As of today at 1:11pm EDT, I'm on the market for a 50" Mini-LED/OLED dumb TV in the US. I remember a while back that people were talking about commercial displays or hospitality displays to avoid the built-in spyware of "Smart" TVs, but in 2026, both of these also seem to have built-in spyware (although business-oriented). I just need 3 HDMI + RCA inputs, and an Optical Audio output, don't need any software on the TV itself.

Do you have any pointer? Or should I just take the L and get any smart TV, never set up network and hope for the best?

#AskFedi #AskFediverse

Walked in Time Square subway station where “Mistral AI” plastered all the walls and support columns with ads listing the “hard problems” it purports to solve, like diseases, logistics, space exploration and the stock market.

It didn’t escape me that almost none of these “problems” require more tech thrown at them but are mostly policy decisions, especially for diseases that are making a recent come-back after having been declared eradicated.

At this point in the Kool-AId process I’m not sure if the omission is intentional or borne out of ignorance, but like incompetence/malice it doesn’t really matter.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence

I have a lovely coworker who expresses himself like LLM chatbots. As far as I know he isn’t using them in the offending exchanges, including because he does it orally and in short Slack messages. But the tells are there: overly cheery in a context that doesn’t warrant it, bullet points everywhere (although rarely exactly three, another LLM tell), repeating most of what I said to him (although it can make sense in some contexts).

If I hadn’t seen him in a videoconference I’d have more doubts, although video generation has gone a long way. More importantly, this is what I mean when I say I don’t want to be “tainted” by interacting in natural language with a computer system. My personal expression style hasn’t changed since I started using programming languages to make computers do my bidding, and yet sustained exposure to LLM output, whether you requested it or it was imposed on you, can do that for you.

I feel like “expressing oneself like a chatbot” should be an insult, and so I’m staying as far as possible from these abominations.

#AI #LLM #Chatbot

This is now day 3 of an uncoordinated Distributed Denial of Service attack against my web server as thousands of different IPs probably belonging to popular AI company crawlers query nonsensical URLs that are necessarily not cached and hog the web server ressources, making all the websites I host unavailable for 5-20 minutes (my free monitoring tier checks every 5 minutes) at a time.

And this is with a firewall excluding the entire Alibaba IP block. It used to be even worse at times before.

Oh good, Claude Desktop on MacOS silently and continually whitelists browser extensions that aren't installed yet on browsers that aren't installed yet that Anthropic says it doesn't support yet.

#AI #Privacy #InfoSec
Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop — That Privacy Guy!

I hate to say I’m desperate, but I haven’t had work in *months*. If anyone’s looking for a #freelance senior #wordpress #developer, please keep me in mind. I do full, custom theme builds, specialize in #accessibility and #semantic code, and am a great communicator about time estimates and budgets! My full portfolio is www.amberweinberg.com

If you don’t have any work, I would appreciate a boost 😊

#frontend #frontendDeveloper #development #WPJobs #needwork #hireme #hire #getfedihired

@silverwizard Did you see that in DeltaChat? They're pushing users away from their own email accounts?

delta.chat/en/legacy-move

Me looking for a job in 2012, bright and bushy tailed: I'd love to work on a video game!

Me looking for a job in 2026, ragged and teary-eyed: Please, anything but AI!

Oh yeah, I'm looking for a new position, either remote or in New York City if the rest of the team would also be in the same office. I'm a lead software engineer by title but I'm also open to technical management. I'm knowledgeable in many web technologies including but not limited to: #PHP, #TypeScript, #Accessibility, #AWS, #Kubernetes, #SQL and #NoSQL.

I work best in medium to larger structures where responsibilities are well-separated, and middleware has been my mainstay for the past decade. I will not use AI assistants.

#FediHire

Chatbots may be able to pass medical exams, but that doesn’t mean they make good doctors, according to a new, large-scale study of how people get medical advice from large language models.

This quote from 404media.co/chatbots-health-me… is accurate, but it absolutely didn't need a large-scale study to be said. Machine learning, of which Large Language Models depend on, are really good at laser-focusing on a specific outcome. So they can pass exams with relative ease: clear and limited goals, discrete grading, that's machine learning bread and butter.

But they aren't humans, who were the ones medical exams were designed for. So you can't make the same assumptions about LLMs passing medical exams as you would with actual humans. Of course, the natural language interface unnecessarily blurs the line.
RE: 404media.co/.ghost/activitypub…

Looking for video game recommendation: I looked into X4 (2018) and I feel like it's just a bit too much for me in terms of gameplay depth. Plus I'm not thrilled about AI generated voice lines (a review describe them as "TikTok AI voice" which I know will irritate me). I still have a space sim itch to scratch, what would you recommend to someone who enjoyed Freelancer (2003) back in the day?

#VideoGames #VideoGame #InSearchFor

Your password must:
- Be between 15 and 20 characters.
- Include at least four of the following: lowercase letter, uppercase letter, number AND symbol.

What kind of fresh hell this is now?

Inspired by @erikcats ’s Inktober post, my 11 year old daughter asked me to post her own #Inktober entries.

Here’s Day 1: Mustache

#Inktober2025