Nobody that understands that is going on there is going to use a website to compress a file, … right?

Very well written.

Ok guys, hear me out.

I need you to buy these cameras and put them on your face.

We will record your video for you and keep it safe for you and never give your data to anybody and we’ll do all of this for free.

We’ll also give you all of the software and setup all of the servers for you. Don’t you worry your silly head about needing to learn anything about how to use technology, just give us your life-long dependence as we’ll take care of everything. Also, AI.*

Also, you will help save puppies and children and you are on the side of puppies and children, right? This is a great deal! You can stop reading here, just click the button to agree… for the puppies.

*

It bugs me also.

My thinking is that the part of Google that I think is bad is their advertising and algorithmic recommendation systems which are built on private data that I no longer wish to divulge.

The Pixel is made by a company that used to be called HTC before they were consumed by Alphabet. That company produced good hardware that was smartly designed and innovative. That legacy continues with the device that Google has sells as the Pixel.

There are a few things about the phone that Alphabet has tainted, such as the inability to use NFC payments because hardware running GrapheneOS isn’t allowed into their secure hardware attestation chain. Not for any real technical reason, only because it allows Alphabet to disincentivize people away from a competitor by abusing their many monopoly powers.

GrapheneOS takes advantage of the excellently designed HTC hardware to create an operating system that is designed from the ground up to be secure. It then leverages the complete control over your hardware to put Alphabet’s other software inside of a little box where it constantly lies to the software in a way that lets your applications work without them actually being able to access everything on your device.

Yes, it is technically an Alphabet product and giving them money can feel distasteful. However, in this case by buying their hardware you can cut off their software, which is the actual thing that is negatively affecting everything.

I’d buy any other phone that fully supported GrapheneOS’s requirements for future devices.

Until then, I’m less worried about giving HTC money than I am about having a device that I know is under my control and that works to protect my privacy.

It’s Android with all of the Google removed where possible and sandboxed where not. You can choose to install the Google Play services and use it like any other Android phone or use it without any Google software.

Some things won’t work, namely things like some banking applications and NFC payments, because they require on hardware attestation that Google will not allow Graphene to pass. Essentially everything that isn’t banking/payment related works exactly like any other Android phone.

It is just a secure phone (though you can still install Facebook on it if you want) that is designed around mitigating attacks that could violate your privacy and security.

Very easy to install, you just buy a Pixel directly from Google (don’t buy from the carriers, they’ll be locked). Enable OEM Unlocking in the Developer menu and then plug it into USB and you can install it directly from the Graphene site via WebUSB. It takes about 5-10 minutes, then your phone will reboot (It’ll give you a scary looking screen about not running a Google OS that you’ll see every time it reboots but it’s just informational, it doesn’t affect anything and the system will boot into GrapheneOS in a second or two).

The more complete instructions and WebUSB install process:

https://grapheneos.org/install/

AI products are getting to ‘New Crytocurrency’ levels of scam.

There’s plenty of idiots who don’t understand the technology and have too much money, so this promises to be a lucrative line of scamming for a while. (I’m sure Trump is working on consumer protection regulations as we speak /s)

The only way we are going to see any meaningful regulations on social media companies is if EU countries impose them.

It won’t come from the US, they own the politicians and media so regulation would be instantly made unpopular via the propaganda channels that they control.

For when you want to livestream your failures directly to the terminal

But may, just maybe, don’t assume everyone is a fucking moron or has no idea.

Well, OP didn’t say they used Arch, btw so it’s safe to assume.

(I hate that this needs a /s)

it’s really good at the mind-numbing work of throwing out noise and junk from broadcast satellites and known radio sources.

That’s the key when you’re looking at applications for machine learning. If you can find a task that’s simple but hard to scale because it requires a human expert then it is very likely that a trained neural network can do ‘good enough’ work at 1,000x the speed.

The results won’t be perfect but, then again, they wouldn’t be perfect even if you assigned the project to undergraduates with two decades of training. You still need an expert human supervisor who’s validating the results and tweaking the system.

In these limited cases, machine learning tools are pretty amazing and they give us capabilities that simply were not available to the average person 5 years ago. I’m not on the AI hype train in terms of the current capitalist casino bubble (chatbots and image generators are toys, not an industry), but from an academic point of view these tools are astonishingly powerful in the right context.

Oh don’t read this as me defending Brave, I don’t think that’s a good browser to use.

I just mean that using deceptive means to promote a product (including botted comments and other shady tactics) is standard practice by now for any company trying to sell a product.

I can’t speak to any of Brave’s qualities because I don’t use it and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. The fact that they’re using marketing tactics like this kind of goes against the good guy persona that they’re trying to present and that’s enough to turn me off of their products.

My idea would be a completely peer to peer system with the possibility of allowing your data to be cached to servers (so your phone isn’t serving a viral video to 10,000,000 viewers, for example) that you choose/own/rent.

Even instances are vulnerable, probably moreso in some areas. For example, if someone bribed the owner of this instance to allow for them to insert malware payloads into the site’s javascript it would be much harder to detect than if Facebook did the same (less eyes on the problem).

It does save us from The Algorithm and the resulting propaganda, so it’s a positive step imo… but you’re right that it needs improvement.

This system wouldn’t a simple ‘put image into a multimodal LLM and get an answer’ like using ChatGPT.

It’d do things like image segmentation and classification, so all of the parts of the image are labeled and then specialized networks would take the output and do further processing. For example, if the segmentation process discovered a plant and a rock then those images would be sent to networks trained on plant or rock identification and their output would be inserted in to the image’s metadata.

Once they’ve identified all of the elements of the photos there are other tools that don’t rely on AI which can do things like take 3D maps of an suspected area and take virtual pictures from every angle until the image of the horizon matches the image in the pictures.

If you watch videos from Ukraine, you’ll see that the horizon line is always obscured or even blurred out because it’s possible to make really accurate predictions if you can both see a horizon in an image and have up to date 3D scans of an area.

The research paper that you’re talking about was focused on trying to learn how AI generate output from any given input. We understand the process that results in a trained model but we don’t really know how their internal representational space operates.

In that research they discovered, as you have said, that the model learned to identify real places due to watermarks (or artifacts of watermark removal) and not through any information in the actual image. That’s certainly a problem with training AIs, but there are validation steps (based on that research and research like it) which mitigate these problems.

I think that it’s awesome and congrats to whatever group put that together.

This is an entirely predictable outcome, the only reason that AI robotics have taken so long to catch up to LLMs and image generators is because there isn’t an Internet full of thousands of TBs of text and images to train on.

It takes time to develop the training sets for robots and the easiest data to generate would be human generated so humanoid robots are the inevitable outcome of the data required to train these networks.

Phone -> Wireguard -> Offshore VPS -> Pi-hole -> over 9,000 proxies -> Mullvad VPN -> Facebook App installed through the Google play store on my Verizon smartphone.

Is this secure? Should I use more Pi-Holes?

I would be very surprised if Brave did not at least at some point sponsor content to position itself as privacy oriented.

Yeah, this is standard SEO that all companies have been doing since people figured out how to game Google’s PageRank algorithm.

The only thing new is the AI who’s search strategy is ‘summarize the top n results’

It seems to me that these are not real problem, other countries solved them dozens of years ago, it is just that you people (assuming you are from US) don’t want to solve them.

I’m aware of the problems and I donate a large portion of my time towards working to fix these issues which were put into place long before I was born. These systems exist as they do for a lot of reasons, many of which are bad. Fixing them will take time and political willpower which, prior to ID being weaponized as a means of cutting off voters, did not exist in the US.

It isn’t as simple as printing out a QR code or loading personal documents onto an ISO 14443-compliant smartcard. It will require infrastructure, staffing and public education. This isn’t something that can be done by election day (in November '26).

They would be a problem for the exact same reasons if they were proposed by Biden. But I still belive that a selection of who can vote done as you suggest is impraticable, you have no way of knowing who vote what before. A massive refusal to allow a certain population to vote would be noted in the end.

It’s bad idea no matter who is in charge. All of our voting systems are open to observers and there are multiple observers at all critical points of voting.

Circumventing all of those checks by having a single system who can simply deny a person the ability to vote with no recourse is a bad idea, it would have been a bad idea under Biden and it is a bad idea now.

A massive refusal to allow a certain population to vote would be noted in the end.

It doesn’t need to be massive to affect outcomes. A few thousand votes can swing close elections.

Even if someone notices something strange. Do you imagine that Donald Trump would allow for the Department of Homeland Security to investigate the Department of Homeland Security’s handling of claimed election interference? Would the newly elected Republican Congress vote to impeach him if he didn’t?

If someone notices vote interference, should they call Donald Trump’s FBI, Donald Trump’s DHS or Donald Trump’s CIA? How do you imagine that conversation would go once it made it to the attention of Pattel, Noem or Gabbard?

Oh yeah, the federated social media software isn’t perfect, I agree.

However, by leaving these giant advertising companies and data silos who side-hustle as a ad-ridden social media sites, we blunt that power which is being used to pour propaganda and misinformation into democratic systems around the world at the whim of a few individuals.

I’ll take some lost data, deleted instances and migration difficulties in exchange.

In addition, any organization that’s using this at scale will also have human experts to handle the edge cases and to validate the system’s findings.

We can’t copy the human expert without years of training, but copying a program/computer system is only a few terminal commands. The ability to do this kind of thing at scale is entirely new.