Artificial intelligence, like any intelligence, has goals and priorities

No. Intelligence does not necessitate goals. You are able to understand math, letters, words, meaning of those without pursuing a specific goal.

Because it’s not AI, it’s sophisticated pattern separation, recognition, lossy compression and extrapolation systems.

And our brains work in a similar way.

I’m willing to debate the potentials of AI again once they manage to do that without those “benchmarks” getting special attention in the training data.

You sound like those guys who doomed AI, because a single neuron wasn’t able to solve the XOR problem. Guess what, build a network out of neurons and the problem is solved.

What potentials are you talking about? The potentials are tremendous. There are a plethora of algorithms, theoretic knowledge and practical applications where AI really shines and proves its potential. Just because LLMs currently still lack several capabilities, this doesn’t mean that some future developments can’t improve on that and this by maybe even not being a contemporary LLM. LLMs are just one thing in the wide field of AI. They can do really cool stuff. This points towards further potential in that area. And if it’s not LLMs, then possibly other types of AI architectures.

The problem is the lack of people’s interest in deep topics,

I’m not sure about that. I think small talk serves occasions where you might want to keep it polite as deeper topics tend to become emotionally loaded disputes.

For example, going to a bubble tea shop. Usually, you don’t want to discuss the meaning of life with the shop keeper, but it may be a nice gesture to talk a bit about the small things in life. Small talk is a good way to share a pleasant conversation and appreciate each other.
Furthermore, small talk can serve as an opener to deeper topics if the occasion arises and everyone seems to be in the mood for such deeper topics.

Anyway, my wife and I are friends with the shop keeper now and we’ve talked about the weather, religions, vacations and how to raise children.

Great band.

For example, it might record if people are browsing for baby products or other personal items.

Don’t mind baby products and dildos or whatever.

They could see bank activity and even login credentials when someone is temporarily displaying their own passwords.

This basically ignores all security measures regarding everything. Sensitive communication, company secrets and so on.

That’s fucking seriously huge. What the fuck?!

that’s what life would be like if we didn’t have to work to survive

Which mustn’t be an issue. Most advanced nations produce a surplus of food for example. So much, that an insane amount of it is wasted and never consumed.

So in principle, sure. Some work is necessary to allow a certain quality of life for all and ensure survival. But if you think about our fucked up wealth distribution, it does not need to be so hard.

Or: “Men buying women’s hygiene products, because they exist.”

It’s really hard for me to find some stuff at all.

It was already ruled that they failed to sufficiently disclose which information was used and how.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-court-fines-facebook-owner-meta-14-mln-undisclosed-data-collection-2023-07-26/

This is not evidence that they’re using your microphone, and you know it’s not.

I didn’t claim it to be evidence for that.

somehow bypassing Google and Apple’s mic usage notifications

Unless some form of hardware notification is hardwired into the device, which indicates cam or mic usage, I’m on the rather paranoid side regarding software notifications. Software is usually much easier to break. I’m leaning a lot out of the window now, as I don’t know how secure those notifications are implemented. However, even then there is reason for concern, given that facebook had / has questionable deals with device manufacturers. If they were willing to share personal data with device manufacturers, there is reason to suspect this went or can go the other way around as well.

I don’t know why you keep coming back to trust. […] That’s not the point.

It is mine. Even though there is no evidence for a surveillance using device microphones itself yet and it could be surprising if they were able to, given the history of facebook, they participated in a lot of rather surprising shit.

Aye. Facebook has been proven to be shady af over and over again.

it wasn’t in secret

Did I misread something? It even says in the title of the linked article, that it was a “secret project”.

The evidence is: among other things, facebook has repeatedly violated user’s privacy. It would be no surprise if they would also monitor conversations via the microphone. Sure, currently there seems to be no evidence for that. But I wouldn’t be so naive to just trust them on that.

Yes. Just another malicious thing facebook does. Surely, they are totally trustworthy in all other regards. /s

Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known.

Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal

Thanks for sharing!

As far as I know, there is no such list (yet).

What should be done:
Escalate it to the people responsible for IT administration & security in your company or institution. They’ll deal with it.

But the default step if you suspect of being infected is not to use the device at all until you got a green light for it from the security/admin folks. Power down, disconnect from any networks, either via physical cables or wireless, unplug external storage devices and wait for further info.

I’d say give it a try and see for yourself.

I can just recommend using Firefox for a multitude of reasons. However, I am biased as I have been using firefox for almost two decades and did not have many reasons to complain.

I understand that you made such an experience, but I can’t share it though. I’ve been a Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox exists, which is almost two decades. (I think I joined somewhere between 2005-2007). I’ve tried other browsers, sometimes I had to. However, I didn’t notice any benefits compared to Firefox. Especially not in performance. Even though benchmarks have always shown clear differences, they weren’t significant enough for me to consider switching, as the difference really didn’t impact my browsing experience.

Regarding the memes: That was just a random annectode which I found suitable here. I don’t claim it has been that way since the beginning. (Can’t relate to that anyway.) But given that it has been around for a while, I don’t see how performance can be an argument in favour of Chrome in this.

I’ve been a loyal Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox has existed. So I’m probably a bit biased. However, when I used other browsers, and if it wes just to try them out, I didn’t notice any benefits in terms of loading websites and executing their scripts. This includes Chrome. In benchmarks there are obviously differences visible, but to me as a user they didn’t matter. I wasn’t so short on time that I needed those microseconds. So I really don’t get how performance could be an argument in this.

Restore Privacy – Alternatives to Google Products – The Big List (2024)