Tomorrow I am giving a talk around the importance for designers to not strive for ‘digital literacy’ but rather for ‘nature literacy’.
I believe an understanding of our connection to nature is the only way people will find incentive to stop destroying it, and to make better decisions as creators. A willingness to spend time in nature every day is part of that mindshift.
Which is why I found this statistic so very disturbing. Our tech-centric world is teaching us to ignore nature:
"The average [US] person will now spend 93% of their life indoors.”
Only 7% of a lifetime outside. And likely a great deal of that time in environments made of concrete. This happens even though we know that a lack of exposure to sunlight is causing low energy levels, problems sleeping and depression.
Even though we inherently know how good we feel every time we immerse ourselves in greenery. My wife calls it “forest bathing” when we go on dog walks in the woods. And I recently learnt that this is simply a translation of the Japanese term ‘shinrin-yoku’, a term that emerged in the 1980s as a physiological and psychological exercise. The purpose was twofold: to offer an eco-antidote to tech-boom burnout and to inspire residents to reconnect with and protect the country’s forests.
During my first months in the Fediverse in 2022 I had two people reach out and mention to me that my writings reminded them of #solarpunk, which I had up 'til then never heard of. Solarpunk aspires to provide an alternative way of viewing the future with humans living in symbiosis with nature and technology – a future where technology is not destructive but only used purposefully where it boosts universal wellbeing and an ability to harmonise with the nature we ourselves are a small part of. Not the masters of. Not disconnected from.
What Solarpunk does for me personally is to provide a way to speak about a alternative futures, rather than get stuck in always criticising the current illusions of inevitable futures.
In a breakout session tomorrow I will be trying out the Solarpunk futures cards as an aid in thinking differently about digital design.
Would love to hear if anyone has experience with running or participating in a Solarpunk-related workshop and the types of concepts or ideas that resonate and contribute to pursuing a different way of making products and services.
"It is estimated that 80% of the environmental impact of products is determined during the product design phase.” – Publications Office of the European Union
One, the subject is LLMs, and I point this out because I’ve suffered multiple cycles of opinionated meatbags saying computers can never ever become intelligent. I fully expect some dingus to shove headlines like “AI can’t get smarter!” in people’s faces, like it’s divine writ.
Two, more training is what makes these things smarter. Data was only a major obstacle when there was next to nothing. And they didn’t just pour the new data into the old setup; every major iteration reconfigures the network. Deeper tends to be better but is slow to train. Wider is a cheap path to novel results but requires obscene amounts of memory. Naturally the companies dumping money into this (because they’ve gambled their reputation on an unproven new thingamajig) are only trying to scale up up up - and that’s why this limit appears. A lot more neat shit is going to arise from small networks. They’ll be organized with better human insight (partly derived from the experience of these big dumb money sinks) and they’ll train much more quickly on much more affordable machines.
Three, tech is not why these idiot corporations are struggling. The tech works as engineers promised. It’s the marketing and executives who promised the moon and the stars as soon as this could almost hold a conversation. We the dorks were cautiously optimistic about the emergent properties. GPT-3 could sorta do math. Yeah yeah yeah, computers doing math doesn’t sound surprising, but the network would have to do math the way you do math.
We the dorks also pointed out that GPT was set up so it was incapable of holding an opinion. It’d finish your side of the conversation if you left that open. And sometimes it’d do a really good job. This approach may get a lot closer to intelligent than critics are comfortable with. Every advancement in AI demonstrates how little we understand ourselves, via endless failed predictions that ‘only a sentient mind could do [blank].’
I don’t know much about the tech behind either, but when I’m using VNC it feels like I’m just remote controlling the mouse and keyboard on another machine via a series of streaming jpegs and when it’s full screen I either have to scale the display so all the elements on the screen are too small or too big, or have scroll bars.
With RDP it’s so smooth it’s like I’m on the other machine. RDP doesn’t just remote control the screen on the other computer, it creates a new desktop session formatted for the remote computer. Someone else can even use the other computer while you log in as a different user. I don’t know if VNC can do this but RDP can even forward local drives and devices to the remote computer, you could plug a USB into your laptop and have it connect to the machine you’re RDPing into. It’s so seamless that I often forget I’m using a different machine when I have it in full screen.
Looks like Victor is pushing their new plastic mouse traps. I have no idea w... no, I do know. Some board member likes them.
They're worthless. Within a few days, the metal catch bites into the plastic trigger and the whole thing seizes up. You can literally throw them into the trash fully set and they won't go off.
And they're now the only 'basic' trap the local shops stock. Completely useless traps.
We work with a German company that has done this twice. They destroyed their product line with a more expensive successor that didn't work, walked it back, and then made the exact same mistake again in the exact same way with the exact same useless tech.
Not AI, just a bad protocol.
Happens to all companies big and small. They're all run by office politics and pandering to the owners.
Hello World! - Tamnjong Larry Tabeh - Medium Tamnjong Larry Tabeh 2 minutes
My name is Tamnjong Larry, and I live in a moderately sized town in Cameroon called Bamenda. My primary experience in the tech field has been in backend development using .NET and Java. Despite my focus on backend development, I believe the true magic in software happens when users interact with the interface — clicking buttons, scrolling bars, switching tabs, and more.
Seeing users interact with systems and how intuitive designs make their lives easier, I found a deeper fulfillment.
I have always been interested in open source. My new passion for design and understanding user behavior gave me an added boost to get involved in open source, which is the best place to learn from actual experts building interfaces that millions of people use. I applied to the Outreachy May to August 2024 cohort. I found the GNOME project, “Conduct a series of short user research exercises, using a mix of research methods,” to be the best match for my goal of learning about the UI/UX design process. I love interacting with people, asking questions, and understanding them.
I believe in:
Adventure: I should try out new things. Contribution: I should be able to give back to the world something of value, no matter how small it is. Optimism: Tomorrow is always better than today as long as I don’t give up today.
I am happy to be part of the amazing GNOME community. Over the next few months, I will share my journey here.
I am excited to be working with amazing mentors, Allan Day and Aryan Kaushik.
Artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT could soon run out of what keeps making them smarter — the tens of trillions of words people have written and shared online....
This assumes that there is a general level of benevolence and altruism in tech companies. There might be some, but probably not enough.
I should say that I absolutely would love if your idea (or credit to the original creator) actually happen. It would be fantastic and I would much prefer that world to what I think we’re going to get.
I think my original two questions still stand:
Does journalism/arts/scientific publishing produce enough content and varied enough content to be sufficient to training the models? I doubt it because let’s say there are 500,000,000 (500M) authors/creators that could be supported by their efforts. That’s a small number compared to several billion people posting on social media, blogs, forums, etc. They also post on a much more broad set of topics. If the tech companies were benevolent and did pay for content, how many more authors and creators could they create? Let’s say they double it, that’s another 500M people (we’ll assume that many more people are even available for these professions). They all need salaries let’s say they each make 60000/year. That’s 30 trillion in expenses/salaries. Even playing with the numbers some, half the people, half the salary and the number is still in the trillions. And that’s probably still not enough content and isn’t even close to the output of several billion people. I think the actual solution would be to partner with social media companies (like they already are) to find ways of inticing more participation to get additional data, but even that probably isn’t enough if we believe the original study
Why partner with newspapers, scientific journals, whatever for likely pretty high fees? Currently, they can subscribe to all the journals, newspapers, etc for probably less than a million/year. That’s cheap for them, they probably already did it. They are probably paying reddit more than that alone. Right now, Facebook is probably negotiating on their treasure trove to get Zuckerberg his next billion dollar bonus.
Overall, I don’t think they are interested in quality data, I think they just want more. Pretty soon they will have consumed everything ever produced (that’s in a format that can be digested) and humanity it’s entirety will not be able to produce data fast enough. At that point, they will probably start producing their own content and asking humans what is valuable and what is not. By 2040, your favorite author may be a machine and the NY best sellers may be a way to determine which AI content is good enough to train the next Gen on.
On #kubernetes birthday I have to say some thanks. Big thank you to all the maintainers doing great work, especially the small team keeping #etcd alive and kicking.
When I was introduced to k8s when migrating a large datacenter over to it, my initial impression was “this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of”. It’s incredible complexity compared to solutions like Xen seemed destined to doom it to the pile of overcomplicated Google tech that seems good on paper and falls down for normal people.
However in the years since I’ve come to really enjoy the ecosystem and the stack itself. There is a learning curve, but the payoff is pretty amazing. You can scale applications to truly global sized without exponential increases in headcount. The ecosystem of third party software around k8s keeps getting better.
So thanks for allowing me to pay my rent #kubernetes. Also YAML is the devil.
I used XMPP in the past, but long-lived public server support is almost nonexistent these days, and proper setup/maintenance requires too much tech skill for the general public. Also, it lacks modern features that many people have come to expect. I would only suggest it for small groups, and only if you can run your own server and provide tech support.
For my needs, Matrix is the best available today. It covers the things that I find most important, and is constantly improving.
Musk is abso-fucking-lutely NOT responsible for the tax incentives, private investment or low interest loans that Tesla got
He has wormed his way into a number of national economic advisory boards under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. His close relationship with Peter Thiel and Catherine Duddy Wood has afforded him a number of opportunities to access investor cash at below-market rates. And he’s spent a fortune on lobbyists at both the state and federal level to influence public tax incentives, grants, loans, and bailouts.
he’s only been good as an eccentric personality
The reason he’s in the public eye is thanks to his extensive investment in PR and advertising. He’s one of the original Silicon Valley moneyballers, having determined that a small kickback to the tech media can reap enormous windfalls of retail investment cash and publicly approved state spending.
Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts....
I personally think we have reach a point where we actually can do this. User controlled project can now keep up and sometime beat big business. Look at Asahi Linux, a small group of nerds are reverse-enginering Apple’s latest tech, and allowing us to do all kind of things Apple never wanted us to do with these machine. Mastodon, Lemmy, Nextcloud, are all open-source projects keeping up with huge company.
Hm... I actually think Ukraine is probably at the forefront of UAV development worldwide at this point (both mass scale domestic production and innovation in design / tactics).
At the beginning of the war they were using bayraktars and commercial quadcopters, and maybe a handful of officially-military-designed western drones. Obviously they drew on established technology, but I actually think at this point developing a completely new generation of UAVs is exactly what they've done (primarily in the aspect of how to keep them tactically effective while making them small and cheap so they can be produced at scale at a limited tech-tier, which isn't something the Western manufacturers really specialize in.)
I think the vital stuff they're importing is tons of artillery rounds and cruise missiles, stuff where you can't really cheap it out in the same way, but if the Kremlin starts getting hit with ATACMS munitions I don't think it's gonna fly to say "naw we found it refurbished bro, nothing to do with the West." IDK, give it time, maybe by a couple years from now they're gonna find themselves at the forefront of production of glide bombs that can reach hundreds of km after building on their exhaustive experience making FPV drones.
Fine, let’s go back to your original argument of it would be easier to switch to Linux then disable windows updates.
So I’ll tell you my experience switching my server from Windows server 2018 to Debain.
The sever has 4 hdds and 2 sdds. I kept 1 ssd exclusively for the OS incase it breaks, I can format without import data loss quickly.
Windows likes to use the NTFS for data storage, so I had all my drives formated as such. Anyways I start the install, a thing iv done countless times.
Install went flawless. Debain was up and running in like 15 mins. Super simple. So I start to get it setup the way I want. As I go to add my ssds and hdds I start having issues. Linux doesn’t natively support NTFS. I didn’t realize that at the time. I didn’t see anything about that before I started the install.
I know I could get some wonky work around that let’s Linux read/write to NTFS, but why do that when there is a file format that Windows and Linux can both use? Fat32. I wanna do it right, so I do.
So now I got to unplug all my drives, connect them to an external usb to hdd, transfer the data to another HD in my gaming pc, format the drive, put the data back into the drive, mount and reconnect it back to the server pc. I had to do that for 4 drives. Ranging from 120 gig to 4tb. The other ssd I had to remove one from my gaming pc and server m.2 slot, install the server one, backup data, format, pit data back on, remove from m.2 slot, reinstall both ssds.
All of that, just to have a Linux server that could natively handle the default windows file format.
Was it worth it? Yes, but it would have been much easier to tolerate Windows.
I consider myself very experienced with tech stuff and I still messed this up. I could have prevented this by figuring out storage before the format, but that one peice of missing info caused all of that.
I won’t even start on all the small tedious things I have to on Linux VS doing the same thing on Windows. (I wish g hub was able to run on linux)
I think you vastly underestimate how many edgecases there actually are. Every one edge case might be a small userbase, but combined, all those small userbases make a significant userbase for whom Linux is less than ideal. And (just a hunch) on Lemmy, this % of users is actually larger than the population at large. Tech-savy people tend to use more obscure programs.
Some edgecases I happen to know(because I happen to fall into three edgecase groups!)
VR
adobe stuff
Many music plugins
Those are two creative edgecases. And I believe using your PC for creative work is actually quite a significant userbase.
And sometimes even IF a product is supposedly supported on Linux, it doesn’t work straight up. I recently tried to install Ubiquity’s Unify program on my Pop!OS, but nope, errors before even installing. Happened to need all kinds of weird dependencies that are outdated and are hard to install. Even when following Ubiquity’s install guide. On windows it just worked. Another edgecase, but it adds up.
So I disagree on your “majority” statement. Especially on Lemmy, I don’t believe that to be true at all.
I’m moreso curious if laptop functions have been offloaded to phones. If you have a full gaming desktop, do you see the use case for an additional laptop? or if most people here don’t see the need for the increased processing power of a desktop, do you just use your laptop and a phone?...
Laptop. I daresay I’m done with desktops…forever? Likely. As technology moves forward a laptop should have plenty of power and storage to do anything. Of course, software companies will write software that chews up resources to convince you you’re getting your money’s worth.
I can’t work on a phone, too small and constricted with inputs. Not even a consideration, now or moving forward. Fine for social media, but bills, games, and art/design? Nah.
So yeah, I’d say laptops forever, but I’m sure the big tech companies won’t let me.
I was listening to Friends per Second (game industry podcast) the other day and they were discussing the future of Xbox. They addressed some of the common stuff everyone is talking about, like is Microsoft going to stay in the console business, squandered IP’s, shuttering financially successful/critically loved studios (Tango with Hi-Fi Rush), things like that. But as usual they had a more nuanced take that also introduced some things I hadn’t considered.
One of the host’s said (more or less) “it seems like we’re no longer seeing a distinct brand and mentality with Xbox, and instead are seeing the transition to ‘Microsoft gaming.’”Just calling if that made a lot of things click into place, and it makes a lot of sense watching that occur while also seeing what they are doing with windows 11 and AI integration/ad saturation.
It’s not as simple as “Microsoft wants everything to be a subscription.“ They want a lot of pulls at the fountain. They want to put ads in front of you, they want to image your computers and scrape every bit of data that isn’t bolted down, they want to trap you in their ecosystem, they want it all. Take any single or two-pronged strategy by any similar company and just dump it into the pile: Microsoft wants all the revenue streams of all kinds at all times. And even if someone doesn’t fully recognize exactly what’s happening, I think a lot of us are getting the sense that they are just getting greedy in a very real sense and that it’s accelerating.
I don’t know if there will be any consequences, I don’t expect some massive exodus from Microsoft/windows any time soon, but it does make me happy to see articles condemning their moves almost every day and a lot of chatter in my own communities about people wanting to find ways to reject these changes, even if their pushing back is small and isolated. Even my parents are asking me about ways to better protect their privacy and deal with these changes, and they are not the most tech savvy in the world (good enough to get in trouble lol).
So I was beyond thrilled to be able to attend & speak this year.
There's always a risk that you can never recapture the magic of your youth. But EMF is consistently brilliant. A delightful alternative reality of robots, lasers, art, lasers, music, lasers, technical talks, lasers, and strange lights in the sky.
All the talks I went to were brilliant. Most of the talks I missed were also brilliant and I'm enjoying watching the catch-up streams. I took loads of silly photos, sat under an inverted fire pit, and talked to hundreds of lovely people. Oh, and watched my brilliant wife be Thor - the host of lightning talks.
I volunteered a couple of times (which was a rewarding experience) and got some meal vouchers for my troubles. Result! All the volunteers seemed to be having a whale of a time. Great seeing people pull together to make something special.
There was decent WiFi all over the field. I don't get the appeal of DECT phones - but they were ubiquitous.
Even the toilets were great! Seriously, it felt like luxury for a festival.
There was far too much to do. I didn't even try any of the CTF games or puzzles, I managed to play one arcade machine (plus a laser-projected Asteroids game), and only sampled a few of the beers available. My petition is to make EMF a 2 week festival in order to allow me to enjoy all of it 😄
All the bugs from my previous visit had been squashed. Presenters were all made to do laptop checks before presenting. There were no airhorns or howling in the middle of the night. Food stalls were relatively quick. All the Q&A happened away from the main stage. And diversity was much improved.
But, what is life if not full of the joys of complaining? Treat these kvetches as minor irritants.
P4 - I went to a workshop which wasn't well designed. Despite being advertised for beginners, the instructor seemed bemused and annoyed that people were asking for help with the basics.
P3 - The Night Market was a bit cramped. Half a dozen vendors in a single shipping container made it hard to browse and chat. While commerce isn't the primary aim of the festival, it would have been nice to have more space to view all the wares.
P3 - Official communications were a bit fragmented. There was Mastodon, and Signal groups, and Matrix/IRC, and probably more that I missed. It's great to have a variety of channels - but it was slightly overwhelming trying to check them all.
P2 - Stage B had a pillar in front of the centre of the stage, which made it a bit awkward to see what was going on sometimes.
P1 - The bar ran out of cider on the last night!!!! OK, it was pretty impressive that we collectively drank the bar dry 😂
P1 - The badges...
sigh I feel bad about ragging on the badges. They're high-tech gizmos obviously made with love. But if you're selling a gadget, I think it is reasonable for people to expect it to work. As in previous years, badges weren't generally available until later in the festival. When I did get mine, it just didn't work. The software crashed trying to update itself and the promised app store also didn't work. I don't think I saw anyone using it to display their name.
I know that the logistics of shipping hardware and getting software working is a difficult process. And I saw the team working flat-out to resolve the issues. The badge tent was full of helpful people and other attendees were willing to share tips. But I can't help feeling that these teething issues should have been solved a few weeks before launch.
I made a small tactical error by camping near to Null Sector. Surprisingly, I was able to sleep through the bone-rattling Drum and/or Bass. I suppose walking for miles in a field will do that! Even so, I came back from EMF feeling like my brain had been energised and my creativity had been given a super-boost.
I don't think I want to give a talk at the next one - I loved the experience, but it's time for more new faces. Instead - I want to see if I can build something delightfully delirious. Perhaps a multi-player collaborative game? Well, I've got two years to get it ready!
The hashtag #BanTikTok has started to gain momentum in the #Philippines because of the recent muting/silencing of a renowned journalist's coverage of the West Philippine Sea issue. Which in turn also revealed that a music video / campaign of a local celebrity regarding WPS was also muted earlier.
Hopefully, this is the spark we are waiting for to get this Communist China-controlled service banned in the country.
Unfortunately, one user shared a photo of a news report on how the DICT (Department of Information and Communications Technology) said that we should be careful with banning apps as these are simply technologies, and small businesses are using it.
> ANC: The DICT asserts it needs to be careful in supporting a ban on social media apps, esp. since they benefit small businesses.
>
> DICT: Let's not single out a particular app. This is just tech. There are evils in it, but there are also good things in it.
It was a poor attempt to deflect the question. Why? The topic was not about the technology, it was about banning [highly questionable] social media apps. There is a huge difference between technologies and services.
The public is not asking to ban the technologies behind “short form videos”. The people of the Philippines are demanding to ban a service.
In 2020 I built a gaming PC and at the time decided to dual boot because I wasn’t going to spend all this money and miss out on some games. However, not 6 months later I dissolved the dual boot config because my son and I never found a game we cared to try that was Windows only.
Proton is a translation layer that helps run Windows games in Linux. It works seamlessly with Steam so you don’t have to worry about it at all… so far, ZERO problems. Of course, YMMV depending on the games you are interested in; however, you can check in advance in ProtonDB, this site will tell you if the game you want to play can be played well on Linux (assuming the game is not ported already).
I also went with a derivative Linux distro that is geared toward gaming so it comes with almost everything you’d need. It’s called GarudaLinux I liked it so much it is now my daily driver for work as well (even though this is one of those “risky” Linux distro since it is a rolling release, meaning you are on the edge of tech available, and I update it weekly… other than some small issues here and there, it’s been going strong for 4 years)
If you have a movie collection, you’d have no problem either unless they are DMR protected somehow… if so, there are ways to watch them but it would depend on what you downloaded… However, if these fishes we are talking about came from the high seas, you’d have no problem. There are some discrepancies regarding hardware support for certain codecs but it all boils down to efficiency, not whether you can play them or not.
I have a VAST collection (3500+ movies, 400 TV shows) in a Linux server that I access throughout my house with many devices (PCs, phones, FireTV sticks, Raspberry Pi, etc) by using an Emby server… Emby is free to use but you get to pay for some features… if you want the fully free and open source version you can go with Jellyfin… I only went with Emby because 6 years ago (maybe more?) when I started, Jellyfin was a bit behind… now they have caught up but I already bought Emby so I keep using it.
My current workplace uses mostly cloud desktops. Basically, even if you’re using a personal system, you install a remote desktop client software (it provides access to another system, it does not allow access to your system), which is used to connect to a server farm of virtual desktop servers. So the work desktop you use kind of overlays itself on your system. Your system is still there, humming away in the background, with it’s only task being to shuffle your input up to the cloud, and bring down the images of your cloud desktop and display them.
There’s some other features, but that’s the core of it. We use a third party “remote monitoring and management” (RMM) tool to administrate company owned systems. You are perfectly capable of using the remote desktop client on a system that’s not company owned. I like this model, since you can minimize or close the remote desktop at any time, and since we (the IT team) have full access to the remote desktop server farm, we can connect to your remote desktop session and see what you see, but only what’s within the remote window. We can’t escape it to see your computer. So if you have a problem with your work stuff, we have access to that. If you have a problem with your personal computer, we need to use a one-time-use (or ad-hoc) remote connection software like LogMeIn or something similar (specifically the LMI rescue type feature set). Once we disconnect from your personal system after doing whatever troubleshooting you asked for, we lose access to that system.
The programs change, but they do the same thing in concept. There are a number of company owned laptops and desktops we have our RMM tools on which allow us to dive into a system whenever we want.
I run a homelab, personally, and when my workplace does not give me the necessary stuff to be productive from home, what I do is build a small virtual system on my home lab, which I remote into when I work (from my desktop), so I can maintain a work/personal division. It’s similar to the cloud system I’m doing at my current job, but the “remote” desktop is a VM on a server in my basement. Other times I’ve been given a laptop, and I’ll set it up in a corner and turn on its built in remote desktop service (to allow remote desktop connections into it), then use the same protocols to connect to my work laptop.
When I’m done work, I just shut down the remote desktop connection and poof, back to my stuff on my PC.
With my current job I went another way, I got a KVM switch, which allows me to switch between two physical computers at the push of a button. (KVM is keyboard/video/mouse) When I’m done work now, I push a button and my screens (I have several) and KB/mouse all switch back to my personal desktop. Same idea but different.
I couldn’t imagine using my personal computer to do work stuff directly. That’s just not kosher in my mind. I have work’s RMM and tools all installed on the system I use for work, and my personal system is entirely free of such things.
I also want to include a short story. Recently a client started a ticket about our company logo being on their personal computer. I grabbed that ticket up and immediately identified the system, and removed it from our system. I followed up with the user to verify that by removing it from our system, the icon disappeared (indicating our monitor agent was fully uninstalled), they confirmed, and I closed the ticket. I kept thinking it’s grossly inappropriate for our software to be on their personal system, and I wanted to get it fixed ASAP. Not everyone is the same, I’ve known users that want or e remote management tools on their personal systems. I don’t understand it, but I can’t tell them that it can’t be there either (the customer is always right, applies in this context).
As I hope I’ve demonstrated, neither myself, nor anyone I work with, nor anyone I’ve worked with in the past, would ever take such an opportunity to snoop or spy on them, but I’d rather not have that liability hanging over my company. All it takes is for one person to have the software on there and accuse us of stealing their private data (say, leud pictures) and publically posting that information on the internet, and I’m sure the policy would change. Of course, we wouldn’t do that, but all it would take is the accusation.
It’s a bad day for us when we see something we shouldn’t, especially if upon seeing it, we’re morally obligated to contact the authorities (in the case of illegal content such as child porn). If course, if something like that is observed by a tech, we must do something about it, but we don’t want to have to get involved in that sort of thing, so we’re pretty careful about it. To put it simply, we’re not looking for anything, and we don’t want to snoop through your stuff, because if we do and we find something we shouldn’t, there’s going to be hell to pay. Not only in the fact that now we need to report it to the police, but also that we need to be able to justify why we were able to see it in the first place. If we can’t justify why we were looking at the content, that’s probably grounds for termination and getting blacklisted from IT, even if it had a positive result (like a pedo being sent to jail).
Bluntly, it’s not worth the risk, paperwork, or inevitable trouble that we’ll face if we do.
Keeping a good separation between personal and work minimizes the risk of IT seeing something that shouldn’t, even if it’s not illegal/illicit. Even your personal financial information. I don’t want to know. I had a call recently with a user who couldn’t log into their bank, and through testing, I was on the lookout for errors while they logged in. As soon as login was successful and their accounts were up, I minimized my remote control so I didn’t see more than I absolutely had to, of their bank info. I got them into the accounts. I don’t care what the accounts are, or what is in them. It seems minor, but that is that users personal information which I do not need to know. I solved their login problem with the site, so I’m done.
I probably have a hundred of other examples, even some where my co-workers had to contact authorities, I’m pretty sure… Every decent IT tech knows that this is a risk and we do what we can to avoid getting caught up in it. We don’t want to have to answer those questions.
If you ever have IT connect to your computer and your background goes black, there’s a reason. At first it was bandwidth related, and we’ll still say that as the reason, but a large reason why we still do it, even into an age of high speed internet, is because a lot of people put pictures of their family, friends, sometimes even inappropriate content, as their desktop wallpaper. It’s hard to miss when it’s your wallpaper. So if it’s blacked out when we connect, that’s one less possible problem we have to deal with.
I’ll stop, but if you have questions for a random internet IT guy, please feel free to ask.
Same with when they added some features to the UI of gpt with the gpt40 chatbot thing. Don’t get me wrong, the tech to do real time audioprocessing etc is impressive (but has nothing to do with LLMs, it was a different technique) but it certainly is very much smoke and mirrors.
I recall when they taught developers to be careful with small UI changes without backend changes as for non-insiders that feels like a massive change while the backend still needs a lot of work (so the client thinks you are 90% done while only 10% is done), but now half the tech people get tricked by the same problem.
AI Appears to Rapidly Be Approaching Brick Wall Where It Can't Get Smarter (futurism.com)
Fedora 41 to Transfer Anaconda Installer to Wayland (debugpointnews.com)
[Music] Prekursor - CYBER CRASH 2000: MACHINE WARRIOR (2020) (prekursor.bandcamp.com)
Like many good cyberpunk albums, this one has lore!...
Hello World! (medium.com)
Granholm calls for tripling of US nuclear fleet (feddit.nl)
Source: world-nuclear-news.org/…/Granholm-calls-for-tripl…...
AI 'gold rush' for chatbot training data could run out of human-written text (apnews.com)
Artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT could soon run out of what keeps making them smarter — the tens of trillions of words people have written and shared online....
Passim Peer to Peer Metadata – F40 Release Party (interesting solution for climate-friendlier fwupd usage) (www.youtube.com)
Change Proposal...
What's the best messaging platform?
Cross-posted from : lemmy.ml/post/16566616...
Tesla CEO Elon Musk could leave if $56 billion pay package not approved, shareholders warned (www.theverge.com)
A social app for creatives, Cara grew from 40k to 650k users in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts....
It's not escalation if they're made in Ukraine! (sh.itjust.works)
r*ddit
Microsoft to test “new features and more” for aging, stubbornly popular Windows 10 (arstechnica.com)
Do you use both a personal desktop and laptop?
I’m moreso curious if laptop functions have been offloaded to phones. If you have a full gaming desktop, do you see the use case for an additional laptop? or if most people here don’t see the need for the increased processing power of a desktop, do you just use your laptop and a phone?...
Microsoft is warping the PC industry into something unrecognizable (www.msn.com)
Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned | Op-ed: The risks to Recall are way too high for security to be secondary (arstechnica.com)
Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts (www.pcworld.com)
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 June 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!...