Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org

If you have a large enough user base that people depend, for whatever personal, safety or security reasons, on your product, then I believe you have a positive obligation to those people to protect them from risks and failures they might never see or understand.

Not because anyone's dumb or incompetent, but because those threat actors make every effort to be invisible to their victims and impossible to understand to defenders.

@denschub @narinarinari I don't install my copy of Firefox through a blog. My copy of Firefox is silently updated in the background by my operating system. I allow this because I assume that Firefox updates will often contain critical security fixes, but will never contain nasty surprises such as backdoors for advertisers which passes them information about the things I see while browsing.

I shouldn't *have* to "care" what's happening on the Firefox blog to prevent my privacy being violated.

There's a difference between being aware of what is happening and putting yourself through intense physical and emotional stress by "doom scrolling" and posting things you might regret later.

Sign off, pet a pet, hug someone.

Though I might dance & celebrate when Biden wins, it will not be for him. It'll be in spite of what he & every mealy-mouthed norms-anxious compromiser has done to put us here. And then, when I'm done dancing, (it may take a moment) I will turn around and put my focus in a new place.

I'm filled with optimism because all caution is gone from my body. We can't afford an ounce of that.

For what it's worth disabled community has recognised this and there's stuff like the hashtag #Alt4Me where you can ask others to help write alt text for your post.

We need to give space for people to ask for help and not make them feel like a bad person for doing so.

Good work -- actual journalism -- from ABC News.
h/t Joy Reid
'No Blame?' ABC News finds 54 cases invoking 'Trump' in connection with violence, threats, alleged assaults. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/blame-abc-news-finds-17-cases-invoking-trump/story?id=58912889

So many Republican electeds out here condemning “political violence” today. Meanwhile Trump has called for political violence over and over for the past 10 years at least. Haven’t heard people like George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, Steve Scalise, and Mike Johnson piping up then about its unacceptability. #Craven #Hypocrisy

I’ve had my fill of living in interesting times

Don’t spread misinformation

I’m annoyed that we’ve found a way to spend 100 times more electricity over standard search to have computers confidently provide wrong answers to questions.

This. All of it. Top to bottom.

This is what the MSM should be plastering wall to wall.

Eyes on the ball, everyone.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-07-11/la-trump-unfit-for-office-biden-election

i think where people’s brains break regarding LLMs is understanding that they generate the most likely result. not the one most likely to be correct, but simply the most likely. if it shows up in the training data more often, it’ll probably get picked. that doesn’t necessarily have any correlation to how correct it is. that there is any overlap between correct and likely is a function of the quality of the training data, which requires intensive and constant curation, moderation, and filtering.

So apparently the European Honeybee has recently been named Virginia's official state pollinator. This steams me so bad. Honeybees are NOT native to Virginia, and the fact that so many people import them to grow colonies and have their own honey actually crowds out native bees that mostly feed on native plants. I'm still not sure how this happened, as the European Honeybee is widely considered an invasive species.

We need a word for real-life enshittification caused by online culture. Like being unable to find an organisation’s info because they’ve Instagram but no website. Or panicked people being sent a videolink to download to their phone when they ring for an ambulance. Or being excluded from residents' association news if you're not on Facebook. Or having cash payment refused. Or staff in the business you’re physically standing in telling you to find the answer to your question on their website.

You can't solve problems you don't understand with software you don't understand.

It feels weird needing to repeat that.

LB: if OpenAI violating copyright becomes legally ok but Internet Archive still isn't, I might actually scream

"We can make a digital AI clone of you that will do your video conferences for you and respond like you."

This mentality shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the purpose of nearly every type of meeting. Let me put it a different way:

"We can make a digital clone of you to go to class for you and take your courses. It will respond just like you in class."

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