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Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette

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  • 799 Stimmen
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    764 Aufrufe
    uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zoneU
    algos / AI has already been used to justify racial discrimination in some counties who use predictive policing software to adjust the sentences of convicts (the software takes in a range of facts about the suspect and the incident and compares it to how prior incidents and suspects were similar features were adjudicated) and wouldn't you know it, it simply highlighted and exaggerated the prejudices of police and the courts to absurdity, giving whites absurdly lighter sentences than nonwhites, for example. This is essentially mind control or coercion technology based on the KGB technology of компромат (Kompromat, or compromising information, or as CIA calls it biographical leverage, ) essentially, information about a person that can be used either to jeopardize their life, blackmail material or means to lure and bribe them. Take this from tradecraft and apply it to marketing or civil control, and you get things like the Social Credit System in China to keep people from misbehaving, engaging in discontent and coming out of the closet (LGBTQ+ but there are plenty of other applicable closets). From a futurist perspective, we homo-sapiens appear just incapable of noping out of a technology or process, no matter how morally black or heinous that technology is, we'll use it, especially those with wealth and power to evade legal prosecution (or civil persecution). It breaks down into three categories: Technologies we use anyway, and suffer, e.g. usury, bonded servitude, mass-media propaganda distribution Technologies we collectively decide are just not worth the consequences, e.g. the hydrogen bomb, biochemical warfare Technologies for which we create countermeasures, usually turning into a tech race between states or between the public and the state, e.g. secure communication, secure data encryption, forbidden data distribution / censorship We're clearly on the cusp of mind control and weaponizing data harvesting into a coercion mechanism. Currently we're already seeing it used to establish and defend specific power structures that are antithetical to the public good. It's currently in the first category, and hopefully it'll fall into the third, because we have to make a mess (e.g. Castle Bravo / Bikini Atol) and clean it up before deciding not to do that again. Also, with the rise of the internet, we've run out of myths that justify capitalism, which is bonded servitude with extra steps. So we may soon (within centuries) see that go into one of the latter two categories, since the US is currently experiencing the endgame consequences of forcing labor, and the rest of the industrialized world is having to bulwark from the blast.
  • 432 Stimmen
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    M
    I think they meant 'because'
  • 68 Stimmen
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    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • 119 Stimmen
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    wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comW
    Most still are/can be. Enough that I find it hard to believe people are missing out without podcasts through these paid services.
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    H
    In the meantime: Parents: don’t give your children lighted rectangles to play with.
  • CBDC Explained : Can your money really expire?

    Technology technology
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    6 Stimmen
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    S
    CBDCs could well take the prize for most dangerous thing in our lifetime, similar to nuclear weapons during the Cold War. I'm thinking of that line from the song in Les Mis. Look down, look down. You'll always be a slave. Look down, look down. You're standing in your grave.
  • AI model collapse is not what we paid for

    Technology technology
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    92 Aufrufe
    A
    I share your frustration. I went nuts about this the other day. It was in the context of searching on a discord server, rather than Google, but it was so aggravating because of the how the "I know better than you" is everywhere nowadays in tech. The discord server was a reading group, and I was searching for discussion regarding a recent book they'd studied, by someone named "Copi". At first, I didn't use quotation marks, and I found my results were swamped with messages that included the word "copy". At this point I was fairly chill and just added quotation marks to my query to emphasise that it definitely was "Copi" I wanted. I still was swamped with messages with "copy", and it drove me mad because there is literally no way to say "fucking use the terms I give you and not the ones you think I want". The software example you give is a great example of when it would be real great to be able to have this ability. TL;DR: Solidarity in rage
  • Stack overflow is almost dead

    Technology technology
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    0 Stimmen
    5 Beiträge
    35 Aufrufe
    ineedmana@lemmy.worldI
    students When I was a student I despised the idea of typeless var in C#. Then a few years later at my day job I fully embraced C++ auto. I understand the frustration but unfortunately being wrong is part of learning