Peace, love, logic and reason.
That’s what humans should live by.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1140547/samsung-chip-workers-offered-a-340000-average-bonus-as-union-pushes-toward-1m-and-an-18
Leaked transcripts show memory-line staff offered up to 607% bonuses worth $477,000, while logic-chip employees get as little as 50%. The 45,000-person walkout, if it lands, would be the largest in semiconductor-industry history.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1140535/flipper-one-we-need-your-help
With Flipper One, we’re reimagining what a Linux cyberdeck can be — it’s a huge project. We’re opening up the development process and asking the community for help.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1137331/meta-deploys-momfluencers-to-counter-child-safety-criticism-meta-is-using-instagram-infl
- Meta invites the moms to glossy events promoting its “Teen Account” safeguards, and the influencers then repeat the company’s talking points to their thousands of followers.
- Many of the influencer posts include easy-to-miss disclosures or hashtags indicating they have a paid partnership with Meta.
- TTP also identified doctors and psychologists who are touting Instagram’s Teen Accounts and have a financial relationship with Meta.
- Despite Meta’s promotion of the Teen Accounts, reports have shown that they fail to protect young users from content related to sex, drugs, and violence.
- Some influencers are also advocating for one of Meta’s top policy priorities: legislation to require the Apple and Google app stores to handle user age verification.
- One medical influencer who was paid to post about the Teen Accounts said they had not been aware of child safety lawsuits against Meta and felt “manipulated” by the company.
- The influencer said Meta edited the script for their Teen Accounts post and gave it an algorithmic boost, helping it rack up millions of views.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1137275/data-centers-raise-nearby-temperatures-by-up-to-4-degrees-in-phoenix
Heat pollution from data centers can boost air temperatures in downwind neighborhoods by as much as 4 degrees Fahrenheit, researchers at Arizona State University report in a new study conducted in the Phoenix metro area.
The ASU study is the first to directly measure air temperatures downwind and upwind of data centers to record the real-time effects of waste heat on surrounding communities.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1135683/x-announces-significant-restrictions-to-free-accounts-50-posts-and-200-replies-per-day
- Direct Messages (daily): The limit is 500 messages sent per day.
- Posts: 50 original posts and 200 replies per day for unverified accounts. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals.
- Changes to account email: 4 per hour.
- Following (daily): The technical follow limit is 400 per day. Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior.
- Following (account-based): Once an account is following 5,000 other accounts, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1131961/former-microsoft-vp-says-microsoft-missed-the-ai-wave-like-the-internet-and-mobile-as-co
Context
He was replying to a tweet with the text:
In the past 6 weeks we have seen a rather strong shift for both Xbox and Windows implementing requested features after years of ignoring them.
This is great but…what changed for both of this massive orgs to suddenly start listening?
Let’s see…
- You make Bing your biggest bet with AI. Not a single percentage point of user share goes up from that investment
- You bet on Copilot with AI. Not even 3% of paying users use it, even when the distribution is massive, and it’s pre-deployed right in their faces
- Then you hire the wrong people and assign them to jobs they are obviously not qualified to do. It gets worse.
- Your OEMs invest on NPUs to then find out that nobody cares because not a single valuable use case was built for those in Windows/Office.
- Your GitHub, which should be thriving in the age of AI, drops below 90% SLA
- Your COGS go up significantly
- Your shares drop significantly
- The only thing you can brag about looks like an utilities company, not a software company
- Shareholders start asking the hard questions
There’s a point where you start getting fun phone calls and an increasing number of voices start asking you to maybe listen to customers.
I say that as a very positive thing (I know I don’t sound like that, I’m grumpy by nature, can’t help it). This is actually positive: If you don’t push for change, change pushes you.
Hit Factory Reset might be what Microsoft actually needed, since Hit Refresh wasn’t enough. Even if it comes with a ton of disruptions.
Source: Mat Velloso on X/Twitter.
Mat Velloso who was most recently the Vice President of Product for the Developer Platform at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. He also led AI developer products at Google DeepMind (including the Gemini API and Google AI Studio). But before his stints at Google and Meta, Velloso spent over 12 years at Microsoft, where he served as a Partner Director managing AI innovation in Windows and, interestingly, spent four years as the Technical Advisor to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1131742/linkedin-user-hides-ai-prompt-injection-in-bio-to-force-recruitment-spam-to-be-sent-in-o
I put a prompt injection into my LinkedIn bio and recruiters are messaging me in Old English and calling me Lord.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1130290/roblox-must-face-iowa-consumer-fraud-claims
On May 13, 2026, the Iowa District Court for Polk County issued a ruling allowing Iowa’s consumer fraud lawsuit against Roblox Corporation to move forward.
The Court denied Roblox’s attempt to dismiss the core of Iowa’s lawsuit and determined that the suit may move forward with its deception claims and certain unfair practice claims. The claims maintain that Roblox purposefully misled parents by misrepresenting both the quantity and the quality of its safety tools.
The Court’s decision allows the following arguments made by the Attorney General’s Office to continue:
- Roblox falsely promised a “safety review of every uploaded image, audio, and video file” to create a false sense of security;
- Roblox intentionally misrepresented the amount of violent and sexual content on its platform to secure lower age ratings on various app stores;
- Roblox uses unfair practices, including the default allowance of adult-child communications and the misleading implementation of in-game currency;
- Roblox lacks sufficient parental controls and fails to warn users about potential harm.
Importantly, the Court rejected Roblox’s attempt to evade the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act by arguing its platform is not “merchandise” simply because it is free to play. Noting that Roblox profits by selling user data and in-game currency, the Court ruled that exempting companies like Roblox under their “free” argument would “create a large loophole.”
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1127554/one-in-seven-people-have-used-ai-instead-of-seeing-a-gp-study-finds
One in five people who use AI for health advice say it has discouraged them from seeking professional healthcare
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1127117/shl0ms-famous-prankster-on-x-twitter-baited-ai-haters-by-posting-a-real-painting-by-mone
Comments
Context
The painting is one of the 250 oil paintings in the renowned French Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series in which he depicted scenes from his home flower garden over the final 31 years of his life.
As the post went viral, many of the critics began deleting their replies, but @SHL0MS and other users such as @Jediwolf took screenshots of some of the best replies before they disappeared.
Individual replies
Critics, however, were eager to point out all kinds of “obvious” details that show why the “AI” Monet can’t hold a candle to a genuine Monet. One person even took the time to write out an 850-word breakdown of the AI work’s shortcomings.
“I’m disappointed I have to even point it out,” writes @egg_oni. “There is no cohesion to the depth and color choices. The reflection of the tree bleeds into the lilypads with no regard for spatial depth or contrast. The background lilypad-algae amalgam is egregiously vague, like most AI art.”
“The reflection in AI art is just noise splattered right,” writes @jordoxx. “Monet actually understood how light behaves on water.”
“The choice of color in places e.g. the purple around the lily pads sticks out to me as decidedly worse than most Monet,” writes @0xchiefyeti. “I get a sense that the artist failed to connect their eyes to the brush/palette […]”
“No frame, no sense of the threshold between subject and object, just colors,” writes @robertjett_.
“I would say that the allegedly real one here is superior in the sense that it carries, and conveys more information than the artificial one,” writes @artprograce. “The dark cold reflection of the trees triggers my attention. They strike me as slightly off, too dirty, and too pronounced to be natural.”
“I’m no artist but a real Monet actually looks like a real place…” writes @amaldorai. “the further back you get in this picture the less it looks like anything at all.”
“Depth, contrast, and cohesion are the most obvious,” writes @para_dim3. “There’s also no clear focal point.”
“It feels less lively,” writes @AzuriSplashes. “It lacks the texture, the rugged edges, the folds, the crevices and creases and bevels and topology of plastic arts. The fine, calculated highlights. The AI version is granulated pixelation, and it looks that way, it lacks the mess of humanity.”
“The fact that it looks like s**t and is s**t,” writes @RDL0013 in a since-deleted reply. “Slop. Doesn’t look anywhere near like a Monet. Looks exactly like somebody trying to replicate style and achieving like 20% of it. Not as vibrant as Monet’s typical choice of colors. Looks dull.”
“There’s no coherent composition,” writes @HundtRichard. “The eye is drawn to the 1/3rd from bottom, 1/3rd from left region and there’s nothing really to focus on. The lilly’s contrast is too low and the negative space around it too cluttered. The surface texture in the water regions are too vertical.”
“[T]here is no consistency in colour choice,” writes @Polymind_. “The view looks obscured perspective wise and feels like there is too much detail in the AI version, which if I am thinking correctly comes back again to the colours being so distinct and contrasty.”
“As an amateur art enjoyer, the only criticism I can offer is that the AI generated image does not make me feel anything,” writes @ThrosturTh. “It does not conjure emotion, thought or wonder. It’s just a colorful wallpaper pattern. If you look up ‘monet painting’ in Google images, you feel something.”
“There’s a certain harshness, no soft blending of colors, no depth, no symbiosis of the elements,” writes @JesTer396.
“The AI seems to be unable to distinguish plant reflections and submerged plants, for one,” writes @DavyRogue27930. “It’s combining tokens from the two randomly and the result is an incoherent muddle of inconsistently saturated greens.”
“Spatial coherence,” writes @enfilmigult. “The phony gen-AI pic isn’t getting it right and the reflections look like they’re growing out of the water. You look at the painting and instantly see the angle of the water surface. Also those lily pads are hideous, looks like someone drew on them.”
“Because it’s crap. That simple,” writes @nightingale9181. “This ain’t no painting. No talent to it. AI needs to go.”
“I present you with my eye lines, thickness denotes how quickly my eye moved,” writes @KEMOS4BE in a since deleted post, which included helpful illustrations. “One has a sensible, meandering composition that fits the subject.”
People are pointing out that results of this experiment are in line with what studies have shown about how people perceive art differently in light of how it was produced. The famous 2004 Kruger study into something called the effort heuristic found that people liked and valued artworks more if they believe they took more time and effort to create.
There is also a natural human bias against AI. A 2024 study published in Nature found that while people generally prefer AI-generated artworks over human-made ones when they didn’t know they were AI-generated, they preferred AI art less after finding out that AI was behind it.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1122224/nuclear-power-plants-far-more-popular-than-ai-data-centers-for-local-areas
Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor.
These results, from a March 2-18 Gallup survey, represent the first time Gallup has asked about data center construction, a topic that has met fierce opposition from local residents in many parts of the country. These data centers house computing equipment that helps power AI technology used by businesses, universities and other institutions. The centers cover large areas of land, require extensive amounts of electricity to operate and need substantial water to cool the equipment, raising concerns about their impact on the environment and local electric bills.
The data center question parallels the wording Gallup uses to ask about local nuclear power plant construction. In the same March survey, 53% of Americans say they oppose building a nuclear energy plant in their area, far less than the 71% opposed to data center construction. Since Gallup first asked the nuclear power plant question in 2001, the high point in opposition has been 63%.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1122224/nuclear-power-plants-far-more-popular-than-ai-data-centers-for-local-areas
Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor.
These results, from a March 2-18 Gallup survey, represent the first time Gallup has asked about data center construction, a topic that has met fierce opposition from local residents in many parts of the country. These data centers house computing equipment that helps power AI technology used by businesses, universities and other institutions. The centers cover large areas of land, require extensive amounts of electricity to operate and need substantial water to cool the equipment, raising concerns about their impact on the environment and local electric bills.
The data center question parallels the wording Gallup uses to ask about local nuclear power plant construction. In the same March survey, 53% of Americans say they oppose building a nuclear energy plant in their area, far less than the 71% opposed to data center construction. Since Gallup first asked the nuclear power plant question in 2001, the high point in opposition has been 63%.
6 Million views, not replies.
Only 1,300 replies.