Do pr people not know about the Barbara Streisand effect?! I was going to skip this decoder episode, except the title of the episode was “Intuit asked us to delete part of this episode”. That’s the only reason I listened, and then only just to the portion they wanted deleted. If it wasn’t for the pr genius at Intuit I wouldn’t have cared. Ffs guys.

My guess is that scale and influence have a lot to do with

To break this down a little, first of all “my guess”. You are guessing because the government which is literally enacting a speech restriction hasn’t explained its rational for banning one potential source of disinformation vs actual sources of disinformation. So you are left in the position of guessing. To put a finer point on it, you are in the position of assuming the government is acting with good intentions and doing the labor of searching for a justification that fits with that assumption. Reminds me of the Iraq war when so many conversations I had with people had their default argument be “the government wouldn’t do this if they didn’t have a good reason”. I don’t like to be cynical, and I don’t want to be a “both sides, all politicians are corrupt” kind of guy, but I think it’s pretty clear in this case there is every reason to be cynical. This was just an unfortunate confluence of anti Chinese hate and fear, anti young people hate, and big tech donations that resulted in the government banning a platform used by millions of Americans to disseminate speech. But because Dems helped do it, so many people feel the need to reflexively defend it, even forcing them to “guess” and make up rationales.

As far as influence and reach, obviously that’s not in the bill. Influence is straight out, RT is highly influential in right wing spaces. In terms of numbers of users, that just goes to the profit potential that our good ol American firms are missing out on.

If the US was concerned with propaganda or whatever, they could just regulate the content available on all platforms. They could require all platforms to have transparency around algorithms for recommending content. They could require oversight of how all social media companies operate, much like they do with financial firms or are trying to do with big AI platforms.

But they didn’t. Because they are not attacking a specific problem, they are attacking a specific company.

Also RT has been removed from most broadcasters and App Stores in the US.

Broadcasters voluntarily dropped it after 2016, I think it’s still available on some including dish. As far as app stores, that’s just false, I just checked the Play store and it’s right there ready to download and fill my head with propaganda.

The US owns and regulates the frequencies TV and radio are broadcast on. The Internet is not the same. If the threat of foreign propaganda is the purpose, why can I download the official RT (Russia Today, government run propaganda outlet) app in the Play Store? If the US is worried about a foreign government spreading propaganda, why are they targeting the popular social media app that could theoretically (but no evidence it’s been done yet) be used for propaganda, instead of the actual Russian propaganda app? Hell I can download the south china morning post right from the Play store, straight Chinese propaganda! There are also dozens of Chinese and other foreign adversary run social media platforms, and other apps that could “micro target political messaging campaigns” available. So why did the US Congress single out one single app for punishment?

Money. The problem isn’t propaganda. The problem is money. The problem is tik Tok is or is on the course to be more popular than our American social media platforms. The problem is American firms are being outcompeted in the marketplace, and the government is stepping in to protect the American data mining market. The problem is young people are trading their data for tik toks, instead of giving that data over to be sold to us advertising networks in exchange for YouTube shorts and Instagram stories. If the problem was propaganda, the US would go after propaganda. If the problem is just a Chinese company offers a better product than US companies, then there’s no reason to draft nuanced legislation that goes after all potential foreign influence vectors, you just ban the one app that is hurting the share price of your donors.

While I appreciate the focus and mission, kind of I guess, your really going to set up shop in a country literally using AI to identify air strike targets and handing over to the Ai the decision making over whether the anticipated civilian casualties are proportionate. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

And Isreal is pretty authorarian, given recent actions against their supreme court and banning journalists (Al jazera was outlawed, the associated press had cameras confiscated for sharing images with Al jazera, oh and the offices of both have been targeted in Gaza), you really think the right wing Israeli government isn’t going to coopt your “safe superai” for their own purposes?

Oh, then there is the whole genocide thing. Your claims about concerns for the safety of humanity ring a little more than hollow when you set up shop in a country actively committing genocide, or at the very least engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity as determined by like every NGO and international body that exists.

So Ilya is a shit head is my takeaway.

Saved me a click, thanks!

The Ai part comes in when you search. Your not just doing keyword searches. You can use natural language and the Ai models “understand” what your looking for and will retrieve it. Also you need the AI for image recognition (what was that website I was looking at with the children’s book with a dog on the cover?)

I don’t know why he’s associated with socialism and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.

I was annoyed, like the OP, then I read your comment and now I’m impressed and have an urge to buy a copy of OED I most certainly will never open. They owe you a commission on my sale.

I look forward to reading everyone’s calm and measured reactions

Alright youve convinced me, I’m a sucker for drama

Whenever I come across YouTube drama I’m always a little sad that I’m out of the loop and can’t participate in whatever is going on and tempted to go down a rabbit hole to figure it out, but then I realize my ignorance has saved me probably hundreds of hours of time that would otherwise be wasted worrying and arguing about things that haven’t the slightest impact on my life. Still, for my sake, enjoy your drama guys.

There are no red flag laws in Maine. There was no legal way to take his guns even if they thought that was necessary. Also, the christofacist supreme court is set to strike down laws that prevent people convicted domestic violence from owning guns, which will chip away at the legality of red flag laws everywhere. Happy Thursday everyone!

I’ve used it just to access Bing Chat, which has become my go to AI chatbot for a couple of reasons: 1) you theoretically get access to gpt 4 without paying 20 dollars a month, 2) it cites it’s sources, and 3) it can create images via DALLE from within the chat (which is handy, you can chat with the AI to help you think of an image prompt, the just say “ok make an image based on that description”). Other then that, i use Firefox at home. At work our choices are chrome or edge, so I use edge because of bing chat and I kind of like the layout better. It feels like choosing between buying something from Amazon or Walmart, which terrible corporation do I hate more in a given moment.

We continue to recommend Wyze lighting, since we consider them lower-risk, lower-impact devices—a security breach of a light bulb, for instance, wouldn’t give someone a view of your living room.

Call me paranoid, but I don’t want a company I don’t trust plugged into my network at all.

I’m sure you’d be fine, the baby will absorb most of the impact.

It’s all the coffee you drank you make that poop a reality.

Without ice cream, there are only screams.

I just want you to know you just gave me my new life moto

I know literally nothing about computers and I’ve been daily driving Linux for well over a decade. I just use Ubuntu and I’ve been pretty much using all the default settings, apart from some customization here and there. There was a time years ago when I wanted to learn and tinker, but in reality I never learned to use the command line for more than running updates (I still sudo apt-get update cause it makes me feel like hackerman).

My point is, Linux is super easy to just set up and run. If you want to learn more, there’s plenty of opportunities for that. But it’s not something to be intimidated by at all. A lot of the community is enthusiasts (who’ve I’ve found extremely helpful back when I used to have problems) so you’ll hear more jargon in these spaces. But I’m sure there are tons of others like me that use Linux just fine day to day without understanding a ton about computers.

During an earnings call on Tuesday, UPS CEO Carol Tomé said that by the end of its five-year contract with the Teamsters union, the average full-time UPS driver would make about $170,000 in annual pay and benefits, such as healthcare and pension benefits.

The headline is sensationalized for sure. But the article itself actually makes the point that the tech workers are misunderstanding that the $170k figure includes both salary and benefits.

“This is disappointing, how is possible that a driver makes much more than average Engineer in R&D?” a worker at the autonomous trucking company TuSimple wrote on Blind, an anonymous jop-posting site that verifies users’ employment using their company email. “To get a base salary of $170k you know you need to work hard as an Engineer, this sucks.”

It is important to note that the $170,000 figure represents the entire value of the UPS package, including benefits and does not represent the base salary. Currently, UPS drivers make an average of around $95,000 per year with an additional $50,000 in benefits, according to the company. The average median salary for an engineer in the US is $103,845 with a base pay of about $91,958, according to Glassdoor. And TuSimple research engineers can make between $161,000 to $250,000 in compensation, Glassdoor data shows.

On the whole though this is a useless article covering drama on Blind, wrapped up with a ragebait headline.

That’s hilarious, but more than likely that’s exactly what happened. I listened to someone explain the process on a podcast recently, can’t remember which one maybe the Vergecast or vox today explained. But the example they used is you go to a country club you hang out with a friend who just bought a Porsche or whatever. They use your phones location to know you are always going to this location and sticking within a few feet of this other phone, the owner of which has the new Porsche. Well they figure that’s your friend and he’s probably talking up his porche, and your in the right demographic to buy a Porsche and you haven’t bought a new car in x years, so guess what now you get Porsche ads. So what you described perfectly fits that example, they figured you’d all be suckers for some totes.