The idea is that generative AI will enable Samsung products to get a better understanding of how consumers use the products – for example, an oven recognizing what is being cooked in it or a fridge recognizing what ingredients are inside. This could allow appliances to understand users’ needs and respond accordingly.

“Understand users’ needs” being a euphemism for “spy on users’ habits and sell that info to advertisers.”

We’ve gone full circle: from having a manual for your new appliance, to having a LLM confidently make up some incorrect info about how to use your new appliance.

The paper states that they studied the HTML form element interactions but “not the keystrokes or content.”

There’s a big difference. Both are more invasive than we would like, but grabbing everything you type while in the app’s browser is much worse than measuring a true or false “did this person submit their comment or did they give up and leave it unsubmitted.”

Tiktok is getting the content of the text, which could be sensitive info, and it grabs from every site you visit, not just the social platform itself.

But I think the main issue is using the data for allegedly targeting of protestors and Chinese political opponents, more than the depth of the data collection itself.

TikTok has always been on the extreme end of tracking and surveilling its users. For example, research found that the app had the ability to record all keystrokes made by users in the in-app browser (i.e. keylogging). This kind of tracking is way beyond what other social media companies do and borders on malware.That’s one reason why the US, Canada, and others banned the use of TikTok on government devices.

A former TikTok employee also alleges in a sworn statement that TikTok stores its user data in China, that the CCP has full access to this data, and that the CCP used this data to spy on protestors in Hong Kong.

So their tracking goes way beyond what other companies do, and China uses that data for expressly political goals rather than simply selling ads to users.

When people claim that leaks “get people killed,” they’re referring to when undercover agents are identified while they’re in the field. The only secrets exposed in these leaks are the computer hacking techniques used by the US to spy remotely through compromised devices.

The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.

You could maybe say that closing off those surveillance channels prevented the CIA from learning about some attack, but that’s really tenuous. It also assumes that the CIA isn’t constantly developing new zero-day exploits so that they can continue to spy on just about everyone on the planet.

It’s always crazy to come into threads like these and see people say “I would murder as many elites as possible” without batting an eye, and in the same comment say “I could never give up hamburgers.” It’s some kind of insane self-soothing to throw all of the responsibility for a global issue onto a few scapegoats. It also shows that people have no intention of doing fuck all about climate change beyond typing up snarky comments on the internet.

People can misquote all kinds of studies they half remember to pretend that they have no responsibility for making changes, but that doesn’t make it true. Just as one example, first world countries’ per-capita rate of meat consumption alone is enough to push the world over our 1.5C warming target. But because it’s an inconvenience to make any changes to my life, I’m going to pretend I would personally kill scores of people rather than make a new recipe for dinner. We’re fucked

Ok but remember this part?

We have a number of options – some fall on the shoulders of consumers; some on producers.

Maybe we can’t convince everyone to quit eating meat, but I would hope that we could appeal to self-described environmentalists, who have a stated interest in making sustainable changes.

That’s the OP’s point, after all. That the science unambiguously states that we need to stop eating meat if we care about meeting our climate goals. Any environmentalist who learns that this needs to happen and still chooses to eat meat is acting against their own ethics.

It has to be both. Our World in Data puts it one way:

We have a number of options – some fall on the shoulders of consumers; some on producers.

Or to cut through the flowery language - farms need to stop producing meat, and people need to stop eating it.

The biggest reduction would come from the adoption of plant-rich diets. Emissions would be halved compared to business-as-usual.

Man I had to rephrase this a dozen times and I still don’t have a good way to communicate what I’m trying to say.

The goal of this kind of callout is to make vegetarians, people who already value animal welfare, aware that they may still be contributing towards animal cruelty. For example, I was a vegetarian for years and then got rocked by the realization that, “oh wait, vegans aren’t just crazies that I can blow off, it was me who was ignorant the whole time.”

So I anecdotally assume that a huge percentage of vegans are vegetarians who went from thinking “vegetarians and vegans are basically the same, besides vegans taking the idea too far” to “oh wait there’s a huge important difference between the two.” On vegan spaces, people often joke that “bullying worked on me lol” because the gentle approaches are easily ignored, but the really blunt “your actions don’t align with your stated ethics” is really difficult to brush off.

TL;DR yeah I think you’re right. The original announcement from the Reddit admin comment didn’t give any details, so I filled in the gaps myself and assumed “heart” would imply compassion, especially since I’ve seen that “stay for the empathy” tagline for so long. After all, why would the change from “front page” be necessary if “heart” of the internet gives a the same sentiment that it’s the core or cutting edge?

The contracted marketing team’s writeup has some limited insight into the reasoning:

…Reddit’s updated brand materials would all point back to four traits: inherently eclectic, positively different, delightfully absurd, and genuinely candid. These traits, along with the uniquely empowering foundation of Reddit as the best place to discover and participate through real conversation, led the team to a new, strategic description of Reddit as “the heart of the internet.”

I’m not experienced enough in marketing jargon to understand if this is saying that “heart” only implies that there are lots of communities available on the platform, or if “genuine” and “real conversations” should be factored in to imply that these conversations and communities should be heartfelt.

But all in all, it seems like the focus is on “you can discuss with lots of communities.” And since “front page” doesn’t imply discussion as much as it implies reading a newspaper, the change was needed.

I find it odd that they changed their tagline from “the front page of the Internet” to “the heart of the Internet.” Reddit is certainly a massive hub for discussion, but “compassionate” is not the first association I have with Reddit conversations. Smug condescension, certainly. Frothing mob mentality, often. But compassion? Rare, at best.

I suppose that Reddit may be trying to simply manifest their hopes for the platform into a reality, but I don’t think it’s that easy. The Reddit welcome banner reads, “Come for the cats, stay for the empathy,” but most people probably know Reddit for the Boston Bombing debacle, r/theDonald trolls, and other nasty news items. It’s hard to believe the cushy corporate messaging when Reddit has so consistently allowed horrible shit on their site until the media fervor gets so intense that they can’t ignore it anymore

The Covid episode made me bail on the reboot altogether. It was the worst offender in every way that the season was bad, including the pacing of the episode.

All the episodes in the newest season resolve the plot in the last like thirty seconds of the episode. It’s like the writers kept writing until they ran out of runway, then just yelled, “oh crap!” and wrapped everything up as fast as they possibly could. Which is bizarre because the episodes are so full of tepid puns and “phone bad” boomer humor you would think the writers were starved for ideas.

Not to mention that the existing Twitter infrastructure was already incredibly insecure before Musk even took over.

Twitter does little to monitor for so-called insider threats, employees or contractors who use their positions in the company to steal information, and instead leaves them “virtually unmonitored."

Twitter suffered security incidents significant enough to warrant a report to a government agency about once a week, with 20 breaches in 2020 alone.

Twitter devs can already take over user accounts since they all have prod admin access (which they need because Twitter still has no QA or staging environments). I can only imagine the potential for abuse once people’s finances get tied together with their account.