wizardbeard

Best part is when system level prompts leak and they're at least 50% this.

It astounds me that the controls for these systems largely amount to just the same interface they give the end users, but just inserted before we get to interact with it. What a clown show.

This company has illegally installed their cameras in more than one town, then tried to sell the local police force on them.

They have lawyers on staff that they use to coach local politicians on how to hold the votes to establish contracts with them in ways that aren't technically illegal, but ensure that no community opposition has a way to have their voices heard.

You can find a lot of these sprts of stories by searching online. In local subreddits, ones dedicated to talking about flock, and local news.

Benn Jordan has a good 40 minute video giving an overview of these systems, how they work, what they track, and why they are a problem. He highlights some cases where families were held at gunpoint by police due to failures of these systems. He also experiments with defeating the AI that reads plates.

Louis Rossman is currently leading a campaign against their installation where he lives in Austin, Texas right now. Has a number of videos on it.

Overview before the Austin City Council vote: https://youtu.be/4RM09nKczVs

Call for people to show up at the Austin City Council session to discuss the potential contract with Flock, and showing how difficult it is to find this sort of stuff and be involved with your local government: https://youtu.be/g4vL1ERdZ9Y

Call to action 2: https://youtu.be/hDOmYqlwxD4

Austin City Council reschedules the vote (in a questionably illegal fashion) with less than 24 hours notice when they realize they kicked the hornet's nest: https://youtu.be/iscDYp6dtl8

Minor followup during the wait for the revised time, at two of the three parks with 90% of reported car break ins these cameras are meant to deter: https://youtu.be/2QbtDWrlPpc

No way that holds up when challenged. Gacha games alone prove existing work.

Never was going to stop just at porn.

Also, this is yet more fingers on the scale to favor large sites that can implement these kinds of content controls while smaller sites like lemmy instances get effectively shut out.

Worth noting that the Internet in Cyberpunk was, and is, closer to the old arpa/darpanet of interconnected individual networks rather than the world wide web we have today.

Some poor souls who arguably have their hearts in the right place definitely don't have their heads screwed on right, and are trying to do hunger strikes outside Google's AI offices and Anthropic's offices.

https://programming.dev/post/37056928 contains links to a few posts on X by the folks doing it.

Imagine being so worried about AGI that you thought it was worth starving yourself over.

Now imagine feeling that strongly about it and not stopping to ask why none of the ideologues who originally sounded the alarm bells about it have tried anything even remotely as drastic.

On top of all that, imagine being this worried about what Anthropic and Google are doing in the research of AI, hopefully being aware of Google's military contracts, and somehow thinking they give a singular shit if you kill yourself over this.

And... where's the people outside fucking OpenAI? Bets on this being some corporate shadowplay shit?

Climbing down from the trees was the begining of the end.

Look man, I get it. The world is heading to hell in a hand basket, and in a lot of ways accelerating towards it.

But there's a difference between awareness and... I guess feeling the "doom" of all of it constantly. Existing with that weight constantly pushing down on you. At least part of that is a choice.

Letting the weight of all of this impact you constantly is not a virtue. Do what you can to push back the oncoming waves where you can. Don't beat yourself up for not being able to hold back everything. And enjoy the joy and beauty where you can find them.

Living your life bent out of shape about things you can't do anything about is just wasting what little time you have, and wasting time while things are comparatively better than they're likely to be later.

And I get the need to speak out about all of it. But it doesn't help. What helps is getting involved with stuff locally, being active in local politics (to a degree, the rot and shitty lying politicians exist on local scales too). Doing what you can. Trying to discard the worry and upset about what you can't. Try to influence those close to you to do the same.

Slap a fur shader on it and ship it!

They can't leave, they can't opt-out.

If you're going to be this pessimistic about simply existing as a human being, it's worth noting that this is absolutely false. There are plenty of ways to opt-out permanently, and some of them are even peaceful.

Less darkly, there are communes and mutual aid communities and the like. Some even arguably self-sufficient.

Beyond that, if you truly feel existence is that fucking bleak, do you really think it helps to spread this shit to people who might otherwise be happily ignorant to it? Or are you content just making the collective experience of existence worse by putting this out into the world? Explicitly desiring to bring others down with you into the pit because you haven't grown enough to find life worth living and enjoying anyway.

Seems silly that the modification to enable logging isn't something you can set with a preprocessor flag (might have the terminology wrong), but it's probably that way for speed purposes.

The abuse potential would be that I think it opens the door to more easily create convincing doctored screenshots of comments and interactions. It's technically possible already, but I don't think we've really seen it on lemmy yet. There's ways around that, like formatting replaced text differently or marking those comments with a clear icon to indicate a regex replacement was used on them, but I still don't particularly like the idea.

I'm thinking that it would also make it easy for people to have confusing interactions, if somehow a regex ends up changing the meaning of a statement or something, and the user forgets they have it set up. I guess the "big icon indicating regex was applied" idea would work there too though. Maybe the icon could even be a button to toggle it on/off per comment?

The common use case I see for regex features on social media apps and addons is for hiding entire comments that match one of your patterns, and I generally think that's the best choice for implementation.

That said, with a clear indicator it had been applied it probably wouldn't be awful.