Yikes.

In 1997; I was walking about 2 miles to and from school. Unsupervised. I had a house key on my neck and was a latchkey kid in third grade. I obediently walked to and from school directly from home; meeting the crossing guard a half mile from school twice a day; as I had to cross a major 4 lane divided highway.

lol you are so wrong.

TL;DR: I think this video oversimplifies the analysis according to the cards and gives Graphene OS undue weight without going into sufficient detail as to why each scored under each category.

I actually don’t agree with this video; and firmly believe it is more than a little biased.

For example, the Pixel, AOSP and Android are given several undeserved points due to lack of proper information or understanding of how certain features work. I imagine this is the case too for the iPhone; if a bit less so.

The review apparently doesn’t deep dive into settings or attempt to maximize privacy by turning off unwanted ‘features’ when settings switches are available to the user; nor does it assume that you set up accounts in as private of a manner as reasonably possible or toggle off as many default-on consent switches as needed.

While I would support scoring and dinging each case or instance for “Privacy Settings that don’t actually work”…this video really doesn’t do a lot of legwork and leans on the anecdotal evidence of scary news stories too much.

Worse was the fact that the entire video felt like they were shilling for Graphene OS; which is known to have a slightly unfriendly maintainer and community surrounding him to say the least.

No mention of Lineage or other privacy oriented Android ROMs were analyzed. AOSP too, was unfairly lumped in and dinged for specific points of the Default Pixel configuration…and yes there are major differences between AOSP and Pixel Android; even though Google tries to be less in-your-face invasive than the other OEMs. Not enough credit is given for the “On-Device” smart features implemented properly on the Pixels.

Out of personal experience; I’d actually rate a proper Lineage OS install of 4 whole Android versions ago to be more private than stock. Not quite as private as Graphene; but not quite as invasive and much more enforcing of privacy. The debloating provided by a clean AOSP-like ROM, such as Lineage, as opposed to a “Stock Android” configuration from a major OEM is stark.

Most importantly I personally feel that the privacy model chosen for the video is far too thickly detailed for an average person. Most of the privacy concerns listed on each card contained concern points that might only tangentally apply or don’t apply at all to mobile phones. The way that each card was scored and applied felt low effort. None of the points on any of the card(s) were weighted with average users in mind.

I really hope someone goes into a much deeper dive; this video is basically clickbait that parrots the commonly parroted advice in the privacy community; which isn’t even good advice, it’s just ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ style advice which gives the user no room to make necessary ‘Privacy vs Convenience’ tradeoffs that they themselves could have made if they understood proper threat modelling.

They faffed around, and now they’re finding out that, yes, the experts were in fact right! Restricting abortion access does cause more deaths and poor health outcomes!

I am glad to see it when the selfish people at the top fall so far down the hill. They orchestrate their own falling typically, much like Ikarus in his waxen wings, falling when he flew too close to the sun in direct sunlight at the height of a hot summer’s day.

As for Google; I hope the DoJ not only pulls up all of the resultant weeds in the garden, but also makes sure to till and salt the soil thoroughly, so that no part of Google can ever hope to rejoin it’s other pieces to form a monopoly or ‘anything like a monopoly’ on anything, ever, again.

Google must rightfully suffer a most painful and enduring ‘Corporate Death Penalty’ so to speak; in order to ensure that no company ever gets so bold again. We must also repeat this with several other large companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple too; as well as a few other companies I’m unable to name because I’m unaware of how ridiculously massive and monopolistic they are.

This is exactly the kind of task I’d expect AI to be useful for; it goes through a massive amount of freshly digitized data and it scans for, and flags for human action (and/or) review, things that are specified by a human for the AI to identify in a large batch of data.

Basically AI doing data-processing drudge work that no human could ever hope to achieve with any level of speed approaching that at which the AI can do it.

Do I think the AI should be doing these tasks unsupervised? Absolutely not! But the fact of the matter is; the AIs are being supervised in this task by the human clerks who are, at least in theory, expected to read the deed over and make sure it makes some sort of legal sense and that it didn’t just cut out some harmless turn of phrase written into the covenant that actually has no racist meaning, intention or function. I’m assuming a lot of good faith here, but I’m guessing the human who is guiding the AI making these mass edits can just, by means of physicality, pull out the original document and see which language originally existed if it became an issue.

To be clear; I do think it’s a good thing that the law is mandating and making these kinds of edits to property covenants in general to bring them more in line with modern law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

The effect is real.

I wonder if it’s possible that Schelp has any ties to the mentioned “Loan Servicer” in Missouri. Might be a fast fix to force them to drop the suit; or at least rotate it around thusly to a judge who is less likely to be unreasonable.

It’s blogspam. Possibly even AI generated.

Fuck /u/Spez

Sorry; the above is mandatory these days when talking about enshittified reddit.

I’d say it very strongly looks like Spez is doing exactly what it looks like. I can attest from my days as a meta-subreddit-mod and reddit mod that this behavior tracks exactly with any time Spez thinks he’s planning an unpopular change; they pucker up hard and start bracing things they think will be affected.

Probably, it is Old.Reddit; because it likely does not add to their revenue. Old.reddit interface was not designed with advertising in mind and it is purely functional first only.

Of course; by editing or removing old.reddit interfaces; they will be lobotomizing their moderation teams. The new reddit interface provides far less control and granular information; making it difficult at times to moderate without falling back to the old.reddit interface.

Undoubtedly they will likely also try to freeze, disable, or cripple AutoModerator /config/ pages, if they haven’t already, or revert them as well when this new enshittification masquerading as a “small positive change” drops. It’s hard to say.

Instead of recognizing their moderators as major stakeholders who have chosen to build their communities on reddit; they have chosen violence, and are treating them like enslaved serfs. Hmm…I wonder if that means they could possibly be breaking modern slavery laws… Until Next Time!

https://media1.tenor.com/images/ce7115153e3ae261c59341f516a8ac81/tenor.gif

Fuck /u/Spez

Leave reddit now.

<3 Melody.

People need to stand firm against the needless RTOs and demands to be present in a workplace where your work consists largely of things you can do safely from the privacy of your own home.

Without more mass resignations when companies start to roll out RTOs like this; they will never learn. If you work at such a company; start looking for another job, even if you are willing to work in the office a few days a week. Punish them harshly for enforcing RTOs.

Now we wait for someone to build an absolutely wonderful chat app on top of this wonderful bit of PoC code…

I genuinely hope someone does. Imagine what this could do if this was routed over Tor using Private Services.

Run this over that; and you’d have a bullet-proof text chat. Wrap a nice GUI client around all of that and you have a proper secure, anonymous messenger with no problems. With a little more build-out; you could even implement the Matrix protocol over this wire-line and basically have full inter-federation and moderation over a secure wire protocol; allowing for complete privacy and client integration.

TL;DR: Matrix over PQChat over Tor. Think about it. A Post-Quantum Dark-Matrix web.

As I stated before; 5% is not significant enough. It won’t ensure the victory; it might barely even turn the tide. Depends on how Trump does.

In some states; that’s even within a margin of error, and might be close enough to cause certain states to enter run-offs…because we know the GOP is a bunch of sore losers.

If I’m going to be completely honest; I feel like these people in support of such a withdrawal of support (of Israel) are going to have to move the needle A LOT more than a mere 5% to get the attention they want.

Might be acceptable to get a little louder about your issue; and properly educate people about it.

Samsung SmartThings and all related apps/frameworks.

Any kind of app that will let me interact with my “Samsung” branded accessories without using a Samsung Device; without the limitations caused by not using a Samsung device

While I wouldn’t condone using an AI to create an entire novel, I would be fine with a human using ChatGPT to generate topics, prompts, and check spelling & grammar.

AI is a tool. It can be used for good, and it can be used for bad. Much like a hammer. There are both good and bad ways to use them.

There’s no reason for there to be prohibition of AI generation; just prohibition of AI Generation being the only source of text.

Lemmy has it’s start by being that upstart anti-reddit competitor. …Just like Reddit was back when Digg dominated the web.

Give it time; it seems Spez didn’t learn his lessons from how reddit ended up dominating over Digg.

Honestly; I think the “Negative” reactions to the bot are overblown and only done by a vocal minority who are sockpuppeting followed by a few people who are irrationally angry that the bot can be, GASP! Dare I SAY IT???!!11, Wrong.

Personally I don’t find the bot problematic at all; and I think it could easily be blocked or ignored by people who find it too inaccurate. So I find it extremely disappointing that the mods are listening to the vocal minority about this.

That being said; I do understand why Mods want to make the bot more accurate. It’s assessments and information can easily make obvious extremists and trolls more obvious to the naked eye; and can help people consume media with some grains of salt. More sources of data are good for accuracy.

In general I don’t believe you can tell any difference between MP3 and FLAC if you listen to the audio at the intended sample rate.

Meaning that @44100hz with 8 bit samples; you can’t tell.

Listening at higher sample rates with higher bits per sample; sure…there’s lots of room for unwanted and even audible error. Audio interpolation algorithms are not miracles, not smart, and not even close to being finely psychoacoustically tuned to your ears in most cases.

If you say you can hear a difference…you are lying or you are cheating by playing back the MP3 over an audio pipeline with a higher sample rate and bits per sample. Anyone could hear the difference when cheating like that. Human hearing can span all the way up to 128Khz; but oftentimes most people can’t notice a credible difference even at 96Khz.

But if you listen to a 44.1Khz signal via a 96Khz set of equipment; you’ll pick out exactly when the audio output shifts between being 96Khz and 44.1Khz.

This is how you can tell when audio is a recording at a lower sample rate. Most hardware is capable of outputting 96Khz so long as you don’t put older things in your audio chain (The pipeline from file to your ears, and yes this includes software and your operating system as well).

The problem usually arises when something is upsampled. Going from 44.1Khz to 96Khz is noticeable when you “Compress” the audio signal to boost apparent loudness. Most low-end equipment and unaware software will do this sort of operation automatically when upsampling your audio to make sure the process does not render your audio too quiet to hear. Your ears can hear frequencies being clipped or limited to a certain volume as well; which can also happen a lot to prevent certain issues. Because most people are unable to regulate this hidden software aspect of their playback chain; you can sometimes hear it.

Luckily if you spend some time with proper DSP software and/or hardware, you’ll be able to unmuddle/unmix these mistakes in your chain. It does take time and patience; and you’ll need a large blend of HQ audio (like FLACs or MQTTs) as well as your standard “downsampled” audio (like MP3s and other lossy tracks), and you’ll be able to tweak things so that everything sounds good.

Software packages like Viper4Windows or Viper4Android are good starting points and are often easy to figure out how to use and offer a very wide and diverse range of controls you can use to adjust the audio to your needs and liking.

Because everyone’s ears are different; there’s also plenty of tools that claim to adjust for your individual ears…and those can be helpful as well in chasing your perfect flat audio response curve and equalizing things to your preferences.