@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-08-05 10:34:05
It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion
@jpanzer@mastodon.social2025-08-29 06:27:15
Labor Day: Bigger Than Ever 17x17K Rally!
📍 El Camino Real, Santa Clara to Redwood City.
🗓️ Monday, Sept 1 | 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM
https://tinyurl.com/historic17x17k
@LillyHerself@Mastodon.social2025-08-01 19:53:37
How do you fight thugs without becoming a thug yourself?
I think about this a lot lately, because there are so many thugs seizing power around the world right now.
If we can't find an answer to this question, our goose is cooked as a civilisation.
@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyz2025-08-18 13:13:25
Really good clear explanation from @…, laying out various problems and risks with trying to implement "age verification" online.
"Firstly, in order to prove your age you’re being asked to hand over some fairly important personal details. ... Usually the company you’re handing these details to is a third party, often one you will never have heard of before. ...
"The data that is being collected for age verification purposes is extremely tempting to hackers ... and at the moment there is no specific regulation outlining the security standards that these companies should meet ...
"Let’s say all the current age verification providers are incredibly robust, though. ... The question still remains... should you be sharing this information with random websites anyway?
"... once you’ve trained the population of an entire country to routinely hand over their credit card details in order to access content, you have given them an incredibly bad habit that it’s going to be tough to break. ... You don’t just prove your age once, after all, you potentially have to do it dozens of times, to access a bunch of different websites. Everything from BlueSky to PornHub to Spotify and even maybe Wikipedia. It becomes a weekly or perhaps monthly occurrence. Just as individual users don’t tend to read every website’s terms and conditions, it’s unlikely they’re all going to do due diligence checks on every provider who asks for ID, especially once they’ve become used to just handing that data over.
"And although that may not be a problem for _you_, you tech-savvy cleverclogs, if you’ve ever found yourself in the position of unpaid IT support for one of your less knowledgeable friends or relatives, hopefully you can see why it’s a huge problem for the UK population more broadly."
And more!
#AgeVerification #OnlineSafetyAct #OSA
@servelan@newsie.social2025-07-20 02:32:41
"Donald Trump Jr. tweeted in July 2023, "Show us all the Epstein client list now!!! Why would anyone protect those scum bags? Ask yourselves this question daily and the answer becomes very apparent!!"
Critics Bring Receipts As Don Jr Tries To Defend Dad Over WSJ Story | Crooks and Liars
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/07/critics-bring-receipts-don-jr-tries-defend
@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.ca2025-08-07 16:16:37
Yes Hitler, would be a reason to be cautious, Microsoft. 🤦♂️
Maybe even ask yourself a deep question about whether this technology is suitable at all for the general public.
But no..
That venture capital says go go go!
#hitler #fascism #socialresponsibility #technology #AI #Grok #Microsoft
https://mastodon.social/@verge/114988351652802386