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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: February 10th, 2025
  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•TikTok's 'Addictive Design' Found to Be Illegal in Europe in breach of the Digital Services ActEnglish
    4·
    8 hours ago

    The big danger here, which these steps mitigate but do not solve are:

    #1 Algorithmically curated content

    On the various social media, there are systems of automated content moderation that are in place that remove or suppress content. Ostensibly for protecting users from viewing illegal or disturbing content. In addition, there are systems for recommending content to a user by using metrics for the content, metrics for the users combined with machine learning algorithm and other controls which create a system of controls to both restrict and promote content based on criteria set by the owner. We commonly call this, abstractly, ‘The Algorithm’ Meta has theirs, X has theirs, TikTok has theirs. Originally these were used to recommend ads and products but now they’ve discovered that selling political opinions for cash is a far more lucrative business. This change from advertiser to for-hire propagandist

    The personal metrics that these systems use are made up of every bit of information that the company can extract out of you via your smartphone, linked identity, ad network data and other data brokers. The amount of data that is available on the average consumer is pretty comprehensive right down to knowing the user’s rough/exact location in real-time.

    The Algorithm used by social media companies are a black box, so we don’t know how they are designed. Nor do we know how they are being used at any given moment. There are things that they are required to do (like block illegal content) but there are very little, if any, restrictions on what they can block or promote otherwise nor are there any reporting requirements for changes to these systems or restrictions on selling the use of The Algorithm for any reason whatsoever.

    There have been many public examples of the owners of that box to restricting speech by de-prioritizing videos or restricting content containing specific terms in a way that imposes a specific viewpoint through manufactured consensus. We have no idea if this was done by accident (as claimed by the companies, when they operate too brazenly and are discovered), if it was done because the owner had a specific viewpoint or if the owner was paid to impose that viewpoint.

    This means that our entire online public discourse is controllable. That means of control is essentially unregulated and is increasingly being used and sold for, what cannot be called anything but, propaganda.

    #2 - There is no #2, the Algorithms are dangerous cyberweapons, their usage should be heavily regulated and incredible restrictions put on their use against people.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•‘In the end, you feel blank’: India’s female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AIEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    It has been long time since social media cared about showing us things that we wanted to see.

    There have been several shootings that have had massive social media impact, you may have avoided them (and you did the right thing) but a huge amount of people experienced witnessing their first shooting death and maybe 2nd, 3rd and 4th this year. That’s a lot of cumulative psychological stress being inflicted on society and it isn’t like we’re living in a world that is otherwise a calming paradise…

    Social media is inflicting real harms and the people in control don’t seem very motivated to try to control them. Or, they did try in tests and determined that Engagement was more profitable and they’re shielded from the externalities so who cares really?

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Was there censorship on TikTok after the U.S. takeover?English
    2·
    1 day ago

    You’re right, as a consequence of the power of this new technology to change our life it poses a constant risk to fabric of society and our ability to understand facts about the world.

    Discourse and culture are shaped by the structure of these social networks. Those structures are designed to the benefit of a dozen or so specific people. The amount of power that it gives them over all of society is not an amount of power that should be wielded by a private individual.

    We wouldn’t let Oppenheimer have an arsenal of nuclear weapons because he was part of the team that invented The Bomb. We recognized, as a species, that this technology was too dangerous for anybody to have (even though we all thought we were the exceptions) and we tightly control access to this technology and stack all kinds of safeguards and checks on their usage as if our lives depend on it… because they do.

    We can all see the power of controlling the perception and attention of society. We can see how discourse is shaken and manipulated for views and profit instead of for understanding and knowledge. We need to treat these technologies like they are dangerous cyber weapons. They need to be studied by professionals and the structure of these systems of discourse need to be set for the public good.

    Just to head off the obvious attack angle. I don’t mean regulate speech, but the upvote system from Reddit is a terrible way to handle the ‘which comments should we show people’ problem. It’s also probably not a good idea to use machine learning to optimize ‘Engagement’ or other metrics when we know the outcome is that it drives content that creates fear, hatred, disgust and anger. A video recommendation algorithm that prioritizes views and comment engagement over anything else ends of amplifying the viewpoints of the most extreme opinions and this creates a false perception of consensus towards extremism. Allowing programs to advertise themselves as ‘News’ when they’re just ‘entertainment shows’ is about as harmful as letting companies claim their peanut butter is ‘allergen free’.

    We’re in the wild wild west with an incredibly destructive technology being driven by a couple of dozen people who appear to have little empathy and a taste for power that may lead them into flying too close to the sun.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•How ICE is watching you: A rundown of some of the tech the government is deploying to identify and spy on usEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    A leader doesn’t seem necessary. The leaderless nonviolent resistance movement has been winning in the court of public opinion.

    100%

    In some sense, they’re using modern technology to mass produce propaganda but the people actually directing things are still stuck in the 1900s mindset when regards to thinking about power.

    Communication Technology has made these kinds of diffuse movements possible, that’s why they’re trying desperately to create an ‘antifa’ to fight against. They want a conflict with a target that they can slander/attack and instead they’re just getting shit spontaneously from every possible angle.

    They’re fighting a 20th century battle with 21st century technology. Like Russia using armor to invade a country armed with Javelins.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Unredacted files reveal Anthropic’s ‘secret plan’ to ‘destructively scan all the books in the world'English
    1·
    1 day ago

    The case against Meta, where they ‘lost’ the copyright claim, was one of the biggest cases recently where Authors Guild v. Google was used. The judge dismissed one of the complaints (about training) while citing Authors Guild v. Google. Meta did have to pay for the books, but once they paid for the books they were free to train their models without violating copyright.

    Now, there are some differences so the litigation is still ongoing. For example, one of the key elements was that Google Books and an actual book fulfill two different purposes/commercial markets so Google Books isn’t stealing market share from a written novel.

    However, for LLMs and image generators this isn’t as true so there is the possibility that a future judge will carve out an exception for this kind of case… it just hasn’t happened yet.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•TSMC to make advanced 3nm chips in JapanEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pure-silicon/

    As I said, we can make nine 9 silicon. But not eleven 9. China makes billions of nine 9 silicon chips per year. But they can’t make eleven 9. Everyone is trying to create lab made eleven 9, it might not be possible. The natural stuff formed over hundreds of millions of years with basically no exposure to water. Which means no contaminates.

    So yeah, we’ve not succeeded in recreating that.

    That’s not what is in the article you linked.

    The very best Spruce Pine quartz, however, has an open crystalline structure, which means that hydrofluoric acid can be injected right into the crystal molecules to dissolve any lingering traces of feldspar or iron, taking the purity up another notch. Technicians take it one step further by reacting the quartz with chlorine or hydrochloric acid at high temperatures, then putting it through one or two more trade‑secret steps of physical and chemical processing.

    The result is what Unimin markets as Iota quartz, the industry standard of purity. The basic Iota quartz is 99.998 percent pure SiO2. It is used to make things like halogen lamps and photovoltaic cells, but it’s not good enough to make those crucibles in which polysilicon is melted. For that you need Iota 6, or the tip‑top of the line, Iota 8, which clocks in at 99.9992 percent purity—meaning for every one billion molecules of SiO , there are only 80 molecules of impurities. Iota 8 sells for up to $10,000 a ton. Regular construction sand, at the other end of the sand scale, can be had for a few dollars per ton.

    You wrote

    The natural stuff formed over hundreds of millions of years with basically no exposure to water. Which means no contaminates.

    From the article:

    It took some 100 million years for the deeply buried molten rock to cool down and crystallize. Thanks to the depth at which it was buried and to the lack of water where all this was happening, the pegmatites formed almost without impurities. Generally speaking, the pegmatites are about 65 percent feldspar, 25 percent quartz, 8 percent mica, and the rest traces of other minerals.

    The quartz they produce has a structure that makes it easier to clean so, when making the quartz crucibles for manufacturing silicon wafers it is the best choice. But the purity isn’t eleven 9s, the highest quality is 99.9992% purity.

    Silicon wafers are made out of even more pure silicon (9n), which is melted in the nearly pure quartz crucibles. The Spruce Pine quartz is for making the crucibles, not making the wafers.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Unredacted files reveal Anthropic’s ‘secret plan’ to ‘destructively scan all the books in the world'English
    1·
    1 day ago

    The argument is that the initial training data is sufficiently altered and “transformed” so as not to be breaking copyright. If the model is capable of reproducing the majority of the book unaltered, then we know that is not the case.

    We know that the current case law on the topic, which has been applied in the specific case of training a model on copyrighted material, including books is that training a model on copyright material is ‘highly transformative’.

    Some models are capable of reproducing the majority of some books, after hundreds or thousands of prompts (not counting the tens of thousands of prompts required to defeat the explicit safeguards preventing this exact kind of copyright violation), as long as you make the definition of ‘reproduce’ broader (measuring non-contiguous matching, allowing near edits, etcetc).

    Compare that level of ‘copyright violation’ vs how the standard in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc was applied. In that case Google had OCR’d copies of books and allows (it is still a service that you can use now) users to full-text search books and it will return you a sentence or two of text around the search term.

    Not ‘kind of similar text that has some areas where the tokens match several times in a row’, an exact 1:1 copy of text taken directly from a scan of the physical book. In addition, the service also has high quality scans of the book covers as well.

    Google’s use was considered highly transformative and it gives far more accurate copies of the exact same books with far less effort than a language model which is trained, in many cases, to resist doing the very thing that Google Books has been doing openly and legally for a decade.

    LLMs don’t get close to this level of fidelity in reproducing a book:

    Google

    vs

    LLMs

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Was there censorship on TikTok after the U.S. takeover?English
    2·
    1 day ago

    We are certainly affected by the social norms and memes which are generated by the larger site’s algorithms even on Lemmy.

    Even here you see arguments that are Reddit styled, you see self censorship from TikTok (unalived, f*ck, etc) and you see the purest outrage-bait from X. A huge portion of the content that we see on Lemmy is content that was surfaced by the primary social media site’s algorithms.

    We do get to dodge the hyper targeted nature of the content so, assuming you’re Lemmy-only (if not, delete those apps for your own sanity) you won’t be given content that is hypertuned to your specific psychological traits so a lot of things will fail to make as big of an impact on you which can give you enough mental space to maintain perspective.