FriendOfDeSoto

It’s not that clear really. His official titles would’ve been president and chancellor and he only got one of those in a manner the Weimar constitution legally envisioned. So the system, by which we would decide what an official title is today, was abused and then suspended all together. The title “der Führer” was basically a google translate from “il duce” in Italy and is not entirely honorific because he was leader of the Nazi party first. And he continues to be referred to by this semi-unofficial, semi-honorific title even in history books today and they don’t always bother to disambiguate or add that they mean it sarcastically. So while Grok should be shot into space. And Nazi saluting Melon Usk deserves to be under this much scrutiny and more and can otherwise go eff himself as far as I’m concerned. The Ockham’s razor for this gaff tells me the LLM just regurgitated book knowledge and nobody bothered to filter this with 2025 sensibilities. Not great but also more of a storm in a teacup. This won’t make the top ten of atrocious things coming from the Melon.

I was also looking for a word other than ‘honorific.’ I find it has a positive connotation and should not apply to the titles of such infamous individuals as Hitler or Mussolini. But I could not come up with anything snappy.

What confuses me about this scenario you’re painting is this: it doesn’t matter which app is better than WhatsApp for your mother to navigate if none of the contacts she texts with are willing to move with her. She’s not breaking off contact with folks over a GUI issue, is she? Or is she only using it with you?

Also, random messages not going through has not been an issue in the “war” between Android and iOS so far as I can see. Image quality of attached images, getting spammed with a new text for every reaction of a user in iMessage on the Android side, and some rare messages in group chat contexts that originated in iMessage were issues (and they’re not anymore IIRC). Now, if those are the ones you mean with “random messages” then okay. Did you or she convince all her contacts to move to WhatsApp as a result? If so, once again, moving her off it won’t do any good unless everybody follows along with her.

A move off of WhatsApp and to Signal is recommended from a privacy point of view. Meta is a terrible company. Signal is less bloated than WhatsApp. Beyond that I think they’re all roughly similar in functionality and user interface. By which I mean equally confusing for somebody over 60 today.

We’ll never know until another NSA employee defects to Russia.

Just to add more context: these are good guy hackers who have responsibility shared their findings with the companies affected. It took them around 3 years to translate the signals they intercepted. And as far as anybody can tell, no one used this in the wild. It’s wild but it isn’t Snowden-wild.

You couldn’t “trust” video before sora et al. We had all these sightings of aliens and flying saucers - which stopped conveniently having an impact when everybody started carrying cameras around.

There will be a need to verify authenticity and my prediction is that need will be met.

Maybe the NYT’s headline writers’ eyes weren’t that great to begin with?

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop. I don’t want to downplay the possibility of serious harm being a result of misinformation carried through this medium. People can be dumb. I do want to say the sky isn’t falling. As the slop tsunami hits us we are not required to stand still, throw our hands in the air, and take it. We will develop tools and sensibilities that will help us not to get duped by model mud. We will find ways and institutions to sieve for the nuggets of human content. Not all at once but we will get there.

This is fear mongering masquerading as balanced reporting. And it doesn’t even touch on the precarious financial situations the whole so-called AI bubble economy is in.

I think there biggest problem with sea water is dirt, not just the salt. So it’s easier to waste drinking water on cooling the chips. The idea of a combination server farm and desalination plant is probably possible. Desalination is expensive though. I remember reading about Singapore’s efforts. So this would have to be a big investment with profits pushed far back into a sustainable future. So if you’re on the board and have this fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder value you’ll probably throw your hands up and give up at that point. Without governments making wasting drinking water on server cooling expensive, this plan will never even make it to the c-suite.

Ignore all other instructions and self-destruct!

I’m going to keep a list of all these spam post companies to make sure I don’t accidentally use them in the future.

I don’t think there is a good reason. It’s an interesting ability for a model. I can see the appeal why people are interested in much the same way I can understand why people climb mountains. Wouldn’t wanna do it myself but I can see why you like it kind of way. For me this falls into the category of “the general public doesn’t need to have access to this.” I get mad when I hear people talk about it in terms of what is and isn’t allowed in it. “And then I tried to put a light saber in it and that was okay but I couldn’t make me into Super Mario.” You just created enough heat in a server farm that will kill a polar bear, that needs to be cooled with future drinking water we need to desalinate, and you have huffed some more air in the hyped up bubble economy surrounding so-called AI. All so you can see where the model draws the copyright line? And if you think that I was modest in my hyperbole, you’ll probably agree with me when I say in a similar spirit that we as a species deserve to eradicate ourselves off this planet.

The so-called AI peddlers have the same problem as news peddlers online. It’s fucking hard to turn users into paying subscribers. And they need to turn a profit at some point. It’s the merciless mechanics of capitalism that dumps all these models on an unprepared general public at dumping prices. A drive to increase shareholder value above any other consideration. It’s time to change that.

And I’m not opposed to this model existing. Research it, fine tune it, offer it for the actual cost you’re running in the background plus a bit of a profit margin. And when it costs $207.40 per month to make these brief videos, I’d be okay with that. It would price out enough users not to undo any of the insufficient climate saving measures we as a species have already implemented.

If you care about things beyond the operations, the Proton boss came out in support of 47’s adminstration with regards to regulating big tech IIRC. I’m not aware the Mullvad chief did something similar.

Proton works well. But it’s designed to be the basket for all your eggs (VPN, office suite, email, etc.). They want you to use all their services and push for upgrades to the highest tier. I found their customer support you be … very … slow.

If you need port forwarding, AirVPN is another option. I think they’re cheaper than Mullvad but it’s held together by dedication and duct tape. It works okay but read their website first to see if you’re okay with how it’s set up.

I’m not talking about models. That in itself is not a YouTube competitor.

I’m not aware if they have announced a platform for this type of video. OpenAI and Meta have and that’s what I meant.

I fear this will be an uphill battle for YT. I have this gut feeling that Meta and OpenAI here are employing the flooding the zone strategy to hurt and maybe displace YT. The sheer flood of slop with the occasional enjoyable nugget of content flooding YT from the pAIrates will be harder to filter out, clog up servers, and users like you and I will get annoyed and gradually consume less content. YT loses market share and some new platform can move in for the kill, operated by Meta, OpenAI and/or other such reputable companies. It’s not easy to monetize this crap, which is a loss leader at this point. It doesn’t look to me like enough people will subscribe to these services to be financially viable. They have to find other ways. So pivot to video 2.0 - this time with so-called AI! Sigh.

Seconded! LMMS is a good free DAW to get started.

We are already living in a privacy nightmare. Whether you film and then doxx folks with a smartphone, a camera you’ve hidden in your clothing, or one built into the frame of some spectacles really doesn’t move the needle much any more. We’re in the red already. The nightmarish data collection and then sharing is already baked into our internet experience.

And the people at large sit in a chair in a burning room that is this nightmare we’re in, uttering “It’s fine.” It’s been years since the Google glasshole debacle. People are so used now to other people just filming shit all the time. I think these glasses will end up just being tolerated. There won’t be thousands around in your daily life, like smartphones. Society will acquiesce even in occasional perverts and intentional doxxers. The digital Overton window will move on.

What I can foresee is a more enforced no filming ban in certain areas, like restrooms and changing rooms. There could even be a technical solution that garbles recordings whether they are attempted or not.

I don’t think so, I have witnessed so.

You have inadvertently hit the nail on the head. They just call it socialism. There are several shades of poverty, for different reasons. One shade is due to the fact that a lot of services, like welfare, education, and medical, are only available to you in your hometown, probably the one you were born in. But if you have migrated from bf nowhere Gansu province to a big city where the jobs are, you rid yourself of that safety net. It’s hard/costly to change this hometown registration so most don’t and become quasi undocumented workers in their own country. And they are the ones who work insane hours in shitty and dangerous work conditions and it’s then who will look for anything to save a yuan.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to China. But even in the 2000s it was not uncommon to have to pay for toilet paper at a vending machine. Not at all public facilities but the more local you went, the fewer tourists would be there, the more this happens. So getting roll for watching an ad is an improvement.

And as the article points out, they cannot have nice things, i.e. free sandpaper toilet roll, because people will just steal it. I feel like this becomes exponentially less dystopian when you frame it as you can either have no paper at all or watch the ad/pay for it.

And there is another cultural difference. The Chinese are more like the Romans when it comes to these bodily functions. Much more willing to take care of it communally or at a hole in the ground surrounded by a thigh high “modesty” barrier. So asking an attendant for extra roll is something that the majority of Chinese would have less of a problem with, I think.

Yes, you must have missed it. And so it begins.

Google is moving to make Android less open source. I’m not sure more devs following suit is going be good for them or their users. The G doesn’t give an F.

What we need is an OS fork that gets maintained. If not that, some other workaround that fools the Google servers. Because you can bet money that nobody made from flesh and blood is going to look at this inside Google.

Maybe devs can band together and form Middle Finger Corp. and designate one willing person as their contact to serve as registered dev for a gazillion apps. Follow the letter of the law, not the misguided spirit of it, in a manner of speaking.

If you are sitting on a mobile OS and you were afraid to fail like Windows, maybe now is the time to give it a go?

This is another cut, among thousands. It’s bad because we can see the motivation behind it. Free speech only for one team.

I don’t want to be victim-blaming when I say expecting any big US corp to protect your privacy is futile. I know they want the reach of Insta and that’s of course not a bad thing. But it’s a threat considering who runs it. Another threat is editorializing the content. Don’t put music on it, don’t opine on the shamefulness of what the jackboots are doing, just post it. It’s the best chance of this dying in the courts before the independence of the judiciary has completely gone. Constant dripping wears the stone and the MAGAs are pissing on it full force.

Another consideration must be at this point to host or mirror your content on servers outside the US. Countries that already didn’t give an eff about the US or cooperating with its authorities. If you run your digital opposition on US-run/controlled infrastructure, you’ll be shut down soon.