Right, I recall news from years ago where a bunch of celebrities’ very private photos backed up to iCloud were leaked. They may or may not have known they uploaded those to iCloud, I dunno. But imagine what’s up there if you don’t realize you’re doing a backup. Not just photos, but like scanned documents with vulnerable information. And all that personal info in a centralized server is a big ol honeypot for a malicious actor.

It’s not hard to see why this is a vulnerability, is what I’m getting at.

I would question the efficiency claim. Uber and the like claimed incredible market dominance, driving local food delivery and taxi services out of business. They’re only now really being forced to find profitability.

I wonder if AI is going to be similar. The powerful models right now, as I understand it, have ludicrous power requirements. I don’t know their balance sheets, but in the current race to market share, I’m skeptical that most of these services are in the green.

What that ultimately says about the future I don’t really know. Like it could be we reach some point where the models get better, or more specialized, or something and profit arrive. Or maybe theres a point of diminishing returns where the profit just can’t be made, and once the hype falls off (and investors stop clamoring for AI) these companies will ask what they’re getting for the money spent.

(And of course I could just be straight up wrong about profits today not being there.)

It comes from the case against Henry Ford after he saw his company was making gobs of cash and decided to give some of that to his employees. Shareholders successfully sued him to stop this on the grounds that he has a fiduciary duty to shareholders.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

As with anything legal, there is nuance, but the basic assertion that there is fiduciary duty to shareholders is not wrong.

You really can. Right to work, + free speech is only applicable wrt the government.

The fact that it’s legal does not make it moral.

Not the person you responded to, but: left economically is not left socially.

Also, it’s cheap to speak total bullshit, but it takes time, effort, and energy, to dispel it. I can say the moon is made of cheese, you can’t disprove that. And you can go out and look up an article about the samples of moon rock we have and the composition, talk about the atmosphere required to give rise to dairy producing animals and thus cheese.

And I can just come up with some further bullshit that’ll take another 30 minutes to an hour to debunk.

If we gave equal weight to every argument, we’d spend our lives mired in fact-checking hell holes. Sometimes, you can just dismiss someone’s crap.

I can’t speak for the original commented, but I’m personally quite tired of the thin veneer that’s slapped into these statements. I would prefer a company just be honest and talk about the profit incentives. They want people using the free version to please pay for the expensive one.

For my experience, I still retain the general irritation at product quality going down regardless of how they word it. But now I’m also annoyed that MS isn’t being straightforward about it.

They were never giving it away. They included wordpad with your purchase of windows. They no longer do. I don’t think anyone is saying that windows is not “within their rights”, they’re saying that this degrades the product we already pay for. That is worth complaining about, even if our ultimate recourse primarily ends up being to find an OS that better serves our needs.

Honestly though I’m struggling to understand why you’d think that’s about Microsoft’s rights to begin with??

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Yup, it’s why O(N+10) and even O(2N) are effectively the same as O(N) on your CS homework. Speaking too generally, once you’re dithering over the efficiency of an algorithm processing a 100-item dataset you’ve probably gone too far in weeds. And optimizations can often lead to messy code for not a lot of return.

That’s mostly angled at new grads (or maybe just at me when I first started). You’ve probably got bigger problems to solve than shaving a few ms from the total runtime of your process.

The problem breaks down into a few broad sub problems, as I see it.

1. Confirming the reviewer or voter is who they say they are (to prevent one entity from making multiple reviews).
2. Confirming the reviewer or voter is a valid stakeholder. This is domain-specific, but can be such metrics as “citizen of country”, or “verified purchaser”.
3. Confirming the intent of the reviewer. This meaning people who were paid off (buyers who are offered a gift card for a positive review, which happens plenty on Amazon), or discounting review bombs when a game “goes woke”.

1 and 2 have solutions. Steam cares about whether you’re a verified purchaser, and the barrier to entry of “1 purchase of a game per vote” is certainly enough to make things harder to bot. Amazon might be able to do the same, but so much of the transaction happens outside their purview that a foolproof system would be hard. Not that it’s in their interest to do so, though.

For places like Reddit or Lemmy, verifying one human per up vote is going to be impossible. New accounts are cheap and easy as a core function of the product. bot detection is only going to get harder, too.

If you used some centralized certificate system (like SSL certs), you could maybe get as granular as one vote per machine, but not without massive privacy invasions. The government does this for voting kinda, but we make a point to keep those private identifiers the government gives private.

Yeah, but some amount of the time is just easier to rely on the user agent. Why bother with the fancy logic when user agent spoofing, adblocking Firefox users is a % of a % of a %?

Oh!! Awesome, thanks!

I’ve only watched recently without trying to build much myself for ML. I have the hardware but idk if I want to leave my bulky gaming machine on regularly just to run ML operations. Having a more dedicated piece of hardware to handle it makes the idea much more attractive to me.

Now I just have to learn everything. And then learn how to integrate a locally hosted TPU into the process.

It would actually be pretty cool to see TPUs you can just plug in. They come stock in a lot of Google products now, I think.

Mind that I’m not the person you originally responded to. I don’t think Apple installs a time bomb that bricks your device at a certain point.

But it’s disingenuous to say they aren’t intentionally reducing product life spans, and degrading the experience in the meantime. I don’t necessarily mean support either!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

You’re free to decide if you take their statements on this at face value. But it’s really not just Apple. It’s everyone. Cars today have a shorter lifespan than they used to. Fridges. Laptops. Competitor phones.

Like are you saying planned obsolescence isn’t a thing generally, isn’t a thing for Apple, or just that it isn’t that bad with them?

The scam part notwithstanding, Apple products are designed to stop working. Or, at least, degrade more quickly than they might otherwise. That’s just planned obsolescence though, and Apple certainly isn’t the only one.

I keep a lot of my TTRPG PDFs in my drive. I’m wary of Google generally, but I do have to admit it was pretty cool to see it pick out bits and bobs from my PDFs with not-very-much guidance on my part.

(edit: God I’m sorry about this big ass wall. I ranged and rambled. It’s too early to write this much lol. Tl;Dr 1: law enforcement. Police don’t need a warrant to buy your info. In the US, we have warrants for a reason. Constitution outlines restrictions on "unreasonable search and seizure. 2: Consent. Like, I should have the right to just say no. It’s my data, let me be part of the conversation. 3/4: Safety and equity. It’s still illegal to be gay in some parts of the world. An insurance company or an employer could check your race online if they wanted, whether or not you’ve made that available. )

The problem extends across a few metrics.

First, probably the most tangible. The police can and do use data purchased from civilian companies to bypass regulations. For example, you don’t need a warrant to check phone contacts if you can buy it. You might be saying you don’t do anything illegal to worry about. Have you ever been to a protest? Have your friends? If climate change bothers you, could you see yourself going to one?

Protests are frequently targeted by law enforcement. Even if you think that would only happen if the protest becomes a riot, you don’t control the crowd. If you’re there but not rioting, your phone location can be used as proof of participation. There is precedent, too. They used location data to arrest capitol rioters. IMO those were good arrests, but how many BLM protestors were arrested based on phone data?

Second, consent. Even if I change nothing else in your mind here, consider that we might simply value our personal data differently. I should have a right to be part of the conversation about me. Let me pay $20 to use a product without observation. Products should be up front about what is collected too (GDPR has helped lots with website tracking). Facebook is known to collect “shadow profiles”, where data is compiled on you even if you aren’t on the platform. I should be allowed to say no to that, for any reason, simply by virtue of it being my information.

Third and fourth go together some. Safety and equity. People are still killed for being gay. Legally. And the collection of data on people enables that. Just buy data off of Pornhub to identify who is browsing their gay section. And if someone is found in a country where it is illegal to be queer, all you need is a list of their contacts to find more. Maybe Apple refuses to unlock their phone for you, but that’s okay. Just buy their contacts off Meta.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_territory

But that’s the straightforward issue of equity. Consider someone who has gone to jail. They’ve done their time, they’ve reformed, and now they want to rejoin society. The judge even goes so far as to expunge their records. Well, a background checking company can buy that info still. And that’s just talking about criminal acts that should be reformed. Maybe you don’t care about that. What about crimes that just target BIPOC? In the US, weed is legalizing, slowly. People were still arrested for it, and that history is indelible, regardless of the official record. If even the US Justice System wants to wipe the slate, than the slate should be wiped.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_in_the_United_States_criminal_justice_system

Special mention to Google btw. Good and bad. They do a lot to tell you what and how they collect data, and how they anonymize it. Purportedly don’t sell your data, since they also own the ad network. Like you say, I’m not really worried about the ads, and a lot of their products really are good enough that I don’t mind making that trade. However, I do take umbrage with the idea that it’s fine still. A company does have analytics on their ad campaigns. John Oliver did a funny bit where they put an ad targeted towards Congress. He got a couple of hits too, with their location and had the power to fingerprint their browsers if he wanted. Once you click an ad, you’re in the care of whatever site put that ad out. That means they collect whatever they want on you. Additionally, theyll know what ad brought you in. So if you put an ad out targeting “pregnant people in Texas looking to make a trip”, you’ll have a list of people that Google thinks match.

This whole post misses a lot of nuance and context. It’s a social media post, ultimately. I’m not sure I have enough mental capacity right now to hunt down more links, and I’m about to start my work day. I don’t have any trouble with folks who don’t care – frankly I’m jealous. I’m annoyed that I can’t just use products like most people and not care. It’s just everywhere. Walking down the street I’m on someone’s TikTok, meaning Facebook, YT, Bytedance could get my location without me even interacting with them (shadow profiles from earlier). When I got a covid test recently, I had to download their stupid app to fill out a form. That app has the power to collect endless data points about my phone. Buying concert tickets means signing over my information to your favorite ticket vendor. It’s just endless and exhausting for me.

I wonder how easy it would be to make an extension and fake it’s popularity? Make make it intentionally broken or something, so users immediately uninstall it too.

Sounds like an easy $10k, assuming the scammers would actually pay.

Not to be contrarian, but b) could well be a full decade of work and numerous individual projects