This is one of the pernicious functions of NPR here: to give liberal news consumers intellectual permission to support more funding for more police because, although it is baselessly connected to less murder, even marginalized people targeted by police supposedly want it.

TIL NPR features whitewashed conservative propaganda

I think “pranks” that involve misleading everyone in audible range into fearing for their lives would reduce property values regardless of open house timings

Besides the climate implications, this highlights the centralization risks in Proof of Work mining; the only way to mine Bitcoin profitably is if you have some kind of privileged access to electricity with effectively low ongoing cost, and that access is gated by government regulation.

oof

Poor taste given the context

Maybe she expected the interview to happen and had an article planned about it, and then decided to just write it anyway when it didn’t

What’s basically being said is, making an AI powered software local-only doesn’t make a difference and doesn’t matter. But that’s not true, and the arguments for that don’t seem coherent.

But the company hasn’t collected it, because it doesn’t have it. Your computer has it. So long as it stays on your computer, it cannot harm your privacy. That’s why there is such a big difference here; an actual massive loss of privacy that is guaranteed to be combined with everyone else’s data and used against you, vs a potential risk of loss of privacy from someone gaining unauthorized access to your computer.

The hack revealed that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modded version of Signal that TeleMessage offers and the ultimate location where it stores the messages

lol wasn’t that supposed to be the whole point, what are they even doing

Software that is designed not to send your data over the internet doesn’t collect your data. That’s what local-only means. If it does send your data over the internet, then it isn’t local-only. How is it still happening?

So you don’t think collection of user data is a meaningful privacy problem here? How does that work?

Even with Recall, a hypothetical non-local equivalent would be significantly worse. Whether Microsoft actually has your data or not obviously matters. Most conceivable software that uses local AI wouldn’t need any kind of profile building anyway, for instance that Firefox translation feature.

The thing that’s frustrating to me here is the lack of acknowledgement that the main privacy problem with AI services is sending all queries to some company’s server where they can do whatever they want with them.

I don’t see how the possibility it’s connected to some software system for profile building, is a reason to not care whether a language model is local only. The way things are worded here make it sound like this is just an intrinsic part of how LLMs work, but it just isn’t. The model still just does text prediction, any “memory” features are bolted on.

The use of local AI does not imply doing that, especially not the centralizing part. Even if some software does collect and store info locally (not inherent to the technology and anything with autosave already qualifies here), that is not close to as bad privacywise as filtering everything through a remote server, especially if there is some guarantee they won’t just randomly start exfiltrating it, like being open source.

I don’t care if your language model is “local-only” and runs on the user’s device. If it can build a profile of the user (regardless of accuracy) through their smartphone usage, that can and will be used against people.

I don’t know if I’m understanding this argument right, but the idea that integrating locally run AI is inherently privacy destroying in the same way as live service AI doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

I think the bigger issue here is that you are obviously uncomfortable with the idea of approaching people in public and your parents are treating this as irrelevant and something you are supposed to just force yourself to do it anyway despite feeling like the situation is wrong and threatening. You shouldn’t need to justify not wanting to do that by appealing to some kind of cultural authority about what is acceptable to society.

Personally even as a man it normally freaks me out when strangers approach me in public. It just feels like a very unusual, unexpected and potentially unsafe kind of circumstance, almost never something positive, there’s no way I would trust such a person, so I’m not going to do that to others because it’s like I would be inflicting that on both of us simultaneously, and that would of course come through in any interaction I attempted. How could I expect them to be receptive to that when I would never be myself? People may argue, that’s the wrong way to feel and so it doesn’t matter, replace that attitude with a better one, as if they themselves could easily substitute a totally different way of being for how they are.

If you need an invitation in order to feel safe in a social situation, I would say it is ok to demand that people respect that and not mock you for it.

They didn’t even mention what the business was because the identity of the victim is not released. The article mentions a similar attack on a seller of hardware wallets:

cofounder of the crypto wallet company Ledger

Just because something is crypto related doesn’t mean it isn’t a real business.

Stuff like getting rid of these things makes so much sense, I don’t understand how some people can think human cooperation isn’t important.

all this data is made up lol

wtf

Complex requirements for social media websites to verify the identity of users, respond to spurious automated takedown requests, provide authorities with backdoors, etc. I think instead of explicit bans, it’s more likely they pass a regulations that are made for large websites with lawyers and algorithmic moderation, which are in practice not something fediverse instance operators can safely deal with and go against the basic values of the open internet.