Technology

Oooff ... I don't think it's like MKBHD to come down so hard on a product. But this thing seemed weird (and probably dumb) when it was launched and so I guess this lines up.

Not that a wearable assistant doesn't make some sense, but some former Apple higher ups who think they're good enough to disrupt the smartphone market by ... checks notes ... relying entirely on other companys' new/untested/problematic/maybe-just-shit AI services and pretending that all of the other "smart" devices we have just don't exist in some sort of volley in the ongoing platform wars ... really does kinda epitomise all of shittiness of the current tech world.

US preparations for a "better future". This while we are al limit to an Kessler Syndrome, see

https://www.livescience.com/space/russian-satellite-narrowly-avoids-collision-with-us-spacecraft-and-nasa-could-do-nothing-to-stop-it

Spaceforce now launching weapom systems to destroy "spysats comunists", what can go wrong?

I know there's some controversy surrounding Brave as a company, and I'm not a fan of everything they do, but the goggles feature in their search engine is a really interesting attempt to give users more control over their search results.

The tool allows you to re-rank your search results according to custom rule sets. Each rule contains a regex style string to check against webpage URLs, and an instruction for what to do when a match is found. There are four basic types of instruction:

1. Exclude matching URLs from your search results.
2. Boost matching URLs so they appear higher in your search results than they otherwise would
3. Downrank matches, causing them to appear lower in the results than they otherwise would.
4. Highlight matches so they stand out in the list of results.

Brave has provided some premade rule sets (called goggles) that you can use right away, such as one that automatically removes all pinterest links, or another that boosts posts from tech related blogs. It's also relatively straightforward to create your own goggles, which you can either keep private or make public for others to find and use as well.

If you want to try it out for yourself you can go to search.brave.com and do a normal search for whatever you want. Then, on the results page, click the little "goggles" button just below the search bar. You'll be presented with a variety of premade filters along with a "discover more" button which sends you to a page with more information and filter options.

First launches July and Octubre 2024 - see also https://rocketstar.nyc

The algorithms that Big Tech designed - and the genocide they assisted. The Listening Post explores how Israel’s killing campaign of Palestinians has relied on artificial intelligence to choose its targets. A dystopian nightmare serves as a marketing campaign for technology flawed by design, and deepens the global digital divide.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14392924

WhatsApp is getting an AI chatbot because of course it is

There is one class of AI risk that is generally knowable in advance. These are risks stemming from misalignment between a company’s economic incentives to profit from its proprietary AI model in a particular way and society’s interests in how the AI model should be monetised and deployed. The surest way to ignore such misalignment is by focusing exclusively on technical questions about AI model capabilities, divorced from the socio-economic environment in which these models will operate and be designed for profit.

The promise of AI, for corporations and investors, is that companies can increase profits and productivity by slashing their reliance upon a skilled human workforce. But as this story and many others show, AI is just today’s buzzword for “outsourcing,” and it comes with the same problems that have plagued outsourced companies and workforces for decades.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14277930

Kobo announces its first color e-readers