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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I’ve gone through the list a bit and out of the most popular ones that spied on you, most were adblocks, coupon finders or AI Chatbots.

    Some notable extensions:

    • Stylish. A theming extension, I used to use this back in the day!
    • Smarty. Some sort of coupon code thing like Honey
    • Video Ad Blocker Plus for YouTube™
    • Video Downloader PLUS
    • Karma - Another coupon thing
    • Audio editor online Audacity. Some sort of web-based Audacity clone?
    • GIMP online - Same sort of thing as above with GIMP
    • Ground News Bias Checker - To be fair it probably makes sense this one sends the URL you are visiting, as it’s purpose is to look up the bias of the publication you are looking at.

    Worth a read regardless.



  • The point is that I’ve seen several comments on other posts about this vulnerability, and in the body of this one, saying that Notepad is bloated and terrible now.

    I’m offering a counterpoint that this is not necessarily bloat. It’s debatable that this is the right tool to have this feature, but it can be a useful feature.

    I’m fine with Markdown support, but I wish MS got the message about Copilot being unwanted. Not sure if they’ve added it to Notepad or not at this stage, but given all the places they’ve crammed it into I wouldn’t be surprised.





  • Armand1@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlEvery time
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    14 days ago

    Of course. It’s not like I want this. I was out there messaging my MP when the UK law had just been pushed through and filling out the petitions. It didn’t help though.

    You can send a message to Discord by leaving, but they won’t revert it for places where it’s legally required.


  • Armand1@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlEvery time
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    14 days ago

    I will say that this has been in the works for a little bit now and it’s more related to the UK’s new laws. We’ve had this age verification stuff on Discord for some months now.

    As for why it’s being rolled out globally, not sure. The UK is not the only country / state starting to ask for ages verification on “social media” so maybe they thought it would be easier to use the same approach everywhere? Seems like a bad idea though as everywhere it’s implemented it’s unpopular.

    My experience with it so far has been that… well… It hasn’t affected me at all. Mostly because I only use friends servers and activism servers. Those aren’t age restricted, so you never hit this check.

    As far as age verification law compliance / implementation goes, this is not the worst one. That data leak early on was a clown show though.




  • Hmmm…

    As the article correctly states, machine learning (“AI” is a misnomer that has stuck imo) has been used successfully for decades in medicine.

    Machine learning is inherently about spotting patterns and inferring from them. The problem, I think, is two-fold:

    1. There are more “AI” products than ever, not all companies build it in responsibly and it’s difficult for regulators to keep up with them.

    The gutting of these regulatory agencies by the current US administration does not help ofc, but many of them were already severely undermanned.

    1. As AI is normalised, some doctors will put too much trust in these systems.

    This isn’t helped by the fact that the makers of these products are likely to exaggerate the capabilities of their products. This may be reflected in the products themselves, where they may not properly communicate the degree of certainty of a diagnosis / conclusion (e.g. “30% certainty this lesion is cancerous”)


  • Well, I’d summarise the X-Files as (no spoilers):

    • Mulder has his sister (purportedly) kidnapped by aliens as a child.
    • As a result, Mulder is an occult nut who wants to spend all his time investigating supernatural stuff.
    • For some reason the FBI lets him spend all his time doing that. (Kind of nepotism maybe?)
    • They send Scully to go watch him, but she does a terrible job of that.
    • Every episode there’s a different monster or paranormal thing. Mulder says something like “It’s Bigfoot”, Scully says “That’s silly, Bigfoot isn’t real”, then they see it is Bigfoot but Scully tries to rationalise it away.
    • At some point Mulder gets tangled up in government conspiracies.
    • He makes it his side job to try and crack those conspiracies, but continues his monster-of-the-week formula of normal paranormal investigations for the most part.
    • As time goes on, there’s more and more conspiracy unwinding stuff, but they never fire him or kill him because one of the secret cabal members has a soft spot for him.

    More stuff happens in the later seasons, but I’ll leave it out for spoilers.

    TLDR; Mulder is not anti-government / FBI, he’s anti-secrecy and anti-conspiracy. He’s an occult nut who just wants to engage in his hobbies on the government dime.