It is possible to keep individual files on the local hard drive with different settings (that in my experience never seem to stick past updates).
The default, though, is to take everything on your computer off of your computer, put it into the cloud (their computer), and recommend you pick and choose which ones stay on your computer. In essence, they want you to think of your computer as secondary to their computer. An extension of it.
There is no "your computer", it's just the computer you happen to be logged into at the moment.
The cloud is not something you take advantage of, the cloud is where you live now.
All the comments in here are so damn tedious. Copyright is a mess, but holy shit, people tie themselves in knots to make excuses for pirates being careless and stupid
Would you use Edge as your default browser on Windows 11 if Microsoft nags you with a 3D banner? Microsoft thinks you would. In a new experiment, which appears to be rolling out to Edge stable on Windows 11, Microsoft has turned on a banner that uses 3D graphics to promote the browser....
How stupid do you have to be to believe that only 8% of companies have seen failed AI projects? We can't manage this consistently with CRUD apps and people think that this number isn't laughable? Some companies have seen benefits during the LLM craze, but not 92% of them. 34% of companies report that generative AI specifically...
Another friend of mine was reviewing software intended for emergency services, and the salespeople were not expecting someone handling purchasing in emergency services to be a hardcore programmer. It was this false sense of security that led them to accidentally reveal that the service was ultimately just some dude in India. Listen, I would just be some random dude in India if I swapped places with some of my cousins, so I'm going to choose to take that personally and point out that using the word AI as some roundabout way to sell the labor of people that look like me to foreign governments is fucked up, you're an unethical monster, and that if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)
This aspect of it isn't getting talked about enough. These companies are presenting these things as fully-formed AI, while completely neglecting the people behind the scenes constantly cleaning it up so it doesn't devolve into chaos. All of the shortcomings and failures of this technology are being masked by the fact that there's actual people working round the clock pruning and curating it.
You know, humans, with actual human intelligence, without which these miraculous "artificial intelligence" tools would not work as they seem to.
If the "AI' needs a human support team to keep it "intelligent", it's less AI and more a really fancy kind of puppet.
I've seen people defend using AI this way by comparing it to using a calculator in a math class, i.e. if the technology knows it, I don't need to.
And I feel like, for the kind of people whose grasp of technology, knowledge, and education are so juvenile that they would believe such a thing, AI isn't making them dumber. They were already dumb. What the AI does is make code they don't understand more accessible, which is to say, it's just enabling dumb people to be more dangerous while instilling them with an unearned confidence that only compounds the danger.
I know some artists don't mind it, but I just can't hear the word "creatives" as anything other than silicon valley speak for the source of the content they sell. It feels dehumanizing.
Particularly in this case, it's Adobe, so you can just call them artists, designers, photographers, etc.
Let's not pretend it's all about "bad actors". They don't want masked traffic at all, the "bad actors" gives them an excuse.
And we know this because if the IP was the issue, they wouldn't let you use the site at all, but they will work fine after signing in. Any of these VPNs work as long as you're logged into reddit, even with a throwaway account.
Just make a throwaway account. The VPNs work fine when you're signed in.
I know that's not an acceptable answer for some but if they want to associate your activity with a throwaway account, let them, because they still have no way of knowing which person on the VPN is using that throwaway account.
Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What's happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.
YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube's losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.
But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.
And this is what it looks like.
As for risking competition, at this point, I don't think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.
I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There's a long-term strategy here to nuke ad blocking permanently. That's what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back with a new name.
Driving behavior analysis, or telematics, as the insurance industry calls it, could be better for consumers, leading to personalized rates that are more fair. Plus, if people have to pay more for their risky driving, they may drive more cautiously, leading to safer roads. But this will happen only if drivers are aware that their behavior is being monitored.
I'm so sick of this shit.
Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it's about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.
It also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they're collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.
The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher
Or some new bullshit studies come out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident then people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years.
A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates....
This doesn't have anything to with regulation. This is mainly a bunch of SEO and marketing people whining that Google hasn't been honest with them in telling them exactly how to game their search engine.
Rand Fishkin, who worked in SEO for more than a decade, says a source shared 2,500 pages of documents with him with the hopes that reporting on the leak would counter the “lies” that Google employees had shared about how the search algorithm works.
Am I supposed to care that the poor SEO assholes that need to get their ads more visibility weren't being given all the instructions on how to do that by the search engine?
Most of this article is SEO "experts" complaining that some of the guidelines they were given didn't match what's in the internal documents.
Google is shit, but SEO is a cancer too. I can't be too bothered by Google jacking them around a bit.
That's not nearly shitty enough. It's too useful. Look at all the options and other clickable things you got on the start menu, and it only took one click to open it.
That's not how this works anymore. If this were truly made today, it would be needlessly "streamlined", i.e. everything is hidden so as not to "clutter up" the UI with useful things, and make more room for...nothing. Just wasted space.
We hide everything behind multiple clicks now because the "average user" starts bleeding out their eyes if they're forced to see many things at once.
I have many friends that complain about these things, that noticed the exact same pattern as you.
And yet, every last single time I've ask them "Have you looked into using a different service? Maybe try one?" they mumble out a noncommittal response and never do.
Tack "&udm=14" on to the end of a normal search, and you'll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. All you have to do is add "udm=14" to the search URL....
It's not that it ignored it ten years ago and stopped, it's that much of it didn't exist to the degree it does now, and there was a lot more content being made of different websites, so there were actual results to show.
Google Search went to shit, it's true, but have you tried the other ones? They're not much better.
We have to acknowledge the internet itself went to shit. There's simply less to find out there than there used to be, because the majority of all web content and discussions moved away from individual websites and forums and centralized on a few platforms. They can filter out the SEO junk, but what would they replace it with?
Generally when companies like this are bought it isn't to acquire the talent. That's legitimately what needs to be taken into account when it comes to things like antitrust. You want to buy out this company, are you buying it because you want their talent to join with yours to make something better? Cool. We'll let you do that provided you do it today fair and competitive manner.
Any other reason for wanting to buy this company is going to need to be pretty heavily scrutinized.
It amounts to the same thing, though. Whether you got a few months pay to carry you through or not you still lost your income, and there's no guarantee you'll ever find a job that matches it in pay, benefits, etc.
In a collaborative effort, Apple and Google have developed an industry-standard detection feature called "Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers" (DULT) for Bluetooth trackers. This standard allows users on iOS and Android devices to be alerted if an unknown Bluetooth tracker is monitoring their location.
It has to keep pinging so the iPhone knows it's still close. Other devices detect that ping; it can't choose who hears it when it calls out.
That's the whole thing: they are constantly calling out to any Apple device in the area so that device will report to Apple the tag's location through the Find My network. It has to call out, otherwise it can't function as a tracker.
Which is where this new standard comes in. Alerting you to an unrecognized device nearby that is pinging out while you're moving, because previously there was no shared standard that permitted this across all devices.
But there's really no good solution to this that isn't going to be messy and trigger a lot of false positives. It's a band-aid on a problematic technology that has been normalized, and now they're trying to back-port privacy into it to save face. All of this discussion should have happened before they started selling anything.
It's bad enough to sell cheap consumer tracking devices and provide access to a whole mesh network of other people's phones to use them on, without any consideration for what they would be used for. It's especially egregious that they made that technology proprietary so Android devices could not easily identify a tracker near them.
The solution would probably just be to dismiss the alert with a response like "I am on a plane, bus boat, etc. I'm traveling with strangers and their stuff". Then it would temporarily remember all the local devices, and then dump that list after a set period of time.
You see this in action anytime people go "no no you just don't understand how this works" as a way of sidestepping the overall issue. They try to bury you in the minutiae of it, and what's "technically" possible without acknowledging that A) what's possible will increase over time and B) the issue is not technology, it's the intention of it and the motivations of the people behind it.
It's like trying to deconstruct the concept of a gun, talking about all its potential mechanical malfunctions, its capacity limits, the fact you have to aim it, and so on, all as a way of trying to downplay the danger of it being pointed directly at you.
Yes but imagine it all nicely arranged on a dashboard, with little made up metrics, and spreadsheets and bar graphs and other bullshit, all done automatically, from the 365 panel, and the CEO didn't have to set anything up.
The passivity and the integration of it is the biggest concern.
If there's one thing I have learned from seeing a bunch of different small companies, is it they don't bother to take the time to clean up all the bullshit and turn off all the garbage in 365/Intune. They manage the security and the needed software, all the other crap that Microsoft shoves in there and turns on for them, they don't pay attention. At some point Microsoft will just add this crap, employees won't be aware, or they will be aware, and it would require admin credentials to turn off.
It's frustrating the image for that article is of the 4th Doctor, given the BBC had stopped erasing tapes by the era of the 3rd Doctor. There are no missing 4th Doctor episodes.
Netflix has managed to annoy a good number of its users with an announcement about an upcoming update to its Windows 11 (and Windows 10) app: support for adverts and live events will be added, but the ability to download content is being taken away....
People have been making this comment for so long, with every anti-consumer change, and it's never been true.
Killing VPN usages didn't do it, canceling shows didn't do it, the splintering of offerings across multiple platforms didn't do it, killing password sharing didn't do it, raising prices didn't do it, including an advertising tier didn't do.
And this will not do it.
Hell, this is barely going to tweak the dial. The overwhelming majority of people don't watch Netflix on the desktop app, why should they fear kick back from the few that do? All they'll say is the mobile versions will still let you download (because those file systems are sealed away from the user).
Consumers will accept anything if there's no where else to get what they want. It's why the "free market" has no power in the tech space: consumers are so addicted to their chosen platforms, apps, devices, and services that they will accept literally anything before they entertain the idea of using anything else.
That's partially why enshitification is getting so bad: there's no punishment for it. Users will not move.
"While downloads will no longer be supported, you can continue to watch TV shows and movies offline on a supported mobile device," the Netflix document says
So essentially Windows devices are no longer "supported" wrt this particular feature.
If I had to guess, it might be because the people that pirate Netflix shows may be doing it from the Windows app using the download feature. After all, you have full access to the file system on Windows.
Meanwhile, iPhones have always been locked down to prevent the user from accessing the file system, and Android in the last couple versions has locked its file system down too, while Google continues to become increasingly fierce in trying to detect and block anybody with a rooted device.
Only if the people that pirate the shows are able to obtain those higher quality downloads.
As these platforms become increasingly hostile to users, they're going to be well aware of the subsequent increase in piracy, and implement even more methods of preventing their content from being pirated.
It will always be impossible to stop piracy completely, but you can make it increasingly difficult to obtain best quality.
Keep in mind all of the various things that are starting to be implemented or suggested to ensure device/environment "integrity" in recent years. I promise a day is coming when Netflix and other streaming services will only allow streaming to "approved" browsers and devices, i.e. the ones that allow them to scrutinize every single bit of the stack down to the hardware.
The technology was created to replace voice actors. That's the actual purpose. Its very existence hurts their profession and benefits studios. You can not be a studio, use this technology, and claim to care about ethics, anymore than Amazon can claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.
No one is holding a gun to their head forcing them to us AI. They made a choice. There is no "ethical" way to cripple the livelihood of working class people for the benefit of your business. Just stop using the word.
It doesn't matter if you compensate or get their approval, because the fact is the existence of the technology in the industry effectively compels all voice actors to agree to let it use their voice, or they can't get work. It becomes a false choice.
If there was no financial benefit, if it truly made no difference in how much a studio pays in labor or the amount the artists make, there would be no reason for studios to want to use it.
I'm considering getting a Xiaomi 14 Ultra and I can get it pretty cheap with Chinese rom. I heard it's not that hard to flash it and put in a Swedish/global rom....
If it allows you to unlock the bootloader, flashing isn't really that difficult anymore. What really matters is how well the device in question is supported by the custom ROM and the community. If you can find one that's officially supported by lineageOS, for example, they have good documentation and guides to walk you through it. If the ROM is less popular, you might end up in Telegram channels asking for assistance.
The most important thing you can do is research what you're planning to flash. Check XDA, find Telegram, Matrix, or Discord channels (which I know is extremely annoying), look for other people that have attempted to do this and note what issues they seem to have had.
Edit: A few people have interpreted the title as serious, so I wanna clarify that it was meant as a sarcastic joke about how little sense the neurotypical world makes to me, but it is still legitimately me asking for help understanding said neurotypical world....
Use too much improper grammar and you're lazy and rude. Use too little and you're also rude.
Genuinely not sure what you mean by this.
It's rude to use "too little" improper grammar?
Where are you getting that from?
But to your main point:
Why are neurotypicals in charge of making up the social rules?
Why are you under the assumption that the social rules are something they all got together and agreed upon?
Social rules form over time in cultures, based on the interactions of individuals. It's part of the social zeitgeist. Neurotypical people make up the majority, they do the most social interaction, so the overall "rules" are formed by them.
That's an important point, and and it ties into the way ChatGPT and other LLMs take advantage of a flaw in the human brain:
Because it impersonates a human, people are more inherently willing to trust it. To think it's "smart". It's dangerous how people who don't know any better (and many people that do know better) will defer to it, consciously or unconsciously, as an authority and never second guess it.
And the fact it's a one on one conversation, no comment sections, no one else looking at the responses to call them out as bullshit, the user just won't second guess it.
At any point in the process, does it warn you about setting up recovery with personal email addresses?
Feels like with as much as Proton advertises nowadays as a privacy protecting service, they need to be taking into consideration that a lot of their customers now are going to be average users who don't know anything about proper OpSec. They should be much clearer about what things they can't protect you from.
It shouldn't be in a press release like this, they should be explaining the difference between privacy and anonymity to the customer. It's not like their marketing team isn't aware of the fact most people don't know any better.
It's in their best interests, too, because it doesn't matter how many times you say "we provide privacy not anonymity", the headlines are a bad look.
Windows 11 is now automatically enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission ( www.neowin.net )
Looking for new Site Admins ( forms.gle )
Hey everyone,...
Five Men Convicted of Operating Massive, Illegal Streaming Service That Allegedly Had More Content Than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Prime Video Combined ( variety.com )
Elon Musk has another secret child with exec at his brain implant company ( www.theverge.com )
Microsoft Edge nags users with a 3D banner to change Windows 11's default browser ( www.windowslatest.com )
Would you use Edge as your default browser on Windows 11 if Microsoft nags you with a 3D banner? Microsoft thinks you would. In a new experiment, which appears to be rolling out to Edge stable on Windows 11, Microsoft has turned on a banner that uses 3D graphics to promote the browser....
I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity ( ludic.mataroa.blog )
How stupid do you have to be to believe that only 8% of companies have seen failed AI projects? We can't manage this consistently with CRUD apps and people think that this number isn't laughable? Some companies have seen benefits during the LLM craze, but not 92% of them. 34% of companies report that generative AI specifically...
Adobe Says It Won’t Train AI Using Artists’ Work. Creatives Aren’t Convinced ( www.wired.com )
Hey, so Reddit won't let you browse its site if you're using Proton VPN.
This is what I get when going to Reddit while connected to Proton VPN, connected to a server in the same country I live in.
Used VPN for cheaper YouTube Premium? Congrats, your subscription has been canceled ( www.androidauthority.com )
Is Your Driving Being Secretly Scored? The insurance industry, hungry for insights into how people drive, has turned to automakers and smartphone apps like Life360. ( www.nytimes.com )
IRS makes free tax return program permanent and is asking all states to join in 2025. This could deal a massive blow to private tax filing services such as TurboTax ( apnews.com )
Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation ( www.theverge.com )
A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates....
If Windows XP was released in 2024 ( lemmy.world )
Credit: https://grimgreenfo.rest/notes/9tn7wtthrdb5013t
Most annoying feature ever ( lemmy.world )
Google Search’s “udm=14” trick lets you kill AI search for good | Ars Technica ( arstechnica.com )
Tack "&udm=14" on to the end of a normal search, and you'll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
Does One Line Fix Google? - A “Web” filter that presents what Google used to look like a decade ago | tedium.co ( tedium.co )
Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. All you have to do is add "udm=14" to the search URL....
DuckDuckGo is down. Is there any info about it?? ( lemmy.world )
Update: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-outage-affects-bing-copilot-duckduckgo-and-chatgpt-internet-search/...
IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell ( aftermath.site )
Welp, this didn't take long....
iPhones And Androids Can Now Warn You of 'Secret Trackers' ( www.ibtimes.co.uk )
In a collaborative effort, Apple and Google have developed an industry-standard detection feature called "Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers" (DULT) for Bluetooth trackers. This standard allows users on iOS and Android devices to be alerted if an unknown Bluetooth tracker is monitoring their location.
Bad audience ( lemmy.world )
Scarlett Johansson denied OpenAI the right to use her voice. They used it anyway. ( boingboing.net )
New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC ( arstechnica.com )
ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can’t ( www.vox.com )
TIL one of the oldest TV shows was simply called "Sea Stories" on the BBC, featuring Royal Navy Commander A.B. Campbell describing the personalities and places he had seen. No known footage exists. ( en.wikipedia.org )
aired from 1936-1937. if anyone has a copy pls lemme know
Netflix Windows app is set to remove its downloads feature, while introducing ads ( www.techradar.com )
Netflix has managed to annoy a good number of its users with an announcement about an upcoming update to its Windows 11 (and Windows 10) app: support for adverts and live events will be added, but the ability to download content is being taken away....
Slack is now using all content, including DMs, to train LLMs ( mastodon.sdf.org )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15741608...
Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' ( www.pcgamer.com )
Wise words from Batman ( lemmy.world )
Though I use GIMP
flashing ROM, is it that easy? ( lemdro.id )
I'm considering getting a Xiaomi 14 Ultra and I can get it pretty cheap with Chinese rom. I heard it's not that hard to flash it and put in a Swedish/global rom....
Why are neurotypicals in charge of making up the social rules? They're not even very good at it.
Edit: A few people have interpreted the title as serious, so I wanna clarify that it was meant as a sarcastic joke about how little sense the neurotypical world makes to me, but it is still legitimately me asking for help understanding said neurotypical world....
Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT ( www.tomshardware.com )
Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain ( restoreprivacy.com )
I used an original iPod in 2024, and it was pretty fun ( www.spacebar.news )