I am live.

  • 0 posts
  • 14 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 7th, 2023
  • Technology@lemmy.world•A jury found Facebook guilty of 43 million privacy violations, and Meta could owe billionsbymechoman444@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 days

    And Meta can pay billions, continue doing business as usual, recoup the cost relatively quickly, and eventually become immensely profitable again.

    At a certain scale, what you and I consider to be an enormous amount of money can become almost meaningless to a company like that. A multibillion-dollar fine may sound devastating to the average person, but if it represents only a small fraction of the company’s revenue or profits, it is little more than a cost of doing business.

    If you actually want to hurt these companies and create a meaningful deterrent, the penalty has to be tied to their economic scale. Take a percentage of their profits or, in sufficiently serious cases, their revenue. Make the penalty large enough that the company genuinely feels the financial consequences of its behavior.

    Otherwise, you aren’t really punishing them. You’re just irritating them.

  • Technology@lemmy.world•Federal bill would force VPN providers, ISPs, and DNS services to block foreign piracy sitesbymechoman444@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7 days

    Privacy is not ok. People are stealing intellectual property. You can dress it up however you want, but that doesn’t change what is actually happening.

    At some point, you have to stop convincing yourself that you’re somehow not breaking the law simply because enforcement is difficult or unlikely. Let’s not beat around the bush: I’m completely comfortable with what I’m hypothetically doing when I hypothetically pirate media, and I fully understand exactly what is taking place. I’m not pretending otherwise.

    And let’s be honest, people aren’t exactly hiding it. They’re openly discussing it, building massive communities around it, sharing methods and resources, and publicly arguing for why they think it’s justified. Look at the conversation we’re having right now. The difference is that, in practice, prosecuting every individual pirate or every corporation doing something similar, is generally not worth the resources required.

    But that’s a question of enforcement, not legality.

    Look, man. You don’t have to morally agree with piracy, and you don’t have to pretend it’s something other than what it is. Just admit to yourself what is actually taking place when someone pirates something: they’re obtaining and using copyrighted material without the copyright holder’s authorization. Whether you personally think that’s justified is a completely separate question.

  • Technology@lemmy.world•Federal bill would force VPN providers, ISPs, and DNS services to block foreign piracy sitesbymechoman444@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7 days

    I’m not attacking anyone, and I’m not covering my eyes to anything.

    You basically just proved my point: going after every individual or corporation that pirates isn’t really feasible.

    I’m simply pointing out the hypocrisy in the stance itself. It doesn’t matter who’s doing the pirating; the underlying justification is the same. If it’s acceptable for an individual to pirate something because the company no longer sells it, then you can’t suddenly declare that same reasoning unacceptable when a corporation does it for essentially the same reason.

    You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too. Either you apply the same standards of criticism and ridicule to individuals and corporations, or your argument doesn’t hold water.

    You’re either okay with piracy as a principle, or you’re not. You don’t get to create one standard for individuals and another for corporations simply because you prefer one of them.

  • Technology@lemmy.world•Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brainbymechoman444@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11 days

    I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: ChatGPT’s search function is substantially better than Google’s AI search. And Google’s AI search is, frankly, so broken that it can barely be considered functional in some situations.

    I think part of the problem is that Google is asking its AI to serve two fundamentally conflicting purposes. It doesn’t just want an LLM that does LLM things. It wants an LLM that also functions as a marketing engine. And that makes sense from Google’s perspective because Google is, at its core, an advertising company that happens to operate some enormously successful technology platforms. Advertising is how Google makes the overwhelming majority of its money, so naturally it wants its AI to become part of that ecosystem.

    The problem is that optimizing an AI for advertising inevitably compromises its usefulness as an information system. The AI’s job should be to determine what information is most relevant to the user’s question and present it as accurately and efficiently as possible. An advertising platform has an entirely different objective: determine what can be sold, who will pay for access to the user, and how to maximize engagement and revenue. Those objectives can overlap, but they are not the same objective.

    And this gets even more interesting when you consider what increasingly capable AI systems are supposed to become. The fundamental value of an LLM, AGI, or whatever comes after AGI is that it can act as an intermediary between a human being and an enormous body of information, reasoning about what the human actually needs rather than simply presenting whatever happens to be profitable to show them.

    You can certainly put advertisements around an AI. You can even have an AI identify products or services that are relevant to a user. But the moment the AI itself becomes financially incentivized to favor one answer, product, company, or piece of information over another, you have fundamentally compromised the thing that makes the AI useful in the first place.

    A calculator doesn’t work better because the person who made it gets paid when you enter a particular number. A search engine shouldn’t give you a different answer because someone paid it to prefer that answer. And an intelligent system certainly shouldn’t be quietly optimizing its reasoning around whoever is willing to pay for access to your attention.

    The irony is that the more capable AI becomes, the less compatible that model should be with traditional advertising. Advertising depends on controlling what people see. Intelligence depends on being able to determine what is actually relevant. Those are fundamentally different incentives.

    As usual, the limiting factor may not be the technology itself. It may simply be our inability to resist turning every useful invention into another machine for extracting money from one another.