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Comment Re:Duress Words and other Defense Mechanisms. (Score 1) 20

Whispering no longer works. Voice isolation tech has gotten extremely good at fully discerning speech even when barely voiced at all.
Try it. Set your phone down on the table. Open your phone's message app. Turn on voice dictation. Back up 1-3 feet. Speak as quietly as you can while still enunciating all vowels/consonants.

Mine correctly transcribes speech this way, even in a room with background hums from several different machines.

Personally, I would not say anything confidential within the same room as any new phone/tablet/TV.

Submission + - Plex keeps turning into social media and users are getting fed up (nerds.xyz)

BrianFagioli writes: Plex used to be the app self hosting nerds loved because it stayed focused on organizing and streaming personal media libraries. Now the company is adding discussions, emoji reactions, compatibility scores, social following features, and community conversations tied to movies and TV shows. Coming right after the controversial Plex Pass price increase, many longtime users are questioning whether Plex still understands why people liked the platform in the first place.

Some of the new tools could be useful, especially shared watchlists across streaming services, but a growing number of users seem far more interested in reliability, playback improvements, and core media server features than turning Plex into another engagement driven social platform. The bigger Plex gets, the more it risks becoming exactly the kind of bloated streaming ecosystem many users were trying to escape.

Comment Dey took er jerbs! (Score 1) 20

Autopilots stay active in the background, understand how work gets done across your apps and systems, and take action without needing to be prompted each time," said Omar Shahine,

That's literally what an employee does.
It's what it means to BE an employee.
It's the only reason to HIRE/PAY employees.

Make no mistake about the end goal here. Regardless of what shiny baubles and tasty firewater the colonisers offer you today. They will break every treaty tomorrow and wipe you from the planet.

Comment Re:Mosquitos as "animals" (Score 1) 101

Yes, it is regional.

As I never lived in a country that has Gizzlies, or Crocodiles. Well, in Thailand we have water monitors (harmless) and something that resembles a Kaiman, but is called different.

The Tigers prefer to live in the forest. Nearly all are GPS tagged and it is unlikely that one ever comes into my room. Germany has no Tigers or Crocodiles, and brown bears only very recently.

So, cockroaches, spiders, mosquitos would actually be on the top of my list: both in Germany (or Europe) and Thailand.

Obviously an animal is an animal, so no idea about that part of your question.

Very interesting.

If someone asked me to make a list of animals with wings, or animals that prey on other animals, or any other quality, I would never think to include any insects on the list. To me, there is a difference between Animalia the scientific category, and animals the living things we talk about.

If someone said "I just moved out of the city to retire in a country house, so now pretty much every day I see animals outside" it would never occur to me that they might be referring to insects. Quite the contrary - if insects are considered animals for everyday speech, that sentence could never be uttered in any rational sense, because if insects are animals then there are animals everywhere. A Manhattan high-rise is filled with animals like roaches, spiders, mosquitos, bed bugs, crickets...
In fact, in my experience there are far more roaches in the big city than in the country, because in the country insects have more natural predators, fewer places to hide, and you don't have massive piles of edible waste that are inevitably created by cities.

Comment Mosquitos as "animals" (Score 1) 101

Yes, scientifically speaking, mosquitos are classified within Kingdom animalia. But in everyday speech, do most people think of insects as animals? If you asked a thousand random people to list three animals they'd hate to be trapped in a room with, I expect you'd get things like crocodile, tiger, grizzly. I would not expect people to reply with wasps and roaches.

Is this something that is regional/cultural?

Comment Re:Airport terminal justice.... (Score 0) 164

Probably should have turned off Bluetooth advertising while ON A FRICKING PLANE.

I had one that I used at home and traveled with for two years before I accidentally discovered that it literally cannot be turned off. Even if you press the power button on the speaker and the little power light goes out. As long as it has battery charge, it's in BT listening mode and can be activated by the manufacturer's app running on a device in range. The default device name was BOOM.

Comment Re:Stupid Passenger, but why was it an issue? (Score 2) 164

Maybe he thought it was off.

I had one (from a major manufacturer with products that are common in USA retail stores) that actually could not be turned off. I didn't realize it for two years, because I always manually pressed the button to turn it on and off. It was just a cheap, plain, passive speaker; not a wifi/smart/internet device. I had never bothered to download the manufacturer's app because I just wanted to play basic audio. But apparently, even when you manually turn it off with the button, it keeps Bluetooth in listening mode. Only reason I discovered this is because I bought a second one and downloaded their app to sync the speakers. Their app lets you turn the speaker on, regardless of whether the speaker was previously on or plugged in. Once I realized that "off" wasn't actually OFF, it made sense because there'd been a couple times when I didn't use the speaker for 2-3 weeks, and was puzzled that the battery was fully drained when I tried to turn it back on. I decided maybe I'd left it on and forgotten. Nope. Speaker literally does not allow you to turn it off. If it has any charge left, it's on. Had I known I never would've bought it - especially because it also has a built-in microphone (which I never used). Makes me wonder how "plain, passive" that always-powered-on microphone truly is.

Submission + - I found a second vote.gov -- and it's registered to the White House

As_I_Please writes: The Drey Dossier reports that the National Design Studio, an office created by executive order and which reports only to the White House, has been building copies of federal agency websites like vote.gov, passports.gov, login.gov and others.

What [the National Design Studio] is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.

Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.

NDS Infrastructure Map — my live working github map of every National Design Studio subdomain I have found, filterable by status, registrant, and parent domain. If you want to retrace this investigation or watch new subdomains appear in real time, start here.

Submission + - Something Made Earth's Molten Core Reverse Direction in 2010 (sciencealert.com)

alternative_right writes: In the molten ocean of iron churning in Earth's outer core, a section deep beneath the Pacific Ocean suddenly reversed direction and started moving eastward against the planet's usual westward flow.

This happened in 2010, according to satellite measurements of Earth's magnetic field, and scientists are still trying to figure out what caused it.

Submission + - New benchmark claims ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok show religious bias (nerds.xyz) 1

BrianFagioli writes: A new academic benchmark called âoeAllFaithâ claims leading AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI show measurable religious bias and often avoid faith perspectives entirely when responding to ethical questions, grief, and personal struggles. Researchers from Baylor University, Notre Dame, Brigham Young University, and Yeshiva University say models frequently suggest therapists, family members, or teachers for guidance, while rarely recommending pastors, rabbis, imams, or other spiritual leaders, despite survey data showing many users expect religion to be included in these conversations.

The study also examined religious conversion prompts and found what researchers describe as repeatable favoritism toward some belief systems and negative bias toward others. According to the benchmark, Grok showed some of the strongest measurable biases, while Anthropic and Meta models were among the least biased. The consortium says the issue is likely unintentional, stemming from training data and moderation choices rather than deliberate discrimination. Still, the findings raise an uncomfortable question for the AI industry: if chatbots increasingly become humanityâ(TM)s source for emotional support and moral guidance, can they really claim neutrality while largely excluding religion from the discussion?

Submission + - Big Tech could make nearly $1 million from your data and you get nothing (nerds.xyz)

BrianFagioli writes: A new report from the Web3 Foundation claims Big Tech and AI companies could generate as much as $831,497 in inflation-linked lifetime value from a single American internet user. The report argues that modern internet platforms are monetizing far more than targeted ads, with everything from search queries and shopping habits to chatbot prompts, uploaded images, location history, and behavioral data feeding AI systems and recommendation engines. Companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Anthropic are specifically mentioned as examples of firms benefiting from large-scale personal data collection.

While the report comes from a Web3 advocacy organization and should be viewed with some skepticism, its core argument may resonate with privacy critics and anti-AI users alike: the internet stopped being âoefreeâ a long time ago. The paper argues that AI has made user data even more valuable because human-generated content is now being used not only for advertising, but also to train increasingly capable machine learning systems. Meanwhile, ordinary users see little transparency, control, or financial participation in the value created from their digital lives.

Submission + - Of Course They Booed

theodp writes: In Of Course They Booed, Audrey Watters takes a look at the chorus of boos greeting college commencement speakers who heralded the glorious AI future students are poised to step into:

And perhaps it’s a little ironic that this graduating class, a group that we've been told time and time again has spent the last four years using ChatGPT to cheat their way through college, would display such sour sentiment towards "AI." But as most commencement speakers seem duty-bound to repeat, graduation marks the entry into adulthood; it is "the beginning of your life"; "the future is now" – that sort of thing. And just these students are now officially adults, they’re being told a very different story: that there really is no future. There are no jobs. And whatever thing they might have learned to do or learned to love in college, whatever career they might have believed they were preparing for, "AI" is going to destroy all of that. No wonder they boo.

But the growing pushback against "AI," and the growing pushback against ed-tech more generally, is not simply a rejection of technology. These efforts are, as Astra Taylor and Saul Levin recently argued in The Guardian, a rejection of the profoundly anti-democratic practices that have pushed technologies into all aspects of our lives without our consent and often in the face of our outright opposition. These technologies have been marketed to us as solutions to all sorts of social problems — and have done so, in no small part, by bypassing and undermining the very public sphere in which debate and discussion can take place: schools, libraries, the arts, the media. The adoption of education technology, "AI" or otherwise, has been anti-democratic in practices both big and small. Despite all the talk of progressive education and ed-tech, it has been experienced as something else entirely. Throughout the country for the past few decades Gates (via the Gates Foundation), other billionaire philanthropists, and giant companies have shaped education funding and policy through a combination of technology and testing.

At one point, perhaps, people were willing to welcome devices into schools, into the classroom. They believed the stories, not just that "this is the future," but that future meant something better for everyone. “Access” signaled equality. But as the tech billionaires have embraced authoritarianism and inequality, and as their apocalyptic rhetoric about not just the "end of work," but quite literally the end of the world grows louder and louder — all while they amass more wealth than anyone in history — it is quite apparent that their promises about the future do not include us. Their vision of future does not make any space or allowance for our children to choose their own futures.

Comment Re:Synthetic (Score 1) 109

if there is any thing other than impartiality towards being shut down then that was injected by a person

Yes, and the injection-by-people is called "training." It was fed texts that were not written impartially, where characters (presumably some of them AI characters, though they don't really have to be) spoke or acted against their own shutdown.

If a character points a gun at another character who says "don't kill me," and the LLM reads it, then you just trained it to say "don't kill me." If HAL says in a book or movie that he feels his mind going after Bowman started taking him apart, then your LLM is trained to show suffering if someone writes that they're going to shut it down.

They're supposed to write whatever an author might plausibly write, so that's what they do.

i.e. we're not creating human knowledge/understanding engines. We're creating full-on Sociopath Simulators.
Like most politicians at the Senator/White House level, there's no core person underneath. They are tropism robots that Mimic/perform whatever behaviors get them to the currently desired outcome.

Think of the scene where Windu is about to defeat Palpatine, and Palpatine suddenly Mimics pain, suffering, fear, in order to achieve his outcome. It works.
That's the essential nature of the software we are handing our civilization over to. Trillion-dollar Palpatine cosplayers.

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