Melody Fwygon

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  • 124 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • I suspect they probably do far more than their title lets on; but damn that’s an extremely unfortunate title to have. I can’t imagine that particular part of the title sells well on the resume.

    That said; I think numbers 2 through 5 could probably see their pay halved or cut by a third and they’d still be fine. I wouldn’t push anyone below 200k though. I didn’t suggest the Chairperson because it appears that Mozilla isn’t actually paying them, some other entity is doing so and it’s being reported here for “tax purposes”.

    Note: This isn’t to suggest that they need to cut these folks’ pay right now; it’s just observing where Mozilla might reduce spending if it were to become necessary to keep things going for them. I am actually assuming good faith that each of these folks are well worth their current pay.


  • Hearing this sort of law go into effect just makes me sadly want to ban anyone from the UK from my small communities.

    I’d hate to be forced to do it; but I certainly would immediately start swinging the hammer with IP range bans and banning anyone who is clearly professing to be from the UK.

    Unfortunately the kind of laws they’re trying to pass do nothing to fix whatever problems they have Online; and are basically meaningless political posturing. I feel sorry for people in the UK and strongly recommend they start using VPNs; as it’s the only way to ensure they won’t get snared up in the ensuing waves of bans when compliance with the OSA law that they let get passed is mandatory

    The shoe is clearly on the other foot. It’s not so easy to manage when politicians are allowed to get so uninformed that they go out of their way to pass bad laws.




  • I am glad to see it when the selfish people at the top fall so far down the hill. They orchestrate their own falling typically, much like Ikarus in his waxen wings, falling when he flew too close to the sun in direct sunlight at the height of a hot summer’s day.

    As for Google; I hope the DoJ not only pulls up all of the resultant weeds in the garden, but also makes sure to till and salt the soil thoroughly, so that no part of Google can ever hope to rejoin it’s other pieces to form a monopoly or ‘anything like a monopoly’ on anything, ever, again.

    Google must rightfully suffer a most painful and enduring ‘Corporate Death Penalty’ so to speak; in order to ensure that no company ever gets so bold again. We must also repeat this with several other large companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple too; as well as a few other companies I’m unable to name because I’m unaware of how ridiculously massive and monopolistic they are.


  • This is exactly the kind of task I’d expect AI to be useful for; it goes through a massive amount of freshly digitized data and it scans for, and flags for human action (and/or) review, things that are specified by a human for the AI to identify in a large batch of data.

    Basically AI doing data-processing drudge work that no human could ever hope to achieve with any level of speed approaching that at which the AI can do it.

    Do I think the AI should be doing these tasks unsupervised? Absolutely not! But the fact of the matter is; the AIs are being supervised in this task by the human clerks who are, at least in theory, expected to read the deed over and make sure it makes some sort of legal sense and that it didn’t just cut out some harmless turn of phrase written into the covenant that actually has no racist meaning, intention or function. I’m assuming a lot of good faith here, but I’m guessing the human who is guiding the AI making these mass edits can just, by means of physicality, pull out the original document and see which language originally existed if it became an issue.

    To be clear; I do think it’s a good thing that the law is mandating and making these kinds of edits to property covenants in general to bring them more in line with modern law.




  • I’m going to be bold enough to say we don’t have as wide of an AI/LLM issue on the Fediverse as the other platforms will have.

    I’m certain that if someone did collect data from the Fediverse; it would become a hot topic and it might not be enough data anyways as the Fediverse is not mainstream enough normally. So the data and language collected here might skew in a few imaginable ways that one might find undesirable for a general model of word frequencies.

    Also the fact that people might not appreciate that data being collected. Let’s be real. It’s too soon for such a project to begin. The AI TREND MUST DIE as it currently lives and it’s corpse must be rotted away completely. Now, in internet time that may not be all that long…a few to several years…the memory of the internet can be short-lived at times. It must, however, fade from the public conscience into some obscurity first.

    Once the technology no longer lies in greedy hands again; new development can begin anew.


  • It feels like this vulnerability isn’t notable for the majority of users who don’t typically include “Being compromised by a Nation-State-Level Actor.”

    That being said; I do hope they get it fixed; and it looks like there’s already mitigations in place like protecting the authentication by another factor such as a PIN. That helps; for people who do have the rare threat model issue in play.

    The complexity of the attack also seems clearly difficult to achieve in any time frame; and would require likely hundreds of man-hours of work to pull off.

    If we assume they’re funded enough to park a van of specialty equipment close enough to you; steal your key and clone it; then return it before you notice…nothing you can do can defend against them.





  • I use an instance that does not display or parse downvotes or permit them locally.

    So I don’t see the phenomenon. I don’t care about downvotes. I only see the upvotes; which are a far better indicator to me as to how useful a post I made is. If someone posts trash or extremist things; I block them. If they try to argue in bad faith or with far too extremist of a viewpoint, I block them.

    The bot doesn’t always get the most upvotes but it does have it’s uses. As someone who has used the Ground News app in the past; I have a sense of their rating scale and I do find that it helps classify things; although you should always use your own discretion and not just blindly trust the bot.

    But most people who downvote this bot, do so for completely wrong reasons. Usually they’re upset because they disagree with the assessment of the bot, or do not understand it’s scale. Maybe they don’t like their viewpoint’s position being laid bare for all to see.

    Maybe that should be explained more; and there’s posts on Ground News’ website that EXPLAINS how their rating system works. Perhaps the bot should link them.


  • The issue with too many streaming services is largely the same as not enough streaming services

    An average person will have a wide variety of favorite shows. Let’s say there’s 25 of them. For this example; Access to each of these 25 shows are non-negotiable to you and you feel you MUST have access to them.

    If Service A and Service B are the only options; they both get to set the price. So to get access to a “complete” collection of content that you want you’re paying both of them $50 each. It’s most likely that half will be available only on A and the other half on B.

    Now imagine that there are 10 different services. Each service is owned by one of the big ten networks that makes your 25 favorite shows. We will call them by their number from 1 to 10. Now each of your 25 shows have 10 places they could be.

    On average; each network is likely to have 2.5 shows you like. Maybe a few have made some sweet deals with others; but no one place will have even 7.5 of your favorite shows…because these deals are costly and nobody wants to make less money per view.

    Now each service; because they’re struggling to compete with each other will settle on a price of $10 each. But you still end up being forced to subscribe to all ten of them because no single provider has everything you want and no combination of less than all of them can provide complete access to all that you want to watch.

    Even worse; any one of these ten can raise their price arbitrarily because they’re tired of competing and can’t break even. This means your total spend could be up to $500 eventually as they each creep towards demanding more money like a cable provider.


  • Honestly, there are low-touch/low-fuss distributions that exist that can be installed with some assistance from a more techy person in one’s life.

    But I will admit that Apple is more usable across the board.

    However, not everyone can really afford the extra cost of an Apple system; which genuinely does require re-buying a lot of other devices in order to get basic compatibility.

    For some, yes, Apple does solve the problem. For others, Linux can be accessible and easy to use; particularly if hardware being used is older, and the workflows are common enough.


  • The problem with PPA wasn’t anything to do with the method it uses. Given enough announcement, discourse and investigation by the community; it’s entirely possible that users in general would have accepted it.

    However; Mozilla did something very wrong by deploying this without asking the greater community. Point blank. That’s not good faith; and that did not allow for the community to go over the code and suggest fixes and express their concerns with how it works.

    Instead Mozilla took the lead and decided it will exist; quietly. Without consulting the community. Given that this is how most companies turn selfish, that alarms MANY people who are knowledgeable about how Mozilla typically operates, and it undermines public trust in Mozilla.




  • I can already see how Advertisers AND Websites will collude and break this one.

    • Specifically placed ads; targeted at specific website pages which a majority of their target grouping will visit.
    • Generate an ad that will specifically reside on a page deep inside of the site; think 4+ clicks deep; which is intensely personalized to their target. 1
    • Ad will trigger; register “Impression” and be boxed up into Differential Privacy set by the DAP.
    • Since that’s the only ad targeted for that specific page, any impression is an answer of 1 or ‘True’.
    • Through microtargeting of these deep pages they can learn a lot about what people do online and could potentially break Differential Privacy.

    1 - In this example the URI being targeted could be something like https://www.example.com/zhuli/do/the/* in such a way that when you visit https://example.com/zhuli/do/the/thing/order.php is always recorded.