SnotFlickerman

joined 2 years ago
[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

This was happening before AI, with less sophisticated tools, often called "Persona Management" that allowed one person to control numerous bots with pre-written scripts that could be called up depending on what was called for. The only difference the AI has made is the speed and scale at which the same can be done and be more convincingly not all culled from the same script.

https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/bots-flooded-the-fcc-with-comments-about-net-neutrality-1513307159

Here's an article about a flood of bot comments to an FCC open comment regarding Net Neutrality in 2017, five years before OpenAI would release ChatGPT. So it's definitely been going on before the AI tools as they now exist were available. It's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference, in other words it's the same thing just larger scale due to the speed of AI.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 105 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

company called CiviClick, which bills itself as “the first and best AI-powered grassroots advocacy platform.”

I have been saying this since 2016, when we were dealing with both Cambridge Analytica and Correct the Record flooding the internet with paid political speech masquerading as real people with real opinions who weren't being paid to spout nonsense.

Paid political speech online whether by a human or a bot, should legally be required to state that they are being paid to promote their statements. There should be hefty penalties, large fines for single instances (one person, one message) up to prison time for an organized group (something akin to RICO). The fines/prison time should be even more severe when AI generated messages are fraudulently being promoted as real humans, simply due to the industrial speed and scale AI generation allows.

Paid political advertising on television and radio has for a long time been required to state that it is paid. This should have been priority number one from the Democrats when Biden got into office and they held slim majorities in both houses,

Sure, there's nothing we can do about foreign bot farms, but that's not what this article is about. This is about a US company based in our nations capital whose goal is to spread disinformation abusively to impact public comment. This is a private company absolutely flooding an agency with an open public comment period for an agency proposition and killing the proposition through messages that are not from real people at all but from AI.

The fact that getting this under control at the very least within our own borders is not a priority for any politicians is a fucking travesty and makes our entire democratic apparatus an outright farce.

These definitely could be pretty solid headless Linux serverboxes for microservices.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 32 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Attitudes like this is why people reverse engineer systems and build emulators.

To an extent I understand why Miyazaki and Sony felt they shouldn't let outsiders mess with it lest it was an underbaked and bad remake, but at the same time, it's locking the game to a historical artifact, and one that many people (including myself) had hoped to one day play on PC without using an emulator.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Even if they cannot hoard that much themselves, anything they hoard will contribute to the death of the PC space and I don't think Sony is just going to let their consumer electronics division, which has been a huge part of their brand for decades, go quietly into that good night. They might not have as much money to spend on it, but they're not going to just stop making PS5s and other consumer electronics devices. That also means that if there's PC hardware shortages for the foreseeable future, that they're waiting for those shortages to strangle the PC gaming industry and revert a lot of those PC gaming converts back to console.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (5 children)

My guess is they're watching the PC parts supply issues due to AI and have decided they will use their institutional weight to also hoard parts to push consoles back to the forefront since it's harder to pirate on consoles and easier to resell the same game on new console generations.

Sony is and has been a big institutional player and I would not be at all surprised to see them moving on hoarding parts themselves: for AI, for consumer electronics, for game consoles. They've been practically waiting for a way to kill the PC industry and take the profits from it.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 70 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Aged like milk.

I vote for the "die trying" bit.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Part of a properly functioning LLM is absolutely it understanding implicit instructions. That's a huge aspect of data annotation work in helping LLMs become better tools, is grading them on either understanding or lack of understanding of implicit instructions. I would say more than half of the work I have done in that arena has focused on training them to more clearly understand implicit instructions.

So sure, if you explain it like the LLM is a five year old human, you'll get a better response, but the whole point is if we're dumping so much money, resources, destroying the environment, and consumer electronics market for these tools, you shouldn't have to explain it like it's five.

Seriously what is the point of trashing the planet for this shit if you have to talk to it like it's the most oblivious person alive and practically hold it's hand for it to understand implicit concepts?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 151 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

I mean, I've been saying this since LLMs were released.

We finally built a computer that is as unreliable and irrational as humans... which shouldn't be considered a good thing.

I'm under no illusion that LLMs are "thinking" in the same way that humans do, but god damn if they aren't almost exactly as erratic and irrational as the hairless apes whose thoughts they're trained on.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 50 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

![]*https://c.tenor.com/DU_OBlnc6m4AAAAC/tenor.gif)

Linux in general is the wise choice, no matter the distribution.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

That's because they want to be the ones doing the surveilling. There's loads of disgusting threads you can find online about them discussing ways to disable or hide that their devices are recording so they can surreptitiously record others while claiming they're not. Most often filming vulnerable women.

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 30 points 5 days ago (4 children)

"You'd have anxiety too if you knew that entire government organizations were dedicated to watching your every move while everyone told you that you were crazy."

 

We are getting reports of YouTube rolling out an experiment to some accounts where normal videos only have DRM formats available on the tv (TVHTML5) Innertube client.

This is not limited to yt-dlp. Tests have been run with the same account on various official YouTube TV clients (PS3, web browser, apple tv) and they are also only getting DRM formats for videos.

We live in hell-world.

 

If approved, FADPA would allow copyright holders to obtain court orders requiring large Internet service providers (ISPs) and DNS resolvers to block access to pirate sites. The bill would amend existing copyright law to focus specifically on ‘foreign websites’ that are ‘primarily designed’ for copyright infringement.

The inclusion of DNS resolvers is significant. Major tech companies such as Google and Cloudflare offer DNS services internationally, raising the possibility of blocking orders having an effect worldwide. DNS providers with less than $100 million in annual revenue are excluded.

While site blocking is claimed to exist in more than 60 countries, DNS resolvers are typically not included in site blocking laws and regulations. These services have been targeted with blocking requests before but it’s certainly not standard.

It's aimed at DNS resolvers, so folks better start busting out them Pi-Holes and setting up unbound.

 

OK, maybe you wouldn't pay three grand for a Project DIGITS PC. But what about a $1,000 Blackwell PC from Acer, Asus, or Lenovo?


Besides, why not use native Linux as the primary operating system on this new chip family? Linux, after all, already runs on the Grace Blackwell Superchip. Windows doesn't. It's that simple.

Nowadays, Linux runs well with Nvidia chips. Recent benchmarks show that open-source Linux graphic drivers work with Nvidia GPUs as well as its proprietary drivers.

Even Linus Torvalds thinks Nvidia has gotten its open-source and Linux act together. In August 2023, Torvalds said, "Nvidia got much more involved in the kernel. Nvidia went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of companies who are doing really good work."

 

OK, maybe you wouldn't pay three grand for a Project DIGITS PC. But what about a $1,000 Blackwell PC from Acer, Asus, or Lenovo?


Besides, why not use native Linux as the primary operating system on this new chip family? Linux, after all, already runs on the Grace Blackwell Superchip. Windows doesn't. It's that simple.

Nowadays, Linux runs well with Nvidia chips. Recent benchmarks show that open-source Linux graphic drivers work with Nvidia GPUs as well as its proprietary drivers.

Even Linus Torvalds thinks Nvidia has gotten its open-source and Linux act together. In August 2023, Torvalds said, "Nvidia got much more involved in the kernel. Nvidia went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of companies who are doing really good work."

 

At CES 2025, a company called Sybran Innovation showed off the Code27 Character Livehouse. It's an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever.

 

Copied from Reddit's /r/cscareerquestions:

The US Department of Labor is proposing a rule change that would add STEM occupations to their list of Schedule A occupations. Schedule A occupations are pre-certified and thus employers do NOT have to prove that they first sought American workers for a green card job. This comes on the heels of massive layoffs from the very people pushing this rule change.

From Tech Target:

The proposed exemption could be applied to a broad range of tech occupations including, notably, software engineering -- which represents about 1.8 million U.S. positions, according to U.S. labor statistics data -- and would allow companies to bypass some labor market tests if there's a demonstrated shortage of U.S. workers in an occupation.

Currently the comments include heavy support from libertarian think tank, Cato, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association

The San Francisco Tech scene has been riddled with CEOs whining over labor shortages for the past few months on Twitter/X amidst a sea of layoffs from Amazon, Meta, Google, Tesla, and much more. Now, we know that it's an attempt at influencing the narrative for these rule changes.

If you are having a hard time finding a job, now, this rule change will only make things worse.

From the US Census Bureau:

Does majoring in STEM Lead to a STEM job after graduation?

The vast majority (62%) of college-educated workers who majored in a STEM field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling. In addition, 10% of STEM college graduates worked in STEM-related occupations such as health care.

The path to STEM jobs for non-STEM majors was narrow. Only a few STEM-related majors (7%) and non-STEM majors (6%) ultimately ended up in STEM occupations.

If you or someone you know has experienced difficulty finding an engineering job post graduation amidst this so called shortage, then please submit your story in the remaining few days that the Public comment period is still open (ends May 13th.)

Public comment can be made, here:

https://www.regulations.gov/document/ETA-2023-0006-0001/comment

Please share this with anyone else you feel has will be affected by this rule change.

549
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/technology@lemmy.world
 

Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.

This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation

view more: next ›