Gregory's ServerThe reason so many firms push so hard to get you to use their phone apps rather than their websites is that the depth of invasive personal data they can gather via the apps is usually enormous in comparison.
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10 posts total
Niklaus Wirth, creator of PASCAL programming language and much more, dies at 89. Peace.
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@lauren I was quite taken with his Pascal successor, Modula-2, and was sorry that it didn’t get more traction in the dev community. I don't need AI to help me with my writing. And if I did, I'd stop writing. Period.  @lauren I can't wait for the obviously-AI-augmented writing style to emerge, a la T-Pain with autotune Sometimes being here on #Mastodon reminds of being on Usenet many, many years ago. This is simultaneously a blessing and a curse.
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 @lauren we always prefer genuinely grassroots culture, even with all the repetition, personally. yeah it can be exhausting but it has potential in ways that venues that give a more packaged experience do not. By blocking non-logged-in access to #Twitter posts, Musk in one fell swoop broke millions of URLs around the world pointing at and ultimately promoting his site. Impressive. Most impressive. In light of the ongoing changes at #Reddit and their CEO praising how Musk has handled #Twitter, IF you are a current regular user of Reddit, do you plan to: Anonymous poll
Poll
Keep using Reddit as you have been
2
1.5%
Significantly reduce your use of Reddit
39
28.9%
Attempt to eliminate all your use of Reddit
94
69.6%
Use Reddit even more
135 people voted. 0
0%
Voting ended 20 Jun 2023 at 18:35.
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 @lauren if AskHistorians and a handful of other heavily moderated, expert driven subreddits stay active, I'll keep using the site as a reader. If they go, I'm out entirely. I'm certainly done as a major contributor, which I was from 2010 until recently.   We shouldn't be worrying about AI wiping out humanity. That's a smokescreen. That's sci-fi. We need to worry about the *individuals* now and in the near future who can be hurt by the premature deployment of generative AI systems that spew wrong answers and lies, and then when asked for confirmation, lie about their own lies! And just popping up warnings to users is useless, because you know and I know that hardly anyone will read those warnings or pay any attention to them whatsoever.  The warnings are also cold comfort to the loved ones of the guy the vigilante gang beat to death because some generated content somewhere labelled him an unrepentant pedophile in their neighbourhood. I don't know what the solution is. Mandate that an indicator of its origin be prominently displayed within the generated text? How could that work?  @lauren we should worry even more about *individuals* now and in the near future who knowingly and cynically make and market these engines of deceit in order to profit from the chaos and confusion they will cause. If you need proof that #Twitter has become a self-replicating joke, just consider these two headlines from this past week: 1) Twitter to remove legacy blue checks from non-paying accounts starting 1 April [ I will feel honored when he zaps away mine. ] 2) Twitter to provide option for paying accounts to remove blue checks [ to avoid the embarrassment of being exposed as paying for Twitter ] You can't make this stuff up.
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 @lauren Always good to schedule major changes to features that combat impersonation for April 1st. From the frying pan into the fire: People pulling money out of banks today to buy cryptocurrency. |
@lauren From @pluralistic:
"An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not mandatory is forbidden."
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/
@lauren
I agree
If it will run on a website, I'll avoid installing an app and use it through the browser
The only few exceptions are mastodon, my bank and the core calender, mail etc apps that I've replaced with open source alternatives. All the google/pre installed crap got removed
Ideally, I'd prefer to have a dumb phone which supports signal and will sync contacts with nextcloud. Everything else is a distraction