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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: January 7th, 2026

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  • Based on a facial recognition selfie, checked against your existing profile pics

    They’ve been doing this for a long time, but supposedly for bot-detection; which are now just using LLMs to generate slop to game the platform and its users. But with human users now possibly considered unauthentic by others, because they haven’t yet de-anonymized themselves.

    It teasing a “reimagined experience” that will test full-screen videos for a section of users “the moment they open the app.” is an interesting choice, when addictive design features for its platforms are under scrutiny. But I guess it only addresses the problem in relation to children; adults of course being fair game, which could be another reason to be extra cautious and use age-estimation in the verification process.


  • until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship

    Trust me bro. These systems will never be abused by those managing the system: surely they couldn’t give themselves access privileges, surely they couldn’t remove data access records, surely individuals in positions of power would never modify, remove or share data out of self-protection, including their buddies’ (assets)…

    You’re all just a little confused, you see: these video-capable cameras currently only record snapshots of vehicle identifiers, that happen to be registered to individuals, and might depict its driver and persons surrounding the vehicle. And don’t give me any of that future hocus pocus of “video footage”; that doesn’t exist actually, it cannot simply be enabled with a single over-the-air update…

    These cameras, among the many others might, or might not keep a record of everything you do outside your home, and stack it on top of data harvested by other data aggregators; but we promise we won’t look at it. Why aren’t you smiling? It’s by contract: we’ll monitor compliance of both our self and our partner with a mutual interest. And uuuhp, no deliberate loopholes that we actively exploit.



  • Am I the only one that finds it ridiculous, non-E2E encrypted cloud storage isn’t protected from mass-scanning (against opaque cryptographic hashes)? Just because one technically could, and “nothing in the law prevents” a provider from doing so, or a legal basis is explicitly being provided (in case of the EU’s Chat Control), doesn’t mean one should. You’re still preemptively scanning private content, and it should be irrelevant whether or not it’s encrypted.

    I’ve frequently criticized Apple in the past, but I can’t do anything other than praising them for dodging this privacy-nightmare; unlike services provided by the likes of Google or Meta, that actively encourage the use of unencrypted options by default, while happily “volunteering” in case of the EU’s Chat Control.








  • I think there’s a distinction to be made between solutions which are client-side, versus those that are server-side, or at least have a server-side component that is functionally necessary.

    For the first category, the termination of a subscription shouldn’t lead to denial of access to the current build of the software: it should remain functional in the absence of lower-level updates. Ideally this software is sold as a one-time purchase, having life-time free updates bundled, or sell upgrades on a versioned basis; but a subscription fee for future updates seems perfectly reasonable too, if the previously stated conditions are met.

    For the secondary category I believe it’s in the service’s right, to provide it’s products on the basis of its own terms and conditions; that is, if it doesn’t employ morally questionable practices, like: outpricing other services using venture capital, for the purposes of attracting a user-base for future exploitation (by raising fees, or by turning the user into the product; despite an ever decreasing value proposition: i.e. venture capital enshittification).


  • Algorithmic feeds are the problem here, which are exacerbated by features like autoplay and infinite scrolling. Users should by default only be served content from channels they explicitly chose to subscribe to. Algorithmic feeds should be separate from this subscription-based feed, and only bleed over if subscribed to said channels; which shouldn’t be any different for shorts (only showing shorts from subscribed-to channels, if not hidden altogether when preferred). Simply put: make timelines finite again, by not endlessly resupplying it with spam; which includes the unhealthy amount of “sponsored content”.




  • Most “name brands” have long been acquired by large umbrella corporations, and shortly after doing so, the “brand recognition” is often leveraged to market white label products; which is increasingly the only differentiator between it and off-brand products. That, and the price-difference: simply paying more for a meaningless “name brand”, on an equally inexcusably poor quality product; besides a slightly less shitty customer experience, hopefully.

    I really think it’s poor design to purely filter on appearance of brands, rather than actual brand reputation. Yes, it might serve as an overgeneralized indicator for questionable reputation, but marketable brands shouldn’t be treated as reputable either.