Good old firebase. Notifications are not entirely device local on android, or something like that.

Especially from Gartner of all places. Maybe this will finally start tempering the hype in the executives.

Yes, you’re correct.

But that rollout doesn’t make headlines like all the ones from the US government telling people to use encrypted messaging like WhatsApp or Signal. That’s what got them to WhatsApp to begin with. FBI tells everyone very loudly to get off standard texting. They jump as a collective to where half of them already are.

As I’ve already alluded to: this has precisely zero to do with the technical aspects of security. Ease of use does matter (why pushing to Signal didn’t work at the time the FBI spooked everyone), but only a little bit, and is overshadowed by momentum of where people already are.

I might be able to get my family off WhatsApp with the recent article about it being banned from (I think it was) Congress’s phones.

But again, this isn’t a technical problem where you can just point at what’s obviously the better choice. There are complications of personal relationships, individual resistance to change, whether or not you’re willing to train your family members, etc.

My grandmother is in her late 80s and it is astonishing that she can even manage WhatsApp to pariticipate in the family group chat. I’m not upending that and causing her the added stress, work, isolation if it fractures the family groip chat, and signing myself up for all that extra work to try and drag people to new platform and hold their hand through the bumps… just so I can be comfortably principled, using the best option, and trying to prevent Meta from getting info about me for a few more years that they likely are getting through other means.

I’ll revisit as the elders age off.

I care about my privacy, but I’ve thought long and hard about my specific threat model and what is and isn’t important enough for me to make a big deal out of. For me, this is an acceptable sacrifice.

Doesn’t have to be that way for anyone else. Just has to work for me and my life. And it does.

Ultimately I’m just trying to give reasons why people are still on these platforms. I took the initial comment I responded to at face value. I’m not really looking to debate here, and my opinions don’t invalidate anyone else’s.

How is that fucking legal?

Give us this very sensitive information, we promise we won’t misuse it, and we’ll let you fiddle our AI as a treat.

Momentum of where friends and family are.

It’s nice to be able to say “well they’re not worth talking to then”, but at some point I need to be able to reach my parents so they can babysit my daughter. Or be able to know that family will be in town and expecting me to be available. Or be able to have any way of knowing what life events are happening to my loved ones without having to wait for it to be brought up in casual conversation months later as if I should already know.

My extended family and friends do a poor job communicating on a good day. If I try to add another hurdle, I’m not the one who wins that fight.

Don’t forget “styrofoam walls painted to look like tunnels”. Fucking looney tunes.

Most still are/can be. Enough that I find it hard to believe people are missing out without podcasts through these paid services.

I mean, that’s at least functional grammar.

“advertiser’s creative”? The fuck is that? You aren’t cool by dropping the noun out and trying to use an adejective in its place.

Why does this description sound entirely like someone trying to sell me something?

What? Corded phones exist, and most schools and offices have at least one in each room. Dumb phones exist. Pagers exist.

Smart phones are not the only singular solution for easy, quick contact.

Didn’t they just pass a site-wide decision on the use of LLMs in creating/editing otherwise “human made” text?

Why do they need to take the human element out? Why would anyone want them to?

God I hope this isn’t the beginning of the end for Wikipedia. They live and die on the efforts of volunteer editors (like Reddit relied on volunteer mods and third party tool devs). The fastest way to tank themselves is by driving off their volunteers with shit like this.

And it’s absurdly easier to lose the good will they have than to rebuild it.

Other studies (not all chess based or against this old chess AI) show similar lackluster results when using reasoning models.

Edit: When comparing reasoning models to existing algorithmic solutions.

No, more like “Your marketing team, sales team, the news media at large, and random hype men all insist your orange machine works amazing on any fruit if you know how to use it right. It didn’t work my strawberries when I gave it all the help I could, and was outperformed by my 40 year old strawberry machine. Please stop selling the idea it works on all fruit.”

This study is specifically a counter to the constant hype that these LLMs will revolutionize absolutely everything, and the constant word choices used in discussion of LLMs that imply they have reasoning capabilities.

Hey, now it’ll work better as a suppository!

Hey @[email protected], your blog post really seems to be making the rounds now!

Edit: not sure why the downvote. It was originally posted by mirrorwitch, of the awful.systems instance, on the tech takes community there. Direct link: https://awful.systems/post/4558700

It also got noticed by Hacker News, which is funny to me given that the original community it was posted to is incredibly anti-HN. Also that roughly half of the comments are people who were unable to follow how it was written (funny given HN’s overwhelming elitist slant). Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200773

If mirrorwitch doesn’t want the shoutout, just say so or send me a private message and I’ll take this comment down.

Yep, this discussion has been done to death decades ago when datacenters and other secure facilities started using iris scans.

Biometrics is the username, not the password.

It’s frustrating that so many reporters and news orgs can’t grasp this.

Yep, basic opsec (which I’m totally not following on this account). Mix up your slang and phrasing, fake personal details, and rotate accounts to avoid any singilar one building up too much info on it.

I’ve been running the same heavily customized Windows box for half a decade now. Like “tore critical system components I don’t need out from the install media” level of customized. A good chunk of the “modify windows for privacy” tools shit the bed because parts of what they want to flip switches on for better privacy simply aren’t there on my install.

No issues with updates, nothing bricked or fucked up even with me definitively using it not as intended.

The more I progress in my tech career (roughly a decade in now) the more blatant it becomes that the overwhelming majority of issues people have with computers (especially in the modern era) are self inflicted. This is common across all OSes and Distros.

Is one of these murderous religious people in the room with us right now?

Way to completely miss the point of the comic. Tearing down someone out of a vain desire to be “right” helps no one. Fight people who use any belief to justify being shitty to others. Go read some Vonnegut and learn to leave people who get goodness out of shit alone.

Edit: The comment originally was about religious people being murderous. My first edit was to add an additional thought. This dude’s edited now to change the core of his argument from “murder” to “opression”.

No, but the parrot isn’t hallucinating either.