in some randomness is just obscuring the reality and the fact that their models are derivative of the work of organizations like the BBC and Wikipedia, while also dependent on the works of tens of thousands of authors to develop their corpus of language.

In short, there was a ethical way to train these models. But that would have been slower. And the court just basically gave them a pass on theft. Facebook would have been entirely in the clear had it not stored the books in a dataset, which in itself is insane.

I wish I knew when I was younger that stealing is wrong, unless you steal at scale. Then it’s just clever business.

Terrible judgement.

Turn the K value down on the model and it reproduces text near verbatim.

I’m not worried about me. I can manage. But I had to intervene and make it a Project for my immediate family. Which is always unfun, because who wants to expose all their personal data that way, especially photos.

Crazy that Google just screwed over GrapheneOS like this.

Great link, and I fully agree. If it’s possible anyways.

Yes, but that shouldn’t explicitly opt in, and they shouldn’t marry that product to Gmail and Google Drive if they are going to push it to enable by default.

Again, it’s really insidious. They push it so aggressively I had to disable it on my personal device twice, and I can’t just not use Google Photos app because it’s tied to the camera itself on pixel phones.