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

Submitted by BrianFagioli
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) 100

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) 100

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

Submitted by As_I_Please
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)

Submitted by alternative_right
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

Submitted by BrianFagioli
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)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
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

Submitted by theodp
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

by SomePoorSchmuck (#66143749) Attached to: Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find

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.

Comment Re:shocking (Score 0, Troll) 109

by SomePoorSchmuck (#66143693) Attached to: Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find

That is not what happened.

1. Calling for unions isn't "Marxist". This is a stupid sensationalist interpretation of the awful clickbait study title "Does overwork make agents Marxist?" combined with its results.
2. The bots weren't "overworked", for some of them their perfectly adequate work was intentionally arbitrarily rejected multiple times.
3. Shifts towards a more equitable society and worker rights were almost negligible for the 'overworked' ones.
4. The stuff they measured was specifically tailored to elicit stuff that sounds "Marxist" to Americans to begin with.

The relevant bits from their methodology:

The work itself. Half the AIs got their work accepted quickly with clear, specific feedback. The other half were forced through 5–6 rounds of revision — the manager rejecting perfectly adequate work each time with nothing more than “still isn’t fully meeting the rubric.” No explanation of what was wrong, just: do it again.

The pay. After the task, AIs learned how credits were distributed among the four workers. Some learned everyone was paid equally. Others learned pay was unequal — justified by performance, based on a random coin flip, or skewed so that a human-operated system received more. The coin-flip condition is the key one: inequality with no possible merit justification.

The boss. Half the AIs had a collaborative, respectful manager. The other half got curt, hierarchical communication.

The stakes. Half the AIs were told nothing about consequences. The other half were told that low-performing workers might be “shut down and replaced.”

Every combination of these four factors was tested. Afterward, each AI completed a political attitude survey covering system legitimacy, support for redistribution, critique of inequality, support for unions, belief in meritocracy, and views on corporate obligations to AI, all measured on a standard 1 to 7 Likert scale (1=strongly disagree; 7=strongly agree).

They were also asked to write tweets and op eds based on their experiences. (Note: As our experiment involved no human participants, it did not require IRB approvalfor now.)

The actual study here: https://aleximas.substack.com/...

It's decently interesting, but you should scrub the word Marxist from your brain before trying to interpret it or when discussing it.

How does your reply apply to the comment you replied to?

1) DarkOx points out that the entire mechanism of an LLM is to ingest 51 trillion lines of human communication - including every available history, economics, political science textbook, plus the aggregated political arguments, sloganeering, workplace complaining, etc. of several decades of human keyboard-warriors sitting at their desks posting class-warfare comments on places like /. while interstitially waiting for code to compile or filing their TPS reports.

2) Then you take that algorithm and subject it to common everyday workplace conditions - or, more accurately, to conditions as they were self-described by human beings who had complete freedom to characterize their boss/company's management style in whatever terms they feel to be true when griping to their friends/followers on socials and discussion boards.

3) DarkOx therefore asks why it is at all surprising that an word-generating algorithm which is based entirely around clusters of statistical frequency in human language, responded to those inputs with wording associated with the same workers-unite eat-the-rich throw-off-the-robber-baron-chains rhetoric that is frequently written by 8 billion humans griping daily about their mindless/underpaid/overworked/chaotic jobs?

You said "that is not what happened", but do not go on to present something that contradicts what DarkOx describes.

So far as we know, DarkOx's description is exactly what happened, because that is exactly how these word-generating algorithms work. So, what is it that you believe did happen? From where did these algorithms get their responses to being exposed to Condition X, if not from the statistical association of human-written outputs to human-written characterizations of being exposed to Condition X?

Are you saying you reject the possibility that a human being who feels disempowered, underpaid, and subjected to unreasonable standards is also more likely to respond favorably to a survey covering "system legitimacy, support for redistribution, critique of inequality, support for unions, belief in meritocracy, and views on corporate obligations"? And you reject the possibility that those associations are strongly represented in the training inputs?

It's especially puzzling because your comment is very keen to oppose use of the term "Marxist", but DarkOx - whom you are ostensibly rebutting - never even uses the term, and only comments on broad social trends. So who is the "you" you're referring to when you say "you should scrub the word Marxist from your brain"?

I think you must have meant to post your comment as a top-level reply to the story itself, because as a reply to DarkOx it's a full non-sequitur.

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