abucci

anthony.buc.ci

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Recent twts from abucci
In-reply-to » Silicon Valleyā€™s top AI models are terrible at rebus wordplay puzzles Rebus puzzles provide wordplay challenges involving both images and text, and they can confound Silicon Valleyā€™s most powerful AI models āŒ˜ Read more

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net Silicon Valleyā€™s top AI models are terrible at almost everything. They only seem otherwise because people are easily fooled into believing they have capabilities they donā€™t have.

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In-reply-to » World's richest 1% emit as much carbon as bottom two-thirds: report The richest one percent of the global population are responsible for the same amount of carbon emissions as the world's poorest two-thirds, or five billion people, according to an analysis published Sunday by the nonprofit Oxfam International. āŒ˜ Read more

@Phys_org@feeds.twtxt.net Weā€™re going to be killed by these peopleā€™s excesses, almost literally. This ratio is indefensible.

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In-reply-to » DeepMind AI can beat the best weather forecasts - but there is a catch By using artificial intelligence to spot patterns in weather data, Google DeepMind says it can beat existing weather forecasts up to 99.7 per cent of the time, but data issues mean the approach is limited for now āŒ˜ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I feel like my kid is a better weather predictor than most weather sites. He freaks out whenever the pressure drops and we know a storm is coming šŸ˜†

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In-reply-to » DeepMind AI can beat the best weather forecasts - but there is a catch By using artificial intelligence to spot patterns in weather data, Google DeepMind says it can beat existing weather forecasts up to 99.7 per cent of the time, but data issues mean the approach is limited for now āŒ˜ Read more

@xuu@txt.sour.is Right now theyā€™re laying the groundwork for uncritical belief in the power of #AI, so the next step will be accepting the magical incantations as if they were real.

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In-reply-to » How AI avatars of the deceased could transform the way we grieve Companies are now offering chatbots that appear to come from beyond the veil. But psychologists say this "grief tech" may interfere with the patterns of brain activity through which we adapt to loss āŒ˜ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I donā€™t know but I donā€™t want it!

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In-reply-to » DeepMind AI can beat the best weather forecasts - but there is a catch By using artificial intelligence to spot patterns in weather data, Google DeepMind says it can beat existing weather forecasts up to 99.7 per cent of the time, but data issues mean the approach is limited for now āŒ˜ Read more

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net no it canā€™t. Your blurb is literally ā€œif we had data we canā€™t have, we could predict weather betterā€. DeepMind is irrelevant in that statementā€“anyone could.

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More data contradicting the existence of ā€œecho chambersā€. As Iā€™ve argued many times before, the concept of an echo chamber or information bubble is not real. The podcast below is an interview of an author of a study where they actually intervened and changed the information diet of 20,000 people (with consent!), then surveyed them after three months. They observed essentially no changes to the study subjectsā€™ beliefs and attitudes. They also observed that the typical person, while they tend to gravitate towards people with similar political leanings, only get about 50% of their content from such like-minded people. They get the rest from neutral sources and maybe 20% from non-like-minded people.

Varied information diet + No change in attitudes when information diet is forced to be different = no echo chamber.

Listen to the podcast episode here

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In-reply-to » How is everyone finding GitHub CoPilot? šŸ¤” Good / Bad ? šŸ¤”

@prologic@twtxt.net

  1. Itā€™s criminal: Copilot was only possible because of massive theft of other peoplesā€™ work (no compensation or even acknowledgement to any of the developers whose code was used to create Copilot)
  2. Itā€™s positioned to put software developers out of work or so fully de-skill them that they no longer know how to code anything but prompts (after which come corporate-justified salary and benefits decreases)

Donā€™t use it. No one should ever use it. Youā€™re destroying your own future as a software developer by leaning on and supporting these things.

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How Google Authenticator made one companyā€™s network breach much, much worse | Ars Technica

šŸ¤¦ā€ā™‚

WHY are these big companies treated as though they are the be all and end all of infosec? These are rookie mistakes Googleā€™s making, at scale.

Unfortunately Google employs dark patterns to convince you to sync your MFA codes to the cloud, and our employee had indeed activated this ā€œfeatureā€. If you install Google Authenticator from the app store directly, and follow the suggested instructions, your MFA codes are by default saved to the cloud. If you want to disable it, there isnā€™t a clear way to ā€œdisable syncing to the cloudā€, instead there is just a ā€œunlink Google accountā€ option.

Like, never ever put your multi-factor tokens into a single cloud storage location! The whole point of this being ā€œmultiā€ factor is that there is a separate, independent physical factor involved in the authentication process. If the authenticator app on your phone puts the tokens in the cloud, then it reduces the security that comes from having a second factor. This is basic stuff.

Of course, never ever use Google Authenticator. All it does is generate TOTP and HOTP codes, which you can do with any OTP app, preferably an open source one thatā€™s been vetted.

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In-reply-to » I guess I'm read for bed. Instead of grep -rin foo I just typed rm -rf foo. What the heck, brain!? O_o Luckily, I just caught it before hitting Enter.

@mckinley@twtxt.net I do the ls thing regularly. I even do it after Iā€™ve already lsed the directory but have run some other command afterwards. I tend to think of it like the LOOK command in text adventures.

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In-reply-to » Experts warn 'green growth' in high income countries is not happening, call for 'post-growth' climate policies The emission reductions in the 11 high-income countries that have "decoupled" CO2 emissions from Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fall far short of the reductions that are necessary to limit global warming to 1.5Ā°C or even just to "well below 2Ā°C" and comply with international fairness principles, as required by the Paris Agreement, according to a paper published in The Lancet Planetary Health j ... āŒ˜ Read more

@Phys_org@feeds.twtxt.net Green growth was always horseshit and everyone knows it.

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In-reply-to » In setting up my own company and it's internal tools and services and supporting infrastructure, the ony thing I haven't figured out how to solve "really well" is Email, Calendar and Contacts šŸ˜¢ All the options that exist "suck". They suck either in terms of "operational complexity and overheads" or "a poor user experience".

@prologic@twtxt.net I use the gmail webapp for work, and I have to say that over the years itā€™s gotten less and less usable. There are so many little usability things that itā€™s bad at. For instance, if you select a message and hit the Delete key nothing happens. The message is not put in the trash like youā€™d expect. There are issues like that scattered all over the app. I suspect they spend most of their energy on the spyware side of gmail and dedicate less to making it a useful app for end users (which seems to be true of their search engine too).

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In-reply-to » @adi @prologic It's worth bearing in mind that

@adi@twtxt.net I think it is, and one benefit they have is that you can add third-party repositories to the F-Droid app as you discover them. So, for instance, if you know of a developer who pushes builds to an F-Droid compatible repository, you can add that to your F-Droid app and start tracking updates like you would for any other app in there. Canā€™t do that with Google Play!

F-Droid tends to focus on open source applications that can be built in a reproducible way, which limits the inventory (though of course tends to mean the apps are safer and donā€™t spy on you). There are non-free apps in there as well but they come with warnings so youā€™re informed about what you might be sacrificing by using them.

That said if you have a favorite app you get through Google Play, thereā€™s a decent chance it wonā€™t be in F-Droid. Many ā€œbig corporateā€ apps arenā€™t, and vendor-specific apps tend not to be either. But for most of the major functions you might want, like email clients, calendar apps, weather apps, etc etc, there are very good substitutes now in F-Droid. Youā€™re definitely making a trade-off though.

What I did was go through the apps I had installed on my last phone, found as many substitutes in F-Droid as I could, started using those instead to see how they worked, and bit by bit replaced as much as I could from Google Play with a comparable app from F-Droid. I still have a few apps (mostly vendor-specific things that donā€™t have substitutes) that come from Google Play but Iā€™m aiming to be rid of those before I need to replace this phone.

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In-reply-to » @adi oh yeah, no doubt. I just like to keep an eye on these things because I hate being blindsided.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, itā€™s true. Thing is, Linux as a desktop operating system sucked in 1996 yet I adopted it then anyway because I wanted nothing to do with MS anymore šŸ˜† I know itā€™s not for everyone but Iā€™m pretty tolerant of a less-than-stellar experience if it means I can be free of big-company garbage.

I havenā€™t tried a Linux-based smartphone OS in a long time so I donā€™t have any idea how bad/good it might be. I figure when I finally break down and get a new phone Iā€™ll experiment on my current phone.

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In-reply-to » @adi @prologic It's worth bearing in mind that

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net F-droid. Getting APKs from developers you trust and side-loading them. Some flavor of Linux. Some distro of the open source parts of Android.

There are lots of options. Bit by bit I divest from anything thatā€™s distributed from Google Play. With my latest phone I find and download APKs so that I could have the app without all the Google crap woven through it. By the time I need to replace this one Iā€™ll be fully free of Google Play. Most of my apps come from F-droid now. You can a perfectly functional phone/pocket computer unless youā€™re addicted to installing dozens of corporate apps.

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In-reply-to » @adi @prologic It's worth bearing in mind that

@prologic@twtxt.net Iā€™ve had a Teracube phone for about 3 years now. Theirs comes with a guarantee of 4 yearsā€“if something thatā€™s covered breaks, you send the phone to them and they fix it and send it back, or they send you a new one. I took advantage of that last year when the screen broke; their tech support even helped me figure out how to wipe the phone when the screen didnā€™t display anything. Pretty painless all around. Have to say Iā€™ve been very happy with it. It doesnā€™t have the top-end features that new big company phones have, but I donā€™t want those features so thatā€™s not an issue for me. I dunno if itā€™s available in Australia or if itā€™s just a US thing.

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In-reply-to » Oh btw all, Fairphone 5 is out https://www.fairphone.com/en/, I remember @jlj was interested in it! :D

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Itā€™s worth bearing in mind that

I used to have a lot of hope for them but these two ingredients mean that enshittification is virtually inevitable.

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