cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19683130 > The ideologues of Silicon Valley are in model collapse. > > To train an AI model, you need to give it a ton of data, and the quality of output from the model depends upon whether that data is any good. A risk AI models face, especially as AI-generated output makes up a larger share of what’s published online, is “model collapse”: the rapid degradation that results from AI models being trained on the output of AI models. Essentially, the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-reinforcing cascade of bad thinking. > > We’ve been watching something similar happen, in real time, with the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology. It’s not just that they have bad values that are leading to bad politics. They also seem to be talking themselves into believing nonsense at an increasing rate. The world they seem to believe exists, and which they’re reacting and warning against, bears less and less resemblance to the actual world, and instead represents an imagined lore they’ve gotten themselves lost in.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19117230 > As X’s owner and most followed user, Elon Musk has increasingly used the social media platform as a microphone to amplify his political views and, lately, those of right-wing figures he’s aligned with. There are few modern parallels to his antics, but then again there are few modern parallels to Elon Musk himself.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19060045 > Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context. Since October 7, social media platforms have been challenged for the unjustified takedowns of pro-Palestinian content—sometimes at the request of the Israeli government—and a simultaneous failure to remove hate speech towards Palestinians. More specifically, social media platforms have worked with the Israeli Cyber Unit—a government office set up to issue takedown requests to platforms

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18985984 > Palantir, the company named for the dangerous seeing-stones that tended to mislead their users, has announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver services for classified networks in US defense and intelligence agencies. > > “This is a first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology that will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s best-in-class large language models (LLMs) via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP) in Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments,” the announcement says. > > Palantir is a data-analysis company that sucks down huge amounts of personal data to assist governments and companies with surveillance. It is somewhat unclear from the text of the announcement what services Palantir and Microsoft will offer. What we do know is that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will integrate Palantir products. Previously, Azure incorporated OpenAI’s Chat-GPT4 into a “top secret” version of its software.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18923426 > The Israeli army is using Amazon’s cloud service to store surveillance information on Gaza’s population, while procuring further AI tools from Google and Microsoft for military purposes, an investigation reveals.

Qt 6.7 is out with lots of large and small improvements for all of us who like to have fun when building modern applications and user experiences. Several additions are released as technology previews, and we are looking forward to your feedback so that we can get everything ready for the next LTS release!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13664088 > After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the whole population has been forcibly displaced. Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come. > > By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. One of the key findings is that Israel's executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7492853 > Software that controls your body should always respect your freedom. This article is a recap of scandals of medical devices, like hearing aids, insulin pumps, bionic eyes, and pacemakers, and what we can learn from them. It's astonishing: you wouldn't expect these devices to be run by software in such a way that they can leave you completely helpless.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7456748 > The mission-driven tech company behind the Firefox browser, Pocket reader and other apps is now investing its energy into the so-called “fediverse” — a collection of decentralized social networking applications, like Mastodon, that communicate with one another over the ActivityPub protocol.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7435108 > Thursday on X (Twitter), all users saw the same pinned topic under the “What’s happening?” sidebar. As part of a “timeline takeover” — which gives advertisers “priority access to logged-in users’ first impression of the day” — conservative media nonprofit PragerU is promoting the hashtag “#DETRANS” to advertise its new film about “the stories of detransitioners.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5724757 > It’s not surprising that ChatGPT has been accused of breaching the EU’s main privacy law – PIA blog noted that ChatGPT was a privacy disaster waiting to happen back in February. As the first complaint to be taken up by an EU data protection agency, this case will be watched closely by other EU Member States, and around the world. The Polish inquiry is likely to investigate many of the key GDPR issues that arise for AI programs and be used as a benchmark in future legal cases.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5592397 > Forty years ago, Richard Stallman announced the plan to develop the GNU operating system, which would be entirely composed of free software. The existence of a free operating system would enable people to operate their computers in freedom, throwing off the power of the developers of nonfree software. The GNU Project has also built the global free software movement.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5486771 > We did an analysis of the Google antitrust trial. Last week, over half of the trial was held behind closed doors because the judge, Amit Mehta, is deferring to Google on the need for secrecy.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344 > The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn't have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don't have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607 > This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody. > > We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay. > > But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5323962 > The Grift Shift is a new paradigm of debating technologies within a society that is based a lot less on the actual realistic use cases or properties of a certain technology but a surface level fascination with technologies but even more their narratives of future deliverance. Within the Grift Shift paradigm the topics and technologies addressed are mere material for public personalities to continuously claim expertise and “thought leadership” in every cycle of the shift regardless of what specific technologies are being talked about.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5196551 > A decade after Snowden exposed NSA’s mass surveillance in cooperation with the British GCHQ, only about 1 percent of the documents have been published, but three major facts can finally be revealed thanks to a doctoral thesis in applied cryptography by Jacob Appelbaum.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2811405 > "We view this moment of hype around generative AI as dangerous. There is a pack mentality in rushing to invest in these tools, while overlooking the fact that they threaten workers and impact consumers by creating lesser quality products and allowing more erroneous outputs. For example, earlier this year America’s National Eating Disorders Association fired helpline workers and attempted to replace them with a chatbot. The bot was then shut down after its responses actively encouraged disordered eating behaviors. "

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2757988 > "When we let corporations decide who is allowed to speak, they act with a mixture of carelessness and self-interest, becoming off-the-books deputies of authoritarian regimes and corrupt, powerful elites. > > Alas, we made the wrong tradeoff with Trusted Computing. For the past twenty years, Trusted Computing has been creeping into our devices, albeit in somewhat denatured form. " > > "As I wrote last week, giving manufacturers the power to decide how your computer is configured, overriding your own choices, is a bad tradeoff - the worst tradeoff, a greased slide into terminal enshittification"

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2650558 > **Highlights**: > > - More work on C2X features. > > - The strlcpy and strlcat functions have been added. They are derived from OpenBSD, and are expected to be added to a future POSIX version. > > - Support for x86_64 running on Hurd has been added. > > - CVE-2023-25139: When the printf family of functions is called with a > format specifier that uses an (enable grouping) and a > minimum width specifier, the resulting output could be larger than > reasonably expected by a caller that computed a tight bound on the > buffer size. The resulting larger than expected output could result > in a buffer overflow in the printf family of functions.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2546109 > Read why "Web Environment Integrity" is terrible, and why we must vocally oppose it now. Google's latest maneuver, if we don't act to stop it, threatens our freedom to explore the Internet with browsers of our choice.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605 > A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.