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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • FYI, the most relevant information to avoiding your phone showing up in ICE’s rented databases is how they are getting the location data:

    The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.

    This includes a link to a prior 404 story that may have a list of apps, but it’s paywalled and none of the archive sites seem to have it indexed: https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/





  • Put a paper towel flat on a table (long side left to right, if you have a half size towel). Take your pointer finger and thumb on each hand, and touch the left thumb to the bottom left corner of the towel, left pointer to the top left, and mirror on the right hand. Keeping the left-right length of towel taut, slowly pinch both hands. From the side view, the towel’s center will rise on the left-right axis (the U-shape). Finish pinching to complete the motion.

    The bug’s center of gravity is above the feet, so it turns out that as long as you keep the paper towel taut, the body is lifted and it quickly attaches its feet to the towel.


  • For anyone wondering:

    Take a paper towel, grip both ends, gently place paper towel over the stinkbug and close both ends keeping the length taut (not putting any pressure or touching where the stinkbug is, just letting the U-shaped fold in the center where you are not touching enclose the stinkbug). Gently twist to seal exits while not squeezing the stinkbug.

    You are now holding a paper towel with a non-activated stinkbug. Do what you will with that stinkbug.



  • Ultimately it took ProPublica to pull back the curtain on a computed market where an algorithm was telling landlords how much to charge tenants for a majority of the market. And even then, I don’t think it’s stopped.

    This is exactly my point. The ability for companies to gouge consumers is exacerbated by algorithms, sure. But they have power because the regulatory rules are either in their favor or not.

    Even exposing it as you note didn’t change it. Likewise individual consumers don’t have the ability to change it. It’s a red herring and false solution to say “AI can fix it.”


  • I’m always up for a good AI dystopia article, but this is pretty poorly written, taking a very long time to say very little new or interesting. For this reason I wouldn’t be surprised if the author used AI assistance in writing it, which would certainly tell you something about the author’s objectivity. (It has a lot of earmarks of recent-model AI essay writing, like repeated use of the rule of threes, though I admit a human could have produced it. )

    The thesis appears to be that AI can be an equalizer to put individuals on equal footing to corporate data processing tasks. But conversely that it may not be because viability, quality and reliability depends on who controls the model and whether it hallucinates in critical or non-critical ways. Thanks for the clarity, article.

    None of this is new thought, but just another part of an inherently AI-normalizing line of thinking that AI is just another democratizing technological tool (but that could be used for evil - or good! - or evil!). The author addresses some of the AI flaws but ends almost where it began, with that flawed premise, which elides how unlike other tools, AI actually degrades our abilities to think and communicate once we start relying on it. The article doesn’t address that communication, meaning, thought, and reliability are degraded when either individual or corporate systems integrate AI.

    Instead, the author would like you to think individuals can level a playing field by using AI against corporate algorithms. And sure, a person denied a medical claim by a health insurer low effort AI can now write a generic low effort appeal, but that appeal can just a efficiently continue to be denied by better funded AI. It’s a spurious and illusory benefit to the individual.

    What truly matters and is unaffected by consumer AI use is power - political and corporate power. AI just floods the zone with more output, but the result of us all adopting AI will change nothing to the power imbalance in our system. The solution to low effort slop won’t be more low effort slop - we’d just be burying ourselves deeper in it.