deong @ deong @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I don’t think it’s especially disguised…

It's not like the Republican party was engaged in a large scale effort to cultivate disinformation from Russian trolls. The Russians were doing it on their own, and the GOP was just the beneficiary, playing up whatever random disinformation happened to pick up traction and occasionally reaching out to coordinate efforts.

And it wasn't "a few dozen Facebook ads" -- it was a pretty large amount of activity, including things like breaking into private systems and leaking information. But aside from that, you're basically making the argument that astroturfing doesn't work, and we know that's just not true. Having a million "ordinary citizens" extol the virtues of some position often just works better as a persuasive argument than having one or two celebrity endorsers, or at the very least it adds credibility. That's why people do it.

It’s going to be extremely hard to convince a court that the thing you’re making is both a parody and a legit competitor you believe users should switch to.

As you point out, parody has to be a comment on the thing you’re parodying. In the Hyundai example, the problem was that it was commenting on something else. The problem here is that it’s simply not a comment on anything. It’s a product you’re making to compete with the original.

That all depends on Apple's ability to run it effectively, and they have basically no demonstrated ability to do that.

App Review is an absolute joke. Listen to last week's Accidental Tech Podcast. One of the hosts is developing an IMDB competitor app, and he's been rejected three times as of that episode. One rejection was for playing copyrighted video without permission -- in an app that doesn't have any code that can play a video. One was for not having a link to his T&Cs in a field in the app store that can't render links. And the third was for displaying copyrighted media in his screenshots (maybe? no one really knows), and that media was the cover art for movie and TV shows. None of those even pass the sniff test. We all know that you're allowed to show the cover art for a movie in an app that has information about movies. We all know that's Fair Use, but beyond that, a third grader knows that literally everything in the world that presents information about movies does it. At the exact same time that all this is happening, Apple happily published some scammer's app called "Threads" and let it collect 300,000 people's information who thought they were downloading the actual Threads app from Meta.

It's always been this way. I personally wrote the original iPhone app for a large US retailer in 2008 -- the first year the App Store existed. App Review's only purpose then was to detect your use of private APIs, usually because that would let you build things Apple didn't want you to build. That's the only purpose it serves today, 15 years later. Everything else is random noise that just punishes you unpredictably for no reason. I had an update of that app rejected once for using our own company logo as the icon. They don't catch obvious scams. They never have. The people doing these reviews know nothing or are given so little time that the way to game their metrics is to just randomly reject sometimes without analysis. Unless they change something, it'll just be a thing that scammers fill out however they want with no consequence to them at all, and a random 5% of legitimate developers will waste a few weeks arguing over when it's applied to them with no logical basis in reality.

Adobe also has some legal experience and an IP lawyer or 80. And they have common sense on their side. You can't just say "parody" like a magic incantation. It's not like calling dibs on the front seat. It actually has to be a parody. I can't just release my own Guardians of the Galaxy 4 as a completely straight up movie with the same titles, characters, etc., and say it's a parody.

He has no shot. He has less than no shot. There's a better chance that his IP lawyer is disbarred than there is that he wins in this.

Yeah, that this is a name and logo that they even entertained for half a second is pretty strong evidence that they're not up to this challenge. This is like starting a law firm and calling it "Buttfuckers". No one is going to take you seriously, and you not seeing the problem means they shouldn't.

There's always a router, and there's always a DNS server. Normally, your device is asking to join a network, and something on that network assigns it an IP address, a DNS server, and a gateway router to use. That's true whether you're connecting to WiFi or a cellular network. The difference is just which device is assigning you those things. You can also override that on your side by specifying a static configuration that can break things, but I don't think that's your problem.

"Private DNS Mode" here is only referring to whether or not you want to encrypt the DNS lookup traffic. That's certainly not a bad idea, but it's a separate issue from whether or not you have a working DNS setup at all. From the screenshot below, it looks like you do have a working DNS configuration. To connect to a server, you type the server's name (e.g., mobile.pornhub.com), your browser sends a DNS request to your DNS server asking it to return the IP address of that server, and then it uses that IP address to ask the server to send it a web page. You're getting to the part where you've asked the server to send you a web page, but the server is refusing because your browser didn't make the request over HTTPS (i.e., using encryption).

I don't know why that is, but I'd try the steps outlined here.

I don't think you understand how a research organization works. This isn't three guys in a basement searching for child porn. It's a research institute at Stanford University. They'll have gotten funding to do the work by applying for federal grants, getting approval from multiple Institutional Review Boards who are charged with, among other things, making sure that the people involved in the research are appropriately taken care of. They'll be required to have counselors on board. However "legit" you think such an outfit might possibly be, multiply that by three.

This is their job. It is the same as if they worked for a law enforcement agency. When someone gets arrested for child porn, we don't also charge the police, prosecutors, and judges who might have to look at the material as part of prosecuting a case. I promise you Stanford isn't paying a team of professors and postdocs to just diddle themselves to kiddie porn all day.

So your advice to any organization seeking to minimize illegal activity is to willfully ignore any trace of it?

There’s no real distinction between the two. We don’t have a definition of AI or intelligence — never have. Inside the field, ML has some recognized connotations, but outside of specialist literature, they’re just marketing fluff.

I think there are probably some ways to cross over a bit, but really, LLMs aren't necessarily aimed at the kind of things we want a virtual assistant to do today. Siri falls down mostly on its ability to correctly do things quickly and reliably. Generating 5000 words of convincingly human sounding explanations isn't what I want from a thing I quickly trigger on my phone. What I want is very short or no reply accompanying the action I wanted to take. Call this person. Start navigation to an address. Turn on the lights. Play the version of a song I like from this specific live album. Some of those things are things Siri really sucks at today, and none of them are likely to get a lot better with an LLM in place. Maybe playing music benefits from a more robust understanding of the language of my query, but the rest of it are things where the suckage is more that Siri takes 8 seconds for the server to respond or just inexplicably decides that today it doesn't know how to turn on a light.

At this point it feels like a great LLM would let Siri fail to respond to a much more varied set of ways for me to ask my question in English, but that's not really the target we're shooting for here.

You could do it with custom development work -- write your own iOS and/or Mac app that uses Apple's Maps API, but this becomes a fairly substantial software project that you need a programmer to create. It's not doable just using the Maps app on your device as a user.

You can set MAKEFLAGS in /etc/makepkg.conf to something like "-j8" (where "8" should be something like the number of cores you have or maybe number of cores minus one or two if you want to leave some CPU capacity available.

However, the build instructions for a specific package can override these defaults. You'd have to look at the resolve-davinci package files to see if it does that for some reason that might be important.

Mostly you're paying so that never getting any resolution is someone else's fault.

I'm a bitter, stagnant, arrogant old man. That this guy also can't write for shit is coincidental.

It is unfathomable to me how Reddit isn't profitable.

Facebook makes a mint by telling advertisers, "trust us, we'll get your ads in front of people who might buy your product based on a lot of inference around their fairly generic profile data plus some tracking cookies". One guy should be able to sell a billion dollars worth of ads on Reddit. Just put up a form that says, "which subreddit do you want to advertise in?" and "what's your credit card number?". That's it. They have like 10,000 completely segmented markets just sitting there full of hundreds of millions of people who have self-selected to be members of those communities.

We spend hundreds of billions of dollars collectively trying to figure out which google search terms might find us a few more solid leads. Reddit has an amazing list of them for every company in the entire world. How in the everloving fuck have they managed to blindly bumble around for two decades without ever falling into the giant pile of money in front of them?

But the fact that virtually none of those organizations use it tells us a lot. Companies that actually need to maintain standards and procedures do it by putting "Important Procedure v3.1-FINAL-FINAL.docx" in Sharepoint. Could they build something on a blockchain that would have nice properties? Sure. But they don’t actually care about those properties really.

The current AI/LLM hype may or may not be overpromising what they can really deliver, but it's different than blockchain in that at least what they're promising to deliver is valuable. Blockchain still has no actual use outside of organized crime and financial speculation. No one actually needs decentralized currencies or NFTs or whatever. It's all speculators hyping why I should care so that maybe I'll buy Bitcoin and continue to prop up their investment.

LLMs actually solve real problems. Answering customer support requests is a thing nearly every company absolutely has to do today, and AI promises to make that faster and cheaper. They promise to make software development more efficient and cheaper. They promise to make communications better. Those are all incredibly valuable promises to be making. It's a reasonable argument to say it's all smoke and mirrors and they'll fail to deliver on that promise, but that's a different failure mode than NFTs or blockchain stuff where the technology works as advertised, but there's no actual problem of any value being solved by it.

It's not that I've never had any problems. It's more that those are infrequent one-time problems, and if something happens once every two years that takes me 30 minutes to solve, I'm willing to do that if it makes the day-to-day use of my system smoother. Flatpak feels like I'm rubbing just a little bit of sandpaper across my face 20 times a day, and the promise is, "yeah, but look how you'll never have to solve this minor one-time things again", and that's just not a trade I want to make.

And in a way, everything is a CLI tool on most normal systems. Evince or Acroread or whatever you prefer to read PDFs is not "a CLI tool", but if I want to use LaTeX to create a document, I want to be able to do something like

        $ xelatex myfile.tex
    $ evince myfile.pdf &


  

I don't want to have to build my document, bring up my app launcher, click on the Evince icon, hit Ctrl-O, navigate to my pdf file, and double click it.