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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2025

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  • 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.



  • 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)