Notices by Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org), page 2

I'm very happy about how the fediverse works, this is one of the few spaces that's ad-free, but I've been contributing to my instance, and I hope that my contributions make it possible for other users who can't afford it to join the fediverse too. Is this sustainable? Honestly I don't know. What I know is that browser development is not sustainable with contributions alone. Not by a long shot. 7/11

But what if you don't want to see ads at all? You can totally do that! There are very good and effective ways to block ads, and it'll make for a better online experience. But don't be under the illusion that will somehow change the current dynamics. Most services you'll see will still be ad-funded, and they won't be able to survive if they can't serve ads. Alternatively you'll have to pay to access them. Which brings us to another topic: donations. 6/11

And it's not just Google. Every ad network is going to extreme measures to track you, because it is *profitable* to do it. And as long as there's an economic incentive, they'll do it. The only way to stop this is by removing the economic incentive to tracking. You'll still be served ads, but at least they'll be generic then. I don't know if PPA will achieve that, but the status quo won't. I'm 100% sure about that. 5/11

So let's get that out of the way, Mozilla hasn't become an ad company, it already was. pretty much always has been. The company didn't really want to talk about it in these terms though. Which brings us to the second topic: ads are now heavily reliant on user profiling and tracking. That's bad. 3/11

First of all let's make something clear. I've seen people claim that Mozilla has become an ad company because Mozilla bought and ad company, but that's ridiculous: Mozilla's work has already been funded by ads for two decades. The first agreement signed with Google dates back to 2005. That paid for most of Firefox development, an ad-funded browser. Most of the internet is ad-funded at this point. You might not like it, I don't like it, but that's the way it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances 2/11

Chances are that you might have heard about #Firefox "Privacy Preserving Attribution for Advertising". I've been working for Mozilla for 12 years and I've learned about it here on the fediverse, not only because I haven't been paying much attention, but because internal comms have been occupied with other stuff. So let's talk about something I feel Mozilla desperately needs: transparency. 🧵 1/11

This article is absolutely damning, the IDF is devolving into just another middle-eastern militia, largely at the expense of Palestinians.

https://www.972mag.com/israeli-soldiers-gaza-firing-regulations/

Somehow I had missed this. AI is going fine.

> On May 14, Tianle Cai, a PhD student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency in large language models like those that power such chatbots, accessed GPT-4o’s public token library and pulled a list of the 100 longest Chinese tokens the model uses to parse and compress Chinese prompts. [...] The longest token, lasting 10.5 Chinese characters, literally means “_free Japanese porn video to watch.” Oops.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/17/1092649/gpt-4o-chinese-token-polluted/

@dysfun @NeonPurpleStar well, he's making it look like he's doing them a favor 🙃

I can't believe how the western press will happily write about how “Putin is open to negotiations” on the same day when the Russian armed forces launch a deliberate terror attack on a civilian target.

The only thing Putin is interested in is the complete erasure of the Ukrainian nation, its people and its culture. Nothing more nothing less.

Memory errors in consumer devices such as PCs and phones are not something you hear much about, yet they are probably one of the most common ways these machines fail.

I'll use this thread to explain how this happens, how it affects you and what you can do about it. But I'll also talk about how the industry failed to address it and how we must force them to, for the sake of sustainability. 🧵 1/17

This is gonna be fun: OpenAI runs afoul of the GDPR because it generates false information about individuals and they don't have full access to the data that pertains to them.

From the article:

> Maartje de Graaf, data protection lawyer at noyb: “The obligation to comply with access requests applies to all companies. [...] It seems that with each ‘innovation’, another group of companies thinks that its products don’t have to comply with the law.”

https://noyb.eu/en/chatgpt-provides-false-information-about-people-and-openai-cant-correct-it

So I just learned what "The Stack" is today: an aggregation of GitHub repos for machine learning from which I can opt out.

But I won't.

I won't because they scraped some hot garbage I wrote in bash and Python that would make you faint. Bottom-of-the-barrel throw-away scripts full of coding crimes. Stuff like

find | grep | awk | xargs | ugh

...invoked via subprocess.run() then fed into more garbage.

I want "artificial intelligence" to learn this. It's going to be fantastic.

I wonder if I could cook up a script that turns Star Trek erotic fan fiction into Rust code, then upload *that* to GitHub

tired: opt-out of AI training datasets
wired: enthusiastically opt-in all the garbage that's sitting on your disk

@HistoPol @si_irini for an even better experience I always recommend the fantastic Spicediver fan-edit of Lynch's Dune, which restores a number of important scenes and the book ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faHQA_0d9Mo

@Suiseiseki this is public data in crash reports, these are strictly opt-in, nothing is sent unless the user explicitly consents every time. You can see it here: https://crash-stats.mozilla.org/

BTW I don't think running on that kind of hardware is going to be pleasant: all forms of rendering & A/V decoding will be software-only, I/O is going to be a pain, etc... But it still works.

The fact that some #Firefox users are running it on surprisingly dated hardware is a testament to its versatility and ability to scale down all the way to really old machines.

@stshank the book mention that the largest ones that were sighted were 400m in length, so this is a very chubby one