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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • Don’t forget the rest of your phrase there: justify… “to who”?

    If to you, he would have to do a LOT more than he has, for you to still buy in despite seeing that.

    To them, merely having the title of “CEO” seems to be enough, to those who refuse to dig deeper. pOsItIoN oF aUtHoRiTaH.

    They will be shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED when their money goes poof.

    Put another way, your question presupposes several things, e.g. “In a fair world, how could that be allowed to happen!?”.

    BTW, Donald Trump lowered the funding for the SEC, the agency responsible for investigation of financial fraud matters. Also he + the Republican Congress lowered the funding for the IRS too. After ACTUALLY “defunding the police” with his right hand - while simultaneously claiming that the leftists wanted to “defund the police” with his left - we will see a lot more of this than we did in the past.

    In the past, criminals feared the police and did not want to get caught. Now that there are fewer investigations into financial frauds… we have FA, and we are about to FO.




  • NO - you would need a power level to be over 9000 for that.

    This is half that. So you have only half control of the Universe. Like, you have to submit a request to your boss to use your power to do anything, but then he/she gets to either accept or deny your request. Requests must be submitted in triplicate and accompanied by a notary public cosignee signature. Other terms & conditions apply. Also, Huffman has veto power, and your requests may be lost or ignored at any time - but if YOU ever lose or ignore a reply in turn, then you are banned.

    Yet one more reason to say: Viva la revolución!








  • Ofc it could have been benign, but there is no evidence that it was, while conversely everything that we currently know points to a breach of ethics.

    One, they did not fully disclose that a camera was even there (unless I am mixing up this story with another one just like it?). That also makes it impossible to…

    Two, they did not obtain proper (or any) consent. A banking ATM that needs to use your face to verify your identity could be an example of a benign use, and ignoring the enormous potential security implications of that atm, it could do so with a popup on the screen “Do you consent to having your face observed?”, “Do you consent to storage of your facial data in our database?”, “Do you consent to us selling the marketing data we collect from analysis of your facial data?”. They did none of this.

    Three, when asked about it, they lied. Technically they obfuscated the truth, which is just another way of stating that they lied.

    Ofc it COULD have been benign, but so far they are zero out of three already towards that end - and that is even from just what we know so far.


  • Their corporate website mentions that they use the data for marketing purposes. Whatever type of face they see - e.g. male or female, large or skinny, etc. - gets correlated with what was purchased, and then they sell that data for marketing purposes. Exactly like Google selling your search history, except with likely fewer restrictions in place.

    Their website doesn’t mention how often they get hacked to give away that data for free - to be clear, that data meaning A PICTURE OF YOUR ACTUAL FUCKING FACE. I don’t know what resolution, or even what someone would do with it later, I am focusing here on the fact that the picture taking seems nonconsensual, especially for it to be stored in a database rather than simply used in the moment.


  • Surely many who have them received them from elsewhere before immigration to America, and likewise the proportion of immigrants who have them I would expect to be oversized. Americans tend to be more greedy than anything else and don’t put in the effort required for such small (financial) rewards.

    Also, those with PhDs tend to congregate into certain areas that support those jobs, i.e. cities but not even a goodly number of those so much; plus smaller college towns too ofc. As such, many in the general populace might rarely if ever run into one for the largest majority of their lives, unless traveling specifically to those areas for some reason?

    And ofc rural areas are far larger, geographically speaking, than places where a person with a PhD would (likely) go. So you could randomly pick a spot on a map 100 times and never manage to find someone with a PhD anywhere within tens of miles, I would expect - although that line of thinking reveals my own biases: do most educated farmers stop at like an MS and just follow up with their own (possibly even extensive) self studies, or go all the way to PhDs while working their actual farms? (I doubt it bc it does not sound practical, and that is a hallmark of farmers afaik, but I could be wrong…) Anyway, I expect the unequal distribution is a contributing / exasperating factor to the general rarity.




  • They might literally have had some psychological issue, where they were trying to see how far they could push it without being caught.

    Or this whole article could be a hit job - maybe the original thesis literally wrapped these sections with text saying “here is an example of a plausible attempt at plagiarism that would not get caught today - please do not quote me out of context here, m’kay?”. The devil is in the details, and I for one am not volunteering to put in the amount of effort it would take to properly judge this person.

    Although I bet their bosses are, now.




  • Exactly, yeah like I’m not trying to remove myself entirely from “society” - the physical law of entropy means that people need to put in EFFORT to make things happen, and that deserves to be recognized, plus the dev should have a proper means of support to be able to buy food, shelter, etc.

    I even tip at restaurants wherever I go. I don’t know if I’ll be okay in the future - I don’t own a home or know my retirement plans, but I don’t think a few dollars will make the difference, but it can boost someone else’s day and that’s really something:-).

    I really like Netflix’s player, their CC options, and the quality of their streaming service. It’s just too bad about the content going all over the place, and THAT part is actually not their fault.

    Though I just could not do that for Google Music, when they pay the original artists so extremely little:-(.


  • They are a company - their obligations to their customers begin and end with extraction of funds to disburse to their shareholders:-(.

    Back in the early days when they were trying to ingratiate themselves to the public, they put on a good face - “don’t be evil” and all, but the mask is off now. Even now, they still really truly are more ethical (or at least might be, maybe?) than some others, e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/11951288? (but that is not saying very much at all, to compare an evil corporation like Google to a full-on fairly criminal-like corporation that steals artists & other people’s content against their will; and I only say “criminal-like” b/c the aging geriatrics in various governments around the world barely use computers much less understand its terminology such as “mobile device”, so the existing legal structures remain mired half a century behind what is going on in today’s actual world).

    Also, I am weird - I will do things like pay for Netflix even though I haven’t watched it in months, preferring the high seas that has more content that is no longer there:-P, b/c I want to support continued development of new content (though TV & movies are becoming a dated art form nowadays). That said, YouTube is a VERY different situation, b/c while they do have server costs and what-not, they also are one of the lowest (not THE lowest, but among them… iirc?) contributors back to the artists who actually make the stuff. So a better way would be to find artists that you like, and send them money directly where they would get 100% of the revenue.

    Anyway, I like your post that shows that there is more than one reason to support such apps - not just b/c of the content but also more than that too.