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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I’d recommend trying Ollama+OpenCode to DIY removals. It can at least help find the sites and their removal request pages, but then you’d need to solve captchas and do the requests.

    Some of these PII removal companies go to great lengths to request removals on your behalf without providing ANY additional information that the data broker does not already have.

    The problem is that nobody can tell which PII removal companies act responsibly and which ones are merely data brokers themselves.

    Even the ones trying their best to not distribute more information about you need only to screw that up once, and that single incident of human error leads to a neverending cycle of leaks between downstream data brokers.

    It’s the perfect industry for local AI agents to replace, but the only way to know you’re properly requesting removals without making matters worse is to do it yourself.


  • Emotions are each examples of a continuum. You can be any level of sad or happy or angry, etc.

    I’m not sure the distinction of spectrum from continuum is useful for understanding the world though. It’s just conversationally helpful.

    Perhaps everything is a continuum but we just manufacture a spectrum so we can classify people for our own ease of conversation.


  • Just get the dates right, down to the month. Beyond that, you can make just about everything else up and since most employers don’t want to foot the bill for actual due diligence, your interview performance is what matters next-most.

    Change your job titles to whatever fits the job you’re aiming to get now(remember you’ll actually need to interview for and do the job if you get it, so consider inflating only about 1 level of seniority upward).

    You can add unverifiable resume items to explain gaps, such as a side gig or volunteer experience or family event.

    You can make up 90% of the bullet points under each experience item too, which will increase net job search performance by 28% on average and 122% of hiring managers won’t read them or will read them and not ask about them anyway.

    If you think companies are going to keep your data and blacklist you, then you just need to formally request your complete PII file under applicable data privacy laws such as GDPR or CCPA. If they did keep your data, the same laws can be used to make them delete it entirely (assuming you’re not also their customer, in which case they’ll have permissible reasons to keep it until you discontinue your subscription).



  • I agree with you. Something I noticed and wanted to add: When I mention UBI to people, a lot of them are hearing it like a guarantee that everyone gets enough income to be happy or be comfortable.

    I have found that people who interpret basic income in this way tend to become strongly opposed to UBI on the grounds that it could never be funded and would lead to social collapse due to limited resources.

    Idk what you picture, but I imagine a person on UBI affording to eat rice and beans in a studio apartment somewhere in a low cost-of-living and low property value geography (though perhaps among pleasant neighbors and like minded folks).

    So I kind of think the name “Universal Basic Income” needs to be reworked so it sounds more harsh, almost like a necessary evil. Something like “Rock Bottom Income”, idk.

    I don’t have the perfect answer, but do you think conservatives would get on board if it was like “The poors can’t complain, they can take their complaints straight to Bean Town if they don’t like the wages” or do you think they’d still find it unpalatable?


  • I don’t understand why protestors would even show up in Washington DC during the fascist parade like is being implied in the article.

    The union protests and social unrest currently underway are not really related to Trump’s authoritarian birthday bash except for how the media paints them as a “warm up”.

    Protesters would be better served popping up all over the country except in Washington DC during their synchronized goose stepping contest.


  • During one of the mass exodus events from Reddit to Lemmy, a lot of people started using these tools they would install to automatically scrub and obfuscate their Reddit comments and posts history. Often these tools would replace posts with random letters and even nonsense links because there was suspicion that outright deleted posts could be detected and then programmatically restored if Reddit really wanted to get that user content back.

    I suspect these tools probably exist for Lemmy as well and you are seeing users with long comment histories use them because those also happen to be the users who have a lot of previous content to cover up/obfuscate to maintain/ensure their own privacy.



  • No, but you have access to the protocol so you write your own algorithm.

    Then it is your algorithm, using the common protocol, that goes out and retrieves search results for your feed.

    Likewise, 3rd party corporations can write their own algorithms on the protocol and everyone can choose which algorithms fill their personal feed with search results - turning them on or off on a whim, at a personalized level.


  • I recently listened to Paul Frazee talk about Bluesky on the Software Engineering Radio podcast and it struck me that one thing they got right was looking at social media like a search engine looks at the web, instead of like a centralized platform(Facebook) and instead of like a federated network of platforms(fediverse).

    If your feed is understood to be just the search results you see, then users can understand that their algorithm is something they need to work on in the same vein that they change their search parameters on Google or Bing or other search engines.


  • This is a story that’s been rotating through the media since ChatGPT first released.

    I have an unpopular opinion about this headline after seeing the media cycle repeatedly downplay/ignore what Alphabet has been doing in response to OpenAI: Google the search engine is not in direct competition with ChatGPT, but Gemini is, and Alphabet is smart to keep simpler/time-tested search functionality central to Google rather than react strongly and scrap the keyword-based search bar that users understand are comfortable using - especially older users, but I think most people are starting to discover they have a use for both search and LLM chats.

    I think there are two product categories here, which first looked like they were going to converge in 2022-2024, but which are now slowly changing course as customers start to comprehend how both are necessary for different purposes.

    When I make chats in ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude etc, I am starting to plan them longitudinally so that I can use them over and over for a specific project or query type.

    When I turn to a search bar, it’s because I really want a proxy for a specific website or between me and whatever weird site has the answer to my specific question. It’s not that I want discussion and a chat about it, I just want Google’s card-like results with a website index I can read instead of that website’s stylized, animated web design on top or popups or malware.

    Every time I get sucked into a chat with Bing CoPilot(ChatGPT) when I really only had a web search query, I regret wasting my time talking to the LLM. Almost as a reflex, I’ve started avoiding it for most things now.


  • Iran’s government sucks, but this story really shows how the Iranian people are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

    Regular Iranians have more in common with western social values than those of the Iranian government or Russia - it’s been that way before, during, and after the Iranian revolution.

    Not sure what the answer is, but they keep trying to protest and resist their government every few years and they get violently forced back into submission.

    Of all the countries with screwed up regimes, Iran is one where I think it’s more appropriate to encourage more fluid immigration into western countries - a lot of their working age population is relatively better educated than many other countries too.