this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
287 points (95.8% liked)

Technology

59157 readers
2348 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 73 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I wouldn't be surprised if Alphabet has used data from all these sources all the time.

That's actually the reason I don't use gmail except for registering Android, or use google calender, or google search except occasionally. I have my youtube account separate from my Android, and I don't allow any cloud services, like photo or any other storage or sync services.

The power Google can gain from using these things in combination is huge, just like Facebook influenced the 2016 US presidential election, Google/Alphabet could use this for both political and financial gains to an enormous degree, that would have been completely unheard of prior to Internet becoming widely used.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] LostDeer@infosec.pub 46 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can't wait for bard to join the google graveyard with stadia once the ai fad passes!

[–] dukk@programming.dev 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If it passes.

I hope it passes.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's already starting to, the AI groups of devs basically showed off an alpha to their CEOs, then those CEOs thought it's game changing....while the devs were like "no it's an alpha/pre-alpha and is really dumb"...but the CEOs rolled with it and are now finding how bad it is...so it's been getting slowly dropped. It's %100 a fad and has limited applications. It's really cool tech and I have used it, but it's not something that's going to replace many people.

[–] tdawg@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This is only true for generative and sumariziation systems that are directly consumer facing. Current AI systems have a myriad of applications for internal tooling and B2b type systems. At my work we've built a vast array of tools using all kinds of modern AI that have delighted our clients. Things that previously wouldn't have been possible for the average small buisness like filling out patient information by voice.

People like to shit on AI because they think of the thing google search uses or ChatGPT but it really is changing the world just not all at once. There will be more consumer facing advencments but more than likely these will come in the forms of things like existing products that get augmented in some way to aid usability (AI tooling is fantastic at facilitating accessibility).

AI is never going away it is here to stay and it is continuing to grow and advance

[–] whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago

Agreed. My lead at work wanted us to start trying/using Cursor.so (VS Code fork with AI as a builtin feature) and it's been pretty transformative. I don't see a lot of "hey write me a program that does x" but in my (limited) use of this, a simple "why doesn't this function work" has been pretty amazing.

I have a feeling this is a branding issue more than anything. When you could ask google plain language questions a decade ago and get responses, that seemed amazing. This to me seems like that but more advanced and I just hope they sort out the truthiness and privacy implications. On the one hand, I want the tech to advance, on the other, I would like it to not be such a privacy nightmare.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's %100 a fad and has limited applications. It's really cool tech and I have used it, but it's not something that's going to replace many people.

You are you trying to convince? Lol the more I hear this the more it seems like projection. You say it to comfort yourself because you're not certain that it will but you want it to be true.

The more it gets integrated into the ecosystems that enterprise corporations use the more it will replace people. Our Data Automation engineers are currently training an in house model on company data so you can ask if for anything from the accounting spreadsheets to when the next holiday is (accounting for ACLs of course, can have accounts receivable getting access to accounts payable.)

If you genuinely think it's a fad you most likely don't work in an industry where it has an application or use-case, yet.

I don't know where you're getting this information that it's dying out because that's just objectively untrue. Microsoft is probably pricing out AI model Saas E5 licensing as we speak, Bing chat just got an upgrade with Enterprise Tenants recently that supposedly safeguards your company data, this shit is not going anywhere no matter what lies you're telling yourself. It's not replacing human oversight anytime soon but it absolutely will reduce the amount of humans behind screens at virtually every company in the next decade.

Meanwhile new jobs will open up in AI specific integration as it inevitably becomes too much for Cloud and Data engineers to handle.

"siLlY gOoGle, iTs tHe nEXt cRyPtO" just shows how little you know about it. Probably because you work in a completely unrelated industry and get your information from websites that tell you what you want to hear. Meanwhile your attempt at using AI probably amounts to breaking it's moral safety locks and then running out of ideas. If you worked in a field that AI is being used for, and know enough to lean on its ability to work through large data sets quickly while doing simple QA work to verify its information (which takes vastly less time than searching through all the data yourself) I guarantee you that you'd find it incredibly useful.

[–] SupraMario@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Lol no I literally work in this field. The shit that's being presented now is a fad. We've been doing ML for over a decade now, and all the cool little things you're talking about are not new. It's not even brand new within the last 5ish years. You're acting like this is some brand new industry because chatgpt is the new big thing. It's not it's a product of the industry that's been at this for a long time. All automation removes jobs and it's cool, but don't sit there and tell me it's going to replace jobs that require thought that you cannot build into a DB. If it doesn't have the parameters to do the job it's not capable of doing the job.

Also I thought your Google crypto quip is great...

It's not replacing human oversight anytime soon but it absolutely will reduce the amount of humans behind screens at virtually every company in the next decade.

Lol this is how all automation and any tech works...this shits been happening for centuries... it's not new.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Z4rK@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Man I can’t wait to get 100% out of gmail.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just curious- what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean abandoning/trashing your google account, or do you mean also refusing to send email to gmail recipients?

Personally I’ve gone all the way. Ditching the Google acct was just the 1st step (which implies also ditching Google Playstore). Then I quit sending email to gmail & outlook recipients. Then I went further and do an MX lookup on all email addresses to verify whether a vanity address like bob@lastname.com resolves to google. This has made #email mostly dead to me.

[–] Z4rK@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I won’t stop sending to Google recipients. I have moved my email to Proton, but because of lacking search functionality there I have not yet migrated historic emails.

I’ve stopped using other Google services and deleted data except for Maps and YouTube. Maps I can probably get rid of. YouTube I’ll keep but may be able to use a more fake account.

[–] clark@midwest.social 5 points 1 year ago

I was stuck with a Google account because I still wanted to view Youtube, but then I found alternatives like Piped and Freetube that let you import your subscriptions. Maybe that’s an option, if you’re interested.

[–] blabber6285@sopuli.xyz 11 points 1 year ago

I'm wondering what was the email usage like in the first place if you can just choose to stop sending to most people.

But to be honest, I've only sent handful of emails from my personal account within the same number of years.

[–] juniorneptune@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What makes anyone think google didn't have the access before anyway?

[–] Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 year ago

They did. Its not about that

Now you can throw in a boring pdf, into your drive, and have bard read it and summarize each chapter. For example.

I asked it to read a report i have written for school and summarize it and give mr a few pointers where i could improve it. It was nice and speedy.

Granted the report isnt super long.

Wonder how well it does on a 700 page pdf..

[–] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago

They certaintly did, and already used AI to comb through it for their monitized stalking campaign. I think the only difference now is you can now make use of this somehow too, but I only read the headline lol.

[–] reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Me, who's had a Gmail account as my main email for twenty plus years. 😞

[–] vale@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've been meaning to switch off of Google for months now, but never had the time to properly research what exactly that entails

[–] silentknyght@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Curious what you decide. I feel trapped. My Gmail has been my primary account for almost 20 years. With that kind of longevity, switching would be extremely disruptive.

[–] berg@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When I did it I just forwarded my mails to the new service (fastmail) and changed mail address whenever a mail got forwarded in. When I didn't receive a forwarded mail for a year or so I deleted my old mail and never looked back.

If you use a password manager this get easier though, since you can just lookup where the old mail is used.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] filcuk@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I kept Gmail, but gradually switched over to proton. Eventually, year or two later, it's full of emails I don't glcare about. Start now and take it slow.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Norgur@kbin.social 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

If you choose to use the Workspace extensions, your content from Gmail, Docs, and Drive is not seen by human reviewers, used by Bard to show you ads, or used to train the Bard model.

Yeah... really comforting, Google. Really comforting.

🤷‍♂️ you weren't going to pay for it, gotta pay for compute somehow.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] sirico@feddit.uk 18 points 1 year ago
[–] Doorbook@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

These companies just push hard for people to leave them.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I know people who have their passwords on a google doc or email passwords. I foresee a lot of accounts getting hacked once people can crack the right prompts for the LLM.

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They'll probably isolate the models from each other, but yeah, if they want to train shared models from private data then that could happen.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

But bard is the public one, right?

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] Zaphod@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean, if Bard can access those things, that means Google already had access in the first place. I also don't mind if that means I get to enjoy a better service overall.

The things I don't want Google to know about I have separate anyways

[–] ares35@kbin.social 19 points 1 year ago

narrator: 'google knows about those things, too.'

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Switched to outlook but soon found out that some of your emails arent even received. That occured when I was trying to sign up to this lemmy instance. Luckily the admin was a very friendly person who understood the situation and manually approved my signup.

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Outlook is just choosing another big tech. Why not something like protonmail or tutanota?

[–] PastorHaggis@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm starting to switch over to Proton. I haven't paid for it yet but my plan is to start paying and potentially grab usernames on other sites so I can have a consistent email across any site I decide to use.

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Proton unlimited was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Very nice vpn service that works even on arch Linux on school wifi (making sure to switch to tcp protocol), e2ee mail that I use to send confidential medical records to drs, included simplelogin premium (currently over 400+ aliases), excellent and knowledgeable customer support, and so much more. I just really love this company and their role in the FOSS, privacy, security space.

[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I mean, at this point I find very difficult to believe that people willingly putting their entire life in free Google accounts don't know that they're basically ads meat anyway. The outrage makes no sense.

[–] Bluesheep@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Without going to whole hog and hosting my own infrastructure, what are some good alternatives?

[–] Engywuck@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Mailbox, posteo, zoho, skiff...

[–] mishimaenjoyer@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

proton suite. i'm using it since 2016 and never looked back.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

I thought it was a get people hooked then charge out the nose later thing.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] hornedfiend@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Good luck using all my spam I get on my gmail inbox to serve me ads that get blocked instantly.

Edit: openboard autocorrect.

[–] AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Only reason I ever use my gmail is because they are tied to my phone and some of the games on my phone, otherwise I wouldn't be using them.

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I deleted google and only have game accounts email only from simplelogin aliases. Maybe you'll eventually realize google is a shit company and leave that environment as well.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›