🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞

Voyager

Apprpropriate for a Star Trek AMA :)

Oh yeah, I assume it’s that level of stupidity. Idiots in charge with zero concept of laws or IT or security.

“half joking”

“half joking”

/hj

My brain always reads this as “/handjob” and it breaks my brain for a sec. :)

My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access. In turn, that sensitive material is viewed by more Alpha School employees than students and parents may realize.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I’m gonna stop you right there with a huge huge WHAT the FUCK. That is an incredible decision to have made. Stunning.

I saw that Alpha School maintains a spreadsheet which contains a list of student names, their grade, and an archive of their recordings which shows what’s happening on their screen, their remote tutor, and a video of the student taken via their webcam. This spreadsheet is not only available to anyone at the company, but is also shared in such a way that anyone on the internet who has the link can access the spreadsheet and the videos of students.

“If I wanted to, I could go there and just watch students. Anybody who worked in this capacity could watch the videos of students working on their laptops,” one Alpha School employee told me. “So many hours of just students’ faces […] I’m not sure parents understand exactly what’s going on with that data […] I don’t think that this is clearly communicated, because I’m sure there’d be a lot more opt outs if it was.”

Wonder how many pedos work for the company.

https://archive.ph/XO6Pn

Dunno if that’ll be better, but I created it to see if it helped :)

I did more skimming than reading of the linked article because I don’t care that much abou tthe topic, but I just want to say: We need more of this journalism. THIS is what journalists should be doing so much more of. Calling out lies and specifically this is a great format for that.

It shows you how insular these people must be. That ad was the result of meeting after meeting, plan after plan. They had convinced themselves that the public would eat it up. We would be like “Holy shit that’s amazing, let’s give you ALL our data and video and privacy!”. They actually thought we would go for it. lol.

Text truly is a difficult medium. It doesn’t help that many statements that would have definitely been sarcasm a couple of decades ago are legitimately said by fascists these days.

I’ve been on the internet since 1994, and I was on BBSes before that from 1987, so that along with my ADHD means I tend to over-use emoticons to indicate the light-hearted tone of most of the things I write. heh.

Also I also overuse “lol” and “heh” and “meh” for those purposes, too.

I know some rail against the usage of “/s”, but really, it’s no bad thing. Sure it may identify some jokes that the author intended to be subtle, but in the days where these things are said by some people… it’s just necessary, alas.

Thank you, this gives me where to go looking next :)

Thank you. I’ll play around with available clients, then :)

As I am a Lemmy n00b, can you direct me on what to do to be able to flair users? I like most of the Lemmy method of things, but as an old.reddit user using RES… I’m finding the options a little limited over here so far. :)

You can’t tell they were joking around? :/

Well, I can tell. They are.

I’m passing by this discussion and just inserting myself in here to say: I’d be happier if reddit was more like it was when I joined - when it wasn’t the den of nazis, bots, and shills. Although the admins have always been libertarians^[1] and protective of the fascist point of view… but at least in the old days it wasn’t as pervasive.

But that aside, I agree with you in general.

Everyone can have different opinions, and thats ok.

Wrong. My opinions are the only correct ones. ;-)

I suppose the real issue is paying for the servers. There’s already pushback against the datacenters needed to power LLMs as it is. I suppose the capital to build would have to come from somewhere.

It’s a pity we don’t have a good government for a project like that. That would truly be a public service.

Did some calculations recently. If we took the cropland on which we grow corn strictly for ethanol production and put solar on it, something like 5% IIRC could power enough EVs to replace ALL vehicles in the US. Which means we could use a little more land for solar to power datacenters designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible. A government-run LLM run for the public.

It’s a pipe dream because in our current reality, it could never happen. But like universal health care and a living minimum wage, it should exist.

I know, I’m straying from the topic again. ADHD gonna ADHD. heh

I suppose as long as we were able to regulate AI companies to make sure they were forced to be upfront, honest, useful… it would be a sufficient compromise. But I’m sure we can’t even have that little.

more structure. [etc, trimmed quote]

I’m on board with wanting this :)

LLMs will get worse and shittier Why would they?

Not from the side of them gaining more knowledge but from the side of companies creating them monetizing and otherwise enshittifying them.

If we had a competitive open-source LLM…

So you’re not wrong, I agree; but I was speaking of a different angle. heh

Precisely that one, yes :)

So kinda like an ethical LLM^[1]. I’d be on board with that.

I know it’s unpopular to say, but I’ve found the latest version of Gemini to be pretty useful. But you have to know what they’re good for and not. General knowledge? Generally pretty decent. But you have to ask for sources and check those sources, and don’t tell it what you think, ask it what it knows and to admit when it doesn’t know things. I wouldn’t put my life on the line, but for looking up random stuff, it’s pretty decent.

I know LLMs will get worse and shittier, which I think is a bummer, because they could be so damned useful.