So you may ask: "Why is it astroturfing if we know in advance that they are bots?"
It's because of the product they sell:
Your Global Commerce Partner, Engineered for Peak Performance
Launch your eye-catching online store with ease, attract and convert more customers than ever before.
They basically sell stores online, these stores always keep a free spot for "customers comments" about a product or about their purchase. Do not hope for a second that our friend Suumit Shah, founder & CEO, will hesitate to also populate his stores with fake customer comments. The idea is to prime the pump, and to make people create a login even if it's not for a purchase yet. To make them feel home among bots other people.
Yesterday, I was reading a thread that asked what's the point of buying a new phone as often as as people do. In the comments there were a variety of answers, but what interested me is that there were a wide variety of answers for how long each person liked to go before upgrading. So I've attempted to come up with justifications...
All you wrote is just an ad to purchase more stuff and to give zero thought about the consequences.
8, 9 and 10 years: you dislike change, you are incredibly broke or you only have a smartphone in the first place because it’s basically necessary to function in modern society. Plus you get to be smug about being green.
Your whole thing is about money. If you think that all this technology, energy, CO2, minerals come for free then you are in for a very bad surprise.
You are paying the price as we speak, through the inflation of all the other products you pay for every day. You will pay all your life for your privilege of falling for an ad campaign. Less crops, lower quality of crops? -> You will pay good money because of it. Less irrigation water? Same effect. Insurance companies in general will increase their premium non-stop because the risks will be everywhere. All this money comes out of your pocket.
A phone is not a necessity to function in a modern society, and green people are not smug. You talk as if you were out of the game, as if you were not impacted. Are you from the northern hemisphere? Don't you feel the heat these days?
I'm not sure if you know this, but dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as having fallen for an ad campaign isn't a particularly persuasive rhetorical tactic.
Reminder that this dude wrote this in his essay:
Plus you get to be smug about being green.
Well, you get the greetings of smug people. Also I don't care about rhetorical. Better speakers than me already talked to you all before and they failed to convince you of anything. So you can imagine how much I don't care about being persuasive or rhetorical. I care about facts.
But that aside, a smartphone someone buys every few years is a drop in the bucket for someone's individual contribution to climate change compared to driving, flying, living in inefficient low-density environments, eating pork or beef, or a host of other disproportionate activities. This just comes off as moralizing for its own sake.
Liar, the digital emits more CO2 than aviation.
This just comes off as moralizing for its own sake.
You are a bloody liar or ignorant. It took you like 30 sec to write your rant and spread some lies. But it took me way more time to find the source to debunk your crap. Well, I guess that's what it is to be a green smug.
I don't post the sources, you won't read them anyway.
Yeah, "go away if you're not happy" is really the lamest answer possible. And he is more like "captain reddit", always freaking out about popularity and subscribers.
It's a destructive setback with potential ramifications for the company's customer United Launch Alliance as well as Blue Origin's own rocket New Glenn....
All this business, for the ultimate goal of launching more military satellites, is killing people by millions. Through pollution. One person out of 6 dies from pollution. And pollution is massively generated by clowns like Bezos. Does he have blood on his hands? Absolutely.
Our activity should not be to help Boeing and Lockheed Martin to launch more equipment in the air. It should be to teach new jobs to the people with a current activity that emits pollution and CO2.
This circus is a prime example of what not to do, and how laws are unable to accommodate the people.
I wrote the first line of code for /kbin on January 14, 2021. Around this time, I started working remotely and decided that the time I used to spend commuting to the office would be devoted to /kbin. Throughout this entire period, /kbin has been a hobby project that I developed in my free time. It was also when Lemmy started...
Self driving cars have the potential of killing even more people.
if it can perform better on the road than humans.
Sure! Let's see how these automatic cars drive when there is fog, or snow, or rain, during the night...you know all these cases that no AI ever trained for. Because when was the last time a CAPTCHA tried you with images with snow, or fog, or night, or rain? Never. I will never allow a self driving car on the road, I will vote against it at every opportunity.
How is a self driving car different from a robot? So you want to release robots in the city and maybe they will kill some of us? Not okay. We have enough problem, ban it.
The problem is the car itself, we need smaller cities and to rely less on cars. We don't have the resources anyway to keep the cars model running.
SUSE is committed to working with the open source community to develop a long-term, enduring compatible alternative for RHEL and CentOS users. SUSE plans to contribute this project to an open source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.
Any statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects for the company, including statements containing the words “aims,” “targets,” “will,” “believes,” “anticipates,” “plans,” “expects,” and similar expressions, may constitute forward-looking statements and should be read with caution. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including competitive landscape, development of customer deals, reliance upon customer relationships, management of growth and acquisitions, the possibility of undetected software issues, the risks of impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic downturns, pricing pressures and the viability of the Internet. In addition, any forward-looking statements included herein represent views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. The Company does not have any obligation to update its forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to change and should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date other than the date of this press release.
A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....
Even in the event of threads opening for federation, our instance will never be able to endure the load of the constant traffic induced by 100 millions users.
I wish more people opened a computer to understand how it works. Because philosophy and essays only bring you so far.
I don't see a world where this works, the numbers just don't add up. Anyway meta will never allow you access if you don't sign a ToS with them. No ToS, no service, the lawyers will see to this.
Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the larger Mastodon instances under NDA, presumably to encourage them not to “defederate”...
"Meta is coming! If Threads is allowed to become part of the Fediverse, it will destroy it! It will steal your data! It will inject ads onto your timeline! It will corrupt Mastodon into being everything you hate about Facebook and Twitter combined!"
Why is it so hard for some people to admit that some precaution is required when we are dealing with predators like Facebook?
Let's focus on what we have instead of spending our time and money on federating a monster with 100 millions accounts.
We don't want to become a threads client. Our development must be independent of Facebook. It won't be independent anymore if 95% of the content is coming from Facebook. We need time to digest more users and now is absolutely not the time to federate such a big thing as 100 million users.
Get real. If people want threads then let them install threads. Nothing wrong with that.
And please stop with the "friends" thing
We get it: your friends are on Facebook. We are building something different. That's all.
Oracle is this priest who will try to convert you to christianity when you are in a hospital on your deathbed.
Oracle has been part of the Linux community for 25 years. Our goal has remained the same over all those years: help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone, freely available to all, with high-quality, low-cost support provided to those who need it.
Fuck you
We want to emphasize to Linux developers, Linux customers, and Linux distributors that Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstream distributions of every kind, community and commercial. We are happy to work with distributors to ease that process, work together on the content of Oracle Linux, and ensure Oracle software products are certified on your distribution.
Oracle is one of the biggest personal data broker out there. Fuck you
By the way, if you are a Linux developer who disagrees with IBM’s actions and you believe in Linux freedom the way we do, we are hiring.
The russian army is hiring too.
Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden.
Devour each others please. Thank you and fuck you.
Not a single word about environment. It's as if everything he saw in the newspaper about global warming and the lack of resources did not exist. Have you ever seen a cloud system without a cooling system? No? Me neither.
This is just a thought I had that I wanted to bounce off people who know more about ActivityPub/the fediverse— would it be feasible (and would it make sense) to build an open-source, ActivityPub-compatible dating app as an alternative to Tinder/Bumble/etc.? And if so, what could that look like? Obviously the small userbase...
With such a mass of users, all those people now only have one thing in common: they are consumers. That's the only point of the platform, grouping these people and feeding them ads.
The comments are merely a distraction between two ads.
This is why there is a good reason for keeping a little barrier of entry to the fediverse: this barrier is also a barrier to advertisers.
The barrier is picking a tool, then picking an instance, then accepting that the crowd is somewhere else. threads makes this automatic for you. Even "knowing" that there is another tool is a barrier.
Imagine the UK people trapped on an app talking about US politics 100% of the time. No downtime anymore. No rest, no nothing. It will be governor@florida non-stop.
It's simply a database. Your account is in the database and the threads account is an attribute of it marked as "activated" or "not activated". After that it's just a matter of counting the activated accounts.
In addition to the possible business threat, forcing OpenAI to identify its use of copyrighted data would expose the company to potential lawsuits. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained using large amounts of data scraped from the web, much of it copyright protected. When companies disclose these data sources...
Haaaa, OpenAI, this famous hippies led, non-profit firm.
2015–2018: Non-profit beginnings
2019: Transition from non-profit
Funded by Musk and Amazon. The friends of humanity.
Also:
In March, Open AI co-founder Ilya Sutskever told The Verge that the company had been wrong to disclose so much in the past, and that keeping information like training methods and data sources secret was necessary to stop its work being copied by rivals.
Yeah, he closed the source code because he was afraid he would get copied by other people.
I am very open to discussion on this, and if anyone has a counter-argument, I'd love to hear it, because this is a new field of technology that we should all talk about and learn to understand better.
That's very cool and all but while we have this debate there are artists getting ripped off.
I'm not making blind claims. And I won't point you to the sources either. I'm not making any homework for anyone today. Dig the subject and post us some information if you are really into the debate thing.
Blizzard admits to being aware of requests from the Diablo IV community regarding inventory expansion, though it doesn’t look like the feature is coming an...
Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement.
All you will get from this will me more bots, advertising in every place for whichever brand paid the most. It's all about ads. Just like TV shows, the ads will be integrated to the content and be indistinguishable from the original content.
A place like this one will be treasured as a great thing from the past. It is really what you want?
I couldn't care less about the existence of shadow libraries. What is this attempt at pushing buzz names? Once the the data is out it is out.
She is right to bring the lawyers to the party, this is when the gafam fall, they care about laws. If they didn't then they wouldn't hire a legal department the size of a small african nation.
Hitting the AI devs a few time with massive fees for copyright infringement should cool down their enthusiasm and the party should tune down one notch or two. It's all about money: when the income of ad money is lower than the outcome of fees money then the calm should be restored.
Probably bad. It centralizes the logins on mastodon and give them power over all the other tools that depend on them. If a gafam purchases a big mastodon instance then he also purchases a lot of accounts too.
G/O Media, who owns popular tech site Gizmodo along with a slew of other outlets, began publishing AI-generated articles last week, despite strong objections from many of the members of its staff, according to The Washington Post. The articles are all credited to various bots — Gizmodo Bot, for example — with no other...
GMG Union, which represents Gizmodo’s writers and is part of the Writers Guild of America, East, asked readers not to click on any AI-written articles, saying the articles are “unethical and unacceptable.”
Disclosure: Vox Media’s editorial team, which includes The Verge, is also unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East.
You are one of those people who registered a lot of subs doing nothing. And now you watch the counter grow. I guess we will have the same message every thousand registrations?
You are what went wrong with reddit. I'm blocking your subs
In 2015, Democratic Elk Grove Assemblyman Jim Cooper voted for Senate Bill 34, which restricted law enforcement from sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with out-of-state authorities. In 2023, now-Sacramento County Sheriff Cooper appears to be doing just that....
This is an after effect of democracy. Democracy is not all shiny and bright. If you don't pay attention to what the citizen around you are thinking then you will end up following stupid laws. Once you accept the rules of democracy your interest becomes that you spread your opinion around, not that you stay passive, not caring or respecting too much what other people think.
While you stay idle, other people, in this case religious people, are knocking on doors, pushing their ideas and eventually win vote, win elections and push their bible into laws.
Remember that faith is a powerful engine that is constantly pushing against you if you are not religious. You have to show some resistance and some initiative if you don't want to get caught off guard like the american women did with the abolition of their right to an abortion.
Having spent a lot of time on Mastodon... There are tons of people there talking about federated and self-hosted services, software freedom, censorship, encryption, tech regulation... A very narrow range of topics directly surrounding the fediverse get a lot of attention....
What you should appreciate is the number of argumented answers you had to your question with so few one liners made of "Dan pleeease". Followed by the inevitable clickbait articles. This will probably not last.
I do understand your point. You are case 1: Meta federates with remote instance with no contractual relationship.
Case 1 will never happen because Meta will never allow uncontrolled content over their platform, they will always, always demand that yous sign an agreement before you write anything on their servers. Their lawyers will never allow strangers to publish just like that.
I'm taking about case 2: where Meta federates servers who agree to sign a chart with Meta. A legal framework, which also involves content moderation control, data flow control, etc. And this will cause a big risk of Meta slowly pushing their changes into the protocol. The more servers follow the bigger the danger becomes for everyone.
It's not a knee-jerk reaction, it's a safety precaution against a corporation of which we know the methods. Do you know of a bigger predator to us?
They don't want your friendship, they don't care at all about this open source fediverse thing. We are a risk to their business, nothing else. Other fell before, other will fall after. There is nothing to gain here for us and everything to lose, so block it.
CEO Replaces 90% Of Customer Support Staff With AI Chatbot, Internet Angry (www.ndtv.com)
Attributing the decision to prioritising profitability, Dukaan CEO Suumit Shah said customer support costs reduced by 85 per cent.
Personal Justifications for different phone life cycles (kbin.social)
Yesterday, I was reading a thread that asked what's the point of buying a new phone as often as as people do. In the comments there were a variety of answers, but what interested me is that there were a wide variety of answers for how long each person liked to go before upgrading. So I've attempted to come up with justifications...
.. (kbin.social)
.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket engine explodes during testing (www.cnbc.com)
It's a destructive setback with potential ramifications for the company's customer United Launch Alliance as well as Blue Origin's own rocket New Glenn....
/kbin project management costs, financing, future plans (kbin.social)
I wrote the first line of code for /kbin on January 14, 2021. Around this time, I started working remotely and decided that the time I used to spend commuting to the office would be devoted to /kbin. Throughout this entire period, /kbin has been a hobby project that I developed in my free time. It was also when Lemmy started...
San Francisco protestors are disabling autonomous vehicles using traffic cones (www.techspot.com)
SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment (www.suse.com)
SUSE is committed to working with the open source community to develop a long-term, enduring compatible alternative for RHEL and CentOS users. SUSE plans to contribute this project to an open source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.
Defederation, Threads and You (kbin.social)
A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....
(Opinion:) You're So Vain, You Probably Think This App Is About You: On Meta and Mastodon (micro.coyotetracks.org)
Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the larger Mastodon instances under NDA, presumably to encourage them not to “defederate”...
You're So Vain, You Probably Think This App Is About You: On Meta and Mastodon (tracks.ranea.org)
Shared by @tchambers and originally written by @chipotle...
Keep Linux Open and Free—We Can’t Afford Not To (www.oracle.com)
Oracle underscores its commitment to helping keep Linux open and free for the global Linux community.
Microsoft’s cloud ambitions for Windows could kill off desktop PCs – and sooner than we expected (www.techradar.com)
Windows 365 for consumers is imminent? So the rumor mill reckons
Fediverse dating app? (kbin.social)
This is just a thought I had that I wanted to bounce off people who know more about ActivityPub/the fediverse— would it be feasible (and would it make sense) to build an open-source, ActivityPub-compatible dating app as an alternative to Tinder/Bumble/etc.? And if so, what could that look like? Obviously the small userbase...
Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users (www.theverge.com)
OpenAI says it could ‘cease operating’ in the EU if it can’t comply with future regulation (www.theverge.com) Japanese
In addition to the possible business threat, forcing OpenAI to identify its use of copyrighted data would expose the company to potential lawsuits. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained using large amounts of data scraped from the web, much of it copyright protected. When companies disclose these data sources...
Diablo 4 does not allow inventory expanding but Blizzard is working on a change (gamerkick.com)
Blizzard admits to being aware of requests from the Diablo IV community regarding inventory expansion, though it doesn’t look like the feature is coming an...
Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement (www.theverge.com)
Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement.
Pixelfed is adding a Sign In with Mastodon option (media.kbin.social)
Real Engineering: The Questionable Engineering of Oceangate - an in depth analysis of the Oceangate disaster by an expert in composite materials engineering (www.youtube.com)
"This is profiteering, not innovation."
Gizmodo’s staff isn’t happy about G/O Media’s AI-generated content (www.theverge.com)
G/O Media, who owns popular tech site Gizmodo along with a slew of other outlets, began publishing AI-generated articles last week, despite strong objections from many of the members of its staff, according to The Washington Post. The articles are all credited to various bots — Gizmodo Bot, for example — with no other...
Yet Another Post About Threads/Defederating and 'wait and see'
Sorry. I know it’s getting a bit annoying with all these posts obsessing over this subject but still…...
/m/Futurology has reached 2000 subscribers (kbin.social)
I'm happy to announce that /m/Futurology has reached 2000 subscribers!...
Sacramento Sheriff is sharing license plate reader data with anti-abortion states, records show (www.sacbee.com)
In 2015, Democratic Elk Grove Assemblyman Jim Cooper voted for Senate Bill 34, which restricted law enforcement from sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with out-of-state authorities. In 2023, now-Sacramento County Sheriff Cooper appears to be doing just that....
Can we please remember to talk about things on the fediverse besides the fediverse itself? (kbin.social)
Having spent a lot of time on Mastodon... There are tons of people there talking about federated and self-hosted services, software freedom, censorship, encryption, tech regulation... A very narrow range of topics directly surrounding the fediverse get a lot of attention....
Is there any kbin instance that is seriously considering defederating Meta/Threads? (kbin.social)
I've checked the fedipact signatories, but they all seem to be lemmy instances.