"we should be deeply troubled by the way #AI is being leveraged to further concentrate power in a handful of companies"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/31/yes-you-should-be-worried-about-ai-but-matrix-analogies-hide-a-more-insidious-threat

@lupyuen i'm troubled by how much journalism is bullshit.

journalists pumped up AI and now that people can do quite realistic fakes on their gaming pc things are scary all of a sudden.

it's not that the concentration of power is something new, they even admit it by using "further". for decades people warned about it, only to be ridiculed for NOT being outright lazy. being told to just use gmail, apple, etc. it's just so convenient!

hell, the guardian page is likely behind cloudflare or another of those "DDoS protection" companies which in all likelihood are fronts of spy agencies to snoop unencrypted traffic.

@bonifartius

I reluctantly have to admit that I was in the camp; "Just use GMail/GitHub/whatever" and is now working to get out of it. GMail is practically gone, not quite because there are mail servers (Outlook?) that aren't willing to send to non-FAANG servers, even after going through the hoops of Google "special setup".

1. Android is a big step, because I had a lot of bad experience with non-Google phones in the past.

2. YouTube... It is so convenient ;-)

@lupyuen

@bonifartius

YouTube; and its competitors still require "Create an Account", so isn't that jumping out of the pan into the fire?

@lupyuen

@niclas @lupyuen
sorry, i'm a bit tired and sick so this ended up not so well written :)

i used github and other stuff for long enough. formerly i'd have recommended sourcehut, but drew decided to do virtue signalling. it's tiresome that the more integrity and consistency one wants, the fewer things are left.

i never really had problems with sending mails to big providers, maybe using a smallish provider keeps the IPs clean enough? people on hetzner etc. always seem to have problems. i also don't send really much to FAANG though.

i'm not sure about how to fix things for the mobile space. imho the most usable alternative now is sailfish os, which unfortunately is partially closed source - i can't really blame them, still it sucks.

for the things i watch i rarely need an account on youtube. it's annoying that video still is so centralized. maybe videos still are too big. av1/opus kind of fixes that, but shifts the problem to computing power again. nobody wants to transcode videos on their phone before uploading, and transcoding a bunch of videos is a good way to DoS a server :P