> If your data is stored in a database that a company can freely read and access (i.e. not end-to-end encrypted), the company will eventually update their ToS so they can use your data for AI training — the incentives are too strong to resist
(-:
Like using that /s or using that smiling emoji sign you used.
A good joke would land even if some other people miss it because of the text format.
"Microsoft would never do this" would have landed for me.
If you can tell sarcasm from text, that doesn't mean everyone can.
For my part, the smiley face was much-appreciated as I've seen people who genuinely would think that with a straight face.
--- EDIT: Spelling of a word
:)
/s is basically the internet-enabled equivalent of a sarcasm tone or a wink - it is much more difficult to detect genuine subtle sarcasm on the internet because of the absence of common communication tools. /s is also a valuable accessibility tool for those that might have difficulty with social cues and subtlety so, for all my autistic friends, I'm happy to defend it.
On the internet it is very possible and often plausible that someone can very much believe what may appear to a reasonable person to be sarcasm. Having a crutch online does not equate to an equivalent crutch offline.
Anecdotally, neurodivergent folks I know prefer, and some even require, a sarcasm indicator online.
I didn't become paranoid, everybody else didn't!
Stallman is always right.
Not really. Almost always right....
About communication with other humans he’s pretty much always wrong.
Imagine we’d had a better communicator who wasn’t a gross toe nail picking troll fronting free software? It shouldn’t matter. Only the ideas should matter . But the reality is different.
When you put in law that ISPs should adhere to some government-provided blocklist, this is already a game over. No matter how sane your government is. The government in 10 years might be vastly different, and the ability to control the ISPs is too alluring to not abuse
I'd rather live in a world where you could find words like "kill all russians", or child porn, or blatant propaganda than to live with the government censorship. I lived in Russia and the experience was nightmare. Who knows, maybe if the government didn't have the tools they had then the independent media would still be reachable by an average russian, the pictures of the pointless massacre would be public and the war would be over in a week
So I dunno bout that.
Any takes on what 2029 will look like? (related to this topic, ofc)
Pro tip: sign up for the business/enterprise version when reasonable in price.
I do this with Google Workspace. You can also do it with GitHub.
(Google doesn’t train on Workspace, Github doesn’t train on business customers, etc)
Yes, I know, it's dicey when people get used to a nice, friendly platform, and the platform gains lots of users, and then at some point (or several points), the terms start getting worse, and people feel misled and betrayed.
I get that. But this is a corporation. Hell, this is Microsoft. It's hilarious how many people think they've actually changed since their antitrust judgment in the 90s. I guess a lot of folks here are too young to remember it, even.
Companies exist to make money. If they are giving you something for free, they are either a) getting something else out of it already, or b) giving it to you for free now and looking for ways to get their own value out of it later. I don't mean that in some sort of cynical, "fuck the world" sense; that's just reality, and that's fine, for the most part.
If you don't like this, don't use free services provided by corporations. Host your own. Yes, I know it can cost money. Yes, I know it's more work. But that's life. TANSTAAFL.
I've had a VPS running for a couple decades on a small provider. These days it costs me a little under $200/year. Much cheaper options exist. I run a web server, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a slew of other things on it. It requires very little maintenance because I just run Debian stable on it, keep up with security updates, but otherwise leave it alone. It backs up the important stuff to S3 using duplicity, but -- knock on wood -- I've never had a catastrophic failure that required a restore in the ~20 years its been running.
Obviously the root problem is the incentive structures created by a system that relies on scarcity to assign value to things being applied to things that effectively cost zero to duplicate. Obviously companies are not my friends, I self host everything, heck I even have a local copy of my VPS, it's on solar, I'M fine. I don't expect Github to do good things and make good choices, but that doesn't mean I can't be mad about it when they do things I don't like. Also I live in the real world and have to deal with society and there would be friction I create for myself when I try to exist in tech and refuse to use github, might be a worthwhile trade but it IS a trade.
...yet
The belief of business users that this will remain true is grounded more in hope than in cold, dispassionate, business based decision making.
If it's not life or death, encrypt every byte of data you send to the cloud.
If it is life or death, you should probably not be letting that data traverse the open internet in any form.
Conspiratorial thinking? Sure. But if you've been around for a couple decades and seen the games these people play (and you aren't a complete sucker), then you'll at least be aware that there's at least slight possibility that these companies can get things from their customers that they (the customers) did not knowingly agree to.
Please don't reward these companies with money.
And I don't see any mention that that exempts you from being trained on. (Yes, the blog says you're still covered, but at that price I'd like to see a contract saying that)
If the publishing industry can't win a case against the AI firms then you don't stand a chance when you finally find out they've been training on your private data the whole time.
They can tell you one thing and do the opposite and there's effectively nothing you can do about it. You'd be a fool to trust them.