Hey everyone. There's a new youtube feature that rolled out just yesterday that's raising some privacy concerns.
People in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, and Singapore can now share videos and chat with friends directly within the YouTube app. The update bring
This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.
If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.
This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.
To turn this off:
Go to your youtube app settings
Go to Privacy
Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"
Trimming the source id (the stuff after the '?' in links) will also prevent this from happening.
1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.
2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.
3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."
4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.
Additional source and more details below. Absolutely thrilled to say that this is real. And yeah, it's huge.
For all the reasons above AND ALSO because this particular lawsuit is a defamation case
Privacy lawsuits are hard because most privacy laws are super super weak, and there's very rarely a lot of money or enforcement backing privacy laws for...twenty million reasons, really...
But defamation suits? Those have teeth.
(In large part because, at least in some countries and including in the US, defamation laws protect public figures the least - and "public figures" legally includes most if not all politicians, and a hell of a lot of other rich ppl too)
A Munich court ruled Google's AI Overviews are its own words, making it liable for false claims, a decision that, if it holds, could reach e
A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense.
According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages.
That distinction matters. Search engines have traditionally had more protection because they index and link to other people’s content. AI Overviews changes the machinery. Google is not just showing the web anymore. It is summarizing it, rewriting it, and sometimes apparently hallucinating a tiny legal grenade into the results page.
Friendly reminder as we get closer to the launch of the ModRetro M64. ModRetro is owned by Palmer Lucky, a self described “Radical Zionist” who fundraises for Donald Trump.
Palmer Lucky also has another company, called Anduril Industries, that manufactures and sells AI powered weapons and surveillance systems. ModRetro even sells Anduril branded gameboys that were made from the same metal that they use to manufacture attack drones.
Don’t buy this thing. A 200 dollar Nintendo 64 clone is not worth your soul.
The reason I’m bringing this up now is because there seems to be a new marketing push happening for this device. It’s all over my feed on TT and IG right now.
They seem to be pushing the fact that there are new Nintendo64 games being made for the M64. This is very misleading because any game that runs on the M64 will run on a real Nintendo 64.
There’s also been new games coming out for the Nintendo 64 for years. ModRetro didn’t make this happen. They’re just publishing a few games. The Nintendo 64 Homebrew scene has been thriving on its own.
It is year 2028 and Linux has been completely rewritten in Rust.
After adding Rust support to Linux kernel in 2021 Linux repo has been flooded with patches and pull requests from brave Rustaceans rewriting critical components in Rust to ensure their stability and memory safety that C could never guarantee. After a few painful years of code reviews and salt coming from C programmers losing their jobs left and right we have finally achieved a 100% Rust Linux kernel. Not a single kernel panic or crash has been reported ever since. In fact, the kernel was so stable that Microsoft gave up all their efforts in Windows as we know it, rewrote it in Rust, and Windows became just another distro in the Linux ecosystem. Other projects and companies soon followed the trend - if you install any Linux distro nowadays it won't come with grep, du or cat - there is only ripgrep, dust and bat. Do you use a graphical interface? Good luck using deprecated projects such as Wayland, Gnome or KDE - wayland-rs , Rsome and RDE is where it's all at. The only serious browser available is Servo and it holds 98% of the market share. Every new game released to the market, including those made by AAA developers, is using the most stable, fast and user-friendly game engine - Bevy v4.20. People love their system and how stable, safe and incredibly fast it is. Proprietary software is basically non-existent at this point. By the year 2035 every single printer, laptop, industrial robot, rocket, autonomous car, submarine, sex toy is powered by software written in Rust. And they never crash or fail. The world is so prosperous and stable that we have finally achieved world peace.
Ferris looks down at what he has created once more and smiles, as he always did. He says nothing as he is just a crab and a mascot, but you can tell from his eyes... That he is truly proud of his community.
(link to the post cos I cant figure out how to share a Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/ug422y/lightning_fast/ )
I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.
A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.
The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.
The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.
A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.
A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.
Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.
Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.
Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".
"This spell causes the hair to fall off cats." "It works with my tome"
"This spell causes the hair to fall off cats." "That's fixed in Xaranthius' latest publication, you just have to rewrite your entire spellbook for compatibility."
"This spell causes the hair to fall of cats." "Magister Olaus of Writhington uses it to help with his allergies. WORKING AS INTENDED."
I want to see wizards snarking at each other over different magical languages/scripts, the same way programmers do it over different languages.
Sure, "High Tower is a powerful language, but it's such a pain to write. I just use Unity* as it's simple to write and can do nearly everything I need" "cranky because you can't memorize all the conjugations and declensions, aren't you?" "LOOK MAN, I CAN MEMORIZE ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACE OF YOUR MOTHER IN ECSTASY. IN FACT, BEHOLD!" *a little time window appears between them, demonstrating exactly that. The first wizard (seen through the window) turns around and winks at the "camera".
"you kids today with your lizardman. How can you get anything done in a language without gendered pronouns? It's like fingerpainting. Sure you can learn on it but once you've got the basics you should switch over to a REAL language"
"the Kalic have been here already. We better get out before the rest of their army marches in." "how can you be sure?" "you see that teleport?" "no" "well, if you COULD see it, you'd see it's written in Adevic Yevi. That's the Kalic magic language." "couldn't it be someone else? We saw those Monon traders, maybe one of them..." "no. No one writes Adevic Yevi unless they're being paid to. It's a language written by committee."
Wizards going on a quest to get the spellbooks for a lost spell, only to find out that it was written in skydove cant. No one can read that shit! The creator must have been one of those weird "functional wizards". (They're obsessed with making sure their spells have no side effects)
There's a small library on the outskirts of Freeport which tries to collect versions of basic spells in every language. The Adevic Yevi version of "fireball" takes up 7 pages, mostly boilerplate setting up the interfaces with fire and explosions and ExplodingMagicalBallFactorySingletons. The Lizardman version is basically "AHAHAHA, YOU GO BOOM!"
There's a bunch of wizard apprentices working on porting an old "Summon Bread and Fishes" spell from the absolutely archaic language it was written in. Once it's in Unity, it'll be easy to modify and teach to more wizards, which'll obviously be good for disaster areas. It's just too expensive to keep paying the ancient guys who can still do magic in TRAN-FOR.
Eccentric wizards keep inventing new languages for spells. You look at them and they're neat, but it'll never catch on. And either you're right, or the next time you're applying to be a court wizard, the advisors want to know if you have at least 5 years experience in Tilted Runic and you're like "it only came out 2 years ago!" "aren't you a chronomancer?" "oh good point. Yeah I've been using it for 20-30 years."
There's wizards who will spend incredible amounts of time doing silly things with spells in strange ways. There's this guy (Vorth) who made his own language where there's only one basic spell: fireball. Everything else is basic magic glue tying multiple fireballs together. So like, he's got a breakfast spell. Stand back (good advice for all his spells), and you'll see a fish get knocked out of the local pond, flung through the air by successive explosions, and eventually it lands on his plate, nicely cooked and deboned, if slightly charred (the glass of milk is harder to explain). His magical door locks involve a quicksilver sphere and molten lead changing shape when heated... It's tricky but it seems to work. He's working on a teleport spell, but so far it's mainly just killed test subjects (primarily sheep from a nearby farm).
* so the funny thing here is that this isn't a reference to the unity game engine. The main country in my One Hundred and One Magical Pistols setting is called "the union" and their language is called "unity".
Wanders are like "they're available everywhere and once you learn how to do it it's so powerful!"
Staffguys always talk about how you can do ANYTHING with a staff. Wanders claim it's a pain to carry around an overpowered device that can do ANYTHING when you just need to cast fireball or a simple one man teleport.
Meanwhile the bare wizards are showing off how they don't need any magical tools and can just do hand motions.
Wanders and staffguys retort that when a spell goes wrong, THEY need to go to store for a new magical tool. YOU need new hands.
got back to work on my kernel a bit. settled on a filesystem to use. idk what this type of filesystem is called if it already exists cuz I just pulled it out of my ass so somebody please let me know
the disk is divided evenly into blocks.
an inode (if that's the right terminology?) is just the first block of the file/directory. if the file or directory contents exceed the block size, it allocates a new block, and stores a pointer to it. kinda like a linked list.
for directories, the data in the inode is a list of inodes of the files within, along with their filename and type. the type not only determines how the OS treats it but also how the kernel treats it—a file of a type relating to a directory type is treated as a directory.
this does mean that theres no way for the kernel to know if an inode is a file or directory, without looking at the parent directory.
inode zero, the first block on the disk, is always treated as a directory, which is the root.
the user can choose to reserve some blocks for listing which blocks are used, so that it doesn't have to seek the whole disk for a free block.
if the block is at the end of the chain, the bytes used for identifying the next block in the chain is reused for showing how many bytes are in the block, so that content can be of any size, not just a multiple of the block data size.
for example, if blocks are 512 bytes each with 510bytes of storage, the inode will point to the first block. the first block will have the first 510 bytes in it, a flag stating theres a next block, and the block ID of the next block. that next block can have the next 510 bytes, and so on. once you reach the end of the data, the flag is unset for that final block, and the amount of bytes stored in that final block is stored.
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
Chuckling to myself remembering the time I completely broke a scammer's brain by telling them I use Linux.
Scammer: do you have an apple or a windows computer please?
Me: neither, I use Linux.
Scammer: no no no, I asked if you use a apple or a windows
Me: neither
Scammer: what is the sticker? Is it a four boxes or is it an apple with a bite?
Me: ... I don't use EITHER of them. There's a third operating system called Linux. It isn't a PC or a mac. Please tell me you understand
Scammer: do -- do you know what I mean about apple or windows sir?
Me: yes. I'm a software developer. I understand completely. I'm telling you that YOU don't understand. Its called Linux, spelled L-I-N-U-X, type it into google
Scammer:
Scammer: but is it an apple or a windows computer sir
BTW, just to make sure everyone knows, this isn't just some internet rando commenting on her observations on the internet.
They are an Assistant Professor of Media Industries at New York University and literally just finished writing The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal, a book on the history of the computer industry in the 70s.
This tweet isn't just an observation, it's the result of years of research and study. And it's absolutely true.
The complete lack of support for these chill dudes (gender neutral - not all are male, P.S. many are also queer) is not only unfair, it's a major security risk.
There's something called SSH - Secure Shell. A secure protocol for accessing and controlling network devices. It's an integral part of every major Linux-based server, which run the vast majority of internet and government IT infrastructure on the planet. It's also sometimes used on other operating systems like Microsoft Windows. There's another little bit of software on just about all Linux operating systems called XZ Utils. It's a set of data compressors.
XZ Utils was being maintained by one person, a dude named Lasse Collin. An integral item used by about countless operating systems and servers that run everything from military systems to literally almost every single web and content server on the planet. One guy. He was fucking tired.
So when someone named Jia Tan showed up and offered to ease some of that burden, Collin leapt at the chance. And for years, it went well. They worked together to maintain XZ Utils. Then other people began showing up telling Collin that it's fine to retire now, move on to other projects, Jia Tan can take care of it. Collin listened.
Within a year of Collin handing over the reins, Jia Tan had implanted code into XZ Utils that granted unauthorised access to any system using it via SSH. Which means it was a backdoor that granted direct unauthorised access to the majority of network device and computer systems on the planet, and indirect or potential unauthorised access to almost every other network device and computer system.
This kind of attack is called a "supply chain attack." Instead of trying to break in from the outside or directly attack a target from within, you compromise a step in the supply chain that eventually makes it's way to the target system. This happened a few years back with the SolarWinds attack, known to have been caused by the Russian government, after they compromised software updates for SolarWinds, VMware, and Microsoft products being used by the US Federal Government. (Side note: President Trump refused to comment on the attack for days, before finally declaring that despite the evidence China must be the perpetrator).
It has since been learned that Jia Tan's supportive voices were all sock puppet accounts. They and Tan appeared to always post from Cina, though sometimes seemed to be posting from the Middle East and Europe. They worked on just about every notable Chinese holiday. This seems to indicate Jia Tan was not only an alias, but a name chosen as false flag in the event the years-long deception was uncovered. Current suspicion is that this was another Russian cyberattack, but we may never know for certain.
And this attack was only noticed by one other dude, Andres Freund, who noticed his SSH connections were a little slower than normal and decided it would be fun to investigate. He was a Microsoft employee but that investigation wasn't his job. He just thought it was worth doing.
The vast majority of the world's network infrastructure, used by every government and every corporation, compromised because the entire planet was relying on one chill dude and he was fucking tired.
areudirty
theartofmadeline
baratheonpilled
tangentwithtanner
andulkaphoto
prguitarman
germansingergirl
gummygunk
origamiaround
janainaart
