I think there is a path forward where the internet and the content on it are sufficiently commoditized that the costs become trivial to average people, like the cost of running an LED at night, and so monied interests move into other areas like robotics and the internet begins to drift back toward the idealized vision mentioned in this post.

I doubt it will ever drift all the way back, but it is getting super cheap to run edge compute and store data on the cloud.

It’s getting increasingly cheap to write code with LLMs too, and if that continues to evolve at the rate it’s going then users are not going to feel locked into their big-name platform of choice anymore. Porting from Apple to Google to Microsoft to Amazon to Self-Hosted etc, will be a lower and lower bar with fewer and fewer barriers for the average user, making for a hint of that old wild frontier feeling online again.

Super weird. I recall that tickets from cameras were found to be not enforceable in California back in the early 2000’s because officers signing the tickets were not on site at the point of the infraction and so could not testify that they actually witnessed the full scope/context of the events in question before any court of appeal.

I wonder if that’s changed or if this system is somehow different than the previous iterations where officers signed tickets after only witnessing video footage.

Bummer, you are right. I was wrong. I misread the first study and thought they were detecting faces through object like glasses using infrared, however that is not the case. They just mentioned detecting eyes through glasses(using visible spectrum) and then moved on to talking about infrared for other purposes.

Damn, well I’ll take down the comment. Thanks for pointing this out, sorry to waste your time!

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Whether it passes or not, civilians need to start using the infrared on their phone cameras to see through face coverings and profile law enforcement identities during execution of illegal orders anyway.

I cannot believe there is not a widely used FOSS app for this when the hardware is in your pocket already and the research is prevalent for how to do this.

I don’t understand why protestors would even show up in Washington DC during the fascist parade like is being implied in the article.

The union protests and social unrest currently underway are not really related to Trump’s authoritarian birthday bash except for how the media paints them as a “warm up”.

Protesters would be better served popping up all over the country except in Washington DC during their synchronized goose stepping contest.

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During one of the mass exodus events from Reddit to Lemmy, a lot of people started using these tools they would install to automatically scrub and obfuscate their Reddit comments and posts history. Often these tools would replace posts with random letters and even nonsense links because there was suspicion that outright deleted posts could be detected and then programmatically restored if Reddit really wanted to get that user content back.

I suspect these tools probably exist for Lemmy as well and you are seeing users with long comment histories use them because those also happen to be the users who have a lot of previous content to cover up/obfuscate to maintain/ensure their own privacy.

Inject it with bleach! That’ll do the trick.

No, but you have access to the protocol so you write your own algorithm.

Then it is your algorithm, using the common protocol, that goes out and retrieves search results for your feed.

Likewise, 3rd party corporations can write their own algorithms on the protocol and everyone can choose which algorithms fill their personal feed with search results - turning them on or off on a whim, at a personalized level.

I recently listened to Paul Frazee talk about Bluesky on the Software Engineering Radio podcast and it struck me that one thing they got right was looking at social media like a search engine looks at the web, instead of like a centralized platform(Facebook) and instead of like a federated network of platforms(fediverse).

If your feed is understood to be just the search results you see, then users can understand that their algorithm is something they need to work on in the same vein that they change their search parameters on Google or Bing or other search engines.

This is a story that’s been rotating through the media since ChatGPT first released.

I have an unpopular opinion about this headline after seeing the media cycle repeatedly downplay/ignore what Alphabet has been doing in response to OpenAI: Google the search engine is not in direct competition with ChatGPT, but Gemini is, and Alphabet is smart to keep simpler/time-tested search functionality central to Google rather than react strongly and scrap the keyword-based search bar that users understand are comfortable using - especially older users, but I think most people are starting to discover they have a use for both search and LLM chats.

I think there are two product categories here, which first looked like they were going to converge in 2022-2024, but which are now slowly changing course as customers start to comprehend how both are necessary for different purposes.

When I make chats in ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude etc, I am starting to plan them longitudinally so that I can use them over and over for a specific project or query type.

When I turn to a search bar, it’s because I really want a proxy for a specific website or between me and whatever weird site has the answer to my specific question. It’s not that I want discussion and a chat about it, I just want Google’s card-like results with a website index I can read instead of that website’s stylized, animated web design on top or popups or malware.

Every time I get sucked into a chat with Bing CoPilot(ChatGPT) when I really only had a web search query, I regret wasting my time talking to the LLM. Almost as a reflex, I’ve started avoiding it for most things now.

Iran’s government sucks, but this story really shows how the Iranian people are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Regular Iranians have more in common with western social values than those of the Iranian government or Russia - it’s been that way before, during, and after the Iranian revolution.

Not sure what the answer is, but they keep trying to protest and resist their government every few years and they get violently forced back into submission.

Of all the countries with screwed up regimes, Iran is one where I think it’s more appropriate to encourage more fluid immigration into western countries - a lot of their working age population is relatively better educated than many other countries too.

Is this for real? Do these exist and are they any good?

I think they probably wake up thinking exclusively about how to increase their net worth, through politics and marketing, at the expense of low information voters.

Have you seen the price of a decent piece of avocado toast though?

1990: “We don’t do that, do that yourself at home. GTFO”

2024: Starts at $11.95 just for avocado, addons are extra

A lot of the work they do is aimed at thwarting the business models of cyber criminals, scam sites, etc.

Their reviews are probably from the people who had a good thing going using bots to scrape PII or take advantage of free trials/free tier SaaS products but were suddenly put out of business by cloudflares captcha tools.

In 7 days, the new poll numbers are going to be real nail biters.

No. Read closely. Both require it to be in the app.