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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2025

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  • Nah they’ll be able to get out, likely for free if they don’t mind a bit of detainment first. What they should be doing is finding a new place to work or seeing if their current employers will move them to an office in another country. And big companies should be expanding their offices in other countries to make up for the loss of workers, or moving their offices back to places where American tech workers are willing to live rather than moving to conservative states and then pretending there aren’t educated workers for them to hire in the US.


  • The system that scours search results doesn’t store the images, but they are stored. Maybe or maybe not by Google, but someone is collecting them and keeping them in order to feed whatever “AI” or hashing algorithm comes next.

    And it’s actually not the “whole point” in a technical sense. It’s mentioned because they want to make it sound less harmful. You’d never compare actual images directly. That would take a ton of storage space and time to compare a large set of files byte for byte. You always use hashes. If it was easier or cheaper to use the images directly, they would, just like the “AI” agents that do this in other systems need the actual images not hashes.


  • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoTechnology@lemmy.zip*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    Problem is that this means the images have to be kept around in order to compare them. So, often these caches of child porn and other non-consensual images which often are poorly secured are targets of hacking and thus end up allowing the images to spread more rather than less. And the people sharing these things don’t usually use the services that do this kind of scanning. So in general, it has more negative than positive effect. Instead, education to prevent abuse and support for the abused would be a better use of the money spent ln these things. But more difficult to profit from that and it doesn’t support a surveillance state.





  • ICE agents just like all law enforcement agencies, are public servants employed by taxpayers. Good luck finding any other legitimate job you can hide your identity from your employer. If you choose to serve the public, you choose to be in the public eye and should be identifiable. I could care less if they wear a mask or not, but they should be required to have some other identifiable marking if not, like a badge number, or hell, even something to identify that they are agents and not just random kidnappers would be an improvement.

    As for being harassed for doing their job, if they’re doing the job in a reasonable way, they wouldn’t be harassed. Sure they wouldn’t be able to hit the quotas they’re given, but having quotas for finding criminals is a backwards concept in general and means they have to create criminals when there aren’t enough that are easy to catch. It shouldn’t be easy. It should be thorough, especially if no life is in danger from the “criminals”.


  • A little over half have them. But several other states do have anti-union laws that are similar to that part of the right to work laws. So that’s not all that different across states anymore even though that’s what the laws were originally supposed to be for.

    The other smaller part of the laws that’s actually usually more impactful these days especially for bigger cities, is that local governments can’t make laws to limit firings and without unions to make agreements around what kind of things people can be fired for, it effectively allows businesses to fire people “with cause” (i.e. they can’t get unemployment) for things that wouldn’t be fireable offenses in many other places. This causes large cities to end up with having to support a lot more unemployed people when big companies use these kinds of tactics to fire a lot of people.

    For example, often “insubordination” doesn’t require that the thing you were told to do and didn’t do was in your employment contract. Like a salaried employee who’s contractually obligated to work a minimum of 35-40 hours refusing to work an 18hr day when they’ve already worked 18hr days all week is generally easier to fire someone for “insubordination” for than in some other states that treat employment contracts as actual contracts.


  • “Right to Work” refers to the concept that companies don’t need a valid reason to fire someone without notice or severance benefits.

    It’s marketed as employees not needing a reason to quit or change jobs, but that’s not really true anyway considering most of the states allow binding non-compete agreements and your health insurance is tied to your employment and usually impossible to get at similar cost outside of the employer group market due to “stop loss” policies and other risk sharing plans.

    And there aren’t many laws anyway that prevent employees from leaving a job without a reason in non-binary"right to work" states, so the only real advantage is to companies.


  • But, but, it’s a corporation doing all that not the government, so the constitution doesn’t apply, right? /s

    And there are laws already to protect your privacy. Sure the punishment for breaking the law is exponentially lower than the profit they make by violating it and there’s no punishment beyond the financial one and no punishment to the people doing it, but you’re protected, right? /s /s /s




  • Nope, Texas had no problem denying my unemployment and appeal when the company had a major change in leadership and I wasn’t interested in playing politics. They came up with some made up excuse that I was not coming to the office daily per the policy. And my boss had already been pushed out of his role as COO and Executive VP and moved to a marketing director job with no real power, so he couldn’t help.

    When I was fired the date they gave that I hadn’t come in I was able to present evidence to the unemployment when I came in the office and left because traffic was bad that day and I took the toll road and had the receipt. So, they came back with another day. That one I hadn’t used the toll road and since I wasn’t allowed to get other employees to say they saw me there, so I had no evidence that wasn’t fully under the control of the company. That was enough for them to rule I was insubordinate by not coming into the office for 8 hrs/day when it was policy to do so. Forget that I was paid salary and worked way more than 40hrs a week. And that I was doing way more than I was supposed to be based on my job title and I was barely being paid anything for what I was doing. They weren’t saying I wasn’t working enough. Just that I violated that one rule even one time was enough for unemployment to be denied. That’s all it takes. I could have appealed higher, but that would have required a lawyer and would have cost more than the pittance I would have gotten from the unemployment anyway.

    So, yes, refusing a direct instruction, even once, is even more severe than that and likely would be enough to have your unemployment denied in a “right to work” state.



  • GPT5 just proved what many of us in the software industry on the technical side have been saying since the beginning.

    LLMs are not AI. And they are only as useful as the information they are trained on, and with the industry using all of the internet to train the majority of them, they have tons of false information. And everything an LLM says is based on s confidence level that it’s correct, but those confidence levels are configured so low that it’s often way off. Plus people are used to computers giving specific, correct answers, but LLMs are all about small talk and making things up to fill time because that’s what they’re trained on. People need to learn these aren’t AI and everything they say needs to be taken with that in mind. Double and triple check it before believing it. But since we often don’t even do that with humans, thus the whole anti-vax thing for example, it’s even harder for people to want to do that for something that was explicitly marketed as preventing them from needing to do the research.

    So now that those not profiting directly from AI are seeing that it’s probably never going to get better as promised, they’re losing confidence. But it will stick around for s while. The energy industry is powerful and is lobbying hard for it since it’s the first time in a while our energy demands have spiked so high. And with the mechanisms to monitor climate change being shut down or explicitly destroyed in the US, and conservatives convinced that the natural disasters are just short term, dirty fuel demand is back, more than ever. So they have a ton of incentive to keep it alive ss well as the companies making it.