The argument seems to be that having a corporation restrict your ability to present arbitrary text directly to the model and only being able to go through their abstract interface which will integrate your text into theirs (hopefully) is more productive than fully controlling the input text to a model. I don't think that's true generally. I think it can be true when you're talking about non-technical users like the article is.
The use of specialization of interfaces is apparent if you compare Photoshop with Gemini Pro/Nano Banana for targeted image editing.
I can select exactly where I want changes and have targeted element removal in Photoshop. If I submit the image and try to describe my desired changes textually, I get less easily-controllable output. (And I might still get scrambled text, for instance, in parts of the image that it didn't even need to touch.)
I think this sort of task-specific specialization will have a long future, hard to imagine pure-text once again being the dominant information transfer method for 90% of the things we do with computers after 40 years of building specialized non-text interfaces.
One reasonable niche application I've seen of image models is in real estate, as a way to produce "staged" photos of houses without shipping in a bunch of furniture for a photo shoot (and/or removing a current tenant's furniture for a clean photo). It has to be used carefully to avoid misrepresenting the property, of course, but it's a decent way of avoiding what is otherwise a fairly toilsome and wasteful process.
This sort of thing (not for real estate, but for "what would this furniture actually look like in this room) is definitely somewhere the open-ended interface is fantastic vs targeted-remove in Photoshop (but could also easily be integrated into a Photoshop-like tool to let me be more specific about placement and such).
I was a bit surprised by how it still resulted in gibberish text on posters in the background in an unaffected part of the image that at first glance didn't change at all. So even just the "masking" ability of like "anything outside of this range should not be touched" of a GUI would be a godsend.
It behooves me that Gemini et al dont have these standard video editing tools. Do the engineers seriously think prompting by text is the way people want videos to be generated? Nope. People want to customise. E.g. Check out capcut in the context of social media.
Ive been trying to create a quick and dirty marketing promo via an LLM to visualise how a product will fit into the world of people - it is incredibly painful to 'hope and pray' that by refining the prompt via text you can make slight adjustments come through.
The models are good enough if you are half-decent at prompting and have some patience. But given the amount invested, I would argue they are pretty disappointing. Ive had to chunk the marketing promo into almost a frame-by-frame play to make it somewhat work.
Speaking as someone who doesn't like the idea of AI art so take my words with a grain of salt, but my theory is that this input method exclusivity is intentional on their part, for exactly the reason you want the change. If you only let people making AI art communicate what they want through text or reference attachments (the latter of which they usually won't have), then they have to spend time figuring out how to put it into words. It IS painful to ask for those refinements, because any human would clearly understands it. In the end, those people get to say that they spent hours, days, or weeks refining "their prompt" to get a consistent and somewhat-okay looking image; the engineers get to train their AI to better understand the context of what someone is saying; and all the while the company gets to further legitimize a false art form.
They don't need to get your GPS location. With 4G and 5G the timing and clock precision at the basestations is enough to multi-laterate you down to about 50m (prior 3G/2G stuff was more like 100-200 meters). They are required by US law to store this multi-laterated position data track (updated every time your phone announces itself to basestations) for 2 years. But most telcos store it for more like 5+ years because it's valueable and they sell it.
This is all automatic and completely pervasive. Worrying about GPS and userspace computers in the smartphone is important but even if you protect that you've already lost. The baseband computer is announcing your position by the minute. Cell phones couldn't really work without the basestations deciding where you are and which will handle you.
I've been repeating this ("a law") since the Snowden leaks days. I was so sure. But I tried to look up my reference for it (it was Wired) and I'm just not finding it and indeed I'm finding government memos (https://web.archive.org/web/20160112232215if_/http://www.wir...) that show it isn't true.
I'm sorry. It is not a law. I am wrong. Thank you for the correction and preventing me from continuing to repeat this embarrassing falsehood.
That said, they do still collect and use this data and turning off GPS doesn't do anything.
US senators request for visit forms are just for show if you're not "important". That said maybe just requesting an in person visit is enough. I would definitely not recommend just showing up at a US senator's public office building (and you probably didn't mean this, just making it clear for everyone).
Not just the power to arrest people. The power to break into citizens residences and use force. All done with just a permission slip they give themselves. No judicial warrant involved. No oversight. It is not overstating it to to say this is unprecedented violation of constitutional rights within the lifetimes of everyone currently alive (WWII internment camp survivors excepted).
This is being done right now and has been done for weeks. It continues to be done at the same rate as a week ago.
If you think the courts are going to keep letting it happen anyway without any consequences... have some faith. Justice moves slowly but hope is not lost.
Thanks for posting that link, but after reading it, I'm not nearly as hopeful as you are:
> Also on January 12, 2026, the Court ordered Respondents to respond to the Petition by January 15, 2026 at 11:00 a.m., certifying the true cause and proper duration of Petitioner’s confinement and showing cause as to why the writ should not be granted in this case. Respondents entered an appearance that day but have not filed any response to the Petition.
The government didn't even bother responding to the habeas petition because they knew what they were doing was unconstitutional, but it still successfully sows fear.
Worse, ICE detained the man again less than 24 hours after he was released on the judge's orders and called it a "mistake": https://youtu.be/jmoF63Msk0Y
I know who the domestic terrorists are, and it sure as hell isn't Renee Good or Alex Pretti.
I hope you are right, but the administration does not tend to follow court orders. They break the law and then use every legal mechanism at their disposal to slow walk cases through the system. And then, as I say, they do not follow rulings except under the most extreme pressure.
I have about as much faith in the courts ability to actually walk any of this back as I do in their ability to return the families they have kidnapped from my community.
I'll relax when it gets through SCOTUS (who has overturned nearly 90% of lower conservative court rulings to be in Trump's favor) and not a moment before.
That said, at least they have a broad cipher set support and their HTTPS-only implemetation does work in older browsers and systems. That's nice. But HTTP+HTTPS would be better.
Tracking the murderers who executed citizens in the street and then fled the scene of the crime and any sort of trial or investigation? That ICE and Immigration and Border Patrol? I wonder why. And since when is tracking public officials operating in public in the capacity of their government jobs illegal?
These federal goons need to be tracked and observed to record their crimes. That much is indisputable.
No, the ones on broadcast television news where they go scene by scene breaking down any claims of Alex being at fault being bogus lies that you are now repeating.
As much as I dislike TikTok, I dislike this dangerous mischaracterization even more. If you start propagating the meme that screens are like chemically addictive drugs the governments of the world will feel emboldened to use violence force to 'regulate' them. Screens are not drugs. They do not directly manipulate the biochemistry of incentive salience regardless of valence of perceived stimuli. They just provide enjoyable stimuli. It is VASTLY different. Conflating them is playing in to the hands of the authoritarians.
Gambling doesn't directly manipulate biochemistry either. Neither does porn. Both are recognized as addictive. If you think reading Dostoevsky is in the same realm as doom scrolling algorithmically tailored Instagram reels because they're both "enjoyable stimuli," there's not much of a conversation to be had.
This is a thread about government-aligned owners censoring content on a platform the government forced a sale of. The authoritarians already have the thing.
False. Gambling disorder exists, but it is grandfathered in. It wouldn't be accepted today. Porn addiction has no entry in the DSMV or ICD10, it is purely a made up concept advanced by for-profit companies looking to exploit people (and authoritarian governments looking to control). The same kind of groups that used to run camps to "fix" gay people.
If you think a chemical directly manipulating the biochemistry of incentive salience, making you want something regardless of it's valance, is the same as eventually liking something you watch and hear that's actually rewarding, yes, there's not much conversation to be had. Lay interpretations of this field are not very useful.
Gambling disorder was introduced in DSM 3 (1980) before much was known about human neurobiology under 'impulse control disorder not elsewhere classified'. Back then they even thought dopamine was a 'pleasure' chemical. And we now know it's about wanting, not liking. You may be mixing it up when it was reclassified as the DSM 4 (not 5!) did a big reorganization.
Kent Berridges' lab review articles are a great place to start to understand addiction, wanting, and liking and how they are different. But mostly importantly, how addiction works so you can see how chemical addictive substances are vastly different. https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/selected-review-art...
Edit: and re: "porn disorder/gaming disorder/behavioral impulse disorders to 'screens' in general" and the behavior of the ICD re: china, see the widely cited Nichole Prause' work https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=yySl87AAAAAJ&hl=en
I don't follow. DSM-5 (2013) moved gambling into 'Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders.' What specifically are you saying happened in DSM-4?
Thanks for sharing. I'll read Berridge.
The distinction you're drawing is mechanistic. I'm not submitting a paper to a journal. Kids are scrolling until 3am, teen mental health is cratering, boomers are getting radicalized by bot farms, and democracy is being sold for pennies on the dollar. If your response is 'technically not addiction,' we're not having the same conversation.
This is untrue. Take it from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519704/table/ch3.t39/ "Impact of the DSM-IV to DSM-5 Changes on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health [Internet]." In 5 they actually moved it to the 'Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders' because it was grandfathered into it's own class and really fit nowhere else in the reorganization. It shouldn't be there either but it was too late.
You've prescribed some outcomes: I am not saying you have not personally observed these things. I am saying they are not due to addiction and that using comparisons to addictive drugs and addiction implies that people have no volition when reading things or watching things on screens instead of, say, watching them in their environment directly. That's a very dangerous claim. If you think that it's okay to claim screens can make you do things and need to be regulated like addictive drugs, we are definitely not having the same conversation. You're advocating that text and video need to be regulated by government use of force and that's really dangerous and wrong.
I agree that the corporations pushing these propaganda machines are a huge problem. But it's not one involving addiction.
The DSM-5 work group chair said the move was based on brain imaging showing gambling activates reward systems like drugs do [1]. That's not grandfathering, that's reclassification based on neuroscience. Your source is a comparison table of criteria, not a rationale for the reclassification.
The WHO recognized gaming disorder in 2019. The field is expanding. But even if it never formally recognizes social media addiction—call it whatever you want.
I'm assuming good faith, though you are putting words in my mouth. I said social media is a cheap, shitty, and extremely addictive drug. I'm happy to rephrase that to 'cheap, shitty, and extremely compulsive in ways that damage health, relationships, attention and has immensely negative effects for society as a whole.' I never once mentioned government regulation, you can reread my comments.
My opinion is that people should view it as lame and self regulate. I do not think it is likely to happen.
Uh, every enjoyable experience activates glutamergic activity the bilateral shell of the nucleus accumbens, even looking at a pretty sunset. The problem is when it's not the result of processing attributes intrinsic to an experience but instead mediated chemically.
The argument that, "That brain brains when you $x." is so trivial and useless I usually assume it's done in bad faith. But you seem to be engaging on the level, so why?
I'm sorry, but "playing in to the hands of the authoritarians" is using shite like TikTok, generating revenue for the authoritarian billionaires who are currently destroying the world.
We are not disagreeing. Definitely do not use TikTok for those and many other reasons. But calling an audio visual stimuli an addictive drug is just as wrong and dangerous. That will lead to those same authoritarians controlling screens with use of force justified by the false metaphor.
Are you willing to write accessibility support for the new xfce only wayland compositor? How will you get every other wayland compositor to support your non-'wayland core' accessibility extension?
People like to frame things like the waylands are some sort of default and nothing is being lost and no one is being excluded.
Everyone has settled on an accessibility standard (Matt Campbell's). So it's not "your" accessibility protocol, it's already "the" accessibility protocol. This is working as intended IMO: allow things to compete and future in the wild and then pick the fittest.
Right. The push based accessibility that is only supported by GNOME's compositor, mutter, and GNOME's DE's userland as of this last 6 months. I would very happy to hear about even this extension supported under other wayland compositors and software. Do you know of any?
Since you seem informed perhaps you can clear something up for me, when Cambpell says "push full accessibility tree to trusted clients" does that mean you get the entire desktop tree, or only for that application?
Because if you don't get the entire window tree, because you only get the single windows information when that application provides it, it is highly incompatible with existing solutions. They say it is compatible because application developers can create a new virtualized thing themselves. But that's not compatible. And beyond that, it is a "solution" that prevents me from controlling my own computer. I understand GNOME is targeting everyone not just power users. But as a power user I am someone. I am a human being.
And Campbell's assertions that push is more performant than pull and full tree are being backed by arguments informed from problems that don't even apply generally. GTK 4 broke this, not GTK 3. It's not a push versus pull thing. It's wayland architecture focused Gtk4 causing the problem when things are fine in X11 focused GTK 3. ref: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6269 a11y: No API for supporting a11y Selection interface , https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6204 a11y AT-SPI: get_child_count implementation iterating over all children causes freeze for objects with many a11y children
What use is human sounding TTS when your desktop cannot read the contents of windows?
As someone with progressive retinal tearing who's used the linux desktop for 20 years I'm terrified. The forcing of the various incompatible waylands by the big linux corps has meant the end of support for screen readers. The only wayland compositor that supports screen readers in linux is GNOME's mutter and they literally only added that support last year (after 15 years of waylands) and instead of supporting standard at-spi and existing protocols that Orca and the like use GNOME decided to come up with two new in-house GNOME proprietary protocols (which themselves don't send the full window tree or anything on request but instead push only info about single windows, etc, etc) for doing it. No other wayland compositor supports screen readers. And without any standardization no developers will ever support screenreaders on waylands. Basically only GNOME's userspace will sort of support it. There's no hope for non-X11 based screen readers and all the megacorps are say they're dropping X11 support.
The only options I have are to use and maintain old X11 linux distros myself. But eventually things like CA TLS and browsers just won't be feasible for me to backport and compile myself. Eventually I'm going to have to switch to using Windows. It's a sad, sad state of things.
And regarding AI based text to speech: almost all of it kind of sucks for screen readers. Particularly the random garbled ai-noises that happen between and at the end of utterances, inaccurate readings, etc in many models. Not to mention requiring the use of a GPU and lots of system resources. The old Festival 1.96 Nitech HTS voices on (core2duo) CPU from the early 2000 are incomparibly faster, more accurate, and sound decent enough to understand.
>The only options I have are to use and maintain old X11 linux distros myself. But eventually things like CA TLS and browsers just won't be feasible for me to backport and compile myself. Eventually I'm going to have to switch to using Windows. It's a sad, sad state of things.
Gentoo, duvian and all the bsds will keep x11 around until the heat death of the universe. Anyone who doesn't force systemd on their users also doesn't force Wayland. You have plenty of options before windows.
What? This description makes no sense. Nothing changed with at-spi2, that is X.org/Wayland independent. The only think which got added (and is already suppored by Kde) is a protocol to inform the screen reader about keyboard events, as it previously used the "anyone in my session can read my keyboard" capability of X.org.
This is nice, but PDF jumped the shark already. It's no longer a document format that always looks the same everywhere. The inclusion of "Dynamic XFA (XML Form Architecture) PDF" in the spec made it so PDF is an unreliable format. The aformentioned is a PDF without content that pulls down all it's content from the web. It even still, ostensibly, supports Flash (swf) animations. In practice these "PDF"s are just empty white pages with an error message like,
>"Please wait... If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by visiting http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download. For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/go/acrreader. Windows is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries."
Maybe in spec, but the damage is done and persists.
The (USA) Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources has nearly all their regulation PDFs as these XFA non-pdfs that I cannot read. So I cannot know the regulations. My emails about this topic (to multiple addresses over many years a dozen times) have gone unanswered.
If Acrobat supports it it doesn't matter what the spec says. Until Adobe drops XFA from Acrobat and forces these extremely silly people to stop, PDF is no longer PDF.
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