Spyke

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Tesla knew Autopilot caused death, but didn't fix it

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"A bit misleading" is, I think, a bit of a misleading way to describe their marketing. It's literally called Autopilot, and their marketing material has very aggressively pitched it as a 'full self driving' feature since the beginning, even without mentioning Musk's own constant and ridiculous hyperbole when advertising it. It's software that should never have been tested outside of vehicles run by company employees under controlled conditions, but Tesla chose to push it to the public as a paid feature and significantly downplay the fact that it is a poorly tested, unreliable beta, specifically to profit from the data generated by its widespread use, not to mention the price they charge for it as if it were a normal, ready to use consumer feature. Everything about their deployment of the system has been reckless, careless, and actively disdainful of their customers' safety.

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Mozilla.ai is a new startup and community funded with 30M from Mozilla that aims to build trustworthy and open-source AI ecosystem

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This is something I think a lot of people don't get about all the current ML hype. Even if you disregard all the other huge ethics issues surrounding sourcing training data, what does anybody think is going to happen if you take the modern web, a huge sea of extremist social media posts, SEO optimized scams and malware, and just general data toxic waste, and then train a model on it without rigorously pushing it away from being deranged? There's a reason all the current AI chatbots have had countless hours of human moderation adjustment to make them remotely acceptable to deploy publicly, and even then there are plenty of infamous examples of them running off the rails and saying deranged things.

Talking about an "uncensored" LLM basically just comes down to saying you'd like the unfiltered experience of a robot that will casually regurgitate all the worst parts of the internet at you, so unless you're actively trying to produce a model to do illegal or unethical things I don't quite see the point of contention or what "censorship" could actually mean in this context.

privacy

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'Facial recognition' error message on vending machine sparks concern at University of Waterloo

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There is a massive fundamental difference between having a person see your face in public, or even having a basic security camera record your face, and having a system recognize your biometric data and stalk you through every public environment with extreme precision.

The general public should absolutely not accept the imposition of being expected to be followed through every public place by private corporate entities for undisclosed purposes. We can and should aggressively push government representatives to take strong regulatory action to outlaw this behavior and aggressively punish violations.

Will making these efforts actually change matters? Maybe, maybe not. Will throwing your hands up and just assuming it's impossible to change anything and that we should all just lay down and accept it as fact lead to the worst possible outcome? Absolutely.

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Revealed: WHO aspartame safety panel linked to alleged Coca-Cola front group

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Not to defend diet coke (any kind of soda is not healthy for you, regardless), but I would generally assume that drinking 144oz (assuming 18x8oz cans/day) of any type of beverage that isn't plain old water would tend to cause some level of serious health effects, given that's more than your entire general recommended daily fluid intake from all sources. I feel like the general takeaway is that most food and drink is bad for you in excess, and companies constantly slapping "diet/low fat/low carb/etc." labels on junk food products that are marginally healthier than their peers gives a false impression that you can have your cake and eat it too in terms of negative health effects from these foods/drinks.

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Numerous Tesla owners say they've been trapped inside their EVs after they lost power. Here's how to manually open a Tesla door if you get stuck inside.

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Maybe instead of engineering stupidly complex electronic door handles they could just, I don't know, design a simple mechanical door handle that is also aerodynamic? These gimmick "features" automakers keep insisting on add pointless mechanical complexity, pointless areas of failure that are expensive to repair, and aren't even something many consumers care about, or in many cases are overly complex hassles they actively don't want.

games

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Dragon's Dogma 2 launches to "Mostly Negative" review bombing after microtransactions reveal, and man, what a bummer

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The microtransactions are one issue among many. To be frank, putting microtransactions in a $70 USD title would still warrant negative reviews in and of itself, but the the game is also having catastrophic performance issues and crashing on PC for what seems to be the majority of players, to the point of many Youtube channels covering it that did not get press copies being all but unable to play at all.

It doesn't matter if a game has a lot of good elements, if it has bad ones and people cite those bad elements in negative reviews it's not review bombing, it's consumers giving an honest review of a product.

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Dear server admins, please defederate threads.net. Dear users, ask your server admin to defederate threads.net.

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Meta has had plenty of chances in the past as a massive leader in the social media market. Those chances have been used to conduct illegal violations of user privacy, monopolize multiple market sectors, and ultimately go as far as actively abetting crimes against humanity. It is entirely reasonable and I think fundamentally imperative not to give them any more chances.

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Firefox will have a built-in ‘fake reviews detector’ — Amazon is in trouble

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Then you can ignore/turn it off? It's also a function to protect users from malicious online behavior, dunno how that could be interpreted as a nanny, unless you also insist browsers shouldn't warn you when accessing known malware links or similar. If you really insist on having the absolute freedom to not be advised about it when you're being scammed then go off I guess.

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EVs Could Last Nearly Forever—If Car Companies Let Them

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While it's true that EVs can be built with fewer moving parts in the drive system itself, and that companies could absolutely produce longer lasting vehicles if they focused on longevity, there are still a lot of parts of a vehicle that simply will not last beyond a certain point. The moving parts of an EV still cover everything in the suspension, wheels/brakes/steering, and a number of other components that are very costly to replace, not to mention the underlying frame/unibody of the vehicle itself being vulnerable to wear over time depending on the conditions it's driven in. "The few moving parts that wear out" still covers a huge swath of a vehicle, even if you take the engine and transmission out of the equation.

Well-built EVs with a focus on longevity and repairability could extend the lifespan of the average people mover by a great deal, but at the end of the day cars will by nature eventually reach a point where the cost to repair some major core component becomes too great to justify, outside of rare or collectable cases.

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Justice Department accuses Visa of debit network monopoly that impacts price of 'nearly everything’

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I have the most incredible news for you about this crazy new thing called... cash.

More seriously, there's no reason government bodies shouldn't just create a central digital transaction system with real money, instead of pouring resources into the stupidity of a blockchain system. Save everyone a lot of trouble and wasted compute cycles and just make the source of trust in the system the fact that it's administrated by a trusted central authority running a database, instead of the various shell game wank of blockchain systems.

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Google's AI Bots Tout 'Benefits' of Genocide, Slavery, Fascism, Other Evils

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They are not being "honest", they are representing flawed and problematic data patterns integrated into their models, because the capabilities they actually posses are dramatically less than companies and the general public seem to be happy to assume. LLMs aren't magically going to become pop culture evil robots that want to kill us all, but what they have already become is tools for unethical corporate exploitation and the enablement of more advanced scams and disinformation campaigns.