deweydecibel

Or the fact that once it’s off of your hard drive and sitting comfortably on their cloud (their hard drive), they can scan it and harvest it for data.

I’ve seen people defend using AI this way by comparing it to using a calculator in a math class, i.e. if the technology knows it, I don’t need to.

And I feel like, for the kind of people whose grasp of technology, knowledge, and education are so juvenile that they would believe such a thing, AI isn’t making them dumber. They were already dumb. What the AI does is make code they don’t understand more accessible, which is to say, it’s just enabling dumb people to be more dangerous while instilling them with an unearned confidence that only compounds the danger.

I know some artists don’t mind it, but I just can’t hear the word “creatives” as anything other than silicon valley speak for the source of the content they sell. It feels dehumanizing.

Particularly in this case, it’s Adobe, so you can just call them artists, designers, photographers, etc.

Or, ya know, just users.

Driving behavior analysis, or telematics, as the insurance industry calls it, could be better for consumers, leading to personalized rates that are more fair. Plus, if people have to pay more for their risky driving, they may drive more cautiously, leading to safer roads. But this will happen only if drivers are aware that their behavior is being monitored.

I’m so sick of this shit.

Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it’s about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.

You’d also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they’re collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.

The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher.

Or some new bullshit study comes out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident than people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years. That’s a pattern of risky behavior.

Maybe the central problem is racing to put other people out of work period, regardless of who they are. Maybe putting people out of work is not a net benefit for society, it’s actually negative in the long run, and only truly a benefit for shareholders. They don’t need any more of those at the expense of the working class.

You also shouldn’t keep using software with known vulnerabilities. You can find a maintained fork of Chromium with continued Manifest V2 support or choose another browser like Firefox.

It’s disgusting how this exact idea is used to push users away from things they want, and no matter what they claim, you can’t convince me this isn’t part of how they design certain updates. When the customer has no choice but to update, the company has no reason to make the update appealing. They can actively make it all worse and worse and worse, while continuing to scare users into accepting it.

I’m tired of companies hiding behind “security” to mask anti-consumer shit, and I’m tired of the security community helping them shovel that shit while acting like the consumer is a fool for not wanting to eat it.

Are Microsoft a big, evil company?

A. No, that’s insanely reductive. They’re super smart people, and sometimes super smart people make mistakes. What matters is what they do with knowledge of mistakes.

I have no doubt there are smart employees, but they don’t call the shots. Case in point.

The dude set up a strawman argument, then didn’t even bother to burn it down properly.

Bad enough I have to let Microsoft constantly run on my phone, no way Adobe gets that privilege too.

Affinity Photo is on another planet compared to photoshop.

Other than 32 bit, what else have you got that actually sets it apart?

Because the single purchase license thing doesn’t look like it’s sticking around.

PS for those unaware:

If you use Firefox, you can add a custom Search engine with the Search URL string:

https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%25s

Then set that new custom Search engine as default.

I believe they’re suggesting just doing a full backup up of your system/Docker container. Which isn’t ideal, but I think they’re trusting people who can run a Jellyfin server to be able to use the scripts.

My Jellyfin is also running media from recycled HDDs from work. No where near this impressive haul, but it was nice to be able to get a solid 10 TBs for free to get my server going.

It is shocking because they did it after the investigation had started, which is monumentally stupid.

You can destroy any records you want at any time, unless there’s an investigation underway or you have good reason to believe one will be starting. At that point, you’re destroying evidence.

That’s just a classic issue with most tech people: they either forget or don’t know how to adjust their speech for a different audience than themselves. Often they don’t even comprehend just how much “common knowledge” isn’t actually common outside their social spaces.

Then there’s some that are deliberately refusing to help uninformed people understand, or are even outright hostile to them.

Yep, the timing lines up. As part of the buyout offer, they probably had to demonstrate an effort to cripple the open source fork of the thing IBM wants to buy.

Oh I know, I’m still on Motorola because they have unlockable bootloaders and SD card slots. But in recent years they’ve started taking them out of some of their mid-range models.

Point is there should be more options. Removing the SD card slot is just a bullshit way to push cloud storage.

I know, and I do, but the point is choices shouldn’t be so limited. They should be standard.

Now can we please get them back in phones?

That’s a pretty standard position nowadays from a lot of different tech companies. They can’t possibly give the user any freedoms, because it might compromise something. It’s this broad assumption that all users that refuse to surrender control of their device should never be trusted and therefore not have their desires respected.

Like how Google continues to actively punish users that claw back control of their devices through custom roms or rooting, and of course Apple has been doing that forever. Microsoft is threatening more invasive restrictions in windows, too. It’s why shit like integrity checking is continuing to be pushed.

The pattern is very clear: you are required to let them stick their arm up your device’s ass to participate in our “modern” tech space.

It’s the equivalent of a store that forces all customers to strip naked before entering to prevent shoplifting. You of course don’t have to enter that store, but that store has also run virtually all the other stores out of business, and it’s the only one that carries the specific brand of chips you’re looking for.

Be thankful it didn’t take an explosive shit.