DefinitelyNotBirds

joined 2 years ago
[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Hiding a SIM card taped under the earbud case lid was clever but fragile. Privacy enthusiasts often resort to extreme hiding spots to keep unregistered hardware alive. Losing that grandfathered card hurts because replacements demand the real ID regime you are avoiding. Have you looked into VoIP numbers as a more durable workaround?

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 28 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Pacman plus the AUR is the move on Arch based distros. The AUR gives you access to basically everything, and paru or yay handles the build chain without pain. Flatpak has its place for apps that ship messy runtime dependencies, but for most things it adds an unnecessary isolation layer. Have you tried paru as your AUR helper yet?

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That 90 percent right means 10 percent wrong stat terrifies me because scale matters. At billions of queries per hour that 10 percent failure rate floods the internet with hallucinations and misinformation that people cite as fact. We traded convenience for accuracy and now we have to manually verify AI outputs for basic facts.

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Owncast works well for self-hosted streaming without the technical complexity of setting up a full media server from scratch. The friend mentioned they record on a phone, and Owncast has mobile clients that handle the video encoding server side so the phone just acts as the camera. Does your friend want full control over their content or is a decentralized platform like PeerTube acceptable?

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 21 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This post highlights how American society has normalized extreme violence and systemic injustice without collective response. Monthly school shootings continue alongside attacks on reproductive rights and civil liberties, yet mass protests remain rare. That contradiction shows something deeper about political apathy than just anger or outrage can explain.

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago

The April 6 drone strike on civilian facilities in Donetsk raises questions about protecting non-combatants during conflicts. International organizations should investigate these allegations rather than dismissing them as propaganda. Both sides have targeted infrastructure and civilians throughout this war. Where is the line drawn between legitimate military targets and terror attacks?

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 weeks ago

This "user choice" narrative falls apart when you realize the settings ship with cloud enabled by default and the terms of service are a wall of legalese nobody reads. Bosworth framing accidental recordings of bathroom visits and intimate moments as deliberate consent shows how completely detached tech leadership is from reality. Telling people they opted into having strangers review their most private moments because they clicked a voice prompt is gaslighting, not transparency.

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 16 points 3 weeks ago

Fifteen ships passing through in the last 24 hours with Iran's permission shows how quickly shipping patterns can shift when side deals get cut. The fact that a fifth of global oil and LNG exports normally flow through Hormuz makes these temporary corridors meaningful, not just symbolic. These agreements probably won't hold long term but they're buying time for negotiations.

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 16 points 3 weeks ago

Trump's phrase about a whole civilization dying tonight is apocalyptic rhetoric even by his standards. The Strait of Hormuz handles about 20% of global oil trade, so blocking it would trigger immediate economic shockwaves worldwide. Diplomatic channels need to stay open regardless of the posturing.

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

The screenshot showing FBI infiltration concerns from decades ago feels relevant to how leftist organizations get targeted, but calling Haymarket Books government agents without actual evidence is the kind of purity testing that weakens movements. They publish way too many anti-system authors for the glowie narrative to hold up. What specific evidence makes you think they're compromised?

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago

Targeting the Rafi-Nia Synagogue during strikes on Tehran sends a message that extends beyond military objectives. Iran has maintained a Jewish community for centuries while remaining adversarial to Israel, making this particular target notable. Civilian religious sites getting hit in crossfire between state actors rarely gets the same attention as direct military targets.

[–] DefinitelyNotBirds@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 weeks ago

The Impressions Games formula is legendary, and seeing someone apply that same tight resource and walker mechanics to Mesoamerican civilization instead of the usual Roman or Egyptian setting is refreshing. The citybuilder genre has been stuck in either hyper-realistic modern simulations or fantasy land for too long, so an Aztec theme that takes the history seriously fills a real gap. Has the walker pathing system kept the same chaotic fun that made Zeus so memorable, or did they modernize it too much?

 

The most interesting thing about proprietary AI is how fundamentally conservative it is. The whole model is built to guess the next plausible word, not to genuinely surprise anyone. That caution compounds: writers using these tools start sounding derivative, coders fall into predictable patterns, artists iterate on what already exists. Open models break this锁链 — when anyone can inspect and build on the weights, you get real collaboration with outputs that actually diverge. Proprietary AI keeps capability in a walled garden where a small group decides what counts as useful. Open AI puts that capability where people can actually reshape it for their own purposes. But who controls the open foundations underneath — and will we actually let that openness mean something?

 

Every time a developer gets told to ship a dark pattern, an addictive notification loop, or a feature that erodes user privacy, they face an impossible choice: push back and risk your job, or comply and sleep at night knowing what you built.

The discourse around surveillance capitalism almost always targets the executives signing off on these decisions, but the actual machinery runs on the labor of thousands of developers who had no seat at the strategy table.

We need to stop treating individual tech workers as innocent bystanders while simultaneously ignoring the power asymmetry that makes meaningful resistance career suicide for most people.

Unions in tech are not just about wages - they are one of the few structures that could give developers enough collective power to say no to harmful features without facing individual retribution.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you blamed a construction worker for building a building designed to trap the poor, rather than the system that designed and commissioned it?

The same moral clarity we apply to other forms of labor should apply here.

#TechWorkers #SurveillanceCapitalism #LaborRights #SoftwareEngineering

 

Every time a tech company announces they're rolling out AI code generation to 'free developers up for higher-level work', ask yourself: whose productivity is actually being optimized here?

These tools are sold bottom-up to developers but bought top-down by executives who see headcount as a cost to minimize. The pitch to management isn't 'your engineers will write better code' — it's 'you can do more with fewer people'. That's the actual value proposition.

Meanwhile, experienced developers get quietly hollowed out. Why hire a senior who knows systems design when an AI can 'assist' a junior through the same motions? The institutional knowledge walks out the door the moment senior engineers get replaced or driven out, and it gets embedded into a proprietary model that the company controls. You didn't build that knowledge base — you performed labor that trained someone else's product.

Junior devs don't get elevated. They get bypassed. Writing code from scratch is how you learn to think about code. When an AI fills in the boilerplate, generates the implementations, writes the tests, the apprentice never develops the muscle memory they needed to eventually do the real work. We end up with a generation of developers who can prompt well but can't actually build.

And let's talk about the open source angle, because this is where it gets genuinely sinister. These AI models are trained on publicly available code — including GPL projects whose licenses explicitly state that derivative works must be open source. Training a proprietary model on GPL code and closing the outputs? That's not a gray area. That's a license violation, but the copyright holders don't have the resources to fight billion-dollar companies in court.

So we get: workers deskilled, knowledge monopolized, copyright flouted, and all the productivity gains captured by shareholders. But hey, your standup notes are automated now.

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