deweydecibel

Or the fact that once it’s off of your hard drive and sitting comfortably on their cloud (their hard drive), they can scan it and harvest it for data.

I’ve seen people defend using AI this way by comparing it to using a calculator in a math class, i.e. if the technology knows it, I don’t need to.

And I feel like, for the kind of people whose grasp of technology, knowledge, and education are so juvenile that they would believe such a thing, AI isn’t making them dumber. They were already dumb. What the AI does is make code they don’t understand more accessible, which is to say, it’s just enabling dumb people to be more dangerous while instilling them with an unearned confidence that only compounds the danger.

I know some artists don’t mind it, but I just can’t hear the word “creatives” as anything other than silicon valley speak for the source of the content they sell. It feels dehumanizing.

Particularly in this case, it’s Adobe, so you can just call them artists, designers, photographers, etc.

Or, ya know, just users.

I think they’re talking about the designs, not the whole decade.

You also shouldn’t keep using software with known vulnerabilities. You can find a maintained fork of Chromium with continued Manifest V2 support or choose another browser like Firefox.

It’s disgusting how this exact idea is used to push users away from things they want, and no matter what they claim, you can’t convince me this isn’t part of how they design certain updates. When the customer has no choice but to update, the company has no reason to make the update appealing. They can actively make it all worse and worse and worse, while continuing to scare users into accepting it.

I’m tired of companies hiding behind “security” to mask anti-consumer shit, and I’m tired of the security community helping them shovel that shit while acting like the consumer is a fool for not wanting to eat it.

I get it’s a joke, but I hear it so much, it makes me question what some of y’all are doing to your cats that this is the go-to joke.

I’ve owned a lot of cats, as have my friends and family. They’re all chill, and most open to affection. It’s very rare to find one of these “Satan” cats. I legitimately can’t keep my cats off me. I almost wish they hated me sometimes because their constant badgering for pets can get a little annoying.

For the record, Aaron Swartz never actually went to trial, nor was he “sentenced” to anything.

Federal prosecutors came after him with overzealous charges in an effort to make him accept a plea deal (they do that a lot), which he rejected. It would have gone to court where the feds would have had to justify the charges they were bringing.

But that never happened because he killed himself.

We don’t actually know how this all would have played out.

He didn’t get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them, and his download requests were getting blocked.

And to be clear, he wasn’t downloading from the Internet as one might download a car, he went into a restricted networking closet and connected directly to the switch, leaving a computer sitting there sending access requests. He had to keep going back to it to check on the progress, which is when they caught him.

And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.

Yeah, I agree with the sentiment of the post, but this is just wildly misleading. He was not sentenced to anything, he committed suicide before the trial.

He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected, in an effort to make the feds justify the ludicrous charges they were pressing. Had it gone to trial, he certainly wouldn’t have been found not guilty, but it’s unlikely many of those charges would have stuck. It’s extremely unlikely he would actually have served 35 years.

Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.

He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.

We don’t need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.

I know it’s not the point, but I love the completely arbitrary bit where they’re walking down a road together, and has absolutely no bearing on anything the happens.

It is shocking because they did it after the investigation had started, which is monumentally stupid.

You can destroy any records you want at any time, unless there’s an investigation underway or you have good reason to believe one will be starting. At that point, you’re destroying evidence.

That would go to shit immediately. The sheer level of moderation that would be required to prevent that from being abused and corrupted would be insane, and then that kind of moderation would in turn invalidate the whole project because the moderation itself would have its own biases.

But it especially wouldn’t work in a federated space. Are you suggesting that people can just open their own instance of that? If there are multiple different instances for this kind of thing, that’s even more abusable.

Part of the reason Wikipedia works is it is centralized, relatively neutral, and you need sources on facts. It’s run by people that adhere to a strict standard, and everyone that contributes is required to adhere to that exact same standard.

What would be the scholarly criteria for the sort of thing that you’re talking about? What is the standard? And how do you enforce that standard in a federated space?

Because if it’s anything like how federation works around Lemmy, there can be no standard. Instances are going to do whatever they like based on the biases of each admin, which undermines the entire concept.

The original “article” isn’t an article, it’s just an announcement.

https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/

As for this article, it’s a blog post attached to a book store, expanding on Doctorow and their book. There’s a lot more context being added in this blog post than in that announcement. There’s ads but they’re just ads for the books available in this store. I.e. relevant to people who are visiting a book store’s website.

Not saying shitty sites don’t lazily re-write articles all the time to harvest views, but this isn’t a good example of that.

Reddit’s value as a social media platform drops as it’s value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that’s was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.

Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.

In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.

That’s a strange read on Reddit. I’ve heard people say this before, and it’s baffling.

Reddit is, and always has been, a link aggregator first and foremost. Of course it’s reposts and screenshots of others sites. That’s kind of the point. To bring you Twitter so you don’t have to actually be on twitter.

Meta realized the same thing we all realized when we came here: userbase entrenchment is significantly more difficult to overcome nowadays than it was back in the 2000s when Facebook managed to pull everyone over from Myspace.

Legitimately, it seems like the average user nowadays is so hellbent against even a modicum of inconvenience or a slightly less populated environment that they will accept literally anything. The big tech and social media platforms couldn’t shake off users if they tried anymore. They can do every every shitty, anti-user, anti-consumer thing under the sun and users will bitch about it, but never, ever try an alternative.

And that’s why these companies and their devs don’t listen to feedback anymore. Why bother?

I’m just curious what you thought might have happened to Snapchat? What app took its place in your estimation?

Call centers tell you to empathize but that’s not something you can teach. You can either do it or you can’t. So they give those terrible scripts, and then some of them require you to speak the scripted lines, even when you know all it does is piss the caller off.

No hears that scripted pablum at the start of call and thinks it’s genuine. No one. “I’m sorry to hear your having issues sir, but I’ll be happy to assist you.” genuinely comes off condescending at this point. They know you know it’s scripted, they know you know the representative has to say it, but they make them do it anyway.

Here’s what I found doing ISP call center work, and it worked virtually every single time: imply through tone and pointed comments you’re as frustrated as the called with how shitty the service and the hardware is. They’re never prepared for it, it always catches their anger off guard.

Don’t outright say “Yeah, Cox is absolute dog shit, and that POS gateway we make you pay for isn’t worth the cost of the the technician we’re sending out to ‘fix’ it.” You’ll get in trouble for that.

But if you’re careful and creative, you can make them appreciate you think that

Some of my favorite help desk moments are those times you get to a be teacher for someone that’s genuinely listening and happy to learn.

Fun fact: the psychiatric yard is where the psych ward doctors are allowed to go outside and play for an hour everyday, and where a psychologist is most likely to be shanked by a psychiatrist.