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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • The idea is that generative AI will enable Samsung products to get a better understanding of how consumers use the products – for example, an oven recognizing what is being cooked in it or a fridge recognizing what ingredients are inside. This could allow appliances to understand users’ needs and respond accordingly.

    “Understand users’ needs” being a euphemism for “spy on users’ habits and sell that info to advertisers.”

    We’ve gone full circle: from having a manual for your new appliance, to having a LLM confidently make up some incorrect info about how to use your new appliance.


  • The paper states that they studied the HTML form element interactions but “not the keystrokes or content.”

    There’s a big difference. Both are more invasive than we would like, but grabbing everything you type while in the app’s browser is much worse than measuring a true or false “did this person submit their comment or did they give up and leave it unsubmitted.”

    Tiktok is getting the content of the text, which could be sensitive info, and it grabs from every site you visit, not just the social platform itself.

    But I think the main issue is using the data for allegedly targeting of protestors and Chinese political opponents, more than the depth of the data collection itself.



  • When people claim that leaks “get people killed,” they’re referring to when undercover agents are identified while they’re in the field. The only secrets exposed in these leaks are the computer hacking techniques used by the US to spy remotely through compromised devices.

    The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.

    You could maybe say that closing off those surveillance channels prevented the CIA from learning about some attack, but that’s really tenuous. It also assumes that the CIA isn’t constantly developing new zero-day exploits so that they can continue to spy on just about everyone on the planet.



  • Man I had to rephrase this a dozen times and I still don’t have a good way to communicate what I’m trying to say.

    The goal of this kind of callout is to make vegetarians, people who already value animal welfare, aware that they may still be contributing towards animal cruelty. For example, I was a vegetarian for years and then got rocked by the realization that, “oh wait, vegans aren’t just crazies that I can blow off, it was me who was ignorant the whole time.”

    So I anecdotally assume that a huge percentage of vegans are vegetarians who went from thinking “vegetarians and vegans are basically the same, besides vegans taking the idea too far” to “oh wait there’s a huge important difference between the two.” On vegan spaces, people often joke that “bullying worked on me lol” because the gentle approaches are easily ignored, but the really blunt “your actions don’t align with your stated ethics” is really difficult to brush off.