• 71 Posts
  • 99 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle



  • The OS itself doesn’t serve ads, but rather the apps you install and the web pages you visit.

    I don’t know what phone you use, but a stock Samsung phone absolutely serves ads and tracks like crazy. You can monitor the activity with something like Adguard. Not to mention the bloat like Facebook will call home even when you aren’t using it.

    So yeah, it would be nice if the OS itself wasn’t an open door for this type of crap.



  • You don’t need a cargo bike (those are expensive), consider a kid’s bike trailer. They typically carry around 100lbs (45kgs?), which is plenty for larger trips (I’ve done some Costco runs w/ my bike trailer).

    My errand getter is a steel 90s MTB. Front and rear racks + a few trailer options. I’ve been easily able to haul over 120lbs.

    My favourite trailer, and one that I could recommend to pretty much anyone, is the burley travoy. So many benefits with the only con being it’s price (especially with the extra accessories). Well, well worth it, IMO.





  • The majority of the internet is porn.

    Again, I’ll separate entertainment from informational, since entertainment can be garbage, and still be consumed.

    Bad information doesn’t help anyone.

    it’s not like LLMs you can chat with are completely useless.

    The problem is, you wouldn’t know unless you know.

    With a legitimate website that has human writers, editors, and fact-checkers, they can at least have creditability and a reputation to uphold.

    Far too many randomly generated websites have a lot of information, but without any guardrails. If you know enough about a topic, you’ll realise that the information on these AI sites are pretty much useless. That is, you couldn’t use them as a source because enough of the info is bad/incorrect/incoherent, that it’s like asking a toddler who may or may not give you a valid question.

    I’ve contacted a manufacturer of bike stuff, and their support is given by AI. While the answers you get sound like they could be right, it’s like getting an answer from someone who heard something about something from a friend. When you actually ask for a human, the answer is often different (and correct).

    There is no accountability, or credibility, or responsibility, or integrity with AI. It has no reputation to lose if the information it provides is bad or not.

    I know that AI isn’t going away. I’d personally be OK with some human verification system for websites, and would be more than willing to use a filtered version of the internet that blocks AI generated content. Call it curated or whitelisted, but I want my information to come from a human being.


  • But you know they are spam, so it’s something you can avoid. But what if the majority (over 80%) of the calls you receive can’t be identified as spam. At some point, you may be wasting far more time than it’s worth to keep using a phone without some major whitelist/blacklist system.

    Also, what happens when the outbound calls you make are answered by AI, and you don’t know? If this AI is giving you replies that are word salad, how long are you willing to tolerate it?

    I’ve been getting text messages now from companies that I actually do business with, but they are spam. Calls from companies that I have accounts with, and they are scams. At some point, SMS and phone calls will be more trouble than its worth.

    And the thought of either having to go without it, the pain of replacing it, or the frustration of being strung along in a scam are not thoughts I want to have.


  • There will always be a large number of sites that are not capitalist hellholes that only exist to steal user’s data or scam users or do other malicious things. This may be down to things like credit unions, federated social media, and non-profits that exist to make the world better, but there will always be something that is out there that keeps it from being useless.

    No doubt that there will be people who still have morals and will run sites and services that don’t completely screw people.

    But at some point, you won’t be able to tell which are legit, and which aren’t. AI generated websites can make any scam site look completely legitimate, fake thousands of testimonials, have bots post about it on every major website (Reddit, YouTube, etc.) without being caught, etc.

    The currency of the internet is no longer about what’s valuable to users, but what’s valuable to bad actors, data thieves, and marketers.

    There will be a tipping point when the bad far, far outweighs the good, and I’m curious to know when society decides that the internet isn’t worth using anymore.


  • Let me ask you this: assuming you use the internet for information rather than entertainment, would the internet be useful if the majority of content ends up being AI generated (not fact checked, not accurate, and not original)?

    What if the overwhelming content you come across could neither be verified as true, and the majority of comments (including here on Lemmy) were bots? Would you still use it?

    For me, it would stop being useful. Almost like a library only carrying fiction, when I’m trying to research a topic.

    For entertainment, sure, it’ll be great for sucking the attention from people without having to invest in skill to be good at something. Hell, if you currently find YouTube shorts and Tiktok to be “good content”, then it’ll be around forever. Corporations and advertisers love this technology.








  • but a tool that takes away the toil of monitoring

    Ok, so Lifelabs posts patient lab results online for them to see. They CLEARLY mark “high” and “low” for items that are out of range (of the norm).

    A nurse would quite literally crosscheck 50 blood markers in a matter of seconds, without the need for expensive AI or at a risk of them losing their job/qualifications.

    In this specific case, the fever + high WBC would be more than enough for a nurse to know that something was up. It makes me think that adding AI just adds another step.

    I’m not saying that the application of AI to detect abnormalities is wasteful, but I do think it’s unnecessary and possibly a negative in the context of basic lab work.