I think the most likely case is: this company is labeling images from meta AI use from people who opted-in to share their data with Meta.
It's certainly possible that it's something much more surprising / sinister, but there is a fairly logical combination of settings that I could see a company could argue lets them use the data for training.
I'm also very certain that few users with these settings would expect the images to be shown to actual people, so I'm not defending Meta.
I know some of the criticism of Meta: many people don't like the way their products are optimized for engagement. I've heard about their weird AI bots interacting on their platform as if they were people. And I know people of all political stripes have had complaints about content moderation and their algorithm.
But all of that is within the bounds of the law and their terms of service.
None of it would remotely approach something like: bypassing the well-advertised features in the glasses that show when the camera is in use and secretly recording things to train AI. It's hard to imagine any company's lawyers approving something like that. (this sounds like what many commenters believe is happening)
FWIW, I suspect this is the relevant section of the Privacy policy:
> "When you use the Meta AI service on your AI Glasses (if available for your device), we use your information, like Media and audio recordings of your voice to provide the service."
Meta has consistently and repeatedly shown an absolute lack of respect for user privacy for basically as long as they’ve existed as a company. I’m honestly not certain there’s anything fully out of the question as far as things they might do, regardless of what their policies might say.
They bought a “privacy” VPN app and used it to harvest data, then abused Apple’s enterprise app deployments to continue to ship the app after it was banned from the app store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
You missed the cases where the facebook app ran a local webserver on your smartphone which the facebook ad trackers would send data to to be able to track you across all websites, breaking GDPR laws and circumventing browser third-party cookie controls?
This sort of low effort post, we can all recognize right?
Read the book series. Battle with a culture different than your own. The absolute depression by the third book helps you experience this more than this bullshit Cliff’s notes.
And yes, Greg was 100% about grappling with the nuances. One of the smartest men I’ve known.
We had an awesome book club talking about historical sci-fi and modernity. He always saw the optimistic side, how humanity could conquer, but I, child of Amazon, could see the end-stage capitalism.
Makes for fantastic dialogue. Read the book series. It’s worth it!
There is an economic asymmetry between having a frontier model that people pay to use vs. being someone paying them so they can keep improving it.
Also, from the outside, we only know about the advances that get shipped/put on servers. Presumably, a lot more promising advances are uncovered than are shipped. Maybe they don't fit the product, maybe they are not ready, or maybe they provide a competitive advantage if used and improved internally without disclosure.
So there is a potential growing development/information/frontier asymmetry, of unknown magnitude and velocity.
Yep. I agree. I’m assuming that the best model for coding is always six months advanced ahead for the investors. Even with that assumption, there’s a huge democratization effect.
I’ve never seen a tool more accessible for people of all backgrounds and abilities. It should be celebrated. And yet “engineers” are worried about their identities.
Just s/AI/surveillance state/ and it reads pretty much the same. People in the US you should read NSPM-7 which is obviously simply targeted at this admin's out group. Things seem to be well in motion already from the outward indications we have about DHS spending and disregard for legal processes. People are just still in denial or not paying attention.
I'm trying to bring a slightly different take to the pricing of ShipItAI (https://shipitai.dev, brazen plug). I've got a $5/mo/active dev + Bring Your Own Key option for those that want better price controls.
Still early in development and has a much simpler goal, but I like simple things that work well.
Well this was an interesting thread to see pop up.
Hi, I'm Zack, I was a Sr. Unix Administrator at AMZN in 1999 and worked alongside very talented folks like snovotny, lamont, yvette, grabatin, gborle, jamison, craig, and so many others. The responses from Benjamin Black and Peter Voshall are correct.
We definitely were on DEC Tru64 at this time. Sun was running the big databases like ACB. I recall worries that obidos might not be able to build in a few months time so the engineer with the little corgi (Erik?) spiked out a linux build and then it was linux pizza boxes as quickly as we could build them.
We built CMF and other things to handle mass provisioning but it was chaotic for quite a while. I don't recall anyone talking about what would later become AWS in those days.
Good work on the new release. As a long time Scrivener 2 user, I'm happy to see this.
However, I wanted a simpler and subjectively nicer looking tool for distraction-free writing and thus made my own. It's free, has a few social features built-in, tracks writing progress/goals/distractions, and can make good looking books.
Also, adding features to Singular Writer has been really easy, as evidenced by it being in existence for a few months. For the Windows crowd, we've had feature parity from day one.
Check it out if you want to write more [with friends].
Some details about the person behind it and maybe some links (on the page) would be great. These days I'm wary of downloading anything I can't get a wide range of opinions on by searching, and all I get are irrelevant results.
That's an excellent point! In focusing on the features and such, I forgot to write up an About page, I'll do that.
For those reading here, I'm the guy that wrote a blog post on how to self-publish a book in 2017 that was on the front page here for a day or so back in February (www.zhubert.com). After that, I realized how ludicrous it was that publishing had to entail so much complexity, so I started thinking about what I wanted while writing my second book, then took a break and wrote the app instead.
The binaries are code signed for their respective platforms, and the links off the main page demonstrate the features by category (Writing, Publishing, Social). There are some nice pictures, some animated gifs, and a Twitter account over at https://twitter.com/singularapp.
There used to be a Linux version. You can still find it, it's v.1.6 or so (predating v.2), needs 32-bit libraries and is unsupported. But you can get it running. The problem is if you bring the project file into a new version it will convert the file format and there's no going back.
Curious whether you have any plans for an iOS app accompanying this? My partner uses Scrivener for writing currently, but does a lot of it on their iPad, so Scrivener's app + Dropbox sync is a fairly important thing for them.
(Scrivener's Dropbox sync being frequently buggy may help explain why I'm asking about this for them...)
>(Scrivener's Dropbox sync being frequently buggy may help explain why I'm asking about this for them...)
Hmm, never had an issue with Scrivener/Dropbox sync.
Mind you, I open Scrivener only 3-4 times a week and close it after I'm done with a document. I also don't use it frequently from my other machines (iMac/iPad), so it mainly syncs what I save on the main driver.
Yeah, they have a workflow that's very switching-dependent. Go out and work with the iPad all day, then switch and edit on a laptop at home.
They also like working at some coffee shops with not-ideal WiFi, which may help to expose bad sync cases. (I think it's fine for the sync to fail sometimes, but they've lost work before to this, which seems unacceptable.)
That definitely sounds frustrating. Personally I don't like how intrusive it is, always blocking the loading of the app while it shows me the sync process.
iOS (like desktop Linux and Android) are entirely possible and would be fun to build. The underlying data storage is platform agnostic (hurray SQL) and the development environment is bifurcated only along desktop vs native lines.
This is pretty much why I stopped using Scrivener entirely and started using WriterDuet for screenwriting. Trying to sync on Google Drive was an impossible shitshow. Still pisses me off.
I'm 10k words into my little writing hobby and will try this. Imported two chapters and I like the simplicity and aesthetics a lot. Absolutely love setting X words and having it tracked...simple, intuitive, awesome. I'm slowly getting back into writing after a hiatus so I'm sitting at a measly 500 words/day goal :D
My other authoring tool (Papyrus Autor) is great when it comes to Grammar/Spellchecking/Style and is pretty much the go to tool for German writers however it feels too cluttered for my personal taste. So I'm switching over to singular for prewriting with spellchecking turned off and then I'll load it into PA for the other tools (which will be an interesting and humbling experience).
If it helps motivation, try inviting a few friends and sharing your word counts with them.
I spent two years working on my first book, barely hitting 5k/week during the first draft. My experience definitely affirms that as long as you don't stop, you'll finish it! ;)
I like this! As a not-very-serious writer, I had previously been doing my writing with VSCode plus a couple of extensions and themes to make it look like Ulysses, but I think I will give this a look. I'd be happy to chip in some money if you put a donation link up.
I hate seeing people struggle to support their app. Even the Ulysses guys got blowback when they went from one-time payment to a subscription model - which seems totally warranted from a power user.
Right now it's super lean and I haven't needed any additional income to support it. In the future that might change.
If I were to charge for anything, it'd be paid "themes" for the eBook side of things. I feel that aligns with my objective of making a writing tool for everyone, while getting paid by people making money off it.
Originally the project was called Social Writer and those screenshots date back to that time. I decided the name was too limiting and changed it a couple of weeks ago.
I think I was shooting for something in between the two. If you've read the post by Hugh Howey about Neo, you'll find that we tend to think quite a bit a like.
Productivity and publishing, that's what I wanted.
Ulysses looks great but had nothing to help me measure my novel's progress. Writing down before/after word counts was just lame (sorry). The publishing tools were also rather limited.
Scrivener helped me publish my first book, but, as I mentioned, I didn't like looking at it (sorry!).
So Singular Writer aimed to have the looks of Ulysses and the brawn of Scrivener (without all the configuration).
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