Technology

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28675950

Archived link: https://archive.ph/Vjl1M

Here’s a nice little distraction from your workday: Head to Google, type in any made-up phrase, add the word “meaning,” and search. Behold! Google’s AI Overviews will not only confirm that your gibberish is a real saying, it will also tell you what it means and how it was derived.

This is genuinely fun, and you can find lots of examples on social media. In the world of AI Overviews, “a loose dog won't surf” is “a playful way of saying that something is not likely to happen or that something is not going to work out.” The invented phrase “wired is as wired does” is an idiom that means “someone's behavior or characteristics are a direct result of their inherent nature or ‘wiring,’ much like a computer's function is determined by its physical connections.”

It all sounds perfectly plausible, delivered with unwavering confidence. Google even provides reference links in some cases, giving the response an added sheen of authority. It’s also wrong, at least in the sense that the overview creates the impression that these are common phrases and not a bunch of random words thrown together. And while it’s silly that AI Overviews thinks “never throw a poodle at a pig” is a proverb with a biblical derivation, it’s also a tidy encapsulation of where generative AI still falls short.

Automakers and tech developers testing and deploying self-driving and advanced driver assistance features will no longer have to report as much detailed, public crash information to the federal government, according to a new framework released today by the US Department of Transportation.

https://archive.ph/wWwjG

Fuck the stupid morons who defend Apple.

Imagine if Microsoft banned Windows users from installing the software they want on their computer.

Imagine if Microsoft required all software developers to give them 30% of their earning or Microsoft will ban them from Windows

Archived without paywall:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250424134846/https://www.404media.co/even-the-u-s-government-says-ai-requires-massive-amounts-of-water/

The facebook page Canada Proud often posts news updates, citing mainstream news sources. But the posts sometime add misleading details not found in the original reports, according to a review by The New York Times.

One of its posts this month said Prime Minister Mark Carney had suspended his campaign because of “connections with China” and cited a major Canadian news outlet, Global News, as its source. But the Global News article did not actually mention any connections to China.

Canada Proud describes itself as a “grass-roots group of Canadians” concerned about the country’s direction. The page is owned by Mobilize Media Group, a Toronto public affairs firm.

The company has bought more than $250,000 in ads targeting Canadian voters

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/canada-election-facebook-instagram-meta.html

Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:

"PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn't store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse."

A Tesla influencer randomly caught his odometer double-counting mileage on video. Wild.

Adrian Basar did not want to become a distant-water fisherman. With 22-hour workdays and pay of around 450 dollars per month, it’s not the most glamorous—or fulfilling, or generally safe—job.

But for 10 months out of the year, when he’s out at sea, Basar can’t talk to his siblings, or anyone in his family, because he’s not allowed to use the Wi-Fi on the ship.

“I think the companies that don’t want to put Wi-Fi on their ships pray for things not to be revealed,” Basar said. “There are many companies that don’t want Wi-Fi.”

A coalition between a self-organized Indonesian fishers’ union, a Taiwanese human rights group and multiple global labor organizations is trying to change that.

The “Wi-Fi Now for Fishers’ Rights” campaign, which has been organizing since 2023, wants to make Wi-Fi access a standard in the industry, both to help improve working conditions through union organizing and to allow the workers to have contact with other human beings for more than two months per year.

Other third-party Bluesky apps, which make up the larger open social web known as the ATmosphere, don’t have to follow these same rules. At least, not for now.

https://archive.ph/rc2sX