A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things, too.
Though, I don’t think that means they won’t get any better. It just means they don’t scale by feeding in more training data. But that’s why OpenAI changed their approach and added some reasoning abilities. And we’re developing/researching things like multimodality etc… There’s still quite some room for improvements.
Do you think this approach would be worth a try for the threaded Fediverse (aka Lemmy)? I mean your use-case is very different. We have some rudimentary image detection to flag other kinds of unwanted images in Piefed. I could experiment with something like https://github.com/monatis/clip.cpp. Have it go through the media cache and see if it can do something useful for us. But I don’t think it’d be worth all the effort unless the whole approach is somewhat accurate and runs in real time on average VPSes.
This one? I loosely followed your work… Maybe I should try it someday. See how it does on a regular VPS. Thanks for the link to the IFTAS. Seems they have curated some useful links… I’ll have a look at their articles. Hope they get somewhere with that. At this point, I don’t think there is any blocklist accessible to the average Fediverse admin?!
Edit: Thx, saw your other comment with the link to horde-safety.
You’re probably right. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to walk close to the edge with things like this, though. Every update to the detection model could change things and get them in jail… So I certainly wouldn’t play a cat and mouse game with something that has several years of jailtime attached… But then I don’t really know the thought process of the average pedo. And AI image detection comes with problems anyways. In the article they say it detected 6 million pictures already. While keeping quiet about the rate of false positives. We know people have gotten in serious trouble for (false) claims. And I also wouldn’t want to be the Fediverse admin who has to go through thousands of flagged pictures and look at them and decide which is which. With consequences attached… Maybe a database of hashes would be the only option. That doesn’t detect new pictures, but at the same time it comes without flase positives and you can’t draw conclusions from hash values.
Yeah, unless someone publishes even a set of hashes of known bad content for the general public… I kind of doubt the true intentions are preventing CSAM to the benefit of everyone.
And will we get that technology to keep the Fediverse and free platforms safe? Probably not. All the predecessors have been kept away for sole use of the big players, despite populism always claiming we need to introduce total surveillance to keep the children safe…
Also helps the general population to take part in science. Plus, you can read things your (small) academic institution didn’t subscribe to. And when I tried it, it was super convenient. Just put in the DOI and get a paper, no other steps like university logins, VPNs etc needed.
Ultimately, the same thing applies to all internet services. If you’re paying for a service by watching advertisements, they have to show them to you. I’ll be an additional line in your mail inbox, mixed with the messages. Or an ad in-between the posts of social media. In between the list of news articles. And of course for AI serviced that include advertising, it needs to be the same.
I’m currently not doing much freelance work or working in any customer-related department… So I don’t use any CRM. But I heard some freelance programmers like InvoiceNinja. I just got a bit interested in organizing some stuff. So I started evaluating some knowledge-management and (Free Software) enterprise solutions. But I’m less interested in the CRM part. And I didn’t find any awesome match, yet.
The article sounds like there is just Salesforce and now Twenty (and SugarCRM). But there are a lot of other open source alternatives that have been around for quite a while: Odoo, ERPNext, SuiteCRM, CiviCRM, … just to name a few.
What I’d like best is to just buy them at a regular store. Not do onlines shopping in the first place. (And then figure out how to return something that was delivered with some special service. I guess you can’t drop them off at the next DHL place, like with the other Amazon stuff.)
But I guess they’re fine, too. The Amazon sellers have the same “brand” inverters like Ecoflow and Growatt.
Hmm. But with those three, the simple sets (2x400W + power inverter) seem to be ~100€ more expensive than on Amazon. Maybe I have to go with Amazon then. Thanks anyways! I’ll keep an eye on discounted offers.
Any good store that will sell me a super cheap and good set including inverter here in Germany? I mean they’re on Amazon for 250€, but maybe there is a better shop?
I wonder if that’s still a thing, it’s been announced years ago. I don’t know anyone using the Google Assistant, and I removed that from my device. Have to ask some of my friends, or at the pizza place.
Nice. I think Daisy should also get a Youtube channel so we can listen to her, handling the telemarketers.
And I want that technology for my personal use as my own assistant/secretary.
I think that’s overestimating the complexity. In my example you can just delete all data from people who cross the border regularly. I heard like >80% of Americans don’t travel that much. So you’d still catch the vast majority. And there are additional giveaways. Visiting relatives will follow a pattern or coincide with holidays like every other thanksgiving. Weekend trips will start at the end of a week while work will be during the week and often someone would visit a worksite multiple times.
And correlating data and having multiple datapoints helps immensely. For example if you want to correlate license plates with cell tower data: One measurement will only narrow it down to a few hundreds or thousands of people who passed the highway at that point. But, a single additional datapoint will immediately give an exact answer. Because it’s very unlikely that multiple of the people also return at the same time. Same applies to other statistics.
And you don’t even need to figure out the patterns. It’s a classification problem. And that’s a well understood problem in machine learning. You need a labeled dataset with examples and ML will figure out the rest. No matter if it’s deciphering hand writing, figuring out shopping behaviour to advertise, or something like this. We figured out the maths a long time ago. Nowadays it’s in the textbooks and online courses and you just need some pre-existing data to start with. Maybe you’re right and compiling a dataset will take more than 3 weeks. But it’s certainly doable and not that complicated. And menstrual cycles follow patterns. That makes machine learning a precise approach. It’ll home in on the ~4weeks cycle, find outliers and data that never followed a realistic cycle.
I agree, there are complications. People need to be incentivised to pay attention. Government agencies regularly fail at complex tasks. Due to various reasons. But it’s probably enough to make peoples’ lives miserable if they have to live in constant fear. So there is an additional psychological factor, even if they don’t succed with total surveillance.
And this approach is a bit unlikely anyways. It’s far easier to pass a law to force clinics to rat out people or something like that.
But my guess is that [predictive policing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_policing might become an issue. Currently we seem to stick to intelligence agencies and advertising with that technology (and Black mirror episodes and China). But that’s mainly a political choice.
We’d need to identify some threat model to continue the discussion. I don’t know what people are afraid of. I’d say the other way round is more likely. For example a state decides to pursue people terminating a pregnancy. They can use data from telecommunications providers to find out which phones cross the border to the neighboring state and return the same or the next day. Disregard people who do it regularly, and then correlate that data to other factors. Like pull up the menstrual tracker account that was accessed by that specific IP address.
We know since Snowden that some agencies do similar things (supposedly for terrorism) and generally a lot of logs are kept. Also we have lots of automatic license plate readers and additional surveillance available.
Aside from that, it is spread that Amazon knows if you’re pregnant before you do. They could also buy the data who is interested in romper suits, supplements or other specific things and then isn’t. I suppose it’s not exactly about that… More that Amazon have some good heuristics and algorithms to predict things from general shopping behaviour. And you could also do the same thing to menstrual tracking. The cycle is pretty regular. And then it usually stops once someone gets pregnant. And I believe after that it takes some time to settle down to a very regular pattern again. You could easily detect that with an algorithm. And simultaneously get rid of artificial (spammed) data that doesn’t follow what is possible. Probably takes a skilled programmer like 3 weeks and then you can tell if an account owner is real, and probably even if they take some contraceptive or not, due to the slight variations. And if an app has some recommendations features, they’re likely to already include the groundworks for data analyzing.
Ultimately, the government already analyzes and stores the data from telco providers. And it’s always easier to combine several factors to make good predictions, than to rely on a single source. And I’d say this kind of surveillance has to be done automatically, anyways. It’s almost never feasible to sift through databases manually.
Computer databases are kind of purpose-built to organize a lot of (arbitrary) information. I seriously doubt this kind of chaos is going to make even the slightest difference. It’s probably just giving people some false sense of security while any information that’s stored in any cloud can still be retrieved. And effortlessly be matched to whomever they like to oppress. At least if it’s associated with some account, email or specific phone.
What’s the point of spamming one specific menstrual tracker / women’s health app? Lack of better hobbies? Or is there some controversy around the company behind it? Or just general state of freedom and surveillance in the USA?
I don’t think this is a piracy community. Maybe have a look at the Wikipedia article and the side bar there.