I deactivated Facebook years ago. I never had it on a phone, and I’m quite aware it’s the Boomers’ platform of choice to keep in touch, I joined it years ago at work. But today I got the final kick up the arse to delete the account:
We’re updating our Privacy Policy as we expand AI at Meta
Hi ermine,
We’re getting ready to expand our AI at Meta experiences to your region. AI at Meta is our collection of generative AI features and experiences, such as Meta AI and AI creative tools, along with the models that power them.
What this means for you
To help bring these experiences to you, we’ll now rely on the legal basis called legitimate interests for using your information to develop and improve AI at Meta. This means that you have the right to object to how your information is used for these purposes. If your objection is honoured, it will be applied from then on.
We’re including updates in our Privacy Policy to reflect these changes. The updates come into effect on 26 June 2024.
Thanks,
The Meta Privacy team
No. Just fuck right off. I don’t need to beg you for an exception, Zucky-babes. I need you to stick your AI where the sun don’t shine. AI is out there stinking up the information space and trashing what’s left of the human-authored internet, and I don’t want to be part of it. Now I’m sure that Facebook will ignore this and salt away the data they claim to be deleting in 30 days to use for their AI anyway. Facebook has got previous form. All your base are belong to us. That’s the Faustian pact we all made with social media 20 years ago.
AI. Just say no. It’s not intelligent, and its talent for enshittification knows no bounds. Yes, protein folding is the exception, but it has trashed search, enabled legions of amateurs to make curiously revolting ‘art’ that looks superficially pretty but twists the gut and it is scattergunning randomly recycled text garbage across t’interwebs. It’s time we had the text equivalent of Foundview validated through the blockchain to save us from this sea of garbage.
Foundview was a quaint ambition to secure integrity of the photographic image. It failed because of Gresham’s Law – bad money in circulation drives out the good. We need the same for art1 and for writing.
I have a sneaking admiration for Zuckerberg. We all know that this was the terminus that train was headed for. Now get the hell off my lawn, Zuck
- AI aficionados will say good artists will be able to use AI to do new things, and that’s no doubt true. The problem is that it will enable those with the artistic talent of a 6-year old to flood the space with ‘art’ so the problem will change from appreciating good art to finding it. We will miss the gatekeepers as time goes on ;) ↩
Simple Living In Somerset 
I have worked with all the social media companies. Facebook is the rare one which won’t sell you data (you buy audiences)
There is a saying “If it is free, you are for sale”
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Yesterday in Spiked:
When you ask AI Overviews for a list of fruits ending with ‘um’ it returns: ‘Applum, Strawberrum and Coconut.’
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I must be missing something – but why did you deactivate FB rather than obliterate it all those years ago or at some time since?
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The Small Mustelid Group 😉 But also because it is sadly the choice for boomers and GenX, particularly the less technical to organise things, I disenfranchise myself from a lot of IRL community activity. Once upon a time people would do this on the webspace their ISP offered, but that has gone the way of the fax machine and the landline. I have some sympathy for the aims of the IndieWeb but it’s all so tough to get your head around.
Moxie Marlinspike was dead right, people don’t want to run servers, and never will and that is how the end to end principle and the open web died into the arms of social media. I can choose to stand for my principles, but I can’t make other people do that. The bastards are even taking over Web 1 technologies. An old college friend thought I was blanking him for some months, turned out Gmail discards what I send to him. Silently, and I have no idea why. At least it consistently discards what I send to my own Gmail account (which was how we resolved the problem) but a different personal email on a different domain gets through, no idea why, no idea how to fix. The Magnificent Seven have balkanised the open web into silos for their commercial desires.
I will miss those divine mustelid pics and soe of the research. At least that is susceptible to an anonymous clean skin FB account as it’s read only, other community stuff means I am SOL, from some Ramblers groups to occasional amateur radio. I have no idea of a fix, other than buddying up with someone who is on social media.
In mustelid compensation, pine martens are approaching, possibly entering Somerset!
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Yup, I was missing something – infact quite a lot really!
Your Gmail story is well odd – but one to bear in mind.
I must really be a bit of a dinosaur/sad git as [AFAICT] I have absolutely no presence on SM!!
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Nice story – but I guess you might just be a tad conflicted at the source of the funds.
As mentioned before, IMO all this charity stuff really is a big can of worms!
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Au contraire. Firstly because: mustelids but secondly while I am totally of the somewhat Calvinist opinion that selling the poor empty dreams to fund middle class projects is borderline abusive, that is a political call and clearly there’s not the will. Not my circus or monkeys 😉
To my shame I didn’t know Exmoor had enough tree cover for pine martens. It’s mainly along the north coast and around Porlock by the looks of it, and bits along the river , else these bad boys are covering tens of km of open ground, I don’t expect to see a head pop up at Dunkery Beacon or Hoar Oak !
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Thanks. Your rant reminded me to delete a work-related FB account I’d forgotten about. The closer these idiots get to sucking everyone into their platforms 24/7, the more I worry that I’m actually a fat, lazy alien who’s spent the last 50+ years with a VR headset on playing a frequently rubbish hyper-realistic sim game called “Earth: 1971 and Beyond”.
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Training AI on human generated content make sense, if you ignored the morality of copying people’s work and even their writing styles. Training AI on AI generated content is … I struggle to find the right word for it.
Just deleting FB (X, twitter, etc.) is not enough. On most web pages, including this one (wordpress.com) the websites have a ‘share this post button’, or analytics. Behind that is FB (X, twitter, etc.) javascript that they still use to build a profile of you, even though you don’t have a FB account.
I use Firefox as my browser of choice. There is a wonderful plugin/extension called ‘NoScript’, that I have stopped FB, X, Google analytics and any other sites from running said javascript. It really helps with anonymity and stops big tech building a profile of which sites you visit. I also use it to disable advertising javascript too. I can strongly recommend it.
Recently my energy company (who use AI to generate email replies to customer queries) changed tack from trying to convince me to get smart meters to telling me my meters had reach the end of their life. Conversing with them (or more likely their AI email answering machine) has not helped me establish if this is true or not. (I concede it might be true, but remain cautious. I cannot see much benefit to me of a smart meter).
At the risk of going seriously off topic, what do you think of smart meters? Do you have them?
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“telling me my meters had reach the end of their life”: They are trying that line with me too.
They also swear they have no dumb meters with which to replace the old meters. How can that be given that smart meters can, apparently, be risky for anyone in a household who was a pacemaker or defibrillator implanted?
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I did work at centrica for a while, the old smart meters worked on a dodgy SMS link that sent data every 15 minutes. And drop outs happened all the time. Might be the reason
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@Jam:
No smart meter for me. IMO, there is much more to this story than is being publicised. Nobody would make such an investment without some foreseen payback. That the payback is not yet clear is not really surprising as its form is probably at a cost to the energy user. Furthermore, all the purported behavioural benefits (for the domestic energy end-user) can be achieved without ever resorting to a smart meter. How they get away with the Einstein adverts continues to amaze/puzzle/amuse (in roughly equal proportions) me!
Interesting. In part, this is why I had said “[AFAICT]” in my comment above re SM!
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Nope. Because I don’t like the thought of some oik in a network ops centre going clickety-clack and cutting me off. From OVO
Ha Ha bloody ha. You lot must think I was born yesterday. I want ’em to have to look me in the eyes to cut me off 😉
I don’t see what it does for me. I do approve of knowing one’s consumption to save money on power. Efergy engage. Job done. I do appreciate there is a data leak, though if you use the in-house display then unless you fear GCHQ listening on 433MHz outside your house that’s probably OK. If they want to know how much power you’re using they can probably ring up your supplier 😉
I’m sure that the recent monthly prods to submit readings is to get people to use smart meters. I ignore most of these and do about every fourth. If they really want to know they can send a grunt out.
The requirement for a SM is one of the things that nixed Ripple for me, though the main thing was trying to understand how to fill in a tax form with that dividend in kind made my head explode. There are enough renewables ITs to do that job in a comprehensible way, dirt cheap at the mo 😉
If I had a plug in EV or some other oddball load I might consider it. But after the buggery they made of SMETS1 I don’t have any faith in the system. They use the mobile network FFS (I belive some parts of the UK use LoraWAN, which this doesn’t apply). That’s easy, but a hostage to fortune – I think one type used 3G which si being decommissioned, this will continue to happen, 4G will be decommissioned for 6G, 5G for 7G etc. Which is fine given the service life of your average smartphone but crap for smart meters. Why they didn’t go Lora to a concentrator at the substation which can use 4G and be swapped out for 6G etc without bothering customers beats me, but that seems to be what they did
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Thanks everyone regarding your thoughts on smart meters.
Glad I am not the only one who thinks the Albert Einstein adverts are an insult to my and most peoples’ intelligence.
I also think they really should fix the SMETS1 meters and other problems before rolling them out further.
Interesting, looking at Octopus’ agile tariff pricing on a 30 minute basis here: https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard then I think that we FIRE’ed types could possibly benefit this system. Certainly I do use most of my electricity during the day when it is cheap. Shutting my desktop PC off from 4pm to 7pm would be no great hardship.
It is the poor workers and non-FIRE’d types that will be out at work all day and need to use power during the evening peak that will get really hammered.
It would be possible to optimise it even further. A nice big power bank (like Ermine’s Bluetti one), charge it up during the day with cheap electricity and use that in the evening. I really think though that if that needs doing (power shifting), that the government should be doing it on an industrial scale, not relying on each of us individually to solve their uneven load distribution or pricing us off at peak times.
Optimising my portfolio is enough for me, optimising electricity useage would be a bridge to far. I agree with what ZXSpectrum said, words to the effect that he just wants to be able to put the heating on when he wants, which being wealthy enables. (A massive paraphrase I half remember, but I agree with him.)
Plus there is a major downside if if all goes horribly wrong: https://www.vox.com/2021/2/20/22292926/texas-high-electric-bills-winter-storm-griddy
I remembered that on the news from a few years ago. People were sleeping out in their cars and running their engines because it was so cold and there was no electricity. Although at $17,000 for a couple of days electricity, it would have been better if they had been cut off too!
I would just stick on a standard tariff, it may be financial sub-optimal due to being home all day, but it avoid any risks, so no point in a smart meter. I think I will keep saying no to the smart meter despite their latest claims it has exceeded its working life.
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I do have a smart meter but I do live in Spain! It’s useful for me track my buying from the grid and selling to the grid balance via my solar panels. I use them for heat in winter and obviously air con in summer. My bills are zero as the credit pays the standing charge as well. Payback is five years and I can add another house to the credit as well
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Real sun for them panels rather than the watery stuff in Blighty 😉 There again I’m not one for the heat, I enjoyed Madrid on a work trip way back when in early November, temperature was about right for me, each to their own!
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I retired or stopped work at 55, three years ago. If I wanted the same standard of living I have here then I would have needed to work another five years for the extra wiggle room in the SIPP. Getting used to the heat is interesting and it does get very very hot. I live around 40kms from where the Spaghetti Westerns were filmed. I jus getting used to the heat. I do love the comments section as it goes all over the place
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The memory of driving a rented car w/o aircon and a spectrum analyser and some optical transmission kit from France through Spain on the E-80 to Aveiro in Portugal in July still stays with me. We returned in the middle of the night to try and stay alive after the experience of the outbound journey. I know some guys in Murcia, now that’s just hard IMO 😉
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In a previous existence I was at a conference of commercial investigators. It wasn’t my job, but there was free food and stationary. A lady gave a rather boring talk about the advantages to small businesses using Facebook.
At the end a chap explained that she clearly had not researched her audience. And could she recommend ways of generating mass fake accounts to use in friending and locating debt defaulters.
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I don’t get the hate for AI myself.
I’m old enough to remember when Excel was introduced. It just enabled easy/quicker mathematical analysis which in turn meant just more mathematical analysis done in Excel. Great for Microsoft.
Many white collar jobs are just copying and pasting words and code from place to another with minor modification. All that AI will do is automate more of that process, making the human editor at the end more productive.
Now lets take art. Major artists don’t make their own art (since like the middle ages), they get someone else to do it and maybe touch it up a bit. Similarly there’s hardly a photo taken these days that isn’t photoshopped (looking at you Kate Middleton). If the picture is going to be touched up by a human anyway does it matter if AI or a human being made the starting point? We have form here, Marcel Duchamp exhibited a french urinal as art 100 years ago …
That said. I don’t do social media for other reasons. It’s mostly just a sea of wank.
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It’s an aesthetic call, not a philosophical one. I don’t find the results pleasing at the current stage of usage. Culture gets away from you as you get older though – I don’t like rap, I switch off anything with obvious Autotune and I’m not that keen on vocal fry in female vocals. I didn’t grow up with so much of any of them. It’s fine that culture moves on – I can sort of admire rap as modern poetry even if it isn’t to my taste. Current AI art has something in it that jars me off.
It’s not quite my recollection – I did originate designs and some new ways, building on the work of others to be sure. One it’s shaken dow a bit more I must find out if AI can take some of the grunt out of coding though, I am only interested in the end function now and it was never really a passion in the first place.
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there was a post about this on the Indeedably blog – the “Schooled” article from 7th May 2023
You’d find it interesting, I think
from the post:
Total time taken to develop a functional solution? Working on my own, I had unsuccessfully invested weeks. It took the AI less than two hours, and most of that was consumed by me refining the prompts.
Total number of code lines I had to write to reach the solution? Zero.
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I remember reading that. What prompted the idea was buying one of these data loggers rather than the more general purpose one half the price because I CBA to do the programming to get the second to do the job of the first, I just wanted to investigate the sensor data.
I had a look at copilot. The $100 subscription stuck in my craw. I could easily afford $100, but the atavisitic memory of shooting every subscription in sight as the first step I took in the emergency of wanting to leave work still holds power. I don’t write code professionally, and I don’t think I can jump over the principle. The Ermine does not do subscriptions. No apps, I use PAYG and I buy things like cars cash. One of these days perhaps I may allow Ida Auken into my head, but Github Copilot isn’t going to be the gateway drug.
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