Live data from Hacker News

Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

theverge.com

331–340 of 383 posts

Re: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

#331
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a project where one of the services was a model that decided whether to pay a medical bill. Before you start justified screams of horror, let me explain the simple honesty trick that ensured proper ethics, though I guess at cost of profit unacceptable to some corporations: The model could only decide between auto approving a repayment, or refer the bill to existing human staff. The entire idea was that th…

Mmmmhm, which means the humans now understand that they should be callous and cold. If they're not rubber stamping rejections all the time then the AI isn't doing anything useful by making a feed of easy-to-reject applications. The system will become evil even if it has humans in it because they have been given no power to resist the incentives

Actually the real issue for the humans was that it would mean possible reduction in employment which is why we had union block deployment for a time until a deal was brokered.

It helps, as you can suspect from "union" comment, that it wasn't an american health care insurance company.

Re: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

#332
post #238

The joy of deleting Facebook in 2021 is something I'll never be able to put into words. A company that's right up there with gambling and tobacco: designed to keep you hooked, no matter the cost.

I haven’t used Facebook in years and I don’t think I will ever pick it up again. But I also don’t think “just quit facebook, bro” is an effective pitch to the average person.

Facebook (and other Meta properties) has sadly become the only popular channel for many sorts of offline activities. The average local sports group, DIY group, parents group, outdoors group etc around me are all on Facebook. The average musician and local business is on Instagram. Not to mention the millions in Europe and Latin America who only use WhatsApp for online communication.

Which is to say for many people the choice is not between Facebook and no Facebook. Their choice is between Facebook and inability to participate in their communities. Yes this sucks, but this is the reality. You cannot ask individuals to make expensive individual decisions to solve a society-wide problem. Instead you should look for regulations, and start building reasonable alternative to facebook and make it palatable to the average person.

You mentioned tobacco and gambling and I think they are actually apt examples of why the change must happen at the society level. Tobacco usage plummeted after decades of anti-tobacco education, smoking bans, advertising bans etc. And we also don’t just ask people to stop smoking, we prescribe nicotine patches to make it easier to quit. Similar for gambling. We don’t just ask people to not gamble, we regulate the industry (or outright ban it) and even in places where gambling is legal and prevalent there are still regulations like making it possible to ban yourself from gambling if it is becoming a problem.

Re: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

#334
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a project where one of the services was a model that decided whether to pay a medical bill. Before you start justified screams of horror, let me explain the simple honesty trick that ensured proper ethics, though I guess at cost of profit unacceptable to some corporations: The model could only decide between auto approving a repayment, or refer the bill to existing human staff. The entire idea was that th…

How hard would it be tweak that model so that it decides between auto-paying and sending it to a different bot that hallucinates reasons to deny the claim? Eventually some super smart MBA will propose this innovative AI-first strategy that will boost profits.

Harder than just automatically rejecting every claim.

Re: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, many of the old forums for various non-IT-related hobbies have disappeared and moved over to facebook groups and there is no alternative as such. Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers, there are some fantastic communities, but if you are into cars or mountain biking or watches or fellwalking/hiking etc......you really don't have any alternative to facebook. I'm tr…

Yes the death of forums is one of the huge hidden costs and another great reason to hate fb. Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility. We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.

Limiting the spread of the information is a feature, not a bug. You don’t want others to take your 2009 forum post out of context and ridicule you in front of a million angry YouTube viewers.

Re: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to exporting one's contacts from Facebook in order to import them into an alternative, there should be a way to use whatever is provided through Facebook's "Download your data" to populate new accounts in the new alternative. Perhaps it already exists but I have thought about writing something that takes what is provided by "Download your data" and produces a local SQLite database, a local webpage, local…

We don't let anyone find you on the site without your short secret code which they need to ask you for. The code can be changed anytime. You (the user) need to actively ask your friends' code to build up the network. This also keeps the network small since you won't go out of your way to ask someone their code unless you really know them. A really private place with only people that matter.

"We don't let anyone..."

"A really private place with only people that matter."

Including an unnecessary third party at the controls.

Hmmm.

Re: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the death of forums is one of the huge hidden costs and another great reason to hate fb. Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility. We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.

Limiting the spread of the information is a feature, not a bug. You don’t want others to take your 2009 forum post out of context and ridicule you in front of a million angry YouTube viewers.

On a forum, "you" is an anonymous username, so ridicule is meaningless. It doesn't follow you into the real world.

Re: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, many of the old forums for various non-IT-related hobbies have disappeared and moved over to facebook groups and there is no alternative as such. Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers, there are some fantastic communities, but if you are into cars or mountain biking or watches or fellwalking/hiking etc......you really don't have any alternative to facebook. I'm tr…

I disagree about the goodness of discord (and facebook) compared to old style forums or (better yet) mailing lists with archives. Searching the forum archives is much worse with facebook, slack or discord than it ever was with even the jankiest phpbb forum or mailman list. Hell, before they grew it up, Yahoo! groups were better from that perspective. And a big part of what made forums for either tech or non-tech hobb…

On forums you can search by username, by topic alone, inside of a subforum, or by text inside of a thread. That level of search granularity is by design so you aren't querying the entire database unnecessarily.

As a result it's far better than "omnisearch" options on social media that only sometimes surfaces what you were looking for.

Re: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

#339
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatives such as the Fediverse are doing just fine, despite HN's categorical rejection of anything that doesn't match the big corporate platforms in scale and revenue as "viable."

My impression about Fedi is that it’s much bigger than most people think it is, but those who are in it don’t like talking about it a lot.

The more people know about it, the faster it gets ruined. An unfortunate law of nature.

Luckily the fediverse already seems to push away a lot of trolls, bigots and capitalists, but it's just a matter of time.

Re: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos you haven’t yet shared

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't know that hidden Facebook services even come preinstalled on most Android phones and persist even when the main app is deleted :( And on Android they're not even the worst privacy player which is Google of course

Yeah, first thing to do on an Android phone is to use adb or something like the universal debloater to uninstall (besides the Facebook app) crap like: com.facebook.system, com.facebook.appmanager, and com.facebook.services. Description of the latter from the uad list: Facebook Services is a tool that lets you manage different Facebook services automatically using your Android device. In particular, the tool focuses o…

> Why is this even always running on a pristine Samsung, etc. phone? Creepy.

Samsung has nothing against creepy, their own TVs are full of spyware too. At least here it can be removed.

And they do care about money which is the reason they do it.

Post reply on HN