The creepiness that is Facebook

[82_28]

Firefox is the best you're gonna get for the time being. When in doubt, use LYNX. I haven't in years, truth be told. But I always know it's there to use. Going back a few weeks, I say get thee to Linux and run FF on that. I have no issues doing so. Adblock, privacy badger and all that are just fine. Ideally no script can run period on Linux without permission. I do use a shit ton of JAVA but that is all server side in order to display windows. I would never log into my fake account at fb with my business permissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29

[82_28]

I decided to update firefox since it's been begging me to do so. After update ads and shit came back. I just reinstalled adblock and privacy badger and all seems fine.

[Elvis]

[MacCruiskeen]

Robbie Martin ‏@FluorescentGrey 11. Dez.

holy shit via @adamjohnsonNYC cc: @exiledonline @MarkAmesExiled

[tapitsbo]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/m ... in-beijing

[identity]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/what-chatbots-reveal-about-our-own-shortcomings.html

What Chatbots Reveal About Our Own Shortcomings
By JENNA WORTHAM
APRIL 21, 2016

Every so often, an idea comes along that mesmerizes Silicon Valley and convinces the most powerful people there that this innovation will irrevocably alter the course of humankind. Outsize proclamations are made, lavish events are held and millions of dollars in venture money are funneled into young, unproven companies. Right now, that fixation has landed on chatbots, little artificial-intelligence programs that work like personalized assistants.

In January, Sam Lessin, an entrepreneur and former Facebook employee who is working on his own chatbot called Fin, wrote a blog post breathlessly declaring the trend “a fundamental shift that is going to change the types of applications that get developed and the style of service development in the Valley.” If prominent investors, executives and entrepreneurs like Lessin are to be believed, the arrival of the chatbot heralds an entirely new phase of computing, one with the potential to overwrite the current app-centric model that smartphones rely on.

In late March, Microsoft invited 5,000 developers to San Francisco for an annual conference called Build. A palpable sense of excitement surrounded the event: Microsoft intended to show off its latest achievement, a software tool kit that would allow anyone to use its A.I. platform to create custom chatbots. Though the company is often viewed as a dinosaur, it has introduced some surprisingly sleek products in recent years, and its bot tool kit seemed interesting enough.

Over a live stream, I watched Satya Nadella, the chief executive, pacing triumphantly as he talked about the company’s advances in machine learning and language processing. I nodded along as he described a “personal digital assistant that knows you, knows about your world,” a bot “helping you with your everyday tasks.” A few minutes later, an executive giddily showed off a chatbot that lets people order pizza via text message, Skype or Slack. The demonstration centered on what Microsoft presumably found most dazzling about the bot: It could be programmed to recognize slang. You can send it a message like “sup pizzabot, send a cheese pizza to my crib ASAP,” and a cheese pizza will still arrive at your crib, ASAP.

We’ve long been promised a future augmented by intelligent helpers, of the type depicted in movies like “Her”: benevolent digital beings who remove some of the chaos of modern existence by organizing our lives, all the while offering emotional support through chipper encouragement and cute jokes. Sometimes, these helpers turn on us, as in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Either way, artificial intelligence represents the manifestation of humanity’s biggest hopes and fears for technology. But for now, it can help us order Domino’s in a different window on the same device we would normally use to order Domino’s.

Commerce seems to be the primary preoccupation of the booming chatbot universe. There’s Operator, an all-around assistant bot created by a founder of Uber; Assist, which lets people reserve hotels and concert tickets by text; and x.ai, which books appointments. In April, Facebook announced that it was introducing chatbots to its Messenger app, so that the company’s 900 million users can order food and get the news, simply by “chatting” with the bots on their contact list. Like Facebook’s, most of these bots work right inside messaging apps; it’s like texting with a concierge, or if Siri birthed a litter of smarter, faster and nimbler offspring — ones you can issue orders to silently and who never get tired, or creeped out, by the nature of your requests.

Outsourcing work to bots sounds ideal to me. My attitude toward technology is fueled by a desire for efficiency — and by laziness. In college, while my friends got into D.I.Y. hobbies like woodworking and sewing, I joked that I was ready for the D.I.F.M. — do-it-for-me — revolution. And yet for all the hype, none of these bots seem to work that well yet. Over the last few weeks, I’ve played with a handful and have struggled to make much use of them. I recently needed to make a reservation for a work lunch. I fired up Operator to find me a table, and it quickly sent back a pleasant but unhelpful reply — declining my request, as it didn’t yet have that capability.

I also suspected that many chatbots depend on human workers to complete their requests. Mat Honan, the San Francisco bureau chief for BuzzFeed, was able to uncover the logistics behind M — a chatbot concierge in development by Facebook — by sending, of all things, a rental parrot to another Bay Area tech reporter. It worked; the parrot arrived. But afterward, Honan made some phone calls and discovered that M’s artificial intelligence was largely a front. M processed the question and passed it along to a human counterpart to finish the job.

Similarly, Operator, Magic and Fin all fall back on hybrid bot-human models. Seen this way, chatbots aren’t that different from hiring a worker through a service like TaskRabbit or Handy, but without ever having to acknowledge there’s another human at the other end. As the sheen of A.I. fades, you can see these chatbots for what they really are: a convenient way to hide human labor. It starts to resemble an update on a centuries-old illusion called the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing device that was said to be automated but was, in fact, powered by a person hidden inside the “machinery” itself.

Even when the services are truly automated, their functions seem secondary to Facebook’s quest for domination. Bots developed in partnership with CNN and The Wall Street Journal can deliver news headlines by Facebook Messenger; Operator and Spring let people shop from within Messenger for clothing and food. Disney built a bot based on the Muppet Miss Piggy that users can talk to if they are bored, and there’s even a version of Zork, an early, text-based video game, that works in there, too. Eventually, Facebook users will be able to use bots to check movie times, bid on eBay items, browse for hotel deals on Expedia, place an order at Burger King and check their bank balances — all without ever having to exit Messenger.

Indeed, it’s hard not to see that as the depressing point of it all: These bots will simply help Facebook and others rope users in as long as possible, like fishermen trawling the open seas with gaping nets. The current slate of chatbots on Facebook look like innovation clipped for the sake of supremacy. The company has been moving in this direction for some time now. Everything from Facebook Live, its new real-time streaming product, to Internet.org, the nonprofit it oversees that seeks to provide Internet access to the developing world, has been accused of harboring the same goal: keeping users on Facebook’s turf.

Bots, which promise to make us more godlike, are instead revealing our all-too-human shortcomings and pettiness. This was on full display when Microsoft tried to show off the prowess of its A.I. in March with a chatbot named Tay, a virtual buddy you could talk to on messaging services like GroupMe and Twitter. Almost immediately, the demonstration turned into a public-relations nightmare as online pranksters taught Tay to mimic hate speech (e.g., “Hitler was right I hate the Jews”; “I [expletive] hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell”). Tay’s rants weren’t the intended work of Microsoft, obviously, but the meltdown revealed an uncomfortable truth: A bot, like any other piece of software, is only as good as its makers’ imagination. Technologies embody the values — and the biases and prejudices — of the society that incubates them, and if we can’t imagine the future we want, then neither can our creations.

[zangtang]

I try not to wish a slow tortuous excruciating death on anyone, because nice guy an that,
but anyone saying,
“sup pizzabot, send a cheese pizza to my crib ASAP,”
- needs to be eviscerated in public and murdered in the face.

There might be slight Karmic imbalance of a vey temporary nature but the world would instantly be a better place.

[jakell]

Apologies if this has already been posted:



It was just the short intro I was thinking of , but there's a bit of the episode attached too.

[Pele'sDaughter]

Ha ha, brilliant! Thanks for posting it.

[82_28]

There is absolutely no way a certain someone bled through organically that I just saw on my now half fake account that I should "friend" or like or whatever. I think the algos pull from your real accounts and harvest them -- which is brilliant. Jesus fucking christ. I use it as a medium to communicate and say what's up to people. I do not use it for anything. I like saying hi. But I don't look up people with whom I have existential regrets with.

[coffin_dodger]

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News Gizmodo 09 May 2016

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

cont - http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-work ... 1775461006

[MinM]

I’m sure people who work for Facebook don’t believe that they’re working for the company that will destroy the world. But, you know, they are. And everyone gets through the day rationalizing their own existence. ~ Jonathan Nolan

@TheAVClub

The exec producers of Person Of Interest suspect Facebook will destroy the world http://avc.lu/26JpAf4

[FourthBase]

A few hours ago I was auto-logged off of Facebook and had to pass the security questions because apparently someone in Edremit, Turkey tried to sign in as me on a Samsung Galaxy A from the IP address 78.169.150.114, lol.

[Nordic]

There is absolutely no way a certain someone bled through organically that I just saw on my now half fake account that I should "friend" or like or whatever. I think the algos pull from your real accounts and harvest them -- which is brilliant. Jesus fucking christ. I use it as a medium to communicate and say what's up to people. I do not use it for anything. I like saying hi. But I don't look up people with whom I have existential regrets with.

LinkedIn is even worse that way. I, too, have had people come up where I think "no way could there be a connection to that person". But there is, and these sites have found it. Somehow.

[Nordic]

Wow, I was just censored on FB for the first time. I cannot post for 24 hours or even "like" anything. My comment was a very scathing one, very anti-Obama, and was in a pro-Obama thread. I was reported and censored for "unacceptable content".

First time for everything.

I said nothing that wasn't 100% true. Facts.

Can't have those.