The platform owners don’t consider engagement to me be participation in meaningful discourse. Engagement to them just means staying on the platform while seeing ads.

If bots keep people doing that those platforms will keep letting them in.

They were still making MiniDiscs and MiniDV tapes? That seems more of a surprise than the Blu-ray discontinuation.

The N-Gage had a bunch of bizarre design decisions.

The game cartridge slot was behind the battery - swapping games required disassembling the phone.

The revised QD version fixed a lot of the mistakes but it was too little too late by then.

If there is going be insistence on platforms being open there shouldn’t be these distinctions.

All of these devices are capable of general purpose computing at a hardware level, phones, tablets, PCs, headsets are now very similar and generalised in that regard. I don’t see why a phone platform should be forced to be open while a games console gets to remain closed, when there is now only a hair’s breadth separating an Xbox from a Windows PC.

Take the AI crap out and give it an open display API and it would be a fun desk toy.

A rotating phone screen in a cylinder creating a hologram-like effect to display notifications/metrics/whatever else.

So the plaintiff’s are claiming Siri was recording them without consent, and that Apple were sharing those recordings with third parties including advertisers.

Apple claims they were sometimes wrongly keeping recordings for internal quality control/analytics but hasn’t admitted to sharing them, and have agreed to the $95m settlement.

The sharing with third parties is the most egregious part here, but it doesn’t seem to be addressed any further.

For TVs now, by buying used. Help yourself and the environment by buying an unwanted “dumb” TV that’s free of this sort of crap.

Or if budget allows, look at industrial displays.

Supply answers demand, is we stop buying junk smart stuff and take our money elsewhere the market will eventually follow.

A while ago a company patented a method using eye tracking to monitor whether TV watchers were paying attention to ads.

It can always get worse.

I honestly don’t know how they do it. Whenever I get handed someone else’s device without an adblocker I find it almost painful to try and use.

I don’t think Mozilla running a Mastodon server is losing focus. The ethos of Mozilla and the Fediverse have a lot of overlap, and Mozilla should desire to have a foot in it.

An official Mastodon server is also a useful platform for marketing and outreach. In contrast an organisation claiming to be all about privacy and open source retreating from a social media platform that embodies those is not a good look.

High energy bills and misinformation about energy saving seems to be causing some odd behaviour here in the UK.

I have relatives who go round turning off every device and appliance at night, despite the negligible power draw they have in standby. Another will only charge their phone at night during cheaper the electricity rate - but runs the tumble dryer during the day.

I also often hear stories about people fearing electronic devices will catch fire if left on standby over night. Which may well be a risk for charging a dodgy Chinese e-bike but probably not for a home router.

With RFC 1149, this would still work now.

According to the internet, he did it at university, eating nothing but mince, chicken, and mayonnaise for about 2 months. He did so to annoy other students in his classes who were vegan or vegetarian.

I’ve actually heard a few stories of uni students getting scurvy, although they were because they either didn’t know how to cook or couldn’t afford food.

The P and D symbol is the DisplayPort logo. I’m not sure when it was first used, but the DisplayPort standard itself is quite a bit older than USB Power Delivery.

It’s still confusing though regardless of which can lay the best claim to the letters P and D. I would have suggested Power Delivery could use some sort of lightning bolt symbol, but then I realised that would probably conflict with Thunderbolt, which also uses USB-C.

It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.

Creating a cost barrier to participation is possibly one of the better ways to deter bot activity.

Charging money to register or even post on a platform is one method. There are administrative and ethical challenges to overcome though, especially for non-commercial platforms like Lemmy.

CAPTCHA systems are another, which costs human labour to solve a puzzle before gaining access.

There had been some attempts to use proof of work based systems to combat email spam in the past, which puts a computing resource cost in place. Crypto might have poisoned the well on that one though.

All of these are still vulnerable to state level actors though, who have large pools of financial, human, and machine resources to spend on manipulation.

Maybe instead the best way to protect communities from such attacks is just to remain small and insignificant enough to not attract attention in the first place.

One reason the letter exists in the first place is because the current leaders in AI would love to pull the ladder up behind them. That’s why they have fostered much of the doom mongering around the technology, which has lead to so many asking for a pause. A pause during which they can solidify their own positions and cut off competition by skewing AI regulation in their favour.

Some of the signatories of the letter are already openly calling for open source AI to be outright banned, because apparently only corporations like OpenAI can be trusted with it.

I agree that AI work should not have copyright protection. Even with human intervention it still collects data, without expressed permission, from numerous sources.

Generative AI models could be trained using only on public domain and royalty free images. Should the output of those be eligible for copyright, but not if they also had unlicensed training data?

It seems there two separate arguments being conflated in this debate. One is whether using copyrighted works as AI training data is fair use. The other is whether creative workers should be protected from displacement by AI.

A member of the UK Parliament recently resigned over sexual misconduct allegations, including groping. His name? Chris Pincher.

Agreed. the generative AI genie is out of the bottle, for better or worse, and there is no putting in back in. I understand a lot of the concerns people have around the technology, and I share a lot of them, but I don’t see what bans and boycotts on a political or cultural level are going to solve.

Even if some countries were to ban or heavily restrict AI tech, others will not. The tech is becoming if not already portable enough to be surreptitiously used even if prohibited. Technological shifts tend to be inevitable and unavoidable, even when it they are very disruptive. There was no stopping the industrial revolution, the automobile, or the internet, and if there is enough real utility in it the same can be said for AI.

Trying to stifle AI will only cause it to develop in the shadows, which I think will only lead to worse outcomes if people become ignorant to to the technologies real capabilities and applications.