What’s become really disturbing in the past ten or so years is how they’ve applied ML to the targeting. Used to be it was just basic keywords and demographic stuff. Now the big platforms put your entire last decades’ worth of history (often both web browsing and social media) through a bunch of filters and spot that people who are like you are more likely to buy this product or join this website.

The reason why it’s fucked up is that “people who are like you” could mean things like anorexia, or addiction problems, or the kind of relationship trouble that makes you a soft target for incel indoctrination, or a bunch of other protected vulnerabilities that would get a company sued through the floor if they actually did it up front. But because it’s all just a bunch of untagged probability distributions in a black box, it’s impossible to “prove” that you deliberately and knowingly targeted a gambling addict to push a high interest credit card, or a recovering alcoholic with booze, even though that’s exactly what happened inside the bundle of weights.

If they’re in my apartment I’ve already got bigger problems.

Phrases like “renewing my subscription” in context of a fucking doorbell itself sounds so absurd to me.

Why? It’s logical to want your video footage held offsite so that burglars don’t just take the device you’re storing the footage of them on. Which means paying someone to store it for you. Which means a subscription. Even if you’re running AgentDVR on an offsite server that you control, you’re still paying money to the hosting company.

A raspberry (or the likes) with some run-of-the-mill ip-cam, some wifi-doorbell and AgentDVR would do the same for even less moneyz. And just for you, not the whole world. Wouldn’t take more than some hours of setup.

Wow. Do you have any idea what you sound like there?

(also, it’s not even true on its own terms. A raspberry pi plus all the components equipment necessary to set up what you’re describing would be easily over $100, I paid $19 for my Chinese internet camera)

eh, you might have a spare day to source a completely uncompromised camera and find someone in a trusted neutral country who runs an unproblematic hosting service and configure a system to do offsite storage in a secure way, but I’ve got other stuff going on. If you can source me a reasonable alternative I’m happy to use it when it comes time to renew my subscription.

I bought a cheap Chinese security camera for a fraction of the cost of a Ring and signed up for their cloud storage system. I’m more comfortable with the Chinese government being able to access footage of my backyard, than the current US administration.

So far the combined might of the Russian, Chinese, American and North Korean hacking teams have been unable to crack the post-it note on my desk.

I haven’t seen inside their system but the chances of it being an LLM are close to zero, least of all because LLMs are notoriously unreliable at calculating numbers. It’s far more likely that they’re saying “AI” because shareholders, and it’s actually something closer to traditional ML.

Yeah when I started travelling on a generous business expense account I found that it was increasingly the case that I didn’t even need to charge things to it. Things just start becoming fucking free when you’ve got money.

I’ve recently been looking at how Facebook’s advertising algorithm works, and it is a piece of pure fucking “the AI did it not us” evil. It can seek out all types of vulnerable people and target them on stuff that if a human salesperson did it you’d call them a sociopath.

Anorexic? Body confidence issues? Financial problems? Signs of susceptibility to fascist messaging? Here’s some paid messages from people who want your dollar. Seriously that whole place needs shutting down, it’s the worst thing to happen to humanity in recent history.

I’m not so sure, the current admin was elected by a populace who knew what they’d be getting. Support for Luigi on the other hand was pretty universal.

Can anyone name a single other news story where the press’ take was so completely at odds with the general population?

A lot of people in this thread are falling for the classic weasel headline reporting trick of using the word “after” to imply a connection, when there’s zero evidence in the article body to suggest it means anything other than two different events happened a day apart.

The best thing about all these organisations moving away from Microsoft is it incentivizes further development and QA. Or at least I hope all these governments switching to OSS are also funding people to keep a close eye on all the PRs coming in from state-sponsored hackers…

Do you work for Microsoft or something? This reads exactly like their sales FUD playbook

Not entirely sure what you mean; Linux’s user management, access control, security etc has always been ahead of Windows’ for its whole existence.

We’re in the process of moving to Linux in our company, entirely because of how aggressively awful Windows 11 is. We’d have been perfectly happy staying on Windows 10 forever, but last week our head of development woke up to discover that Windows 10 had spontaneously chosen to “upgrade” itself during the night without him agreeing to it.

I’ve heard it said that the difference between Machine Learning and AI, is that if you can explain how the algorithm got its answer it’s ML, and if you can’t then it’s AI.

No. This is a specious argument that relies on an oversimplified description of humanity, and falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.

I don’t have many pictures of myself on my own phone. Most pictures of me are on the phones of the people who took them.

The distressing thing for me is knowing that a lot of my friends (and exes) are exactly the sort of people that’ll just absent-mindedly click OK without reading it and share every single photo they’ve ever taken of me; photos which Facebook’s facial recognition will easily tag.