Notices by Raphael Albert (r_alb@mastodon.social)

"But the LLMs won't just go away, right?"

Says who? The technology is ecologically and economically unsustainable. The people who are most enthusiastic about the slop machines are those who are trying to extract money by building or using them. The rest of us has to deal with the fallout somehow while others reap the benefits (in fictional valuations, not actual profits, mind you).

The technology is a failure. What is keeping it alive is tech bro fanaticism paired
with capitalist sociopathy.

"I don't care about privacy because I have nothing to hide" always misses the point.

Privacy is about being able to decide for yourself what others know about you and what they're allowed to do with what they know.

Privacy is about setting boundaries to technology and those who are building it.

Privacy is about having a say in who should get to shape our future.

A handful of billionaires (and an especially vile trillionaire)?

Or us?
--
#privacy #DataProtection

Without altering the system that harbors Big Tech, the European Union will never reach digital independence. All it will achieve is a new ecosystem of irresponsible companies and harmful technologies, but with European addresses.

Meaningful change will not happen from the "top". Our current politicians are apparently incapable of thinking outside their capitalist boxes.

Any change must come from us, or nothing will change at all!
--
#EuropeanUnion #politics #technology #DigitalIndependence

"You wouldn't want to miss out on this new technology, right? Don't be an old dinosaur!"

Dinosaurs have lived on this planet for more than 150 million years. Homo Sapiens has been around for a meager several hundred thousand years, and we're already wrecking the place.

So I guess I'd prefer to be a dinosaur, thank you!

This should not come as a surprise to anyone, but it needed a decision by the Austrian data protection authority nonetheless:

Data brokers have to provide proper information when they scrape someone's data from a company register. They cannot claim to have done so by having a privacy notice on their website. Neither does the exemption for situations in which information would require unreasonable effort apply to them.

From a case recently won by yours truly.
--
#privacy #DataProtection #GDPR

German outlets are reporting about a study done by lobbyists that (miraculously) found that businesses are unhappy with the GDPR.

Obviously, this still hasn't been said enough: the GDPR's purpose isn't making businesses happy! Its purpose is to protect our rights. It's necessary because far too many businesses won't respect our privacy unless they're forced to!

If running their business responsibly is such a huge burden for them, maybe they should let someone else do it.
--
#privacy #GDPR

Today is a good day to remind the people around us that the slop machine marketing is a lie. This isn't about making anyone smarter, more creative, more efficient, or anything else they claim their technology does.

This is about making each and every aspect of our lives dependent on their technology. This is about locking us in and forcing us to pay them to do what we once were perfectly capable of doing without them!
--
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence [sic!] #LLMs #StopTheSlop #Slopposition

@EUCommission
Please make a screenshot of all the comments and send it to your superior. Ask them to send it to their superiors, until it reaches those in charge.

Here are people who know a thing or two about tech begging you to stop your PR and listen for once!

We can't afford to fall for every snake oil grift US Big Tech throws at us! We need the EU and those in charge to be really smart now, because as others have written, there's a lot at stake! Dare to resist the hype, for all our sakes!

Dislike for the slop machine runs deep among you excellent people of the Fediverse! And I adore all of you for it!

Please know that each of your posts gives me hope that together, we can resist this mess!

So please stay loud, persistent, and ungovernable!

So Sam Altman's response to concerns about the wastefulness of his company's technology is basically "Well, raising humans consumes a lot of energy too!"

Either he has finally fried his own brain with his slop machine or he doesn't even bother any more to hide the degrading, dehumanizing, and despicable mindset that fuels the industry he's in.

Either way, those people shouldn't wield any power in the real world, where the rest of us 'dispensable humans' dwell.
--
#StopTheSlop #LLMs #OpenAI

Whenever someone asks me for my LinkedIn details, I give them the same reply:

"I'm a privacy professional. If I were a pulmonologist, I wouldn't advertise on cigarette packs either."

Always get's them startled.

European tech companies should demand stronger regulation, especially on privacy!

Why? Because it would give them an advantage over their US-based competitors, who are neither willing nor able to operate under strict rules.

That's why the European Commission's Digital Omnibus package is such a bad idea. Weak regulation doesn't create a level playing field for all. It benefits the big and powerful players more than anyone else!
--
#privacy #DataProtection #GDPR #DigitalOmnibus

"LLMs won't go away, so we better start using them to make them less harmful" is as about as smart as "my house is burning down, so I better pour some gasoline into the flames so that it will be over quicker."

So the country I live in (Austria) happens to be on the United States of MAGA's "needs regime change to kick it out of the European Union" list.

Great. I was really getting tired of all the "good news" lately.

I miss those innocent days when they would just confuse us with Australia or Trump would claim we were living in forests and having explosive trees.

Every time I ditch another piece of irresponsible and exploitative tech I get this wonderful feeling of being liberated from something that shouldn't have entered my life in the first place.

We all should feel that way more often!

I wonder what all the slop zombies out there are doing during the Cloudflare outage. I mean, they cannot ask ChatGPT what to do next, like they would normally do.
Are they just sitting in front of their screens now, completely motionless, waiting to be prompted? 🤔

Tomorrow, the European Commission will show whom they are representing. Us? Or big tech and slop machine makers?

@EUCommission , who is it going to be? The people with votes are waiting for your decision.

Either way, the leaked Digital Omnibus proposal should cause serious alarm. It is a sad reminder that we cannot rely on politicians to always make the the right choices when it comes to protecting our privacy.
--
#DigitalOmnibus #GDPR #privacy #DataProtection

Imagine what a wonderful world we could build if we weren't so occupied with having to keep others from destroying it.

We need to oppose the European Commission's digital omnibus disaster! We need to oppose it loudly and immediately!

Not only is the leaked proposal an outright attack on our digital privacy rights. The Commission would also set whatever will be left of the GDPR up to fail eventually.

@noybeu has summarized why an how the digital omnibus will harm people, you can read their article here: https://noyb.eu/en/eu-commission-about-wreck-core-principles-gdpr
--
#digitalOmnibus #GDPR #privacy #dataProtection

Friends don't let friends use probabilistic tech for deterministic tasks!