Posts by Cincinnataroo 138 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2015
I'm astonished by how people put up with the hostile activity of companies that do this sort of thing. That are clearly against the majority of mankind for their own perceived benefit.
Too few are prepared to strike back, regain their agency, stop them.
It's worth taking a good look at what they're doing, then asking yourself Am I complicit?
This enshittification has gone so far that some search engines are active enemies of web site owners. (I find some search engines better so these are worth identifying.) In other words you don't want them, they give negative value.
Suggested actions by web site owners.
0. Find other ways to get visitors.
1. Evaluate search engines identify the friends and foes. This article helps. Promote those that are good citizens if you choose.
2. Identify visiting ML engine scrapers (may be same as search). User agent, IP, redirects, DNS lookup, automatic IP updating, ... you decide how much.)
3. For hostile scrapers deliver ML / LLM poisoning content, or blank page if you choose, and/or robot exclusion instructions. (Hand written, algorithmic, gradual change, ...)
4. Manage the system.
Be interesting to know who made this decision.
I saw a post this week saying that a silly claim was untrue.
Some genius "fact checker" pointed to a Google "AI answer" repeating the silly claim. Yep the Google agent accepted the lie, then spread it further.
I wonder whether Richard Head was the programmer.
The future's so bright I better wear shades.
Google intends to let Chrome users choose whether to play in its Privacy Sandbox, or in the adjacent land of data surveillance where third-party cookies support all manner of information gathering.
Whaat? There have always been choices to switch off 3rd party cookies entirely. (Or with exceptions should you wish!)
This statement is, and afaict, has always been misleading. The choices are:
1. No cookies stored at all (clear when it shuts)
2. No third party cookies
3. No third party cookies with exception that you choose
4. All the cookies that can eat you, if you want
5. Weird untrusted "other stuff" like privacy sandbox
6. The great unmentioned area of local storage which should have equivalent controls
I reckon that people who accept the defaults get all they deserve, but that's a separate story. (One solution is you have to switch it all on (opt in), or you're forced to set each and every one when you fresh install a browser.)
What some users want is in-browser-tools to examine, copy, delete, and edit cookies as they choose. Linked to analysis tools so that they can see what the cookie setters are up to, if they choose.
I'd be interested to see a technical assessment or two by people who've, done a job with and without a RAG system. They've had enough time to work with both systems and have informed opinions.
My guess is that with some jobs it can be an advantage, and with others not. Also depends on those involved obviously.
I didn't find that yet in my searches.
This suggests a nice disruptive little game. People collect and refine dangerous prompts.
Share, compete and publish.
Some go out and sabotage the LLM engines with massive compute loads. Compete.
Fun is had by the participants and those making and deploying them get a wake-up call they might not ignore this time.
Well if you had any residual trust in online services, this is a wake up call.
I remember when StackOverflow was in Beta, it was great.
Then there was that statement by one of the developers that they might open source it. The prevarication made it obvious, a lie.
Then you realised the game was rigged. You started an item, shortly changed your mind, couldn't delete it. Somebody had inserted a single irrelevant comment. Yep you realised, the design is pretty pure evil. Automated theft of your contribution.
After that there was a wave of "brownie point hunters" looking for upvotes irrespective that they had no idea what the question meant. (What kind of person is turned on by silly little badges? Dumb scores?)
Then came the organised gangs. I saw wrong answers top voted and right answers downvoted and "amateur lawyered" to death.
The huge numbers of outdated, and now wrong, answers to questions. The good questions unanswered. ...
Then it got sold out to enemies of us all.
Enshittification, upon enshittification. The course to the heat death of the Internet Universe. He who can't see it deserves what he'll get.
So their automated moderation tools have less than a 50% success rate.
Less if we cut out the weasel worded "standards" and apply sane human evaluation.
Now they want to do "well I'm not so sure" (are you?).
Their fake detectors will presumably struggle to even approach 50%, hence what may be a thuggish approach.
The future continues to get dimmer and dimmer, under the guiding hands of these buffoons.
I understand he needs to make the formerly unprofitable, profitable.
Pity his actions are mostly things that I don't want. Like this who can reply. If I can choose the individual accounts that might be worthwhile for some posts. As for blue tick accounts I'd seriously consider excluding them, but would need to check. (If I had the chance.)
I think management grasp of what users want is not minimal, but maybe negative.
Sad. Still usable but getting less so.
I have noticed more error and avoidance to these censorship actions, than the intended result.
Not a scientific survey, but my observations suggest much more than half of the penalties are doled out to the entirely innocent.
Machine Learning based approaches, what do you expect?
Yet all manner of people keep on imposing these things on the populace, AND not realising how bad they are. An indictment of our species maybe?
We might get better results if individuals had to opt-in to the enforced measures AND had easy ways to run their own filtering systems. Enabled by government and platforms but entirely beyond their reach to control. I suspect that together with a few dozen people, I trust, we could outperform these dumb solutions many times over. Take it from abomination to useful.
Consider:
1. My right may be your wrong.
2. I actually want to see what rubbish the disinformation troops are spreading today. Not every day but from time to time.
This might not suit the forces who seek to impose this stuff. Maybe they're somewhat indistinguishable from the forces they claim to oppose. Much the same. Just another faction?
I'd like lists of those who do this, should it continue. I imagine detection won't be too hard.
Then search engines that exclude such web sites.
Then lists of those who're involved.
Assuming this is a further move in the surveillance for everybody, all the time, no choice, movement.
I'd also like to know about anybody who considers Google a trusted source.
If we could ditch the current crop of browsers, the user interfaces of these systems, ... and more, there is potential.
We have the raw materials of a golden age, it's being wasted.
It's up to the individual. Accept defeat and think that these monstrosities are your only options, or do something.
The gloves should be off. I don't know how this is done but:
1. Many who designed, created and managed this system, screwed up. That needs fixing, obviously at the board level too.
2. Many who purportedly govern, police, and legislate are a bunch of clowns. They need clearing from the board when adequate replacements are found.
3. If this were done in collaboration with a state, that state needs to be dismantled, whatever the cost.
4. The niceties of borders protecting those who do this needs reconsideration.
5. Individuals, who're worthy, need to get educated and get the power to over-ride the idiocy and evil of the above.
Maybe fat chance of a perfect solution, but we should try.
Probably: Moscow (chekists) delenda est.
The ecosystem is fundamentally broken. Until that changes we're not going to get decent privacy™.
1. The smart phone companies are inherently opposed to personal privacy, their commercial models can't stand it. Some computer companies too, sadly.
2. Unless we have parallel systems to the "app stores" we won't get privacy.
3. Much of the browser stock is made by people opposed to personal privacy, they won't give it to us. We need decent options.
4. Website and app creation has degenerated into an anti-privacy nightmare, the "developers" have become part of the problem. We need to re-educate and clean the stables.
5. Government has proven quite ignorant, incompetent and counter-productive in fixing it. Until individuals get to choose and opt-in, government and legislation is part of the problem and no real solution.
Against that people still need to advertise their products and services, find out about things... Human ingenuity can satisfy that together with what actual humans want.
Despite the buffoons who talk of "killing email" and "the EU telling humanity to do some other silly thing" there is real promise here. Progress way too slow though.
This looks interesting as does the "Bluesky" project (don't know the current status though).
I hope we can break free of the current stupidity in communication.
Surely all that has to happen is that users get to opt-in to these technologies.
Off by default, you actively decide.
That includes the guinea pigs at present.
You can check whether you've been press-ganged into it. The EFF has something on their site called "Am I FLoCed? A New Site to Test Google's Invasive Experiment".
You could also come up with inventive ways to make your FLoC cohort a thing of great fun and irrelevance.
Well here we have a list of knuckle draggers. Remember them.
Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs
Committee Members
Chair: Mr Andrew Wallace MP, Liberal National Party of Queensland, Fisher ACT
Deputy Chair: Ms Sharon Claydon MP, Australian Labor Party, Newcastle ACT
Members
Dr Mike Freelander MP, Australian Labor Party, Macarthur ACT
Mr Andrew Laming MP, Liberal National Party of Queensland, Bowman ACT
Ms Peta Murphy MP, Australian Labor Party, Dunkley ACT
Mr Rowan Ramsey MP, Liberal Party of Australia, Grey ACT
Mr Julian Simmonds MP, Liberal National Party of Queensland, Ryan ACT
Dr Anne Webster MP, The Nationals, Mallee ACT
Participating Members
Mrs Bridget Archer MP
Dr Fiona Martin MP
Ms Kate Thwaites MP
Mr Tim Watts MP
Have I got this right:
* This company by their policies have triggered people to off themselves.
* Now they want to profit from uploaders while not paying those who did the actual work.
One guess, they expect to go out of business soon.
Suggestions:
* Time to create alternatives
* Don't post their links
* Don't upload video to them
* Play their content through other services without many of the ads.
Hey we have all these folk getting upset by the languages they speak. (I guess that if you took a dictionary you could concoct a way of being offended by most of the words in there. If you really tried all of them?)
Why don't we help these people a bit. When they feel offended speak up, tell us, maybe tattoo something on their own foreheads. We can then give them options.
* Go to a place that cares
* Be deprived of sight
* Be deprived of hearing
* Be deprived of speach
* Various combinations of the above
Make sure the laws are such that others can do the honours should they not be able.
When I read those disclaimers like:
the NHS, which takes data privacy extremely seriously and has put appropriate safeguards in place to ensure information is used correctly.
I hear something like
the NHS, which has no clue about data privacy at all, and would sell information about their grandmother if it paid enough, has put in place measures to ensure that data leaks widely, where we can't trace what's lost, and through leaks that we'll never fix (and don't know how to)
