Unfortunately the main accusation - that Meta systematically downloaded porn to use for AI training data - might actually be false if they aren’t lying about only having downloaded around 22 vids per year. Seems way too little data for a training set to me. Nonetheless they shouldn’t get away with downloading files they didn’t have permission for.

Agree and yes! I happily pay around 100€ annually. Comes with quite a few good perks

• unlimited access to probably one of the best search engines (for search-engine-literate folk it’s not necessarily that you’ll magically find better websites, but the quantity of garbage-/AI-websites will just be heavily reduced and you won’t have the problem that the first three or so links will be ads/sponsorships; it makes searching just feel nicer)
• customisable search (for example, I can generally rank search results for pinterest lower or outright block them to not even have them show up in the first place and instead boost results from beehaw)
• customisable and privacy-respecting AI bots only if you want to use them (from what I could find out, the AI bots always start every new conversation with a blank slate of you, no matter how much you’ve used Kagi or the LLMs before)
• Kagi Small Web, which is an initiative to basically push the “alive internet theory” by highlighting small blogs and personal websites of a whole range of people
• Kagi Universal Summariser, which is an AI summariser that works very well on just about any text you give it and, for the articles and papers I threw at it, doesn’t tend to hallucinate stuff

Thank you, it indeed was wrong. Apparently when I set the link to be translate.kagi.com it tried to send me to beehaw.com/translate.kagi.com Weird but I fixed it now.

And yeah, the options are very neat! I don’t have a captcha though, but that may be because I’m a paying subscriber to Kagi and thus logged in?

To me, the go-to answer used to be DeepL, but more recently it’s Kagi Translate. It’s really accurate for languages I do speak (English to German and vice versa) and allows for recorded speech, although that seems to be reliant on clear talking (my first try of “Hello, what’s going on?” was recorded as “Yo, what’s going on?”)

Maybe it did not have plans to put ads on every last home appliance, but when the interviewer gave them the idea, they started making all of the plans forehead tap

I feel for those who got duped on their fridge. I couldn’t find an entry for this incident, yet, on https://consumerrights.wiki/Samsung so I’ll sit down and try my best to write it up.

You’re right. With all the shit being brought into the spotlight, I easily forget to see all the good the internet is still being used for.

Amazing how in less than the span of my 31 year lifetime the internet turned from absolutely world-changing great and probably directly or indirectly the most fun and useful tool humans can play around with to not-yet-unusable-but-definitely-closing-in slop where you can’t spend an hour without getting mad at some system working against us.

Edit: I hate ending on a dismal note, so let me remind everyone that the “small web” (human-created blogs made with nothing but passion for their craft) exists, even if it’s harder to find. Similarly, for most enshittified websites like YouTube, there’s an alternative to the enshittification (even if it’s just getting something like Grayjay to circumvent the crap on YT)

As @nokturne213@sopuli.xyz said, this is about much more than software. You can’t pirate a gym (excluding the Venn Diagram of probably 0.0000001% of people who both want to go to a gym and know how to hack themselves into said gym’s database).

Click-to-cancel hurts every consumer in America and only benefits the providers of any subscription service.

Yeah! I used DDG for quite a while and it’s pretty okay. Kagi definitely isn’t without fault but for me it’s the best true alternative to Google and I happily pay for it. Allows me to save so much time (cumulatively) by just guiding me to the actual result in most cases (instead of sponsored and ad-infested garbage sites)

Alright. I had to read up again on why this is newsworthy in the first place. Because of the language in their new ToS regarding usage of user data. The article I read, asked why they would only now update their terms despite the California Privacy Act having been in effect for a while now.

I’m very sure, optimistically assuming they are honest and really didn’t change the way they handle user data, that an auditor found the previous wording of their ToS just not clear enough. Working in Quality Management and having attended quite a number of audits, this happens all the time. Company has a process for years, sometimes decades, but then needs to change the wording in a document because a new and overly by-the-books auditor will demand such to have it not only be “correct in spirit” but also “technically correct”. Nothing in the actual process needs to change.

Again, this is me assuming that they really havent done something different in the way they handle data. Isn’t Firefox open-source? Could some savvy code-reader go through it to see if something about the data collection has changed?

Alexandra is the hero students (and scientists) all over the world need! And I’m so glad that my former profs acknowledged and recommended Sci-Hub to us. So many people wouldn’t be able to graduate without debt (or “even more debt” for the Americans) otherwise.

Not only is it voluntary (can confirm that 1&1 doesn’t block the subset of sites I just now tried out which are on the list) but Germany’s approach seems to be pretty tame in comparison, still. Doesn’t make it good, but a lot less bad than it seems by just reading the highlighted section.

While the CUII website lists 24 platforms for blocking, at last count the exposed list contained well over ten times more domains/subdomains, over 300 in total. For perspective, Germany’s site-blocking program is very modest when compared to schemes in the UK, France, Italy, and Spain, for example, where thousands of sites are blocked with information on domains mostly restricted.

Holy cow that’s a horrible take. Please, if you can spare the time and money, come visit our country and don’t just look at the few high-criminality places or the corruption of key politicians. Yes, they exist and should be criticized, but if your conclusion from that is to think that Germany is still just like during one of the most horrific regimes, then you’ve been grossly misinformed and need to experience the daily reality instead.

Look, man, it’s trying its best. And frankly, I think it’s about as ready as it could ever get to replace every single billionaire in the world, considering the sanity of many billionaire’s choices we hear about lately.

True, true. We literally omly have a wood furnace, so are absolutely not affected by this, but I’ll see how reporting potential GDPR violations in the name of someone else works.

Sorry that it didn’t land as an obvious joke. With the NSDAP NPD AfD on such a steep rise, I think I have transcended gallows humour and arrived at necromancer humour levels to be able to cope with this reality.

Thank you a lot for the load of information! I just now got to reading it all. I was very skeptical about the fact that it is fed by the output of other LLMs but the way you explain it makes sense to me that it might not be that much of a problem. I guess a super blunt analogy could be “It’s only incest if it’s your children” lol

Thanks for the explanation. I don’t understand enough about large language models to give a valuable judgement on this whole Deepseek happening from a technical standpoint. I think it’s excellent to have competition on the market and it feels that the US’ whole “But they’re spying on you and being a national security risk” is a hypocritical outcry when Facebook, OpenAI and the like still exist.

What do you think about Deepseek? If I understood correctly, it’s being trained on the output of other LLMs, which makes it much more cheap but, to me it seems, also even less trustworthy because now all the actual human training data is missing and instead it’s a bunch of hallucinations, lies and (hopefully more often than not) correctly guessed answers to questions made by humans.

Does open sourcing require you to give out the training data? I thought it only means allowing access to the source code so that you could build it yourself and feed it your own training data.

I really can’t speak on the security or data privacy of it, since I’m not knowledgeable enough in these topics, but I pay 1€ per month for Port87. I just love the ability to easily create sub-adresses and never have to worry about my “main adresses” receiving the spam I get for e.g. online shopping