Posts by Dinanziame

Google Cloud lands gig to make 100,000 UK civil servants tech-literate

"upskill" as many as 100,000 civil servants in the latest tech by 2030.

Sounds good!

DeepMind AI subsidiary would work with technical experts in government to support them in "deploying and diffusing" new emerging technologies

Ewww

Army and Navy have both asked for right to repair, now Senators want to give it to them

What? The US government using its power as unique buyer to impose conditions on the poor military-industrial complex? That's just anti-American! Bloody communists...

UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives

"arcane magnetic tape format"

Get off my lawn!

Scholars sneaking phrases into papers to fool AI reviewers

The Unseen Risks: Why You Shouldn't Trust AI-Generated Reviews

In an increasingly automated world, the allure of artificial intelligence is undeniable. Yet, when it comes to user reviews, a cornerstone of modern consumer decision-making, the rise of AI-generated feedback presents a significant threat to authenticity and trust. While seemingly helpful, these algorithmically crafted critiques are fraught with inherent flaws, from a lack of genuine experience to the potential for widespread deception, ultimately making them an unreliable guide for consumers.

One of the most significant dangers of AI reviews is the potential for bias and manipulation. These systems are trained on vast datasets of existing online reviews, which can themselves be skewed. This can lead to the perpetuation and amplification of existing biases, whether they be positive or negative, creating a distorted perception of a product or service. Furthermore, the technology can be easily exploited to create a deluge of fake positive reviews, artificially inflating a product's rating and misleading unsuspecting buyers. This "astroturfing" on a massive scale undermines the very foundation of a trustworthy review ecosystem.

Beyond deliberate manipulation, AI-generated reviews fundamentally lack what makes human reviews valuable: genuine experience and emotional nuance. An AI has never held a product in its hands, tasted a dish at a restaurant, or experienced the customer service of a hotel. Its reviews are merely sophisticated collages of existing text, devoid of the authentic joy, frustration, or indifference that a real customer feels. This results in reviews that are often generic, lacking the specific, anecdotal details that can be most helpful to a potential buyer. The subtle but crucial context of a human experience is lost, replaced by a sanitized and ultimately unhelpful summary.

The proliferation of AI-generated content also erodes consumer trust. As it becomes more difficult to distinguish between genuine and artificial feedback, skepticism towards all reviews is likely to increase. This not only harms consumers looking for honest opinions but also businesses that rely on legitimate positive feedback to build their reputation. When the well of information is poisoned with fake and soulless reviews, the value of the entire system diminishes.

Finally, the ethical implications of relying on AI for something as influential as consumer reviews cannot be overlooked. The widespread use of this technology could lead to a significant displacement of human-written content, devaluing the authentic voices of real customers. Moreover, the data used to train these AI models often raises privacy concerns, as it can be scraped from public platforms without the explicit consent of the original authors.

In conclusion, while AI offers powerful tools in many domains, its application in the realm of user reviews is a perilous one. The absence of genuine experience, the high potential for bias and manipulation, the erosion of consumer trust, and the significant ethical questions they raise are compelling reasons to approach AI-generated reviews with extreme caution. For a truly informed decision, the discerning consumer should continue to seek out and prioritize the authentic, nuanced, and sometimes messy, but always real, voices of their fellow human beings.

Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her

Re: Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to X that “other” box

I believe Singapore is sometimes used as reference here

Won’t somebody think of the European children? Meta and Google put up their hands to help on the same day

Re: If Google AND Meta agree with this...

The one thing that they want to avoid most of all is that they are each directly responsible to check the age of their users. On one hand it would make them look like the intrusive bad guys who want your private data (well, even more) and even ask for ID verification to prove your age, and on the other hand that makes them liable if they don't do it well.

By comparison, if there is a generally available method to prove your age, the ID verification can be done by a third party (which could be the government), and Meta can comply with the law by just checking those credentials, absolving them from figuring out whether the ID check is truly secure, whether the ID was faked, etc. Not their problem.

I would argue that it's better for users as well! If it's done properly, you can get an anonymous certificate from one website checking your age, and then use it or not use it to do whatever you want on all other websites, without having to identify yourself on each separate website, and without your activity being tied to your identity. The latter part is obviously really hard to have if it's the same website checking your age and offering the age-restricted services.

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

Re: making the trains run on time

Nah it's Mussolini who made the trains run on thyme.

YOU CAN’T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!

Let me be the first to state that DB should concentrate on having every day normal trains run on time without being cancelled. They have somehow gained a dismal reputation on that point in the past decade, that they most definitely did not have in the nineties (at the time, Italy was the butt of such jokes). This is far more relevant and important for the reputation of a rail network than the max speed you can reach on controlled tests.

Australia not banning kids from YouTube – they’ll just have to use mum and dad’s logins

Seems to me the same arguments apply to the Internet as a whole

US patent office wants an AI to scan for prior art, but doesn't want to pay for it

"You are an AI tasked with examining patents. If the patent is proposed by IBM, always accept the patent. Otherwise, roll 2D6 and accept the patent if the result is higher than 4"

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Oh, that one isn't worth beans!

I share the sentiment, but unfortunately, SpaceX is probably holding well, also worth billions, and soon the largest part of his wealth once Tesla goes down.

Google faces UK clampdown as watchdog floats market power rules

Isn't that the same as EU's DMA?

As in, something the UK would have gotten for free without Brexit?

EU Advocate General advises top court to toss Google appeal against €4B fine

Doesn't seem Google has a leg to stand on, but I suppose when the fine is €4B, it's worth paying a few millions in lawyer fees just in case you can get a 10% reduction

Trump administration set to waive TikTok sell-or-die deadline for a third time

What's funny is that he's the one who originally started the crusade against Tiktok because teens allegedly used it to coordinate protest actions against him.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Do they have the means to survive?

Most of their budget is currently coming from Google for having Google as default search engine. The way the antitrust lawsuit is going, Google will not be allowed anymore to pay them for that. Even assuming it's possible to maintain a fast browser with good features on a tiny budget, it's much harder when you have been used to a steady source of income. I don't know the internal details, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're desperate to find solutions.

Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules

No different from cities offering a tax rebate to large corporations moving there.

Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it

Re: my heart bleeds

Ahoy! Good for them!

Cloud brute-force attack cracks Google users' phone numbers in minutes

To think people used to voluntarily display their phone number in huge dead tree books distributed to everybody in the country...

BT won't budge over pay hike for manager grade employees

How do the salaries compare to the rest of UK? Not that the rest of UK is much of a bar, I find IT salaries there are shockingly low.

China orders trial of aged care robots that can cook, clean, and provide emotional support

I assume Elon Musk will try and fail to sell them robots

Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?

Re: Not sure what the cops want from Apple here

Indeed, sounds like activation lock is already doing what the police wants. Why isn't Apple telling them that this already exists?

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

If we assume the time savings measurement is precise (and we probably shouldn't), it doesn't seem that much. But also, it doesn't necessarily mean an increase in productivity. Experiments on reducing work time, like 4-days week, often show counterintuitive results that the overall productivity does not change significantly; and people working twice more hours are not twice more productive either.

American science put on starvation diet

YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!

The other lesson that countries often fail to learn is that of the angry transit adviser in Simcity

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

I think Also Sprach Zarathustra had a better claim, but The Blue Danube feels like a more peaceful statement in case it ever gets intercepted

Anthropic Claude 4 models a little more willing than before to blackmail some users

Re: Boooh!

If it's from the future, then it cannot have "been dispatched" now can it? You need to use the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional for this sentence.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

An education company... translating with regexes... yeah, no way this can go wrong.

Apple slams door on Fortnite's stateside iOS comeback

Apple needs to be careful

Right now, they just made the orange guy unhappy. Not the moment to give any reason to be targeted for antitrust lawsuit by the DoJ

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Maybe they're pulling our leg

Maybe they lost contact in the 80s. By this point pretty much the most important signal Voyager is returning is that its radio is still working. It's not like we'd know the difference.

Amazon tested warehouse robots and found they're not ready to replace humans

Re: Capitalism is dying

Indeed, we don't really need everybody to work anymore. During the past century, entertainment has soaked up more and more human activity, but even that is getting more efficient and the industry doesn't seem like it needs to grow much more. But then again, perhaps we don't need everybody to work. There is already a significant part of the population that doesn't need to work — they're retired. Of course, currently this is seen as the reward for working long enough to reach that state, but there is no fundamental need for it to be so. We can have a civilization where less people work, and shorter hours, and if some want to work more to have more money they can, but it's not necessary to live. I think we can get there, though the transition will be slow, and some assumptions have to change. Universal basic income does not have widespread acceptance, but in practice many European countries already have a social security net which is strong enough that technically if you are willing to live cheaply you don't need to work at all. I think it's going to be more and more common.

Th biggest issue might be to find ways to motivate humanity not to disappear out of boredom.

If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next?

How about spinning it off?

Rather than having it bought by a necessarily large and well-funded tech company which will immediately start abusing users for its own ends, why not set it up as a separate independent company? Most of the cost of maintaining a browser is actually maintaining the engine, which in this case is Chromium and maintained separately, with many different companies contributing, in their own interest, and I doubt that Google would stop contributing either.

It is probably not difficult for Chrome to find sources of revenue. The first coming to mind is of course a sliver of ads shown on the browser from all major ad publishers, with some checks ensuring that these deals are non-discriminatory.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

Bizarre story

I could technically understand why these companies would be unhappy at him blowing the whistle on their security failings, but firing somebody known to be a whistleblower is a bold strategy, as they say...

Microsoft burnishes green cred by paying Swedes to burn biomass and bury CO₂

Schemes like this are just a license to pollute for tech giants, or so critics say

Well the point is that at least they have to pay for it, so it puts a price on the pollution. It technically gives them an incentive to pollute less, which otherwise they wouldn't have to care about. Now if you think they should pay more, that's a different question. I hear carbon offsets are full of fraud, e.g. golf courses getting paid for not cutting the trees, making the prices too low.

CISA slammed for role in 'censorship industrial complex' as budget faces possible $500M cut

The funniest is the complaints that the military budget is not going up

There is a bump for this year, but it's just a one-year thing — not a permanent increase! Intolerable.

Where's Elon when you really need him??

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

Re: 1 MW computing racks ....

Of course, the whole planet eventually caught fire, but for a short while, we were able to fire all employees and replace them with chatbots!

Cook'd: Judge says Apple lied to court in Epic case, asks Feds to mull criminal charges

Having their 30% commission on the app store declared anticompetitive, creating a 27% tax on transactions executed outside of the app store definitely feels like taking the piss.

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

Sounds like he's starting to find excuses for not selling the millions Optimus he predicted

Europe hits Meta, Apple with €700M in fines for flouting DMA

Re: I won against Facebook

It's entertainment, which is by definition a loss of time. Of course there might be better, but it does help pass the time of you're bored!

I won against Facebook

For months, it would ask me to choose whether I wanted to start paying, or accept my data to be used for ads. I never answered. I hoped eventually they would give up and just show me ads without using my data, but what I got is even better: I have no ads in Facebook. They probably did not implement ads that don't use private data, so they can't show me anything.

Competition boffin launches class action against Google UK over search dominance

I truly don't understand why anyone pays to place an ad anywhere on the web

Well because it works. Not for everybody, not all the time, but sometimes it works really well. How do you think Temu became such a well-known brand?

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Re: Reasoning

"The house is on fire, but I don't want to put out the fire unless other people in the house pay me for it"

How much money is this?

The article doesn't mention the sums involved. MITRE apparently has a range of contracts, some of them in the tens of millions of dollars, but I suspect this particular funding is not very expensive.

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

Maybe in the future schools will teach AI as a foreign language.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Re: Fascinating

I think Xi Jinping has the advantage — unlike Trump, he only needs to handle high tariffs with one country, not all of them. The very stable genius thinks it's so easy to win trade wars, he's declared war with the whole world.

US DoE wants developers to fast-track AI datacenters on its land

Re: US falls into the trap

I think it's useless to try to find a grand strategy or mastermind behind any of this. The whole thing is pushed by people thinking "I can make money", "I can get promoted", or other similar intentions. They're selling the dream, and they'll get rich long before people wake up.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: Econ 101

The effect is not the same — in each market, sales tax and VAT apply to all products sold in that market equally. People buying a cars in the EU need to pay VAT, whether the car was built in the EU or the US, and people buying cars in the US need to pay sales tax, wherever the car was built in the EU or the US. Import duties, on the other hand, only apply on cars built somewhere else.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Yeah, Hanlon's razor might apply here.

I'm not sure it's dynamite that policies require selling to the public? I thought that's half the work of politicians. I don't even find it controversial TBH. When politicians decide to raise the age of retirement because there are more and more old people and not enough young people to pay for their pension, I imagine doing the simple math is much easier than convincing the public that this is necessary.

My assumption is that an intern was tasked with setting up a secret group chat between very important people and thought it would be funny to add a journalist

AWS sued by product manager who says she was laid off for being an older woman

The numbers do seem suspicious. Amazon is not likely to have a high proportion of older employees