A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things, too.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2024

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  • I halfway agree, but the issue with that is, that’s not what happens in reality. In reality these things don’t run on renewable energy. And not utilizing datacenters at capacity is just a waste of resources. And they could find people who donate their voices, which would be fair… But they’re not doing that. So I think half the arguments still apply. It is innovation though, we shouldn’t be opposed just for the sake of it. It needs some proper argumentation.


  • I mean their main use case is gaming… And you can do a few more AI things, LLMs aside. For example generate pictures, voice cloning (or changing), you can have a vtuber avatar and do live-streams as an anime girl. Or run Jupyter Notebooks with arbitrary machine learning projects. Do virtual reality. Or run a big CAD program and design some objects. Maybe even run finite element method simulations to see how your workpiece will deform with stress…


  • As far as I know there isn’t any rule to learn. Grammatical gender is a wild mixture of several things, sometimes it has something to do with the ending of words and sometimes with attributes of the things, if it has like agency, is an inanimate object, or is an abstract concept. Sometimes it’s completely arbitrary and sometimes there are rules to it like with group of people. But there is no way of telling, you got to memorize it. In any way, grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological gender. And I’m pretty sure that’s not it’s origin. Though, we try to link it to biological gender in case of people. But even that has exceptions, and it doesn’t really work with group of people etc.



  • Thanks for explaining. I get that. Seems we’re moving away from democracy and freedom these days. That’s hard to tackle. And there’s a multitude of reasons and dynamics at play. I’ve also learned at school we usually have reforms or revolution available. Plus a few successful forms of nonviolent resistance. Or civil war, war and a restart, continued oppression… We’ll see. I hope for the best. But in my opinion freedom is a constant fight, even in “free” countries, it’s not granted automatically or indefinitely.


  • You’re right, I’m not really sure if I understand what the article is about. And how it translates to the title and us, the people.

    I’m aware of oppressive regimes, weapon systems, surveillance, misinformation and manipulation taking place all around the world. And all of that becoming very efficient by technology, automation, algorithms, etc.

    I don’t think we can rely on the government or the companies, though. The goverment itself is the entitiy oppressing the people. And since the article is talking about the Trump situation… I mean all the billionaires and tech-bros were present at his inauguration ceremony, kissing his ass… I don’t think we can rely on them or their employees, either…

    So my thinking is, if it’s technology that’s going to solve this, or the citizens have any influence in the first place… as the title implies(?!), it has to be something like Free Software. Or at least something independent. Or is there anything else left?

    But I’d agree, me using LibreOffice and encrypting my phone is not going to change if some trans people get arrested somewhere… I really don’t understand what the article wants to tell me… We could overturn the government? Or stop sending weapons or similar tech to certain countries… But that’s all political. None of that is really related to technology in the sense that the answer lies within technology…



  • Nice article 😆 And I wonder if it’s going to stay that way. Or if it’s like a new invention which is still missing a (good) application. I have some other good use-case which are missing in the list and that’s image classification and description, speech to text and text to speech. And machine translation. I think that’s massively useful. But as pointed out in the article, generative AI does lots of things which harm people and society. I mean the promise is that it’s going to get better and stop lying so much, so we can have some proper applications as well. But that’s not a thing yet. And personally - I’m still waiting for AI to merge with robotics and do real hands-on work. Which could be very helpful in some professions. Or lead to a more dystopian future.

    And I believe all the accelleration of everything, spreading misinformation and making it super cheap and easy to manipulate and spam, is here to stay. That’s something we need to deal with, and it’s not easy or straightforward. If I were a tech bro, I’d advertise my AI solution to deal with the issues that arise with AI 😅


  • Well, there isn’t really a way around automated filtering. Spammers and malicious actors also send their stuff in bulk. And those big tech companies already have human content moderators. Usually in some poorer countries and it’s a horrible job. I suppose there just arent enough humans to also deal with the flood of spam, manually.

    These systems are far from perfect. And I’m not really an expert. I don’t use Meta’s platforms. I can’t tell much from that screenshot. It’s missing the URL and it hints at some rule that might be shown below.

    And I didn’t want to say “trust Meta”. Quite the opposite. I just think this one specific claim could be true. Not everything is a conspiracy theory. We know they have automated spamfilters. And we know these make a lot of mistakes. Very similar with what other spamfilters do with short URLs. I’d say the simplest explanation is: their spamfilter sucks. Not that they somehow conspired, wrote additional software to deliberately target Pixelfed instances, but just when it’s a short post… No. I think in this instance it’s the simple explanation. But yeah, gwnerally: Don’t trust and of the big tech companies. They don’t act in your interest at all.


  • We just should take care not to spread misinformation. We need to stick with the truth. And It’s not like the article says. And what they’re infering is wrong, too. And seems that Meta didn’t respond, isn’t up to date anymore, either. (Given Meta tells the truth, but I don’t see any reason to doubt this. This is exactly what happens with spamfilters all the time. And why would they reverse it immediately, if there’s more to the story?)

    Other than that, I agree. If somebody chooses to use a platform like that, they get entangled in some soulless machinery. And that machinery isn’t there to help the user, but mainly to uphold whatever a big tech company likes or needs. Mainly profit and control. Terms and conditions apply.




  • I got some eID and it’s supposed to do age verification for like a decade now. And they must have hired some proper computer science experts, because the idea was to implement this as a “zero knowledge proof”. Which is a very nice concept: You can prove your age to a porn site completely anonymously, without revealing anything (not even your exact age), just that you’re above a certain age.

    Of course no one uses that system 😑

    The technology for sure is out there. So if the true motivation is to block access for minors… We could just do it. Only takes an id with a chip on it and/or a smartphone app.




  • Sure. Copyright is is - is broken. And it certainly doesn’t help I’m paying Spotify etc just so they can pocket the money. But don’t we need something so Hollywood can produce my favorite TV show? I mean that stuff costs millions and millions to make, until it somehow arrives on my screen. Or an author making a decent living with coming up with a nice fantasy novel series? What’s the alternative until we arrive at Star Trek and money is a thing of the past?

    I’m pretty sure the AI companies are stealing copyrighted work. Afaik Mata admitted doing it. For several older ones we know which books were in the training datasets. There are several ongoing lawsuits dealing with books being used to train AI, Scarlett Johansson’s voice etc.

    I agree. As is, AI is a plaything for rich companies. They have complete control, since they hired the experts and they have the money for all the graphics cards and electricity. If it’s as disruptive as people claim, it’s our bad. Because we’re out of the loop.