The city likely provided the same funding for marketing / outreach as was provided to all the other people who got that contract – and those other places generally performed a lot better than talkspace. If the one variable that changes is the third party contractor, it’s difficult to see how it’s the city’s fault on that front, other than buying in to talkspace’s claims that virtual therapy was a thing kids were clamoring for.

And outrage is still a weird bar to me. Not all news needs to generate outrage. It can be a mundane groan of “ffs, the city’s wasting a bunch of tax payer dollars again on a third party partner that already failed to deliver results… maybe we should vote in new people next time around”.

*edit to note: from a ‘technology’ perspective, it’s also a somewhat interesting article, as it highlights the disconnect between some tech company claims, and reality. Especially in regards to the tech companies claims, and the reality of what the intended users actually want/need.

Well, hopefully you have more emotional options than “confused” and “outraged”, and can manage something sorta in between, or off on a tangent from either of those?

I think the main point the article is highlighting, is that there was a gross miss-spend by the city on this service, based on the data that came out about it. The city bought the company’s marketing pitch that students didn’t want in person services, and that students would greatly prefer to get therapy online / virtually. Data came out showing that to be very inaccurate, and interviews with actual students highlight the point – might’ve been an idea to ask them before hand, but whatever. The more “Eh???” point that the article raises, albeit buried near the end, is that even after such a horribly wasteful investment, the govt is doubling down with this company and offering them more money/contracts.

Like change some company names / products to simplify it – the government paid $1m to a private company to supply burgers to students, believing the company’s claim that thousands of students would eat their burgers. Almost no students went for the burgers, and the few that did generally said the burgers sucked balls. As a result, the government is now giving that same company another pile of money to provide burgers to everyone else, because the company claimed that everyone else will eat their burgers.

Meh, I was having an argument with a coworker recently about AI’s evils, and all the doomsayers and apoca-hype profiteering that the big AI companies do. I think this article lays out more plainly what the risks of AI are in terms of ending the human race, than any of the claude-cult stock pumpers that come forward.

It won’t be some AGI super intelligence that ascends and then does away with humanity. It’ll be some random military sorts who get a prompt, and trigger a huge conflict / disaster based on bullshit fed to them from an AI. The AI won’t even do it ‘intentionally’, it’ll just be a convincing enough marionette’s lie, fed to a low enough IQ, to open fire.

I think to understand my position a bit more, it’s worth considering how the US has approached international politics recently.

They knew they were going to bomb the shit out of Iran and cause massive oil price shocks. So a few months prior, they abducted the president of Venezuela, and declared Venezuela’s oil their own via military force – and an ongoing campaign of war crimes against fishermen in the region. They no longer see the point in ‘trading’, or the veneer of polite international politics, and are content to use military force to acquire assets for businesses. They have even threatened military force in the taking of Greenland, a region that’s part of a NATO partners traditional territory.

Seeing as they are prepared to use their massively lopsided military force in conflicts explicitly in the interests of American businesses, such as AI companies, I don’t think ‘money’ is the only metric at play in whether these companies stay around. Musk was literally pillaging America’s data systems under the guise of Doge, and the tech-fascists are very much integrated into the republican administration.

And yeah, these are the same people who partied with Epstein. They likely view the worst thing about the Epstein files situation, as being the audacity of the poors to think they have the right to hold their betters to any sort of accountability based on poor people morality. One reason they likely want their own regulation / law independent “freedom” cities, is so that they can have Epstein parties out in the open with zero risk, aside from STDs. So far, America’s shielded most of their rich pedophiles from any real fallout, but why should they even have to bother with such a nuissance, when they’re busy “earning” their billions by having bitchy low brow word fights on X.

OpenAI is considered of critical importance to the USA government, so much so that they’re saying it’s ok for AI companies like openAI to use whatever copyrighted material they want to train their LLMs.

OpenAI will survive, as long as the US govt survives and is its backer.

Canadians won’t do shit on this front.

I’m literally watching a “merger” in the financial industry, where the smaller player, who used a linux-based back-end stack for the banking system, is being forced to adopt the ‘industry standard’ of the larger financial institution – the industry standard being a US company system, running on Microsoft products, and using an Indian company, running the online banking in Microsoft’s cloud. Having a ‘sovereign’ local community credit union isn’t enough to get members/loans apparently.

Even had an opportunity to ask the new CEO about whether they thought it was a prudent move, given the constant news/trade tensions (admittedly, prior to the most recent issue) – and the CEO’s response was basically “I have a piece of paper from a third party that says there’s no risk, so shut up”. Also, the very accurate comment of “I don’t think the back end matters to people in general, no one is going to move their accounts just to be with a sovereign setup, if they can get a slightly better rate elsewhere”. And you can’t really argue that, seeing as the smaller company that’s being ‘merged’ couldn’t leverage it to gain memberships.

The regulators don’t only not care about this sort of thing, they encourage industry to move things into US tech giant clouds. It’s hilarious, the BC outsourcing regulations say to avoid concentration, but the regulators themselves practically disregard it and demand everyone use Microsoft, and FISERV (a US backend banking host provider that provides core services for like 80% of the credit unions around). The regulators themselves are in US tech giant clouds. There’s practically no chance that our government actually takes any kind of stand against Microsoft or US tech giants.

Agreed. I’ve voted center-left in pretty well every election of my adult life. Generally in favour of a socially progressive / fiscally conservative approach irl. Donated to green party campaigns. Was a card carrying member of Greenpeace for years. But on Lemmy, when I express a generally neutral viewpoint on a topic, and/or don’t support hard-left positions, I’ll be accused of being a right-wing republican nutjob who’s destroying America and supporting Trump and crew’s agenda. Even more amusing in that I’m Canadian, make no attempts to hide that fact, and am vocally part of the “don’t buy american stuff” crowd.

I do think it feels insular/hostile, though my take is different than yours. Yes, I’ve had some folks nitpick posts and one up, though I imagine you get that in many similar social media sites – there’re reasons for the running joke that in order to get a correct answer online, you gotta post a question as a woman, and confidently answer it wrong on a male account, and then people will pile on with correct answers and judgey-ments.

Many of the sites that seem to get posted to lemmy are on VERY fringey locations, locations that often seem highly likely to be hosting malicious content. There’s also far fewer people posting topics, with a very small group of users having like 10k+ posts per year. So it feels a lot more ‘concentrated’, especially on particular subjects, due to those posters’ bias’: if you’re an aggressive poster, it’s fairly easy to astroturf lemmy. Which feels insular / bubbly.

Adding to that, Lemmy has mods who are just as heavy-handed as on Reddit or any other heavily moderated setup – though lemmy’ll moderate things in a far more ‘progressive’ friendly way than most alternatives these days. Pejoratives are allowed for some groups, but not others. Even calling that sort of thing out in more explicit terms, though still in a neutral tone, can get you banned from many communities on Lemmy.

Other guys comment, and the note about pension funds, is more about how things like the CPP will invest in SpaceX – as will many ETF/bundled type ‘funds’ that people use. Things practically outside your control.

Yes, you and others can invest your personal wealth into whatever you want. But your gov old age stuff will invest into stuff like SpaceX regardless, and be exposed to potential risks should things collapse catastrophically.

Lemmy skews left, and censors moderate views / comments. You’re generally ok in various areas to be openly hostile towards certain demographics – typically white people, cisgendered people or men in general. You can use pejorative language to describe those groups with impunity. You can get banned from lemmy sites for questioning left-leaning narratives. Functionally, it’s not that dissimilar.

Censorship is used in part to cater a site to its market niche / audience. Whether you agree/disagree with a sites censorship approach, is generally based on whether you’re in that target audience / intended marketing bubble. If you’ve never been censored on a site for moderate views, you’re just squarely in the target group.

Meh, X skews right-wing, sites like Lemmy skew left, every social media site uses censorship along the lines that their intended bubble-market prefers.

Not exactly news, nor surprising in any way.

Also not all that ‘tech’ oriented really, it’s more mundane political drivel.

It was an example of use cases for wearable tech and people with disabilities. Cameras aren’t ‘technically’ required for the other example I noted related to eavesdropping. There are plausible reasons why people with disabilities would need glasses with cameras, and ‘recording’ people extends beyond just camera-based recordings. The issue is more with ubiquitous, covert, wearable smart-tech.

Yeah, I’m not as fussed over having laws on books, but on whether those laws are realistically enforceable. Like I recall reading at some point that lots of jurisdictions in the states define things like Orgies as a group of three or more people in a private dwelling without shoes on, based on ancient prudish attempts to describe what goes on. That’s a law that’s “on the books”, but practically unenforceable.

Same sort of thought pattern, to me, generally applies to the recording of people in public. It’s practically implausible that govt can enforce it uniformly, and it’s on the books just so they can ‘throw another book’ at a perp who’s been arrested for far greater offenses. There are also potential issues with ‘two party consent’ type recording setups, where one party is wanting to document events for legitimate reasons (recording an interaction with police, to CYA).

Idk. People taking pictures / recording public ‘things’, doesn’t seem like a practical area for privacy legislation to come in overly heavy handed on.

One of the issues is that there are legitimate uses for the tech. Like there was a post recently of a girl with hearing disabilities, ecstatic that she’d gotten glasses that provide real-time subtitles to people she talks to. A business / space with a “No Smart Glasses” policy, could essentially be denying people with disabilities access, which could land them in hot water just the same as allowing unfettered smart glass recordings.

Having them become more ubiquitous will also likely have severe impact on regular day to day interactions, even outside of the pervo-sphere. Talking with friends, or even interactions with other parties, can become a lot more complicated when people can record every word, can take those exchanges out of context, and use them against you in things like court proceedings. Eg. friends will often embellish comments/positions a bit for dramatic effect / story-telling purposes, with an understanding that it’s not got to be perfectly accurate / you’re going to be held accountable for every phrase. So you’re right, that the more ‘obvious’ recording setup of phones limits this risk a bit… but not for long.

Yeah, I’d stopped short of noting that it’d prolly be more realistic to enforce regulations on wide-spread sharing / social media hosting of such content. Like in some ways, recording someone in public for whatever reason seems reasonable – recording interactions with police, for example, being an area that makes a good deal of sense – but posting those recordings, especially with the implied ‘hope’ that they go viral / generate notoriety and/or monetized returns, is pretty dicey.

Idk. Bans on recording someone in public without their consent, feel like a really difficult thing to properly enforce – with or without the glasses. The number of people doing it with Smartphones already, in most jurisdictions at least, would make such a law’s wide-spread enforcement seem implausible. And I mean, you’re in a public area, so you sorta need to expect less privacy… because it’s in public?

It likely doesn’t take too much for any group of coordinated individuals to significantly sway any social media. I mean, even on lemmy – if you had like 5 people who scoured ‘new’, or who had a program to scour ‘new’ posts for specific keywords, and just downvoted/upvoted specific content, it’d have an impact. Enough downvotes will hide posts from most other users, enough upvotes will amplify the message.

Similarly, if you look at who posts to lemmy, there are some folks with like 10’s of thousands of posts in a year, and those posts often follow specific ideological agendas. I once asked one of these sorts of accounts what their situation was, wondering if they were like a paid employee of a PR firm or something given that they had over 50 posts per day, and the response was “You have no proof”. I mean, a simple “Nah, I’m just passionate about certain topics” would’ve sufficed, but instead they chose to deflect the question and claim innocence via a lack of definitive proof. If I had ‘proof’ I wouldn’t have been politely asking/curious as to their response.

Social media is basically designed to be manipulated by propagandists. Doesn’t really matter what corporate structure is behind it, whether its federated or not.