Pretty much every corporately owned service on the Internet actively spies on you for the police.

An important thing to understand as authoritarians take control of governments and start using this comprehensive spying apparatus to target political opponents.

Learn to use your computer. Use open sourced tools and software, invest in your own hardware and host your own services. It doesn’t require years of learning or study, you can often get by with a video or two.

My Jellyfin server doesn’t call the police. My local language models don’t store everything I’ve ever written. Nobody is scanning my NextCloud server or mining my Signal/Matrix/Jami contacts to determine my social graph.

All of this is running on cheap leftover hardware (with some new hard drives) and I save over $100/mo on the equivalent services. And way more if you consider access to every streaming service with exclusive content.

Windows is spying on you, Meta is spying on you, Google is spying on you, Amazon is spying on you, OpenAI is spying on you.

They do this because they make it slightly easier to use software and so people give up every bit of privacy and autonomy for their entire lives just to avoid reading a wiki or learning a technical skill.

I don’t think that that is a good deal.

I do work for a financial advisor, tax loss harvesting happens every tax season. You sell positions that are at a loss and invest the money in something else. Now you can claim that you lost money even if you reinvest in an asset highly correlated in value to the original one (there are some rules about what you can buy, but they largely don’t affect this technique).

This isn’t even rich people, under a million in assets. If you’re really rich there are tons of different loopholes available to you.

Ooo

A lot of people don’t realize that votes are public 🤓

Come on in, the water is fine.

For readers in the future, NPR was a show from back when we had public radio…

Look at meshtastic, it’s only text messages but the underlying system could be iterated on.

The “ai bad” brainrot has everyone thinking that any algorithm is AI and all AI is ChatGPT.

TLDR

“AI”

Sharpening, Denoising and upscaling barely count as machine learning. They don’t require AI neural networks.

Not a thing. From the article:

In some places, the main criticism that residents have about data centers has to do with the amount of water they consume to cool servers. This isn’t the case in Marseille, however, which is well-supplied with this resource. The authorities have even given Digital Realty access to water from the former underground drainage channels of the Gardanne coal mines, located north of Marseille. The water flows into the port, so the firm can use it to cool its systems.

It’s a misleading headline at best, clickbaiting the “ai bad” crowd.

It is definitely overhyped in the fields of language models and image/video generation. The idea that we’re going to have language models replacing people is completely hype. Those tools have some uses, but they’re not remotely close to the things that are being promised by the AI companies.

Hardly anyone pays attentions to the massive improvements being made in robotics or things like protein folding.

Sure, they’re expensive, but not prohibitively so and they’ll only get cheaper and better as investments are made. Investments like South Korea is doing.

Compare the early Boston Dynamics videos of their Big Dog robot using human programmed feedback control systems vs this robot trained using reinforcement learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I44_zbEwz_w

Programming a feedback control system is expensive and requires experts in multiple fields. Training models is a, relatively, simple process so the cost for robotics startups will be much lower. Motors, accelerometers, and image sensors and a strong graphics card is all you need. This process will be further sped up by foundational World Models which allows the training of a control system without any physical components as they’re trained in simulation.

LLMs are way overhyped, certainly, but that’s only a tiny portion of the things that neural networks are being used for.

This could all be done with sensors and rules and, in fact, was. Unless we’re being super loose with what “machine learning” means here. We’ve been teaching robots to semi-autonomously navigate courses and return for ages.

They use sensor fusion, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), path planning, reinforcement learning, computer vision, clustering and classification, and data analysis and feedback loops. All machine learning.

Neural networks are more efficient at computer vision than the old human-programmed methods and can be run on low performance hardware. Path planning and mapping could also be neural network based.

That’s so gross to me personally that I don’t want to think about it. Both from a security as well as environmental perspective. I also disagree that it’s close, at least for how I think you’re using “close” here.

Both BYD and Tesla have announced humanoid robots for around $10k starting next year.

https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/04/06/automaker-byd-to-sell-general-purpose-humanoid-robots-for-10000-each/89605/

https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/tesla-optimus-2-humanoid-robot/

Performative cruelty is the maga brand

It was inevitable that the bubble built on people being hyped and expecting sentient computers would burst.

AI has applications, but the ridiculous promises of these tech companies haven’t been tethered to reality for quite some time.

Computer vision to track inventory and expiration of food in a refrigerator could be useful for busy households. A dishwasher could cut its cycle short if it sees that dishes are clean, saving water and energy.

In addition, robots are home appliances that require AI. Robotic vacuum cleaners learn their surroundings and navigate using machine learning, so much so that ML textbooks commonly use them as teaching tools.

We’re also likely to see humanoid robots(or similarly flexible platforms) becoming household appliances in the near future.

It’s not unreasonable for countries to be investing in new technologies and AI is one of the more promising.

The President of the United States defending a member of his administration named Big Balls, this shit is surreal…

Yes

and was only later appropriated into the proper noun you reference to describe the Nazi’s systematic persecution and extermination of Jews, Poles, Romani and other ‘undesirable’ minority groups.

Yes, that’s my point.

After 1930 it became a proper noun. We’re not speaking Ancient Greek and it’s after the 1930s.

I see Lemmy is filling up with people (not you, the downvote brigade that exists around politically charged topics) who conflate disagreement about minor issues with being on the other side of the argument. Nuance isn’t Ancient Greek either, but you’d think it was given the way people react on social media.