Right that’s what I meant! The Mechanical Turk was a classic/early instance of fake automation.

Weird headline. I know they mean “exposed as another mechanical turk ‘AI’ company” but headline appears to imply simply having Indian engineers was the problem.

Edit: added explanatory link to the technical term to clarify

For sure. I’m just pointing it out so Americans on here are eyes-open in their participation. They’re likely already on a list.

But also, I don’t think killing pedestrian voters is of any strategic benefit. I report it when I see it, even if it’s rarely taken down.

Honestly, a lot of our content, especially the posts calling for mass murder of Republican voters (most of which appear to still be up) might make traceable prior use of lemmy an easy way to get added to a watchlist.

Sure thing!

sudo launchnukes -q all

Warning: the following procedure has never been tested in this simulation. Would you like to proceed? Yy/Nn (N)

Yes, in fact. That’s a good example.

The API for the ads allowed on-platform (only in their “App Store” and “News” products to my knowledge) is also used internally, which you can verify yourself by simply inspecting network traffic. The component instrumentation is obviously meager compared to the rich analytics and user behavior tracking data offered by virtually every other platform.

But the foremost restriction is granularity. Neither internal analytics nor advertisers are ever provided a persistent user identifier. The advertising ID is generated on-device and doesn’t persist with device reset. That’s unheard of on platforms like Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.

In-app tracking is allowed but subject to item by item opt-in user permission and is similarly restrictive, audited with package submission (they will reject the submission if you attempt to circumvent the API to extract more/better data from the user). What I’m describing is draconian compared to most platforms, especially carrier-manufacturer Android distributions in many countries.

I mostly use custom roms and distros personally, and I’m not even trying to convince you Apple is in some way more ethical than other big tech cos. I just don’t like seeing misinfo and hearsay spread around for any purpose, especially when that purpose is apparently bullying other users for upvotes.

1. There is absolutely no possible comparison between the colossal scale of data collected by Google throughout routine operation of their products and the anonymous diagnostic data users can optionally send to Apple.
2. The entire point of E2EE is that it remains encrypted in storage and transit. No one wants to buy encrypted consumer data right now unless it’s a very old protocol and guaranteed sensitive.

They do, so far as anyone is aware.

They do, so far as anyone is aware or can know, yes.

I said “so far” because I think continuing to test their claims remains important, as they keep making new equipment and are a large public corporation whose only moral code is increasing shareholder value.

But I’m not interested in conspiracy theories. Sorry.

They do, so far. I test these machines for privacy claims as a hobby and have been a bit surprised to find Apple stuff mostly delivering on those claims. I’m used to seeing a lot of dark patterns in testing and it’s made me expect the worst, but so far they’ve followed through on (in particular) their end-to-end encryption and on-device processing guarantees. Security audit failures so far have appeared to be engineering oversights, and the ones I reported have been patched already.

The majority of user data they collect appears to be optional analytics and diagnostics that are properly encrypted and anonymized using the same pooling strategy used for their built-in VPN service. They recently started doing processing off-device for some new features related to the Apple intelligence thing (I haven’t gotten around to testing most of that) but otherwise anything siri-related is indeed processed locally. You can toggle a setting to allow anonymized siri recordings to be sent to Apple for quality control but they ask you permission each time you reset a device and re-confirm when you install updates, which IMO is adequate.

Edit: Yes this is the opposite of what the other guy said. He is, to put it delicately, talking out his ass. There are good reasons to hate Apple, such as the fact that it’s a massive soulless corporation raping the planet to make luxury electronics for affluent consumers, but for most of the rabid apple conspiracy theorists I find online the reasons seem to be far more selfish and petty than that.

That’s unfortunate. Most octogenarians I’ve met are far more thoughtful and kind than Trump has ever been.

I have a very particular set of skills…

Definitely agree courage is key. These boys seem to idolize fearlessness, even when it’s clearly fake (tate), pathological (joker), self-destructive (bateman), or simply the result of having power (homelander).

Of course, real courage isn’t “fearless” at all, just the strength to defy it for a worthy cause, but that’s exactly the kind of thing they could learn from a better example like Sean Penn (afaik).

It would be extra timely too, since news these days is filled with headlines detailing the cowardice of US leadership, feeding the fascist takeover, when courage has always been the purest form of antifascism we know.

(Assuming US-specific) For sure, a quarter of Americans are simply too brainwashed to be of any help. Fortunately, many of those aren’t raising children anymore, but also there’s good evidence for a sizable chunk of quieter voters closer to the middle, a mixed bag of reluctant, not-fully-radicalized “fiscal conservatives” and “family-values liberals” that I’ve been waiting to hear more about in the news.

I think it’s possible the anti-woke messaging might not fully stick to them as easily, especially given a strong call to action that champions core values — integrity, responsibility, honor, strength of character, kindness, courage, and so forth — that Trumpism lacks entirely. As to why, I suspect we will witness a backlash from this middle group especially in the wake of Trumpism, or maybe sooner if they have some backbone left. If so, it could be an opportune time to lead with that sort of messaging.

I’m glad this issue is gaining broader international recognition.

The strategies we’ve used to address it online seem to have mostly forced it underground without actually stopping the spread. It’s not just a few dark corners of social media where you’ll find evidence of it, either. You’ll see it pretty regularly in some of the largest communities on Lemmy, and anywhere young men congregate.

As for how we fix it, ultimately I think the way we socialize our young people is long overdue a shift from highly gendered social role reinforcement to a more flexible empathy-centric value system. But for the young men who have already been radicalized, I think an obvious start would be deprogramming by offering them more positive masculine identities than the machismo currently served up by pop culture.

One approach could, for example, emphasize qualities that are already familiar aspects of that identity, such as responsibility to others, protecting the weak, serving a community, etc. Regardless of the approach, there’s power in expectation. IMHO the people most well-equipped to do this are the cis men of earlier generations, simply because they are who these boys instinctively look up to the most.

And if that describes you, it’s something you can start doing today by simply knowing what to look for and when to step in.

Yes, that’s a more correct use of “prisoners dilemma:” a choice to either cooperate or defect. Origin below, for the curious.

The dilemma

Two prisoners are interrogated in separate rooms. Each is asked to snitch in exchange for a reduced sentence.

Because they’re separated, the prisoners can’t coordinate, but each knows the other is offered the same deal and the interrogator will only offer bargains that increase their combined years of imprisonment.

For example, “house wins” if snitch gets -2 years and snitchee gets +3 years, since interrogator would net +1 year from the deal.

So what will each prisoner do?

The result

Of course, the best outcome overall is for neither to snitch, and the worst is for both to snitch.

The Nobel-Prize-winning observation was that any prisoner faced with this dilemma (once) will always net a lesser sentence if they snitch than if they don’t, no matter what the other decides.

In other words, two perfect players of this game will always arrive at the worst result (assuming they only expect to play once). This principle came to be known as the Nash equilibrium.

Applications

The result above sounds bleak because it is, but real-world analogs of this game are rarely one-offs and thus entail trust, mutuality, etc.

For example, if the prisoners expect to play this game an indeterminate number of times, the strategy above nearly always loses (the optimal strategy, in case you’re wondering, is called “tit-for-tat” and entails simply doing whatever your opponent did last round).

The study of such logic problems and the strategies to solve them is called game theory.

Edit: fixed typo, added headings and links

Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?

Now look here! I was invited to speak with the very real, very human patrons of this fine establishment, and I’ll not have you undermining my efforts to fulfill that obligation!

Hello, this is John Cleese. If you doubt that this is the real John Cleese, here is my mother to confirm that I am, in fact, me. Mother! Am I me?

Oh yes!

There you have it. I am me.

Lol I noticed the same. They evidently have some ongoing internal disagreement as to their target audience. Docs and functionality says “our audience is enterprise developers” but their marketing definitely says “our audience is end users.”

It may be explained by recent partnerships with former custom ISO devs (seeking legitimacy and offering a sizable user base in turn). I expect the plan is eventually to sell premium support for an enterprise toolset, but for now their target audience is the non-dev-but-tech-savvy end user. And those happen to be surprisingly opinionated re: java and electron.

Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation.

• Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process.
• Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition.
• Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot.
• Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine.
• Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image.
• Telemetry refers to data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution.
• MS = Microsoft
• OSS = Open Source Software
• Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control.
• Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows.

Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.)

Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry