Readit News> People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so.
Can you link to people who have checked?
I had a couple of the last BlackBerry phones, that ran Android. They came with this "DTEK" [1] app that monitored when apps accessed your phone's sensors. And I remember every time I checked it, the various social media apps had all been caught snooping something like hundreds of times a day. This was happening even when I didn't use the apps, so there definitely didn't seem to be any reason that "makes sense" to do it. Not sure if it was microphone, or maybe just location or something, but audio eavesdropping isn't really out-of-character based on that.
1: https://docs.blackberry.com/en/apps-for-android/dtek-by-blac...
https://crackberry.com/how-control-your-mobile-privacy-black...
https://futurism.com/the-byte/phones-listen-theory-debunkedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVazBWGgg64
They're sending pretty much everything BUT audio.
Main reason is that audio is just tremendously inefficient compared to other signals. It's large and expensive to store and process and doesn't really give you that many bytes of information you can't get elsewhere for how expensive it is to handle.
This is very likely fake.
But why would a company say they do this? It's because so many people believe that this happens anyway that there's next to no cost to them in saying it - and the buyers for this kind of technology think of this as a good thing.
It might be fake, but people being scared of your powerful technology is good for sales.
AI labs do the same thing by actively courting fearmongering.
With billions of phones in circulation, and rumors of audio eavesdropping being quite common, why has apparently nobody ever run a typical smartphone with network logging and memory snapshotting to actually check what all these widely popular apps are doing?
People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so.
These companies are most likely lying or exaggerating their capabilities. Since so many people believe in audio eavesdropping anyway, it's in their interest to make the buyers of their software believe they're much more powerful than they really are.
It's the same as how it's good for AI companies to talk about how AIs are just on the verge of ending the world and must be regulated at any cost - more people believing that what they're selling is absurdly powerful is good for sales.
pcstl commented on Functional languages should be so much better at mutation than they are cohost.org/prophet/post/7... · Posted by u/injuly
The article utterly falls apart in its first paragraph where it itself acknowledges that the whole ML family including Ocaml has perfect support for mutation, rightfully assume most Ocaml programmers would choose to not use it most of the time but then assume incorrectly that it’s because the language makes it somehow uneasy. It’s not. It’s just that mutation is very rarely optimal. Even the exemple given fails:
> For example, let's say you're iterating over some structure and collecting your results in a sequence. The most efficient data structure to use here would be a mutable dynamic array and in an imperative language that's what pretty much everyone would use.
Well, no, this is straight confusion between what’s expressed by the program and what’s compiled. The idiomatic code in Ocaml will end up generating machine code which is as performant than using mutable array.
The fact that most programming languages don’t give enough semantic information for their compiler to do a good job doesn’t mean it necessary has to be so. Functional programmers just trust that their compiler will properly optimize their code.
It gets fairly obvious when you realise that most Ocaml developers switch to using array when they want to benefit from unboxed floats.
The whole article is secretly about Haskell and fails to come to the obvious conclusion: Haskell choice of segregating mutations in special types and use monads was an interesting and fruitful research topic but ultimately proved to be a terrible choice when it comes to language design (my opinion obviously not some absolute truth but I think the many fairly convoluted tricks haskellers pull to somehow reintroduce mutations support it). The solution is simple: stop using Haskell.
Can you provide evidence that code which is "as performant as using mutation" is generated? Mutation tends to be very hard to beat.
pcstl commented on Mangrove trees are on the move, taking the tropics with them scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/alexahn
Yes, I'm wondering if mangroves will start appearing in the Mediterranean any time soon.
I'm assuming the seeds would need to come in through the Gibraltar straight, which is not exactly wide... Also the Med is saltier than the Atlantic, not sure if that would be a problem for mangroves.
Mangroves are generally salt-tolerating and perfectly adapted to growing in brackish water.
pcstl commented on Two million checkboxes (written in Elixir) twomillioncheckboxes.com... · Posted by u/pjullrich
Funny how these things are fairly simple on BEAM. Funny how majority of industry won’t ever learn anything about BEAM and will keep hitting walls for the rest of their careers.
The majority of the industry is made of people who care mostly about their own careers. If solving nasty distributed system problems is simple, you can't justify having a huge bloated expensive team. If your team doesn't spend a lot of money, you aren't seen as very important within the company. Since people want to be important, it's hard to get more productive languages to be adopted.
pcstl commented on Escaping surveillance capitalism, at scale ergaster.org/posts/2024/0... · Posted by u/thibaultamartin
No, I don't think so. I think it's closer to "a plug-and-play computer for self-hostable apps, running locally, with most things configured so you're reasonably secure and you don't have to guess about everything."
That's pretty much what Urbit wanted to be, to be fair, just with a strong networking component powered by a decentralized identity system. It's just too esoteric to have meaningful traction as that.
pcstl commented on Escaping surveillance capitalism, at scale ergaster.org/posts/2024/0... · Posted by u/thibaultamartin
I really thought this article was going to offer a solution, not just enumerate the problems. I'm already all too familiar with the problems.
I like what Umbrel[0] is doing. They're essentially expecting that just like computing was able to move from centralized mainframes to homes, servers are poised to make the same migration.
I think they really need to solve redundancy, though. If I'm to self-host anything important on a home server, I need to know I'll have some way to use it even if my home server fails, especially if I'm not at home when it happens.
I'd love to see some kind of system where I could partner up with other Umbrel users for backups/the ability to restore connectivity. If I knew that in an emergency, I could call my friend in town or my brother out of state and there was some procedure that would allow me to connect to an encrypted backup of what I'm needing, I would feel a lot better about taking responsibility for my own system.
Is Umbrel just actually usable Urbit? [0]
I get that they're trying to go with "done does not need to mean perfect", but this way of putting it is too aggressive and I don't feel like it'll have good outcomes.