BlueMonday1984

Not a sneer, but a link for Baldur Bjarnason for the week:

Why Halide’s Process Zero is an important tool for iPhone photography enthusiasts

Recommend checking it out for his high praise of the AI-free iPhone camera app, but to make it relevant to this community, I'll pull out the opening section:

Knowing how much work Lux Optics puts into their apps, Halide and Kino, I don’t think their recent Process Zero was implemented as a reaction to the ongoing backlash against “AI”. After all, now that people are increasingly negative about generative models, releasing a new photography mode that bypasses “AI” processing feels like a clever marketing stunt.

Personally, I suspect it was at least partially done for marketing purposes - beyond the wide open "AI-free" market niche, the ability to disable Apple's built-in image processing gives users plenty of control over how they can develop photos.

I don’t know anything about French internet law.

Same here, I'll admit

Granted. I was mainly thinking from the angle of "how to I keep the prosecution from having a slam-dunk case against Durov" here.

Also, it seems my expectations from privacy nuts were a bit higher than I expected.

Died 1987, Born 2024

Welcome back Max Headroom Broadcast Intrusion

I’m confident Durov was arrested because the platform he was responsible for is a hotbed of illegal activity, most of which is not under the cover of encryption.

That was Durov's biggest mistake in retrospect. Man should've taken some lessons from Megaupload's demise and gone all the way on E2E - would've given him plenty of plausible deniability if he genuinely couldn't have known what any of his users were doing.

It would've arguably brought other problems, but it would've removed that golden opportunity for the gendarmes to nail him.

Would've likely also earned Durov some brownie points with privacy nuts, as well.

Probably several millions, give or take a few dozen.

YouTube rolled out a new dogshit AI feature and it near-immediately accused someone of being the meme behind the slaughter:

Ah, hell yeah, the much-anticipated finale.

Gonna give particular praise to the opening, because this really caught my eye:

Tech culture often denigrates humans through its assumptions that human skills, knowledge and functions can be improved through their replacement by technological replacements, and through transhumanist narratives that rely on a framing of human consciousness as fundamentally computational.

I've touched on the framing of human consciousness part myself - seems we may be on the same wavelength.

As for the whole "replacement by technological replacements" part...well, we've all seen the AI art slop-nami, its crystal fucking clear what you're referring to.

You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists?

No, but I'd say its a good sign we're getting close to an AI winter

What can I say - I saw solid ammo for some machine-gun flow, and gave it a good throw.

(Special thanks to Rhymezone - I wouldn't have pulled off this rhythmic magdump without it)

This is pure speculation, but this "autonomous AI" hype is probably only further souring the public's opinion on a thoroughly soured concept.

They've already seen AIs royally fuck things up left, right and centre, anything which suggests AI bros are gonna try to magnify their ability to fuck things up is only gonna piss them off.

Part of me suspects there's plenty of those kinda kits out there. The appeal's pretty obvious - just pop the fucker onto any random dumb ordnance you've got laying about, and boom, instant smart bomb.