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Sandbar_Trekker

@ Sandbar_Trekker @lemmy.today

Posts
1
Comments
47
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Google pulls the plug on first and second gen Nest Thermostats

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  • Thanks, I missed that detail. It's probably because of the "no class action" clause that this is a "mass arbitration".

    Unfortunately that usually means that Google is paying a specific company to decide on the outcome of the case. in this case it looks like American Arbitration Association has a contract with Google.

    They're supposed to be fair for both sides, but it's been shown that they almost always rule in favor of the company that has pre-selected them.

    If anyone is in this situation, they will likely have a much better chance by convincing a judge to allow a different 3rd party to arbitrate the case.

  • Google pulls the plug on first and second gen Nest Thermostats

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  • There is a class action "mass arbitration" against Google for this: https://www.classaction.org/nest-thermostat-support-arbitration

    Additionally, the Fulu Foundation has a bounty reward out for anyone who is able to get these working with something like Home Assistant.

    The pot is currently at $12,856.00 https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/nest-learning-thermostat-gen-1-2

    In the U.S., since doing so would circumvent measures put in place on these devices, publishing how to do this would go against sec. 1201 of the DMCA. This has a risk of a maximum sentence of 3-5 years in a Federal Prison. You can still privately show the Fulu Foundation how it is done, and they will be able to use this information to help their case in their attempt to reform this law.

    If you live in the U.S., you can also help by letting your representatives know about this. Here's an ActionNetwork page that Fulu set up so that you can easily do so: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/right-to-repair-reform-section-1201-of-the-dmca

  • OpenAI wants to stop ChatGPT from validating users’ political views

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  • Close, but not always. It will give out the answer based on the data it's been trained on. There is also a bit of randomization with a "seed".

    So, in general it will give out the most average answer, but that seed can occasionally direct it down the path of a less common answer.

  • Some of your AI prompts could cause 50 times more CO2 emissions than others

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  • Why not create comparison like "generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day" or something more easily to compare.

    Considering that you can generate 1000 words in a single prompt to ChatGPT, the energy to do that would be about 0.3Wh.

    That's about as much energy as a typical desktop would use in about 8 seconds while browsing the fediverse (assuming a desktop consuming energy at a rate of ~150W).

    Or, on the other end of the spectrum, if you're browsing the fediverse on Voyager with a smartphone consuming energy at a rate of 2W, then that would be about 9 minutes of browsing the fediverse (4.5 minutes if using a regular browser app in my case since it bumped up the energy usage to ~4W).

  • How is federated social media better?

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  • I agree with your comment except that I think you've got the privacy part wrong there. Any company can come in and scrape all the information they want, including upvote and downvote info.

    In addition, if you try to delete a comment, it's very likely that it won't be deleted by every instance who federates with yours.

  • How is federated social media better?

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  • I think you mean that you can choose a project that doesn't have an "algorithm" (in the sense that you're conveying).

    Anyone can create a project with ActivityPub that has an algorithm for feeding content to you.

  • Salt Lake City, plans to implement AI-assisted 911 call triaging to handle ~30% of about 450K non-emergency calls per year

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  • I think this would only be acceptable if the "AI-assisted" system kicks in when call volumes are high (when dispatchers are overburdened with calls).

    For anyone that's been in a situation where you're frantically trying to get ahold of 911, and you have to make 10 calls to do so, a system like this would have been really useful to help relieve whatever call volumes situation was going on at the time. At least in my experience it didn't matter too much because the guy had already been dead for a bit.

    And for those of you who are dispatchers, I get it, it can be frustrating to get 911 calls all the time for the most ridiculous of reasons, but still I think it would be best if a system like this only kicks in when necessary.

    Being able to talk to a human right away is way better than essentially being asked to "press 1 if this is really an emergency, press 2 if this is not an emergency".

  • The Browser Company, makers of Arc, launches Dia, an AI-first browser.

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  • I had to click to figure out just what an "AI Browser" is.

    It's basically Copilot/Recall but only for your browser. If the models are run locally, the information is protected, and none of that information is transmitted, then I don't see a problem with this (although they would have to prove it with being open source). But, as it is, this just looks like a browser with major privacy/security flaws.

    At launch, Dia’s core feature is its AI assistant, which you can invoke at any time. It’s not just a chatbot floating on top of your browser, but rather a context-aware assistant that sees your tabs, your open sessions, and your digital patterns. You can use it to summarize web pages, compare info across tabs, draft emails based on your writing style, or even reference past searches.

    Reading into it a bit more:

    Agrawal is also careful to note that all your data is stored and encrypted on your computer. “Whenever stuff is sent up to our service for processing,” he says, “it stays up there for milliseconds and then it’s wiped.” Arc has had a few security issues over time, and Agrawal says repeatedly that privacy and security have been core to Dia’s development from the very beginning. Over time, he hopes almost everything in Dia can happen locally.

    Yeah, the part about sending my data of everything appearing on my browser window (passwords, banking, etc.) to some other computer for processing makes the other assurances worthless. At least they have plans to get everything running locally, but this is a hard pass for me.

  • Why should I continue to financially support the development of Lemmy when the developers operate .ml, an instance that is a prime example of arbitrary censorship?

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  • My question simply relates to whether I can support the software development without supporting lemmy.ml.

    No. You can't support Lemmy without supporting lemmy.ml because the developers use lemmy.ml for testing. They have not created a means for users to separate out their donations from one or the other.

    That's why others are suggesting you should just support a different but similar fediverse project like PieFed or Mbin instead.

  • A Researcher Figured Out How to Reveal Any Phone Number Linked to a Google Account

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  • I think you missed the part at the very end of the page that showed the timeline of them reporting the vulnerability back in April, being rewarded for finding the vulnerability, the vulnerability being patched in May, and being allowed to publicize the vulnerability as of today.

  • Is there anybody over here who can tell me more about smart meters ?

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  • Edit: This is probably the wrong community for asking this question since this community is meant for tech related news. c/asklemmy might be better or !technology@piefed.social allows for discussions on anything tech related.

    Smart meters work mostly the same way meters have always worked with one minor difference, they occassionally transmit the current value via a radio frequency. Same as always, you install them at some point where they can measure just how much water/electricity/gas is flowing into the home. The transmitting frequency will be different depending on the device and what country you live in.

    If you want to see the details on how water meters measure water flow, go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_metering

    If you want the details on how gas meters work with all of the different sensors for that, go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_meter

    If you want the details on how electricity meters work, go here and read the "Electromechanical" and "Electronic" sections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_meter#Electromechanical

    Some newer meters are setup to attempt to guesstimate additional information such as what is being used in your home. For instances with water meters, a small flow of water for a short time can mean the faucet was turned on, or a toilet was flushed. A larger flow for a longer time can mean that the bathtub is being used, or a shower, or an appliance (dishwasher/laundry), etc.

  • Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated article summaries to Wikipedia

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  • "environmentally damaging"I see a lot of users on here saying this when talking about any use case for AI without actually doing any sort of comparison.

    In some cases, AI absolutely uses more energy than an alternative, but you really need to break it down and it's not a simple thing to apply to every case.

    For instance: using an AI visual detection model hooked up to a camera to detect when rain droplets are hitting the windshield of a car. A completely wasteful example. In comparison you could just use a small laser that pulses every now and then and measures the diffraction to tell when water is on the windshield. The laser uses far less electricity and has been working just fine as they are currently used today.

    Compare that to enabling DLSS in a video game where NVIDIA uses multiple AI models to improve performance. As long as you cap the framerates, the additional frame generation, upscaling, etc. will actually conserve electricity as your hardware is no longer working as hard to process and render the graphics (especially if you're playing on a 4k monitor).

    Looking at Wikipedia's use case, how long would it take for users to go through and create a summary or a "simple.wikipedia" page for every article? How much electricity would that use? Compare that to running everything through an LLM once and quickly generating a summary (which is a use case where LLMs actually excel at). It's honestly not that simple either because we would also have to consider how often these summaries are being regenerated. Is it every time someone makes a minor edit to a page? Is it every few days/weeks after multiple edits have been made? Etc.

    Then you also have to consider, even if a particular use case uses more electricity, does it actually save time? And is the time saved worth the extra cost in electricity? And how was that electricity generated anyway? Was it generated using solar, coal, gas, wind, nuclear, hydro, or geothermal means?

    Edit: typo

  • lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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  • I really like the "Feeds" feature of PieFed, it allows anyone to combine all of the different communities into a single feed. It really makes browsing something like "Technology" a lot better.

  • lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month

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  • Based on the uptick in "I was banned from Reddit" posts, I'm thinking that we're getting a lot more users that were banned for good reason from Reddit. Looks like Reddit has also stepped up their game in their ability to keep those users off their platform.

  • Chatting on Lemmy? Is it a thing?

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  • Last I heard from her was back around the beginning of April.

  • AI headphones translate multiple speakers at once, cloning their voices in 3D sound

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  • It's not sending the audio to an unknown server. It's all local. From the article:

    The system then translates the speech and maintains the expressive qualities and volume of each speaker’s voice while running on a device, such mobile devices with an Apple M2 chip like laptops and Apple Vision Pro. (The team avoided using cloud computing because of the privacy concerns with voice cloning.)

  • do you think this leaflet was created with AI?

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  • That's not AI, that's just a bad Photoshop/InDesign job where they layered the text underneath the image of the coupon with Protein bottles. The image has a white background, if it had a clear background there would have been no issue.

    Edit: Looking a little closer, it looks more like some barely off-white arrow was at the top of the coupon image.

    Edit2: if you're talking about the text that looks like a prompt, it could be a prompt, or it could be a description of what they wanted someone to put on the poster. The image itself doesn't look like AI considering those products actually exist and AI usually doesn't do so well on small text when you zoom in on a picture.

  • WhatsApp provides no cryptographic management for group messages

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  • Highlighting the main issue here (from the article):

    “This means that it is possible for the WhatsApp server to add new members to a group,” Martin R. Albrecht, a researcher at King's College in London, wrote in an email. “A correct client—like the official clients—will display this change but will not prevent it. Thus, any group chat that does not verify who has been added to the chat can potentially have their messages read.”

  • Why did we stop using Firefox?

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  • Google sells it as an updated extension framework to improve security, privacy, and performance of extensions... But it also nerfs adblockers ability to block all ads.

    There are some forks from chrome that haven't implemented the new manifest thing. So if you really need to, look for those.