Technology

I just try to describe it like email. "You've got your gmails and your outlooks and your yahoos and whatnot, you pick one you like, but they're all email and it won't stop you seeing emails from outlook guys if you're a gmail guy."

I think that on the first wave of users when we had 200k active users Lemmy was in a very different state in terms of usabilities. So much has improved and if we get another event like that I'm sure we will retain way more users.

The instance matters: some will ban you if you cite too many credible articles which bring up uncomfortable truths.

No matter what one's stance is on a political subject, there will be some uncomfortable truths. Unlike a Hollywood hero movie.

I find the funniest shit ever is how Snowden uncovered the biggest shit show and nothing happened. Probably the starting event for me losing all hope in this pathetic species I now call Homo Merda.

I already assumed that all project 2025 purges to date have been done with input from statistical modeling, in a way that removes far more "liberals" who might refuse orders, and retains as many MAGA/fascist bootlickers as possible.

It was well over a decade ago that a store figured out a teen was pregnant. The father was livid they were advertising pregnancy stuff to her. He ate his words.

Yep.

And if anyone doubts this, 15 years ago I had made a tool that created these types of profiles as a proof of concept.

I had scraped tons of subreddits, then you could pass in a user and based on both their subreddits and key words would categorize users across a few axes. That was just using naïve bayes, but worked pretty well.

The AI is just much much better at natural language processing to pull out more detailed info about patterns.

It's getting to the point where I may need to go back to cycling usernames every few years.

You should definitely do that anyways, you never know when some crazy is going to try and dox you. Changing usernames won’t really protect you from advertisers though, software will link the two identities together.

Meta got a fine of over a billion euros. Google got a bunch of smaller fines, but it's probably way above everyone else in terms of fines. Microsoft got half a billion. Even Apple got an 8 million euro fine, but that was more a tap in the wrist to make them think twice about some data collection.

And besides this, large companies are constantly in contact with the authorities and in smaller violations the general policy is to give a warning and let companies stop the illegal data processing voluntarily.

GDPR article 9 (1) says you can't play algorithmic guess with people's religion or political opinions unless you gave express permission to the service provider to do it (i.e. it's not covered in the general GDPR boilerplate)

GDPR prevents using underhanded tactics to assume consent for this type of use.

It’s easier to use a pseudonym on Lemmy.

100% it can, and worse yet, it can be scraped and analyzed like this by Meta, or Reddit, or your nearest fascist dictator.

But that's also pretty much the entire internet in any forum or social media platform, so although I don't like it, I figure that's more or less just part of using the internet.

To me it's much like the whole "There's no expectation of privacy in public."

I hope it doesn't take AI to figure out my attitudes when I regularly proclaim that there are no maga in my life more than required by various pre-existing obligation, Luigi Mangione will be remembered as a folk hero, Trump will one day be shown to be ALL through the Epstein files in all the worst ways (as will many Dems and they should all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law), and most Democratic leadership is 100% owned by the oligarchy too, as evidenced by things such as their support of Israeli genocide and how much more urgently they are fighting Mamdani than they are Trump in many cases.