y helo thar?
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Social media corporations brought the mainstream to the internet in the worst possible way
Eloquently said.
A decent chunk of local businesses don’t have a web presence besides Meta products. Meta would love to be “the internet”, they had a project in early 2010’s to give free “internet” in developing countries. The catch, the internet received was restricted to Facebook. It was called out by net neutrality advocates as being very anticompetitive and India rejected the project in 2016. Even a decade ago the zucc had been using underhanded tactics to put as many eyes on his propaganda machines.
Why should some jackass amass as much wealth as a nation state by siphoning pennies from every other interaction on the planet?
Link to BBC article about India rejecting free internet below.
India blocks Zuckerberg’s free net app Published
- 8 February 2016
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35522899
… launched in 2013 as Internet.org and was offered in 36 countries - had brought more than 19 million people online …
No hablas Espangol
31·5 days agoThat’s fair, everyone has different objectives with their OpSec. But it’s a good reminder for those who might click the link that if they consider trackers bad they can opt out. The first thing in deciding if you care is understanding what’s in your risk profile. If you’ve saved your password for Lemmy to Chrome then yes, Google likely knows.
Even without direct trackers linking accounts there’s browser fingerprinting and other such nonsense to get a good idea who’s who. Just food for thought, not just for you, but for anyone else who stumbles upon this post.
“The best time to join the fediverse is 10 years ago, second best time is today.”
Wayne Gretzky- Michael Scott
Pretty good!
One small suggestion though. Remember to remove everything after the “?” when sharing links to YouTube or other platforms. The “is” (sometimes “si”, sometimes something else) is a server side tracker. When you generated that link on YT, it saved the random letters behind ‘is=‘ to a table in a database associated with your account. Now anyone you share that link with, who clicks on it will be linked to your profile behind the scenes in the data machine of Google.
Additionally, when Google is scraping Lemmy or FB or anywhere else you drop that link it can be loosely related to your YT account. So in theory if no one else shared your link with the sharing code, it’s a strong signal to Google that werecat@lemmy.world is the same as the account that generated the tracking code.
Hopefully that makes sense, it’s something I try and spread far and wide because it’s not well known.
For others looking for a link without the tracker, it’s here for your convenience https://youtu.be/DlTNN0gvkLM
3·5 days agoYea my guy is good, I take it there when I need work done on a lift. There was power issues a few weeks back so me and a buddy replaced the spark plugs(230km and prob factory plugs 😬) but no dice. So I took it to my mechanic to diagnose properly since there were no codes. Turned out it needed both catalytic converters as they were pretty clogged. He got me sorted quickly, but we got the parts from US and with the nonsense down there it was stuck at customs for like 4 days.
“On the one hand this offers practical benefits, but on the other hand these systems collect a great deal of data about occupants, the vehicle itself, and about objects and people in the vicinity. Various parties, including state actors, can gain access to this data,” it added.
Practical benefit? Idk, I like driving so the nanny systems are bogus. I’ll keep my ‘08 G37S till it doesn’t make sense and then move to maybe 2010 GTI because it’s honestly a more fun car. The touchscreen sucks in the 2010, but still very few nanny systems in this vintage of car.
I tried visiting old.reddit.com yesterday and it was a redirect to a login page that appeared to be the modern ui. So I guess PC browsing is off the table, Reddit’s modern ui is trash.
A nearby town (in Canada) has some issues with an encampment of tenters on the city’s land. The city want to evict them to make a new transit hub and have enacted bylaws trying to make it illegal to rent. They’ve spend outrageous sums on police and lawyers trying to kick them out. It went to court and a judge ruled that it violated Canadian charter of rights to be evicted without anywhere to go. So the city spent like $1.7 million on bs and still needs to provide alternative site or housing.
Aha! So they’re small enough to fit into the tubes to block your internet traffic! Ingenious!
This sounds great and if it’s able to be validated even better!
I’m a software dev and historically tough problems took hours to days to solve. Sometimes you’d get lucky and find someone with the same issue in StackOverFlow and just “borrow” the code and adapt it to your use case. There is internal debate on doing things easy and fast, à la AI, or getting a dopamine rush from solving hard problems. I like solving hard problems but I also enjoy deploying and setting up apps on servers and playing with code and infrastructure so code isn’t the only way to solve problems. One day I might start a project where AI is the the dev, other times I want to roll up my sleeves and start typing my own code. So long story short,I haven’t figured out my stance with AI 100% myself.
In my full time job, it’s a no brainer as I have multiple projects and lets me deliver faster and there’s a push from the top to use AI. In my personal dev experience I use local LLM with an open source VS Code plugin and have built full apps just to understand capabilities. I found out after using local models for a few months with a plugin that it basically doesn’t care if you’re signed in they’re siphoning chats locally to their servers. So I forked the repo with the source being in GitHub and had AI iterate over it for a day where it removed all the telemetry code. Got the vsix build for vs code, uninstalled the one from the marketplace and loaded my own build. It runs faster than before and gives me a piece of mind my data remains local. So AI good at doing grunt work like this, I don’t think I’d get much satisfaction of reading 100s of thousands of lines trying to identify all the different ways it was phoning home.
The flip side is I’ve been developing a game on and off for a few years. I’ve handcoded everything and had a pretty dumb bug that I couldn’t figure out with the networking. I don’t want it to be AI and want it as a showcase for my own abilities. I wrote a queue for the game to hold networking events, and everything worked fine when running 3 or 4 instances on my local machine which stayed in sync basically because I could only interact with one instance at a time. So it seemed fine. I was using an array to use FIFO processing, but accidentally had a used pop_back instead of pop_front in the code. When I tried multiplayer with some fam and friends it epically failed as each client was woefully different. I read, re-read and tried to figure out what was wrong for days. Sometime you get blinded by looking at the code too much, and it was just that one spot I couldn’t see. After much mulling about I decided to use Qwen to take a look at the file, sure enough within seconds it found the bug 🤦♂️.
So I’m not sure this story has a point, but hopefully the reader can gleam some insights to what a greybeard thinks about AI. It’s a powerful tool and has its uses. I see many people shut down and immediately lambast the poster (perhaps rightfully so) and froth at the mouth at even and eye batting something might be AI. It’s as if the reader sees AI is the beginning of the end of civilization. I mean I get that, but Pandora’s box has been open and unfortunately unless we get a Carrington event knocking out all electronic devices on the planet, it’s here to stay. We need to understand the people that use it and their intentions more than the output (though closed/open source software is another topic of discussion). I mean AI writes somethings better than me, other times it’s horrendous and goes down rabbit holes that make no sense.
I understand AI is disruptive and there are many reasons for concern with security and reliability of AI generated slop code. I think any Lemmy client should be open source so folks can review the code and understand what they’re installing on their phone and fork it if needed. Disclosure of AI is paramount so each person can make their own informed consent with what software to engage with. Ultimately, newer generations won’t know anything different and AI designed apps will be as ubiquitous as anything else. I’m sure there will still be pockets of folks doing things they like, such as coding the human way, but the draw to AI is an interesting one and for myself I’ve not reached consensus. Maybe when I do, I’ll leave the field of software development as it’s an entirely different game today then it was a few years ago.
Disclosure: no AI used for this post, just some dude trying typing on his phone.
When you onboard onto Reddit it asks interests and points users to subreddits. I don’t think anything like that exists on Lemmy, but could be a good thing for the less tech inclined.