It's not wrong in the direction but it goes a bit too far. Text-only really limits the capabilities. The difference with the modern web is that it is not hyperlinked web pages between web sites but instead javascript application content silos. HTTP/1.1+HTML 5 is just fine, images and video are just fine. Javascript is not fine. That's where we should draw the line.
And without javascript most of the security/privacy issues that make domains require HTTPS-only to prevent MITM attacks simply disappear. When you aren't automatically executing random programs that random places send you the web can be a lot more fun, silly, and with a lot less fragile continuing maintainence required.
This particular set of incoherent sentence fragments in the article don't really make the point the title implies. Or any point. But I'll reply to where it's coming from.
This is one of those "blind monks touching different parts of the elephant and arguing over what shape it is" things. Facist leaning corporations are basically the only interaction with machine learning that most people have these days. Like how corporate scams are the only interaction with cryptocurrency 99% people have. They're not wrong about their experiences. But they're also not talking about the technology. They're talking about the corporate users of that technology.
Just to be clear, this is the full and complete text of the article on that URL. It makes me wonder what others are responding to because this is just incoherent word spam:
>This “country-wide *book-keeping,* country-wide *accounting* of the rate of interest above the soviets. Before seizing power, the dangers “if the liberty of those letters seem to concern about history, about how little weight the costs outweigh the costs. Therefore, for a massive rebirth of the party in his belief that, for the political evolution.
>Was defeated.”* [Max Anger, “The Spartacist School of Falsification”, *Anarchy: A Graphic Guide*, Camden Press, London, 1974. *The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in France during the Russian Civil War did break out, to crush.
>“turn this into a higher infant mortality is 7 per cent of the social order.’” The interest rate is, in part, because if the SWP fail to highlight mass examples of what Trotskyists like Harman do when they had introduced a petition.
> They're not wrong about their experiences. But they're also not talking about the technology. They're talking about the corporate users of that technology.
i think that's the point they're trying to make: the users and purveyors of the technology are inextricable from the technology itself; and given who the purveyors are, we can safely/rightly assume that their profit motives (at best) or cultural motives (more sinister) will be at the forefront of their push to expand the uses of these technologies.
i don't think it's a particulary well-fleshed out point (as another commenter said, what do we actually do with this besides burn down datacenters?) but it's still worth making clear that we are allowed to be as cynical about this technology as the purveyors are about their target users.
I don't follow your logic. 99% of people only interact with cryptocurrency because of a scam but you think that we should be discussing the technology instead? Why? The technology itself seems to be much less important than the widespread fraud it enables... And even then, people were discussing the effect of the technology on the environment, and on energy and component prices... They were also discussing the actual underlying technology below cryptocurrencies - the blockchain, and how it is yet to find its killer app, even as of this day...
The comments there note there is no official Ubuntu MATE release for the first time since Ubuntu 15 (and before 14.04 gnome2 was an option). That's a shame but probably most people who chose MATE (or gnome2) no longer chose Ubuntu due to the conflicting ideologies inherent in the two. MATE users generally don't like change for change's sake.
not sure if this confirms the impression you have there... I wasn't like this until a couple of headless VPS'es (on Arm8) got through the upgrade from 18.x -> 20.x -> 22.x and then crashed out over -> 24.x for a still unknown reason. now I'm just afraid .. or I should say reluctant ..to repeat that whole fiasco.
There were some issues with how the menu icon manager handled the new security policy defaults. This means the editor will break, and the displayed menu may be missing any item that didn't follow the naming convention syntax. Its a lot of packages to bring into compliance, for that one silly feature the devs had to put in before it was ready...
Maybe they fixed it since the rc release, but there were some rough edges in Feb... the kernel USB support cooked the thumb drive partition structure.
In 22.04 to 24.04 the kernel Nvidia GPU driver EOL abandonment began... In 26.04 people will discover most EOL hardware support prior to RTX series will be difficult to bring up.
Probably wise to wait a few weeks for the bug reports to clear out a bit. =3
I asked it to draw the step by step folding and taping guide for making a tetrahedral hot air balloon envelope (tetroon) from a rectangular sheet and it failed completely.
Palantir is a more dangerous enemy of the USA (or any people of Earth) than, say, Iran.
There's no point in addressing their propaganda, but the idea that that a draft leads to everyone from every class of life having to be involved in war equally is so obviously untrue it's a joke.
The people of Hackers News aren't typical and usually have the latest and greatest when it comes to computer hardware and the latest software. Unlike everyone else on earth that doesn't care about such things and often runs old hardware and software and so encounter, and are blocked by, cloudflare's computational paywalls more often than a bleeding edge tech user would imagine.
Luckily almost all modern corporate tracking is done through javascript execution + cookies. The days of parsing actual webserver logs are over for the most part. After all, it's only the browsers that execute javascript code and provide profitable personal information about the human behind the browser that matter. People with JS off are not providing sellable information and therefore classified and treated as if they were bots.
Turning off JS by default and temp-whitelisting only mitigates most of this tracking.
The issue is, even with all the browser protections, you still create an account anywhere or buy something an input your name/email address/shipping address, your "hashed data" immediately gets sent to meta/google as a conversion with "this guy bought a cat toy", and you start getting ads for cat related stuff everywhere.
They don't even need to "track" you properly for this stuff to work and it seems there's no way to escape it.
I don't experience that though I have friends who use smartphones who describe it. So I think a lot of it is via javascript. I doubt every retailer, or even a significant fraction, has their backend sending that type of data to $megacorp. But maybe I'm just lucky or shop weird places or it's because I use a new email address @superkuh.com for every account sign up. Or maybe I'm just not seeing the targeted ads for my $superkuhprofile that do exist because I have almost all ads successfully blocked. Perfect is the enemy of good anyway, all mitigations help a bit. And blocking JS is a huge mitigation.
If those companies are using big SaaS companies for eCommerce and have not going "Don't Track" part of their admin panel to turn off tracking, a lot of those SaaS companies will just sell off the data.
So sure, cat toy small time retailer on Etsy won't but credit card processor or shipper might.
I think part of the issue is that these retailers are also customers of meta/google on the side of purchasing ads, and as a merchant you're highly encouraged to send as much data on your events as you can, or your conversion tracking can be "less accurate"and your campaigns are less efficient.
So it's less about "we're sending the data to $megacorp" and more about "I want the most bang for buck on my own campaigns" when the decision is made.
Using a different email certainly helps, though!
EDIT: highly encouraged by meta et. al! Whether this is a legitimate request to improve results or pure self-interest on the part of meta I don't know!
It really does. But also, having to do this points out a glaring flaw in the design of the fediverse websites. They're applications and not documents. They require executing complex code from unknown third parties just to show a bit of text and some multi-media. This isn't needed at all. And it wasn't like this till mastodon v3 when they broke it.
Despite requiring Javascript execution mastodon actually does have the post contents of a URL in the hidden meta-content HTML header on the page where it scolds you and blocks you for not executing their arbitrary code. All they'd have to do is put that same text in the HTML as actual <p> text. And it's not just mastodon instances, the other fediverse "applications' are just as silly in their intentional breaking of accessibility for no reason.
At least Xitter has Nitter proxies after they went full Javascript - which is also great since it allows accessing content that's often behind a registration wall.
I have yet to find a social network which is actually accessible. The Google thing (circles?) was never actually useable, it was the biggest horror show of all. m.facebook.com was basically the only website that was ever really accessible. All the other players, including the "free and morally superior" alternatives couldn't give two fucks about people with disabilities, which reflects nicely on the fact that they are actually not an alternative, they are a playground for misguided developers...
Fact is, if you are launching a social network which is not accessible from the get go, you are part of the problem. You have no moral high ground, you're just playing around and widening the digital divide, leaving people behind.
These kind of write-ups all have an implicit premise that is unstated: they're talking about corporate AI run by corporations. They're not actually talking about the technology. Corporate AI will never be ethical or safe because corporate persons have different motivations and profit incentives driving them than human persons do. And most of the time they're quite nasty when viewed through the lens of human ethics.
It reminds me of the parable of the blind monks each feeling a different part of the elephant and arguing about it's shape. They're each not wrong, but they're also only talking about a limited subset of the elephant (AI).
Cory Doctorow is much more eloquent in his explaination of this important distinction in his reverse centaur metaphor.
And without javascript most of the security/privacy issues that make domains require HTTPS-only to prevent MITM attacks simply disappear. When you aren't automatically executing random programs that random places send you the web can be a lot more fun, silly, and with a lot less fragile continuing maintainence required.
reply