blobjim [he/him]

  • 146 Posts
  • 1.47K Comments
Joined 5 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 29th, 2020

help-circle














  • His ultimate goal is pretty clear from his last sentence, “It’s a relic of the past. We don’t need government paid media outlets.”

    Which I think is true in the sense that it’s openly government funded. How is RFA, RFE, VOA, etc. useful at all compared to a podcast or some other kind of “independent” media outlet with way less obvious funding sources? I imagine they get more bang for their buck from funding media that appears grassroots. People get news by watching YouTube, looking at social media, etc. and there are other organizations that are way better at that stuff than RFA, etc. And the actual stories that those channels talk about can be written by mainstream western media outlets or US government aligned local outlets in other countries. Why does it need to be RFA specifically? Maybe I’m not familiar with the role of RFA compared to other outlets.

    They might as well just get rid of the whole USAGM ecosystem and spend the money paying other outlets to do the propaganda-making they do instead, or spend the money more covertly.




  • iOS has the same feature, called “Sensitive Content Warning”. They tried to make it a thing where it would send stuff to Apple if it detected hashes of known CP I think, which I guess is a bit different because it wasn’t machine learning (or was it, is the confusion intentional?). But they got so much criticism they rolled that back to what it is now. Where it doesn’t sending anything, and it has a toggle in the settings.

    I think it’ll ramp up over time like a lot of other things. Using machine learning in more places. Phone operating systems already have so many services that contact remote servers. I’m sure that will only increase, and they’ll ramp up combining the machine learning with phoning home.

    I still wonder about the US government’s interaction with tech company software. A quote from a Wikipedia article section on Dual_EC_DRBG in the BSAFE software, which I read recently.

    The Reuters article which revealed the secret $10 million contract to use Dual_EC_DRBG described the deal as “handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists”.

    Are there agreements with executives to implement these kinds of weird features that were clearly more work to implement than their apparent utility to end users? Do Google or Apple employees just have their boss say, “we’re prioritizing the nudity detector, get to work!” and that’s that? What kind of narrative do they cook up to make this make sense to the people implementing it? Because if I worked on something like this I’d be like, “why is this necessary to spend time on? Don’t we have a thousand other priorities?”

    But who knows, maybe the point of this is just to have an automated nudity blur API that any app can use. The same way Hexbear has a NSFW blur feature but more sophisticated. And instead of using server power to detect it, they just do it on people’s phones so server hosts don’t have to pay for that electricity. idk.