FlippantGod's recent activity
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Comment on What are you using these days as an alternative to YouTube? in ~tech
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Comment on reCAPTCHA: Is there method in monotony? in ~tech
FlippantGod Link ParentKeep in mind that google search and youtube are absolutely not and have never claimed to be, platforms for free speech. Google itself removes content, and sometimes DCMA abuse removes content, and...Keep in mind that google search and youtube are absolutely not and have never claimed to be, platforms for free speech. Google itself removes content, and sometimes DCMA abuse removes content, and sometimes countries censor content (albiet independently from google). For google search, google can prevent sites from appearing in searches (usually due to DCMA), and while it ceased operation in china in 2010 after a decision to stop censoring search results for the chinese government, has at least been working on a search engine that will meet the government's censorship requirements.
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Comment on reCAPTCHA: Is there method in monotony? in ~tech
FlippantGod (edited )Link ParentI have a few issues. For one thing, websites opt in, not users. But the big issue is that users visiting sites on firefox recieve more captchas than those browsing on chrome. There are studies...I have a few issues. For one thing, websites opt in, not users. But the big issue is that users visiting sites on firefox recieve more captchas than those browsing on chrome. There are studies showing that reducing page load times increases sales.
What about taking five seconds for an image to slowly fade in so you can click it and then do that for half a minute?
Google is generating value for their own computer vision products but also their broswer, at the expense of firefox users whose only options are to go along with this, switch to chrome, or deny themselves access to websites not even affiliated with google.
Furthermore, iirc, Google developed software to distinguish the cursor behaviors of human users vs bots, so they could have done away with the image captchas entirely as I understand it.
Edit: additionally, the quotes you provided make no claim that the datasets are ever shared with the research community, just that such efforts help improve machine learning. And THEN, even the digitized books are not necessarily made publically available; the digitized text is indeed preserved as they say, by Google, who uses the materials as another dataset I'm sure. In all likelyhood, only a minisulcule fraction of digitized texts are probably ever publically viewable due to copywrites and intellectual property laws. Instead Google seems to provide one or two pages of a work as a preview. Usually the table of contents in my experience...
So out of those claims, the only real one was that it improves google maps, thus bringing more value to thsir products over the competition.
I am certain that captcha is not intended for any altruistic purpose.
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Comment on Daily Tildes discussion - why should we allow (or not allow) fluff content? in ~tildes.official
FlippantGod Link ParentI just fell in love with your idea, but it still comes with a few caveats. People want to see the content they like, aggregated together. But when hierarchies get a few levels down, there is...I just fell in love with your idea, but it still comes with a few caveats.
People want to see the content they like, aggregated together. But when hierarchies get a few levels down, there is considerable seperation, i.e. someone is greatly into ~music.metal.progressive.death and also ~music.hiphop.lofi. That individual's time is now split between these two branches, and the confluence of the two is waaaaaay up in ~music. It might be fair to assume that only the very best, and most widely accepted content from the niche communities will reach the top to be readily visible in the same place. This isn't an issue as long as the individual spends his or her time in the niche community, but it is now a trade off, activity in one is substituted for another. This means that there might be less activity in niche communities as a whole.
Of course this already happens, so maybe it won't be a big deal. On reddit I certainly spend my time in just a handful of niche subreddits with very little overlap, but I can't help but wonder if something as broad and with so many niches like music will not handle this gracefully.
Actually, I guess just having a custom tailored feed would remedy this, but I'll still post this comment in case it gets someone thinking.
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Comment on What is your opinion on ads on the internet (or just ads in general)? in ~talk
FlippantGod LinkMalicious ads are certainly in the minority from legitimate ad servers. However, even legitimate ads can be hijacked by taking control of any of the numerous redirects the ads send users down....Malicious ads are certainly in the minority from legitimate ad servers. However, even legitimate ads can be hijacked by taking control of any of the numerous redirects the ads send users down. Once one of the redirect addresses has been compromised, you get an authentic ad that is now malicious. As far as I am aware, this is not at all uncommon. In addition, even if the personal data isn't sold, it is collected, and companies simply cannot keep this data secure, so it will end up in a bad actor's hands after all.
The only ads I do not block are DuckDuckGo's, which iirc serves up a static ad for whatever you just searched, and not your search history, with no logging or data collection, and with the option to turn them off entirely. Still, I keep a very close eye on the situation.
You make a fantastic point, but it should be made clear that the owners of Floatplane have stated that it is not intended to be a discoverability platform. So in that sense, it does not replace a desireable function of Youtube. It is just a content delivery platform with sustainability (i.e. subscriptions) in mind.
I personally am pretty interested in what sort of content discovery services will develop with recent advances in machine learning. Ultimately I think we won't need to rely on the black box algorithms at youtube and netflix or their data, and instead just self-host something. Also, I believe there was a Tildes thread on exactly this subject if you are interested.