It’s not super clear from the article but it sounds like they’re saying the “increase” in military activity is just a return to previous levels after a lull? Bit sensationalist if that’s the case.

I think this comment is based on an extremely optimistic – bordering on fantastical – outlook.

The complexity of dealing with such large amounts of information will keep increasing forever as the amount of information also grows

The capacity and capability to handle the data will grow too.

AI struggles with conflicting information and mistakes, which happen a lot especially when humans are involved, so eventually you will have lots of “garbage in garbage out” issues causing problems

This is what data analysis is though. Extracting patterns from noisy data. Ignoring outliers. I don’t think anybody is suggesting they’ll just dump a CSV of your web history into ChatGPT and ask it if you’re probably going to a protest this weekend (although does it sound so far fetched that that might actually work?), it’ll be used in combination with existing and constantly improving data mining techniques.

The data one might be able to track will continuously be challenged or removed on legal/compliance bases over time, reducing its availability

Are you implying data protection laws will not only not be inexorably eroded year upon year by increasingly surveillance-hungry governments, but will actually get a significantly better than their current milquetoast state? I’ve gotta say, that’s seeming increasingly unlikely to me; right now we’re seeing mandatory identity verification being legislated on more and more things by more and more governments.

Yes the NSA might want our chatbot logs, but after enough people realize they might be/are getting them, people will stop feeding it as much, or introduce noise on purpose

This has to be a sarcastic reference to Snowden, right? The thing where the entire world found out about the how NSA absolutely is – not “might be” – monitoring your internet and conversation logs, and basically nobody did a fucking thing to change? That was 12 years ago.

And the sheer volume of information relative to the computing power necessary to process everything will also become a problem if they keep trying to process every single thing.

Good thing they’re not doing anything crazy to get more computing power, like buying up practically the entire global supply of RAM or building data centres at an exponentially increasing rate.

What? They’re just computer programs. Almost all computers have high quality entropy sources that can generate truly random numbers. LLMs’ whole thing is basically turning sequences of random numbers into sequences of less random stuff that makes sense. They have a built-in dial for nondeterminism, and it’s almost never at zero.

I feel like I’m missing your meaning because the literal interpretation is nonsense.

Is it really not as easy for them as saying “hey btw don’t use this distro if you’re in California” and fully expecting nobody to comply? I’m not sure if Ubuntu is based in Cali in which case I can see it being more difficult.

Also this “age bracket” thing seems to have an obvious flaw in that any application that’s running semi-regularly can just poll the API every day and find out the user’s DOB by checking when they roll into the next bracket. It’s actually leaking more data about children than about adults in that case. Brilliant.

Thanks, honestly I had not actually read the bill before coming here to shitpost, and it seems like yeah it’s more well-intentioned than people are giving it credit for.

I still have serious reservations about the broadness, vagueness, and premise that mandatory age signals are a good idea at all – it’s a lateral move at best; weakly attempting to kerb the most overtly predatory parts of the whole “age verification” movement, without opposing the idea itself.

But you’re right, it’s not the blatant data-vacuuming law that I think some people imagine it to be.

My first answer is “WTF is RTK?”; my answer after consulting Wikipedia is “no, they’re separate things”.

RTK doesn’t sound like it broadcasts any data out but I barely understood what I just read. The Wikipedia coverage on this whole topic seems rather poor quality, I don’t think it’s just because I’m dumb.

I don’t but I roleplayed for the bit.

If it weren’t completely, stupidly unenforceable, I might still worry about this idea being exported to the rest of the world though.

What I want to know is: in my own haphazard note-to-self text file cribbed from ArchWiki, is it before or after the disk partitioning step that I’m supposed to add an instruction to “email anthraxx my date of birth”?

Or better yet: at what point in the development of my ad hoc tasking system for an ESP32 do I need to stop and go “shit, guess I’d better add a keypad so 12 year olds can self-report their age and safely be prevented from using the ‘romance’ setting on this lightbulb”?

It’s not as clear-cut as most people here are saying.

In short, GPS itself is just listening to satellites, and nothing is leaked that way, but most modern phones use “Assisted GPS” of some sort. The most common (I believe) AGPS is SUPL, which seems to be used by most phones. This involves sending your approximate location to an Internet server, which returns satellite data based on that approximate location.

To nobody’s surprise, in Android this is a Google server. I’m pretty sure most Android distros don’t give you any control over when it’s used, or which servers it uses. Anecdotally, my phone without Google Play services has a horrible time obtaining a GPS fix, so I suspect without GPlay it’s only using raw GPS, but I’ve not bothered to actually dig into it.

As I understand it, SUPL means even if you’re in aeroplane mode, if you have an Internet connection over WiFi you might still be leaking (approximate) location data when using GPS.

I learned about this from this excellent series of blog posts, which is a very thorough comparison of various Android ROMs’ privacy. It has a background section (search for “Assisted GPS”) in each of the ROM-specific posts which explains it better than I can.

It’s the wall on the right – in the wide version (from felesteen.news) it’s all the same blue colour, and a corner, whereas in the Reddit version it’s a white concrete pillar with no corner.

At the very least, someone’s done some infilling on one of them. My most charitable guess was that someone at the news site decided to “punch up” the image for an article header, but the third version and its timing make me think Occam’s razor is the way to go here.

Your version was posted within 3 minutes of this post someone linked in the comments of the Reddit version. So yeah, all credibility lost as far as I’m concerned.

What I don’t get is why, if this is some sort of coordinated campaign, you wouldn’t just generate entirely new images, rather than AI-daydream variants of the exact same one, which makes it obvious they’re manipulated.

Nice find, kind of damning. That version has a totally different wall on the right side to the version posted here, it also seems to be from a slightly different angle. This screams AI manipulation – if not outright fabrication – of at least one of those images. Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re both fake, but a pretty big red flag.

I was gonna say it on the last thread but, before we start appropriating this image as a political symbol as you’ve done here, should someone… maybe… source it slightly better than “Reddit”? There’s plenty of evidence that the school was blown up, but this specific image – conveniently well-framed and poignant – cropped up very quickly on a few random social media accounts, with no photographer attributed, and as far as I know hasn’t actually been verified at all.

This definition of social media is new to me as well, thanks for sharing it. This sort of clarifies a term I really dislike, and which you’ve used: “the algorithm”. It’s always seemed a little murky to me which algorithms it refers to. It’s like saying “don’t eat food with chemicals in it”.

Lemmy does have “an algorithm”, it’s just a relatively simple one based on communities one is subscribed to plus some vote/comment data for the various sort orderings.

Lemmy also absolutely implements a social graph – the data about who has interacted with whom is all stored by the system. It’s not explicitly stored as a graph structure, but then we’re arguing database schemas.

As I understand it, however, you’re saying “social media” arises when the “social graph” data structure is used as an input to “the algorithm”. That seems like a pretty robust definition to me.

One bit of pedantry: user blocks on Lemmy are, by a general definition, a form of social graph, and they do affect what content people see. So Lemmy could technically qualify as social media by the definition I’ve written here. I’m not sure what a more precise definition could be that avoids this technicality.

This was an interesting read, but it’s only discussing blue light filters as they affect melatonin and thus sleep cycle. It doesn’t say anything about other reasons to use them, which for me are:

• Blue LED light is linked to long term macular degeneration, it may also have negative effects on the retina in the shorter term.^[1] It’s not completely clear to me whether these effects would also be basically unhindered by a blue light filter, as the article describes; it gives me no reason to think they would but I’m not a neuroscientist.
• When I’m already using a dark theme with my screen at minimal brightness (as suggested by the article), using a filter lowers the total luminance even further (as suggested by the article).
• It feels less straining on my eyes; maybe that’s purely psychological but hey I’ll take it.
• It’s cozy :3

Given this the article title seems sliiiightly grandiose, but perhaps most people are really only in it for the melatonin thing.

It’s a screenshot of this report from a review of the UK’s security and terrorism legislation, published in December.

TechRadar article discussing the specific encryption issue here.

I was skeptical given the grammar issues others have pointed out but it seems legitimate.

Interesting, thanks for doing the research!

As an extreme non-expert, I would say “deliberate removal of a part of a model in order to study the structure of that model” is a somewhat different concept to “intrinsic and inexorable averaging of language by LLM tools as they currently exist”, but they may well involve similar mechanisms, and that may be what the OP is referencing, I don’t know enough of the technical side to say.

That paper looks pretty interesting in itself; other issues aside, LLMs are really fascinating in the way they build (statistical) representations of language.

This is a good name for one of the main reasons I’ve never really felt a desire to have an LLM rephrase/correct/review something I’ve already written. It’s the reason I’ve never used Grammarly, and turned off those infuriating “phrasing” suggestions in Microsoft Word that serve only to turn a perfectly legible sentence into the verbal equivalent of Corporate Memphis.

I’m not a writer, but lately I often deliberately edit myself less than usual, to stay as far as possible from the semantic “valley floor” along which LLM text tends to flow. It probably makes me sound a bit unhinged at times, but hey at least it’s slightly interesting to read.

I do wish the article made it clear if this is an existing term (or even phenomenon) among academics, something the author is coining as of this article, or somewhere in between.

GPT-4o mini, “Rephrase the below text in a neutral tone”:

This name is appropriate for one key reason: I have not felt the need to use an LLM for rephrasing, correcting, or reviewing my writing. This is also why I have not utilized Grammarly and have disabled the “phrasing” suggestions in Microsoft Word, which often transform a clear sentence into something overly corporate or generic.

Although I wouldn’t categorize myself as a writer, I have been intentionally editing myself less than usual lately to avoid the typical style associated with LLM-generated text. This approach might come across as unconventional at times, but it can also make for more engaging reading.

I also wish the article clarified whether this term is already established in academic circles, if the author is introducing it for the first time, or if it falls somewhere in between.

“avoid the typical style associated with LLM-generated text” – slop!

Ngl I really want to know what the tick icon actually does now.