Everything Whedon has ever done was mid, and I’m going to be banned for saying that, probably.

The lie was WORSE than that.

A lot of the fintechs invovled actually told people their money was safe, because it was subject to “passthrough FDIC insurance”, because their money was ultimately put in an insured bank, and thus was safe.

Problem is that’s not how it actually worked, so basically everyone was straight up lied to.

Basically the whole thing is that the bank keeps track of who owns which account and how much money they have, so if they go bust, you just have the FDIC come in and use that data and write checks, basically.

Except since they’re disrupting banking, they also decided to just fucking not bother, and so even if there was going to be a payout, nobody has any fucking clue who has how much and in which bank said money was.

Absolute clusterfuck, and about what you’d expect from silly-con valley types.

The equivalent of Intune for Linux would be… Intune.

Though you’re still having to do a lot more work on the implementation side for it, and a lot of IT teams isn’t going to want to deal with it for the two people that actually want Linux, out of the 10,000 employees they’re otherwise managing.

big fan of mini PC’s

Same, but just be careful if you venture outside of the “reputable” vendors.

I bought one recently from Aliexpress, and while it’s perfectly functional, it’s using an ethernet chipset that doesn’t have in-kernel drivers so I have to keep compiling new drivers for it every time the kernel upgrades.

Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that I could do without, and not something a slightly more expensive version of what I got would have.

I’ve gone way too far down the automation path.

All manner of temperature, humidity, occupancy, motion, and air quality sensors make all sorts of things do appropriate responses.

For example, I’ve got a mmwave motion/occupancy sensor in the bathroom, and if there’s no motion/occupancy and the humidity is more than 5% higher than the hallway sensor, then turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.

Or, if the air particulate count in the kitchen is too high, turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.

Or, if the living room is occupied, and the tv is on and playing media, turn the overhead lights off and turn the RGB accent light on very dimly. And if the media is paused or stopped, increase the brightness of the RGB lighting so you can see where you’re walking, and if it stays paused or stopped for more than 10 minutes, turn the main lights back to whatever state they were in before media playback started.

No dashboards though, since the goal is essentially that you don’t have to think about what is going on, because it should Just Work™ and never be something you have to deal with.

…though, really, I’d say we’re at like 80% successful with that.

For manual interactions I’ve got a bunch of NFC tags in various places that will trigger the appropriate automation in the case that you either want to do it by hand or it fails to do the needful, plus the app is configured to allow manual control of any device and to trigger specific automations.

ease up on the mo powah baby

But… but… more power better.

But the article seems to be about deadly accidents, and not just accidents.

You can hit an awful lot of things at a shocking rate of speed and walk away with modern car crash design, so I’d be inclined to think it’s more than just the torque curve responsible for all the dead people.

Roku TV app store

Yes, and it works pretty well.

But not so much with the consoles, though there is a UWP xbox app, but it’s uh, not very good.

Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place,

They’re also subject to interpretation, regulatory capture, as well as just plain being ignored when it’s sufficiently convenient for the regulators to do so.

“There ought to be a law!” is nice, but it’s not a solution when there’s a good couple of centuries of modern regulatory frameworks having had existed, and a couple centuries of endless examples of where absolutely none of it matters when sufficient money and power is in play.

Like, for example, the GDPR: it made a lot of shit illegal under penalty of company-breaking penalties.

So uh, nobody in the EU has had their personal data misused since it was passed? And all the big data brokers that are violating it have been fined out of business?

And this is, of course, ignoring the itty bitty little fact that you have to be aware of the misuse of the data: if some dude does some shady shit quietly, then well, nobody knows it happened to even bring action?

How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?

I think what they’re saying is that the ideal wouldn’t be to force everyone to host their own, but rather for the people who want to run stuff to offer them to their friends and family.

Kinda like how your mechanic neighbor sometimes helps you do shit on your car: one person shares a skill they have, and the other person also benefits. And then later your neighbor will ask you to babysit their kids, and shit.

Basically: a very very goofy way of saying “Hey! Do nice things for your friends and family, because that’s kinda how life used to work.”

AI model of that type is safe to deploy anywhere

Yeah, I think you’ve made a mistake in thinking that this is going to be usable as generative AI.

I’d bet $5 this is just a fancy machine learning algorithm that takes a submitted image, does machine learning nonsense with it, and returns a ‘there is a high probability this is an illicit image of a child’, and not something you could use to actually generate CSAM with.

You want something that’s capable of assessing the similarities between a submitted image and a group of known bad images, but that doesn’t mean the dataset is in any way usable for anything other than that one specific task - AI/ML in use cases like this is super broad and has been a thing for decades before the whole ‘AI == generative AI’ thing became what everyone is thinking.

But, in any case: the PhotoDNA database is in one place and access to it is scaled by the merit of uh, lots of money?

And of course, any ‘unscrupulous engineer’ that may have any plans for doing anything with this is probably not a complete idiot, even if a pedo: they’re going to have shockingly good access controls and logging and well, if you’re in the US, if the dude takes this database and generates a couple of CSAM images using it, the penalty is, for most people, spending the rest of their life in prison.

Feds don’t fuck around with creation or distribution charges.

I assume the KDE implementation resizes to default when you stop shaking it.

I could totally see someone coding a function that increases the mouse pointer by x% every y mouse shakes, and then neglecting to put in a size cap.

Yeah, and Windows and OS X both do it as well.

Though there being no upper limit to the size is amusing.

comparative scale of the content involved

PhotoDNA is based on image hashes, as well as some magic that works on partial hashes: resizing the image, or changing the focus point, or fiddling with the color depth or whatever won’t break a PhotoDNA identification.

But, of course, that means for PhotoDNA to be useful, the training set is literally ‘every CSAM image in existance’, so it’s not really like you’re training on a lot less data than an AI model would want or need.

The big safeguard, such as it is, is that you basically only query an API with an image and it tells you if PhotoDNA has it in the database, so there’s no chance of the training data being shared.

Of course, there’s also no reason you can’t do that with an AI model, either, and I’d be shocked if that’s not exactly how they’ve configured it.

The problem I ran into is that every single platform that primarily interacted with Mastodon (The keys, etc.) had the same exact same set of problems.

While yes, my Firefish instance had search, what was it searching? Local data only, and once I figured out that Mastodon-style replies didn’t federate to all of someone’s followers, it became pretty clear that it was uh, not very useful.

You can search, but any given server may or may not have access to data you actually want and thus, well, you just plain cannot meaningfully search for shit unless you go to one of the mega instances, or join giant piles of relays and store gigabyte upon gigabyte upon gigabyte of garbage data you do not care about.

The whole implementation is kinda garbage for search-based discovery from it’s very basic design all the way through to everyone’s implementations.

first time law enforcement are sharing actual csam with a technology company

It’s very much not: PhotoDNA, which is/was the gold standard for content identification, is a collaboration between a whole bunch of LEOs and Microsoft. The end user is only going to get a ‘yes/no idea’ result on a matched hash, but that database was built on real content working with Microsoft.

Disclaimer: below is my experience dealing with this shit from ~2015-2020, so ymmv, take it with some salt, etc.

Law enforcement is also rarely the first-responder to these issues, either: in the US, at least, reports will come to the hosting/service provider first for validation and THEN to NCMEC and LEOs, if the hosting provider confirms what the content is. Even reports that are sent from NCMEC to the provider aren’t being handled by law enforcement as the first step, usually.

And as for validating reports, that’s done by looking at it without all the ‘access controls and safeguards’ you think there are, other than a very thin layer of CYA on the part of the company involved. You get a report, and once PhotoDNA says ‘no fucking clue, you figure it out’ (which, IME, was basically 90% of the time) a human is going to look at it and make a determination, and then file a report with NCMEC or whatever, if it turns out to be CSAM.

Frankly, after having done that for far too fucking long, if this AI tool can reduce the amount of horrible shit someone doing the reviews has to look at, I’m 100% for it.

CSAM is (grossly) a big business, and the ‘new content’ funnel is fucking enormous and is why an extremely delayed and reactive thing like PhotoDNA isn’t all that effective is that, well, there’s a fuckload of children being abused and a fuckload of abusers escaping being caught simply because there’s too much shit to look at and handle effectively and thus any response to anything is super super slow.

This looks like a solution to make it so less people have to be involved in validation, and could be damn near instant in responding to suspected material that does need validation, which will do a good job of at least pushing the shit out of easy (ier?) availability and out of more public spaces, which honestly, is probably the best thing that is going to be managed unless the countries producing this shit start caring and going after the producers which I’m not holding my breath on.

For me, it’s full text search.

I tend to want to find an opinion on something very specific, so if I can just toss a phrase or model number or name of something into a search field and get actual non-AI, non-advertisement, non-stupid-shit results, that’d be absolutely ideal.

Like, say, how Google worked 15 years ago.

Btw.

First: you’d probably be shocked how many pedos have zero opsec and just post shit/upload shit in the plain.

By which I mean most of them, because those pieces of crap don’t know shit about shit and don’t encrypt anything and just assume crap is private.

And second, yeah, I’ll catch kids generating CSAM, but it’ll catch everyone else too, so that’s probably a fair trade.

Install it and use it?

Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).

It’s very centralized, but it’s not that different from what you’d have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.

Though really you shouldn’t do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate “microblog” shit because it’s designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)

15 million Series A financing

Maybe shitty corporate search engines are failing me, but has there been a stated valuation for Bluesky? Googling 'Bluesky valuation" or any combination thereof is a problem since that’s a business term so lol, lmao, search engine worthless.

$8m seed + $15m A series may be a shockingly small amount of equity, or it could be the whole damn company but I’m just not seeing it actually posted anywhere.