I know it’s not specific to the Fediverse, but I recommend you watch this video from Fran Blanche: it’s eye-opening and a bit heart-breaking:

When Google calls you a slur

Fran Blanche is a genuinely kind person, a good engineer, and her career has been hobbled by rampant transphobia.

I would take what ChatGPT tells you with a gigantic salt crystal.

Case in point: I made a fairly important purchase in a foreign country recently. The seller’s countract was in the local language, which I speak for ordinary matters but not well enough to understand legalese.

The seller couldn’t find how a crucial piece of the contract was translated into English, so she typed “Say this in English: the buyer has no right to pull out of the deal even in case of force majeure” in her language. ChatGPT translated it as “The buyer has the right to pull out of the deal in case of force majeure” in English. The exact opposite of what was written!

Luckily for me, while I didn’t know the legal terms in the local language, I could see it was a negative sentence. So I managed to catch it and understand that the clause was in fact working against me-the-buyer, not in my favor.

I know why ChatGPT translated it that way: the force majeure clause in most contracts usually states that the deal is off in case of force majeure (force majeure usually being a euphemism for death). But in this instance, the seller turned the clause 180 degrees around, leaving my children on the hook if I snuffed it early and didn’t complete the payment. ChatGPT, being nothing more than a mechanical parrot, simply repeated the most common form of force majeure clause it had been trained on.

The main takeway from this story is: you should never trust what ChatGPT says, and the more important what you ask it to tell you is to you, the more consequences you will suffer for its mistakes.

Captchas were never about keeping bots out: they’ve always been an excuse to turn ordinary internet visitors into mechanical turks to tag photos to train AI systems without paying the workforce.

Think about it: how many hours total did you spend in your life tagging photos for Google and Google never paid you for your work?

I’m aware of this. My own browser is setup to redirect Youtube links to FreeTube. But that doesn’t address the reasons why I would prefer not linking to Youtube:

• Reducing links that rely on Google services and loosening Google’s grip on everything ever so slightly
• Saving the video for posterity in case it gets pulled out, either by Youtube’s algorithm or by the person who posted it

Will be good for the quality.

You speak as if there was quality left to lose.

Ah okay, I didn’t know that. I personally try to stay away from Wayland as long as possible so support for it gets better before I have to jump in. I’m not an early adopter for that sort of thing - even though Wayland is 16 years old at this point, but amazingly it’s still too green for my taste.

The reason why I posted this is because there’s nothing that prevents you from using any old screensaver / screenlocker out there in KDE. As I said, I use the Cinnamon screen saver in i3, which is not the Cinnamon environment.

That’s the beauty of Linux: you can mix and match things to your heart’s content.

I use the Cinnamon screen saver with i3wm. It’s just a Python script, it’s reasonably light in resources, it looks smart enough and it comes with a nice command to remote-control it if you need to start the screen saver, lock or unlock it programmatically.

I’m not sure it works in Wayland though. I only use Xorg. I suppose it should since Cinnamon works in Wayland too now.

Define normal…

If you go by the definition of being the most common thing, the current surveillance capitalist dystopia is literally the new normal.

What you mean is that you feel it shouldn’t be normal. And you’re right. But sadly, it is now undeniably the norm.

The TOR network itself is safe - at least assuming the TLAs don’t control at least half of the nodes, which is far from impossible. But let’s assume…

The weak point comes from the browser: that’s how the fuzz deanonymizes users. The only safe browser to use on TOR is the TOR browser, and that’s the problem: it disables so many unsafe functionalities that it’s essentially unusable on a lot of websites. So people use regular browsers over TOR, the browser leaks identifying data and that’s how they get caught.

Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:

Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.

The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.

I shit you not. This used to be a thing.

Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.

If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.

Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.

As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we’ve hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.

To evade taxes of course.

Have you ever asked yourself how it’s possible that ALL the fucking ultra-rich almost without exception do philanthropy?

It doesn’t make sense: most of those millionaires and billionaires are psychopaths who essentially don’t give a shit about their fellow man, acquired their wealth by exploiting and shafting others for the most part, and don’t give a shit about how that makes them look: why on Earth would any of them do philanthropy, let alone all of them?

It only starts to make sense when you understand philanthropy is yet another tax loophole.

I would suggest we give him the 3,000 acres of Lana’i he doesn’t own, so the entire island belongs to him, then strand him there forever.

I have been hating this man’s guts since the mid 90’s and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.

But Larry Ellison? Hell no. He never changes. he’s just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.

Runbox, a privacy-focused email provider out of Norway. Our family has been using it for many years with zero issues. The prices are very decent.

I would cancel and tell the restaurant why.

Businesses need to know why they lose customers, because if enough of them report the same reason, they might do something about it.

Sure it is. There’s a button labeled “Manage exceptions” that does exactly that.

It’s not the only thing that leaks timezone data, and the fix is identical: have the machine pretend you’re in UTC.

For example: if you enable Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) in Librewolf, it will lie to websites and pretend your timezone is UTC - because of course timezone is one of the factors used to fingerprint you - and all the sites you visit that show you your local time, or depend on your local time for something or other, will show you the wrong time. And that’s how you know it works 🙂

There is something I don’t understand with people who rant about Reddit: if you hate it so much, why do you stay there?

I had a Reddit account myself. I wasted it and moved on. I certainly don’t torture myself with it anymore: the communities here on Lemmy are smaller but they’re a lot nicer to be a part of, so it’s a no-brainer.