@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-06-22 00:30:01
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-08-24 08:05:44
UK filings: TikTok's revenue in the UK, Europe, and Latin America grew 38% YoY to $6.3B in 2024, up from $2.6B in 2022 (Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2025/08/22/tiktok-booms-in-europe-despite-threat-of-us-ban/…
@tante@tldr.nettime.org2025-07-24 09:03:33
Enlightening thread on Proton's new LLM
https://social.cryptography.dog/@ansuz/114906970072548804
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-25 10:57:58
Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.
@joxean@mastodon.social2025-06-24 11:45:13
@midtsveen@social.linux.pizza2025-07-24 16:15:14
I have a dual-boot setup with Debian and Elementary on my laptop, because Elementary was my very first Linux distro, so it’s got a place in my heart.
Anyway, here are some shirts I own, along with two logos and a tux I made at work using the Plasma CNC!
#ElementaryOS #Elementary
@jake4480@c.im2025-08-24 01:04:13
Starting up Bring Her Back. Anybody seen it, opinions? Guess I'll see. Will probably get to finish most of it before wifey's done with her exam 😂
#horror
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2025-08-24 14:24:18
“A string of bands have pulled out of a UK music festival hours before they were due to perform after Irish band The Mary Wallopers said they were ‘cut off’ for displaying a Palestinian flag.
The Last Dinner Party, Cliffords and The Academic announced on Saturday that they would no longer be performing at the Victorious festival in Portsmouth following Friday’s incident.
…
Rock band The Last Dinner Party said they would boycott the festival in a statement shared on their Inst…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-06-24 00:40:57
Court filings from in-ear hardware startup iyO's trademark dispute lawsuit against OpenAI detail OpenAI and io's early work on in-ear hardware devices (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/23/court-filing…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-06-25 19:31:13
License plate reader company Flock has stopped US agencies from accessing cameras in CA, IL, and VA after reports of lookups related to ICE and an abortion case (404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/flock-removes-state…
