One other hurdle to note specifically in this time: because of the absolute flood of AI bots that tend to hammer popular sites and ignore robots.txt, many web servers out there have moved to a bot allow list — which means if you’ve got a new properly behaved and reporting index bot, you’ll likely find it gets blocked by default on a LOT of the Internet.
Em Adespoton
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Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•Why there’s no European Google?English
322·14 hours agoBecause Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu already exist.
Any new competition starting up now would need really deep pockets to compete for the decade or so it would take to make any sort of profit.
There have been good writeups on why Apple doesn’t provide gyro data — it can be used to physically track people. This is mostly an issue in apps that embed Safari, such as a store loyalty app that can track your movement while you’re in their store — or in a competitor’s store. Since Firefox isn’t embedded in apps, it’s not an issue there.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•Qualcomm’s CEO is working with ‘pretty much all’ major AI players on top-secret devicesEnglish
9·1 day ago“You know you’re Generation X when….”
I find it odd that people now reflect fondly back on “old Facebook” when I remember Zuck and his friends going on about how they got hot girls to give them their photos and personal info.
Hopefully the pendulum will swing again; Gen Z doesn’t actually seem very impressed with AI and the digital services economy.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Privacy@lemmy.world•FCC passed an anti-robocall proposal requiring telecoms, including VoIP providers, to verify user identities before activating serviceEnglish
18·2 days agoThe scammers use the same services as telemarketers. They don’t register consumer numbers; they pose as international call centers with pools of numbers.
Since this is the type of contract that is the most profitable to the carriers, they only dig as deep as they’re legally required to dig into these customers’ business practices. Then they hide behind “I thought they were just another of the many legitimate telemarketers that we service!” excuse.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•Rising Fuel Prices Are Making Return‑to‑Office Mandates Harder to DefendEnglish
121·2 days agoHybrid Electric Vehicle
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•How plausible is a medical tricorder?
4·2 days agoThere was an x prize for a tricorder about a decade back; they found that to accomplish all the tasks, they actually needed three sets of hardware, two of which needed to be strapped on to the person.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•Donating our open-source alignment tool - AnthropicEnglish
7·3 days agoThat’s all great, but all it takes is to unalign a single parameter and it appears to unalign the entire model.
So this is great for ensuring you’re testing what you think you’re testing, but it’s not going to actually secure a model you’re going to make open.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•Spending Just 10 Minutes With AI Can Fry Your Brain, Researchers FindEnglish
12·4 days agoI’m confused. Aren’t you the one who referred to LLMs In a thread that was conflating LLMs with AI? The parent’s comment seems to be right on point.
It’s kind of like how we’ve lost the war on hacking.
Large language models fall under the current definition of artificial intelligence just as much as Cyc or Cog did in their day, or various expert systems and machine learning models, diffusion models, etc.
Pretty much any non-deterministic inference engine can be classified as an AI, including LLMs.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•Spending Just 10 Minutes With AI Can Fry Your Brain, Researchers FindEnglish
61·4 days agoBut which 10 minutes?
One sec, maybe ChatGPT knows….
Yes, but Teslas are spying in everyone they are in the vicinity of, too. Most cars don’t send video from their onboard cameras back to the manufacturer for analysis.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.English
5·6 days agoCheaper for them, that is.
What I want to see is throttleable models, kind of like progressive JPEG, where the default model is “nano” and it has a watch function that analyzes if more tokens might be needed for a certain task and scales up as needed — identifying if the resources are too much for the device and offloading to the cloud (with explicit permission) only if (but always if) needed. Over time as the technology improves, larger models move to the endpoint.
And then people could have a basic set of sliders: on-device only, on-cloud only, or somewhere in between, based on the user’s preferences.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•DHS Demanded Google Surrender Data on Canadian’s Activity, Location Over Anti-ICE PostsEnglish
24·7 days ago“There was a long time where the United States government advised other countries on how to protect people within their territory from foreign oppression,” Perloff says. “And it is appalling to realize that now other countries may have to do that about us.”
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•Stepping Away from Streaming with the Innioasis Y1 Digital Audio PlayerEnglish
5·8 days agoI use my phone as a media platform; I rarely stream any content on it unless it’s off my Jellyfin server.
I also have a Sony Walkman I got in 1986, but as I don’t have any audiocassettes anymore, it mostly operates as an AM/FM radio (tell me again why our phones don’t have AM/FM when Japan and S Korea do?).
One thing I HAVE been considering is a LoRA Meshtastic setup; plug in a router with an extender board at home, and carry a handheld unit or two with me. That would mean that I’d have a non-cellular connection to my home network within a 25km radius of my home, and mesh networking connection to the Internet in most densely populated areas outside that range, AND the two devices could link any phones or work as walkie talkies in areas where there’s no available WiFi or cellular signal.
To me, that’s a step forward, where a dedicated digital audio player doesn’t really solve any legacy or current problem.
But if you’ve already got one, why not use it? The batteries last a whole lot longer than a smartphone.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•Stepping Away from Streaming with the Innioasis Y1 Digital Audio PlayerEnglish
5·8 days agoI still have an iPad 2 I bought in 2011, and amazingly, the battery still lasts 5+ hours.
It’s got 128GB storage, and that’s used to store a movie or two, 30 hours of music, and a bunch of books and PDFs.
Of course, I’m not going to carry it with me everywhere; that’s what my phone is for. Which also has those things stored on it.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•ICANN is Accepting Suggestions for new TLDs (for $227k) - what would you pick?English
5·8 days agoGood luck restricting it for this purpose… but as you’ll see, there isn’t actually a creative commons license that is just “CC” anyway, so that wouldn’t be an issue.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•ICANN is Accepting Suggestions for new TLDs (for $227k) - what would you pick?English
11·8 days agoWe also have .zip but no .rar, .ace, .gz, .bz, .7z, .xz or even .tar.
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•ICANN is Accepting Suggestions for new TLDs (for $227k) - what would you pick?English
12·8 days agoActually, you’re on to something there; have the TLD represent the license agreement to access ANYTHING served over it.
.gpl .lgpl .agpl .mpl .mit .bsd .apache .epl .cddl .cc0 .ccby .ccbysa .ccbynd .ccbync .ccbyncsa .ccbyncnd
Em Adespoton@lemmy.cato Technology@lemmy.world•ICANN is Accepting Suggestions for new TLDs (for $227k) - what would you pick?English
6·8 days agoI’d pick .
And then people can register whatever TLD they want on top of that.

Seems to me Cox would apply here, wouldn’t it? Or is that just for copyright?