@wampus@lemmy.ca
member since 9 Mar 2025 15:21
comments
- on OpenAI hacked Medicare portal, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10h ago
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on Millions Spent, Few Served: Talkspace pledged to expand young people’s access to therapy. Company data shows few were served while the tech platform raked in millions. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago
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.
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on Millions Spent, Few Served: Talkspace pledged to expand young people’s access to therapy. Company data shows few were served while the tech platform raked in millions. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 2d ago
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.
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on Pentagon investigators have discovered that flawed intelligence and an overreliance on AI contributed to a missile strike that killed 123 Iranian school children in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3d ago
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.
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on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been? in c/technology@lemmy.world · 4 Sep 2026
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.
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on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been? in c/technology@lemmy.world · 3 Sep 2026
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.
I’d guess that GCP, AWS, Azure have infrastructure in Australia and many other western nations, and the AI companies would use that as a proxy.
You could potentially block those IP ranges. But then you’re also likely going to be blocking Windows updates, and basic Windows functionality. So you’d first have had to, idk, focus on sovereign tech chains / OS’s. Not to mention, the Aus government is likely hosted inside the sane cloud ecosystems that AI companies are using to launch their attacks from.