Gotta throw out that day-old stuff, ya know?

My family stayed at my house and “the TV wasn’t working,” because it doesn’t have network access and I use an Nvidia Shield instead, so they connected it to the Wi-Fi and ad overlays showed up in the menus! I’m still mad about it years later.

Luckily I dodged a bullet and it didn’t brick it or anything, and the ads went away when the internet access did. I just disconnected it from the network and manually banned the MAC address in case anyone else tries it again.

As soon as RAM isn’t more expensive than the TV.

Anti-vax people don’t seem to get this.

They don’t seem to understand a lot of things.

This is a very important distinction. Anti-vaxxers often misrepresent this method of immune system building to justify allowing dangerous infections to spread. It’s like saying:

“Exercise technically damages your muscles so your body builds them back stronger… so I don’t need to take precautions against injuring myself at the gym.”

Most infections are benign, but you should absolutely still get yourself and your children vaccinated against the ones that aren’t.

Lmao desperately trying to justify sunk cost, I see?

You’re right, it’s not scraping, it’s worse. Most AI bots do scrape sites for data, though since MS has direct access to the GH backend, they don’t even need to scrape the data. You’re giving it to them directly.

The issue here is trust. Microsoft, along with every other company invested in the AI race has proven repeatedly that getting ahead in said race is more important to them than anything else. It’s more important than user privacy, ToS, contracts, intellectual property, and the law itself.

If they stand to make more money screwing you over than they stand to lose from a slap on the wrist in court, the choice is clear. And they will lie to your face about it. Profit machines as big as MS don’t care. They can’t. They are optimized for one thing.

Your confusion is understandable since MS has called like 4 different products “Copilot”. This refers to the coding assistant built into GitHub for everything from CI/CD to coding itself.

All code uploaded to GitHub is subject to being scraped by Copilot to both train and provide inference context to its model(s).

Basically having your code in GitHub is implicit consent to have your code fed to MSs LLMs.

Translation: They going to try to “marketing” their way out of this hole.

Nothing about Windows or Microsoft will fundamentally change.

There’s definitely some “our team, their team” going on, but this isn’t really the same thing.

“Following TikTok’s sale to a Trump-aligned business group, our office has received reports, and independently confirmed instances, of suppressed content critical of President Trump”

This is not a criticism of the sale itself, but of reported censorship after the sale. Make no mistake, Newsom is still on the side of the billionaires. He just wants the billionaires to return to their progressive facade.

I just recently deleted my account and uninstalled the app. I’m not going to lie, it was hard because I had finally curated my algo to some pretty decent content that wasn’t just brainrot trash.

But I’d rather be bored than give Oracle anything.

EDIT: Also Loops is neat from a technical standpoint, but it feels like a ghost town coming from TikTok.

iOS and Android provide these statistics to app developers. Anonymized stats on installs and account statuses are totally fair telemetry imo.

Ah, the Apple strategy of forcing a standard.

EDIT: By that I mean when Apple started putting USB (1.0) on their Macs back in the day to encourage more USB accessories. Not their proprietary (what was the old iPod connector called?) or lightning BS.

I literally wait every year for this video.

Greedy companies do shit like that regardless of any laws. I don’t think this law makes it any more likely.

FOSS developers could create an ethical solution while still remaining legally compliant. The language is generic enough to allow for different implementations.

The bill I mentioned actually relies on parents configuring their kid’s devices. The system it describes just gives online (and even offline) platforms a standardized way of asking the OS what age category a user is as defined at account setup–hardly “dystopian nightmare fuel”…

This isn’t going to stop unsupervised children, which is it’s own problem that technology doesn’t (and probably can’t) solve.

Agreed, but you’d think they would prefer that. The way it is now, they have no way of knowing which platforms have your government IDs.

Though, let’s be real, all they need to do is pay a data broker for the tracking data that’s already being collected everywhere.

What you say??!!

IDK, the amount of abuse people have withstood only to keep using MS platforms is astounding. Some people would rather use trash than learn a new platform.

Clearly, no-one involved in making these laws has ever heard of OAuth. Not every single site needs to manage your identity / credentials. The government already has this info, they can be the identity provider and use OAuth to grant access to age-gated resources without giving any personal data to the platform. Someone mentioned id.me, and I’m pretty sure that’s how that platform works, though they’re a private entity if I understand their site correctly.

I know most politicians are comically tech-illiterate, but it’s so frustrating to see them constantly implement terrible solutions to already solved problems without asking a single expert who knows how this shit works.

That being said, California passed a bill with a not perfect, but better approach. User age is configured on the OS level when a user account is set up, and then it will tell platforms what age category the user belongs to, and nothing more:

(a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:

(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.

(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user:

(A) Under 13 years of age.

(B) At least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.

© At least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age.

(D) At least 18 years of age.

(3) Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.

I think iOS already does this, actually.

The vast majority of things gen AI produces becomes pointless when you take the human out of the equation imo.