Technology

https://spreadmastodon.org/utilities/round-robin

Mastodon wants to make sign-ups easier and direct new registrations automatically to 4 chosen instances in round-robin mode. These instances have to fulfill certain criteria to be eligible, but in any case one them will move out of rotation per year.

I think it is a good concept to actually avoid a single instance dominating everything else and over multiple years the rotation should avoid too strong clustering and makes usability much simpler.

Would this be something you would look for in lemmy as well in the long-term? Or would you trade the benefit of a concious decision at the potential cost of alienating people who just want to get the easiest way, which could happen to be a centralized big tech?

Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.

The writing is on the wall. Those who are staying on Reddit despite everything u/spez said recently are literally asking to be shit on and will fully deserve it.

EDIT: Maybe a false alert after all, my thread is now visible to all. Still weird that it stayed "deleted" for hours though.

I believe Reddit is now automatically deleting threads about Lemmy (or containing links to Lemmy instances)? A thread I made on r/Save3rdPartyApps got deleted with no explanation within seconds of me creating it and I don't believe it's the sub's mods who did that.

(However, I can see it while logged in. So it's a kind of shadow-deletion)

Can anyone confirm whether referencing Lemmy and/or an instance gets your thread insta-removed?

Knowledge silos and expertise are two sides of the same coin. From full stack engineering to DevOps practitioner, our industry loves to pretend everyone can do everything. We’re an industry of hobbyists. We love to tinker. I don’t know if we are fooling ourselves or if the industry has been exploiting our hobby-driven nature, but it’s time for DevOps to get thrown out of an airlock.

After being scammed into thinking her daughter was kidnapped, an Arizona woman testified in the US Senate about the dangers side of artificial intelligence technology when in the hands of criminals.

Jennifer DeStefano told the Senate judiciary committee about the fear she felt when she received an ominous phone call on a Friday last April.

Thinking the unknown number was a doctor’s office, she answered the phone just before 5pm on the final ring. On the other end of the line was her 15-year-old daughter – or at least what sounded exactly like her daughter’s voice.

“On the other end was our daughter Briana sobbing and crying saying ‘Mom’.”

Briana was on a ski trip when the incident took place so DeStefano assumed she injured herself and was calling let her know.

DeStefano heard the voice of her daughter and recreated the interaction for her audience: “‘Mom, I messed up’ with more crying and sobbing. Not thinking twice, I asked her again, ‘OK, what happened?’”

She continued: “Suddenly a man’s voice barked at her to ‘lay down and put your head back’.”

Panic immediately set in and DeStefano said she then demanded to know what was happening.

“Nothing could have prepared me for her response,” Defano said.

Defano said she heard her daughter say: “‘Mom these bad men have me. Help me! Help me!’ She begged and pleaded as the phone was taken from her.”

“Listen here, I have your daughter. You tell anyone, you call the cops, I am going to pump her stomach so full of drugs,” a man on the line then said to DeStefano.

The man then told DeStefano he “would have his way” with her daughter and drop her off in Mexico, and that she’d never see her again.

At the time of the phone call, DeStefano was at her other daughter Aubrey’s dance rehearsal. She put the phone on mute and screamed for help, which captured the attention of nearby parents who called 911 for her.

DeStefano negotiated with the fake kidnappers until police arrived. At first, they set the ransom at $1m and then lowered it to $50,000 when DeStefano told them such a high price was impossible.

She asked for a routing number and wiring instructions but the man refused that method because it could be “traced” and demanded cash instead.

DeStefano said she was told that she would be picked up in a white van with bag over her head so that she wouldn’t know where she was going.

She said he told her: “If I didn’t have all the money, then we were both going to be dead.”

But another parent with her informed her police were aware of AI scams like these. DeStefano then made contact with her actual daughter and husband, who confirmed repeatedly that they were fine.

“At that point, I hung up and collapsed to the floor in tears of relief,” DeStefano said.

When DeStefano tried to file a police report after the ordeal, she was dismissed and told this was a “prank call”.

A survey by McAfee, a computer security software company, found that 70% of people said they weren’t confident they could tell the difference between a cloned voice and the real thing. McAfee also said it takes only three seconds of audio to replicate a person’s voice.

DeStefano urged lawmakers to act in order prevent scams like these from hurting other people.

She said: “If left uncontrolled, unregulated, and we are left unprotected without consequence, it will rewrite our understanding and perception what is and what is not truth. It will erode our sense of ‘familiar’ as it corrodes our confidence in what is real and what is not.”

Takeaways Voicebox is a generative AI model that can help with audio editing, sampling and styling.

This type of technology could be used in the future to help creators easily edit audio tracks, allow visually impaired people to hear written messages from friends in their voices, and enable people to speak any foreign language in their own voice.

Do you think this will be self host able?

How do you envision Voicebox being used by content creators beyond just basic audio editing - could it potentially revolutionize the way we create music or podcasts, for example?