Terrarium [none/use name]

“AI” is just pattern recognition and reproduction models. They routinely fail at basic tasks. It is like having an incompetent junior dev that you have to watch like a hawk because not only do they write bad code, they routinely steal it from copyrighted sources. It helps bad coders pretend to be good ones because their code follows a popular pattern but it is often the wrong pattern for solving the problem - a problem they didn’t actually think about because they thought “AI” would solve it.

The real business case for LLMs in tech is as a propaganda tool for disciplining labor. Tech labor is in demand and therefore expensive. Executives and managers would like to decrease those wages and “AI” provides a rhetorical means by which to do so, including justifying rounds of firings. Productivity will crash because they are literally just layoffs to make higher profits, not because tasks have been automated.

This aligns with the general expectation of a market crash, which has been brewing for years and is now being more or less intentionally created. The big companies are building up “war chests” so that they can scoop up companies that fail and increase their monopolies during the later bailout period.

All lizards want to be a snake. But only a select few are chosen for greatness.

The EU doesn’t know how to do anything else.

Security and privacy benefits from building threat models. It is good to understand how trackable you are on the internet and walking around with your phone.

Do you need to think about how trackable your phone is if you are driving to and from the grocery store? At most you are providing information that the interested parties already have (where you live, where you shop, and when you shop). If you ran into some trouble it could be useful to have not had a tracking device in your pocket, but otherwise little to worry about.

On the other hand if you are taking part in a sensitive action, then yes you need to leave your phone at home or turned off and in a Faraday bag. If it is particularly sensitive then you need to make sure everyone involved does that. Having a tracking device that shows you were at the location at that time is very bad for you and your compatriots. If you need to communicate on-site, use walkie talkies and speak in code. And plan your action around not having comms. This will make your action better planned out in the first place, which is also important for security.

A threat model makes all the difference.

Qihoo is just a typical tech company with a “security” focus. It having a VPN is like Norton having a VPN - like Norton VPN.

Using a shell company is likely just a way to avoid sanctions.

A Chinese app talking to Chinese servers is no more alarming than a Swedish app talking to Swedish servers or an American app talking to American servers. Imagine writing a breathless “report” about how searching the App Store phones home to the United States. You know, to search for and download apps.

So basically the Tech Transparency Project is just doing some nationalist orientalism.

From their website: “TTP is a research initiative of Campaign for Accountability (CfA), a 501©(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog organization that uses research, litigation, and aggressive communications to expose misconduct and malfeasance in public life.”

Their director: “Katie Paul, TTP’s Director, specializes in tracking criminal activity on online platforms such as Facebook. She also serves as co-director of the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research (ATHAR) Project and a founding member of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online (ACCO).”

They are somewhat opaque about their funding. They claim to not accept corporate funding but every funder they list is just a middleman NGO for corporate/billionaire funding.

So, a typical NGO run by a cop.

Tech companies are generally terrible and tied to financialized nonsense, but there is nothing out of the ordinary here. The outrage is premised entirely on xenophobia.

The “political” mods of lemmy.world always call inconvenient facts, “misinformation”. They’re trying their best to reproduce the liberal fact-checker culture of around a decade ago where there were liberal nannies evaluating posts for left wing thought and helping to maintain their walled garden of mainstream propaganda. There still are such nannies, of course, but they’re more openly reactionary now. This kind of person thinks that if Snoped wrote an article about it, that’s all there is to it.

Selectively incurious and intellectually lazy, the real impetus behind this form of liberalism is a simple contradiction: their entire political philosophy is predicated on them being a good and correct and moral person with good and correct and moral views, totally unassailable, but their beliefs are incoherent and often disagree with reality and they spend very little time actually learning and understanding the topics they weigh in on. And they’re used to contrasting themselves with more openly reactionary people that are even less likely to be in alignment with reality, which really makes them feel good and correct and moral. So when presented with left thought, i.e. fsr more coherent and informed opinions, they have a little crisis in their identity and lash out, looking for some way to shore up the opinion they hold after all of five minutes of research. Failing that they just act like a big baby.