Interested in Linux, FOSS, data storage systems, unfucking our society and a bit of gaming.

I help maintain Nixpkgs.

https://github.com/Atemu
https://reddit.com/u/Atemu12 (Probably won’t be active much anymore.)

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2020

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  • Atemu@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlLegitimate interest?
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    5 months ago

    Your browser cannot block server-side abuse of your personal data. These consent forms are not about cookies; they’re about fooling users into consenting to abuse of their personal data. Cookies are just one of many many technological measures required to carry out said human rights abuse.



  • The writer will need to tag things down, to minimal details, for the sake of languages that they don’t care about.

    Sure and that’s likely a good bit of work.

    However, you must consider the alternative which is translating the entire text to dozens of languages and doing the same for any update done to said text. I’d assume that to be even more work by at least one order of magnitude.

    Many languages are quite similar to another. An article written in the hypothetical abstract language and tuned on an abstract level to produce good results in German would likely produce good results in Dutch too and likely wouldn’t need much tweaking for good results in e.g. English. This has the potential to save ton of work.

    This issue affects languages as a whole, and sometimes in ways that you can’t arbitrate through a fixed writing style because they convey meaning.

    The point of the abstract language would be to convey the meaning without requiring a language-specific writing style. The language-specific writing style to convey the specified meaning would be up to the language-specific “renderers”.

    (For example: if you don’t encode the social gender into the 3rd person pronouns, English breaks.)

    That’s up to the English “renderer” to do. If it decides to use a pronoun for e.g. a subject that identifies as male, it’d use “he”. All the abstract language’s “sentence” would contain is the concept of a male-identifying subject. (It probably shouldn’t even encode the fact that a pronoun is used as usage of pronouns instead of nouns is also language-specific. Though I guess it could be an optional tag.)

    Often there’s no such thing as the “default”. The example with pig/pork is one of those cases - if whoever is writing the article doesn’t account for the fact that English uses two concepts (pig vs. pork) for what Spanish uses one (cerdo = puerco etc.), and assumes the default (“pig”), you’ll end with stuff like *“pig consumption has increased” (i.e. “pork consumption has decreased”). And the abstraction layer has no way to know if the human is talking about some living animal or its flesh.

    No, that’d simply be a mistake in building the abstract sentence. The concept of a pig was used rather than the concept of edible meat made from pig which would have been the correct subject to use in this sentence.

    Mistakes like this will happen and I’d even consider them likely to happen but the cool thing here is that “pig consumption has increased”, while obviously slightly wrong, would still be quite comprehensible. That’s an insane advantage considering that this would apply to any language for which a generic “renderer” was implemented.


    It ends like that story about a map so large that it represents the terrain accurately being as big as the terrain, thus useless.

    As I said in the top, you’ll end with a “map” that is as large as the “terrain”, thus useless. (Or: spending way more effort explicitly describing all concepts that it’s simply easier to translate it by hand.)

    I don’t see how that would necessarily be the case. Most sentences on Wikipedia are of descriptive nature and follow rather simple structures; only complicated further for the purpose of aiding text flow. Let’s take the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Lemmy:

    Lemmy is a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social news aggregation and discussion forums.

    This could be represented in a hypothetical abstract sentence like this:

    (explanation
     (proper-noun "lemmy")
     (software-facilitating
      :kind FOSS
      :purpose (purposes
                (apply-property 'self-hosted '(news-aggregation-platform discussion-forum)))))
    

    (IDK why I chose lisp to represent this but it felt surprisingly natural.)

    What this says is that this sentence explains the concept of lemmy by equating it with the concept of a software which facilitates the combination of multiple purposes.

    A language-specific “renderer” such as the English one would then take this abstract representation and turn it into an English sentence:

    The concept of an explanation of a thing would then be turned into an explanation sentence. Explanation sentences depend on what it is that is being explained. In this case, the subject is specifically marked as a proper noun which is usually explained using a structure like “<explained thing> is <explanation>”. (An explanation for a different type of word could use a different structure.) Because it’s a proper noun and at the beginning of a sentence, “Lemmy” would be capitalised.

    Next the explanation part which is declared as a concept of being software of the kind FOSS facilitating some purpose. The combined concept of an object and its purpose is represented as “<object> for the purpose of <purpose>” in English. The object is FOSS here and specifically a software facilitating some purpose, so the English “renderer” can expand this into “free and open-source software for the purpose of facilitating <purpose>”.

    The purpose given is the purpose of having multiple purposes and this concept simply combines multiple purposes into one.
    The purposes are two objects to which a property has been applied. In English, the concept of applying a property is represented as as “a <property as adjective> <object>”, so in this case “a self-hosted news-aggregation platform” and “a self-hosted online discussion forum”. These purposes are then combined using the standard English method of combining multiple objects which is listing them: “a self-hosted news-aggregation platform and a self-hosted online discussion forum”. Because both purposes have the same adjective applied, the English “renderer” would likely make the stylistic choice of implicitly applying it to both which is permitted in English: “a self-hosted news-aggregation platform and online discussion forum”.

    It would then be able to piece together this English sentence: “Lemmy is a free and open source software for the purposes of facilitating a self-hosted news-aggregation platform and online discussion forum.”.

    You could be even more specific in the abstract sentence in order to get exactly the original sentence but this is also a perfectly valid sentence for explaining Lemmy in English. All just from declaring concepts in an abstract way and transforming that abstract representation into natural language text using static rules.








  • I used to not but I wish I did. I want to know where pictures were taken. Photo album software like Immich can also make cool maps out of your photos this way and group photos by location.

    As long as you’re not sharing the pictures with anyone, there is no loss of privacy whatsoever in doing this. I don’t see any reason to generally label it as “not great for privacy”.

    When sharing publicly, you need to be careful of course and run the images through an EXIF metadata stripper.



  • Then for a day and a half after I was working on that spreadsheet, it showed up at the top of the suggested videos.

    Again, which applications had access to your clipboard and user files at that time? If any of the applications running on your computer was stealing your data and selling it for financial gain, Google would likely be buying it and obviously using it against you.

    You also have to consider side-channels. Were you or your friends talking about that spreadsheet project via Discord or some other known abuser? Did you talk about it with a person in your room while daddy Google or Amazon were listening? (Alexa in the room, Google assistant on your phone etc.)

    in short: years of nothing, nothing, nothing, TWO DAYS OF TRANS VIDEO SUGGESTIONS, and then since, nothing, nothing, nothing.

    This might simply be expectation bias. You may have been shown such suggestions in the same pattern before and simply didn’t notice because, contrary to the present, the topic wasn’t on your mind and simply forgot about it because you’re being shown irrelevant suggested topics all the time.

    Even after reading a lot of people telling me that it is just The AlgoTM at work, that incident seems so razor specific to activity I was simply doing on my computer at the same time Youtube was open rather than anything that could be related to my personal interests.

    That’s how “The AlgoTM” works. Google gathers data on you directly through its applications, from 3rd parties selling data they stole from you and indirectly through the same process from people you associate with.
    It’s even possible that some data broker simply made up the fact that you’re trans. Google could have then assumed it’s true because you associate with trans people here. I could very well see that happen in an enshittified system such as Google.





  • Typing anything in another window that is not my browser

    Which windows exactly? The apps you’re typing things into might be spying on you.

    M$ and their 738 parters really value your privacy, so if you’re typing things into Excel…

    copypasting the words “trans” and “talking”

    What applications were running on your computer while you did this? Any of them could be recording clipboard history; it requires no special privilege.

    Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows itself was recording this and sent it to daddy M$ to train LLMs and maybe sell it as a little multi-billion side hustle.

    transgender videos about “How to change your voice” start popping up in my feed. Please know I have zero interest in transgender politics/culture/anything, it is not something I have ever searched for or engaged in online.

    Maybe Google knows something you don’t? JK.

    A more plausible explanation is that Google knows that you’re in the Fediverse (ever Googled it?) which has a far above average concentration of queer people.

    What is also plausible is that someone living with you (i.e. your family) or a friend is trans and you’re obviously associated with them.

    Google doesn’t recommend queer content because they think you’re queer but because it’s what their data-defined statistical algorithms (““AI””) predicts you are likely to be interested in and therefore watch ads for. If you know a queer person or are often in contact with them, you are simply quite a bit more likely to be interested in queer people than the average and therefore more likely to click on queer content.

    Possible that Youtube is reading my clipboard? Reading my keystrokes?

    Youtube itself? Near impossible.

    Other applications? Possible but likelihood unknown.

    Listening to an album via VLC, while Youtube is open in my browser. Suddenly, more tracks from that album start showing up in my suggested feed. Possible Youtube is reading the titles of other apps current open on my machine? (VLC changes its active title to the name of whatever file is currently open)

    Again, Youtube itself directly isn’t doing anything like this. If that album is related to what you were listening to on YT or is even simply also popular with people who listed to the same things on YT as you do or are just generally similar to your person; that’s all it takes for YT to attempt to show it to you.

    Also note again that any application on your Windows or Linux PC can read the window titles of any other application or even simply scan your media library or other files.

    Discord does this for instance for their rich presence function for instance and I would again not be surprised if there was a little multi-billion side-hustle going on.

    I use Youtube all the time as my personal version of Spotify.

    If you’re not reliant on YT’s recommendations, I’d recommend you to download the songs you want to listen to and listen to them on a local player.




  • By the fact that none of the apps I use day-to-day on my Android phone have viable alternatives on non-Android Linux.

    I’d have to run Android inside a container on the mobile Linux which isn’t the best experience and if I need to have Android running anyways, might aswell use regular android.

    While it’d be cool to have, I don’t really need a proper freedesktop userspace on my phone if I’m honest.

    Android is also simply leagues ahead in mobile UI things.