Algorithmic feed where a company chooses the algorithm and objective function
And we pretend that "Share of time is a perfect metric for happiness," then this might make sense.
But... time spent isn't a perfect metric for happiness, and there is another option: 3) Algorithmic feed where the user has more control of the algorithm and objective function.
@mekkaokereke How do you suggest measuring those alternative metrics? Itโs certainly an interesting concept for FOSS, but these recommendation models improve with the number of data points.
While we're talking about affirmative action, legacy admissions, and college athletic scholarships, here's something that most US folks won't agree with (yet), but that is the only thing that makes sense:
College sports athletic scholarships should be abolished. All of them.
They do much more harm than good. They don't make college accessible for poorest athletes. They make it less accessible.
A scholarship is only worth ~$40K a year of tuition. But it prevents you from earning over $100K?
@mekkaokereke Thereโs certainly something to be said for moving to a purely needs-based scholarship program, but how large is the population of kids that could pull in $100k? NI&L dollars already overwhelmingly go to that small pool.
No doubt there are menโs football and basketball programs that bring in revenue comparable to professional teams and can absolutely pay their players. How do we handle those ~75 programs in an ocean of programs with comparatively shoestring budgets?
i hate shopping at kroger because their self-checkout stations never have scales that work and so it thinks youโre stealing and in order to scare you it plays back a video of you from above so youโll stop stealing but i am not so i just get sad because it shows that on the top of your head you are balding and youโre self-conscious and youโre not a thief you are just 30 and you shouldnโt be balding this soon oh why oh why must it be so
@GossiTheDog If a TA already has desktop access, whatโs to stop them from using optical or audio to exfil? A web-app could easily be used to transcode files or texts into a serial bitstream, with the only logged activity being the site visit.
At the end of the day, they could always just write stuff down or take screenshots so thereโs certainly a ceiling to how secure an RDP connection is
@molly0xfff Crypto buzz once again eclipsing a legitimately interesting idea, that being the creation of a market to โbetโ on real life events. www.Kalshi.com is the project Iโm most familiar with, but they all have interesting impact to economics research.
They essentially take the same dynamics that are used to evaluate risk in financial products and expand it to any observer-verifiable prediction you can think of. People are stupid individually, but the mean is typically freaky accurate.
@thomasfuchs So theyโve had an official partnership with OpenAI for a few weeks & still donโt have visibility into the content thatโs already been consumed by their partner? That doesnโt indicate the necessary oversight or compliance monitoring required for this large of an effort
"it's all stored locally" is not a panacea for these alarming privacy-invading products!
what exactly is stored locally? what data is extracted from that local data and sent to the company's servers? is that local data being backed somewhere?
@molly0xfff This tool will also be a panacea for authoritarian and repressive governments looking to monitor their citizens.
More than half of humans alive today live in a country in which their โlocal deviceโ can be legally searched without suspicion or due process.
Even as an American, CBP claims they can search my devices for any reason when I return home from abroad. Being able to ask my computer to share potentially-objectionable info without suspicion, much less a warrant, is scary.
During the 2013-2018 boom when tech workers as a class had maximum leverage, used some of the energy organizing broad tech unions and guilds instead of negotiating for fuck-you money and pulling up the ladder by telling other trades to โlearn 2 code noobsโ
craft broadly populist multi-union legislation to raise taxes for โinfra and natsec basic income fundโ, for a living stipend to infra workers: railroad, steelworkers, electricians, OSS maintainers
@analogist Whatโs most missing is a non-profit to pick these projects up that is funded by whatโs essentially a rounding error at big techโs scale. There are countless libraries that are maintained by a handful of volunteers that are foundational, and at some point that value can either be recognized or allowed to wilt on the vine.
It doesnโt take a lot of resources to maintain most of these projects, but there needs to be an organization that can step in when needed
I hinted at this piece earlier this week, in a rant about the relatively few evil code wizards who are really good at making malware look harmless to security software, and why it makes sense to look at them more closely.
Why Malware Crypting Services Deserve More Scrutiny
If you operate a cybercrime business that relies on disseminating malicious software, you probably also spend a good deal of time trying to disguise or โcryptโ your malware so that it appears benign to antivirus and security products. In fact, the process of โcryptingโ malware is sufficiently complex and time-consuming that most serious cybercrooks will outsource this critical function to a handful of trusted third parties. This story explores the history and identity behind Cryptor[.]biz, a long-running crypting service that is trusted by some of the biggest names in cybercrime.
@briankrebs Really interesting read Brian. Opsec is only as good as itโs weakest link and it seems like you found several potential slip-ups. Makes me wonder whether LE will (or already do) view the site as a potential honeypot target. Did you notice any indications of a dead-man canary/switch that would tip off customers or co-conspirators?
@thomasfuchs โWebsite?! Thatโs how THEY track you to know who has supplies and whoโs prepared!
I got Frank from MilitaryRUs to stock me up with MREs and canned food and just about bought all the .305 ammo this side of the county line. Itโs a bit too late for you my friend..โ
@thomasfuchs Sampling bias is b**ch. Evangelists and/or profiteers make a lot of noise, but hardly any skeptics are going to take the time to scream into the void (and even fewer will be algorithmically-promoted). In itself, the format of most social media platforms disincentivizes nuance and constructive critique.
At best, a โlikeโ is the most thought people give to posts they agree with before they get distracted again
Iโm so glad Apple is really vetting the App Store for quality software.
This is the app for my Bluetooth power meter. Itโs half in Chinese. Some buttons donโt do anything at all. Thereโs dialog boxes that donโt say anything.
The app is called โe_testโ and doesnโt have any English description in the App Store.
@thomasfuchs Apple has allowed some wild stuff on their App Store. Used to have a โhidden vaultโ app with a strange feature to โrecover imagesโ. Come to realize during the Pegasus fallout that the feature was almost certainly a sandbox escapeโฆ
The app is long gone but the bug it used went unpatched for years prior (and may very well still work)
@jsrailton Iโd have preferred a larger fine given the conduct occurred over the course of more than 5 years, but I can understand why the FTC didnโt throw the book.
BetterHelp agreed to two decades of compliance restrictions and monitoring, which will either prevent reoccurrence or create indisputable liability for breaching it. The agreement is likely to be used as a baseline for other market participants without needing to pass new regulations, which is extremely valuable.
@thomasfuchs โBut theyโre disrupting classes, exams and graduation!โ
As someone who had their last semester upended by 2020โs events and couldnโt walk due to a positive test, it certainly sucks. Itโs also not students that are complaining loudly about it. Instead itโs a bunch of wrinkled misanthropes living in a fanciful misrecollection of their youth
I don't think most people on the fediverse appreciate how much of things like the GDPR depend on contracts and documentation.
I also don't think most people on the fediverse appreciate how "it's hard to make this meet some bare minimum standards for data privacy" is not an excuse for not doing it.
"Own your data" is the byline that mastodon likes, but it really isn't true, and a lot of for-profit companies do better than the fediverse does in this regard.
@hrefna Do you think that thereโs a mechanism to change this ethos that isnโt predicated on financial obligations? GDPR has succeeded in part because it aligned profit incentives with consumer protection practices, but that model doesnโt necessarily map to volunteer-run community projects that often have no assets or legal entity to shield contributors.
@ClimateChris Do you have timestamps for these two captures? Thatโs a substantial loss of land for whatโs at most a decade or two based on the image resolution of the first shot
@thomasfuchs Definitely not a fad, but itโs been massively oversold as a tool. Cost continues to be a principal issue. When the cost is roughly equivalent to a human worker in many seemingly-compelling use cases, businesses will stick with the people.
It doesnโt look like this cost will meaningfully change in the near future either, considering the limiting input is the fully-matured cloud compute market.
