I have never in my entire life wanted to "generate an image or video". I like taking photographs and recording videos because they represent the reality of my life. Who would ever want to "generate" fake images as a matter of normal daily activities?
That is indeed a really weird statement from them.
I mostly engage with text based social media or highly technical content so I know that I'm not exactly in the center of the bell curve.
I can see a use case for "AI let's go finding me holiday destination and help me plan my travel and stay". I can also see people wanting to "improve" images and videos etc to remove "blemishes".
But straight up generating random images and videos as content center pieces? That seems like a niche at best unless it's unwittingly done through the "algorithm".
But for mastodon, even if it technically "doesn't matter" nobody stops there. You see things written like "The hardest part of getting started on Mastodon is the first step,"[1]
They talk about chosing a server based on region, language, topics of interest, or which ones your friends use. I've even some mention that your server choice can signal your political leanings.
I don't worry about any of those things when I choose an email provider or ISP.
I never understood the hate for Recall. The idea is definitely good. In fact I want this sort of feature to work across my devices. I guess people don't trust Microsoft to implement it in a secure way?
I think people already just don't want their screen recorded "24/7" regardless of Microsoft, but then when you add Microsoft into the mix, and potentially sending stuff off-host for AI etc, it gets worse?
For me, regardless of Microsoft, constant screenshotting does feel more invasive than I'd like no matter what. It's already bad enough that websites do it on their own properties.
Because every time someone checks it, it turns out it's not implemented in a secure way. You really don't want an accidental transcript of your PII and payment details to just stay there, readable to anyone with access to your user. And that's even without being sceptical and expecting the information to be mined and sold soon.
There's a lot of bad actors on the internet, which makes running a small website quite a chore -- and this one is much more visible than the average small website. At the very minimum you must keep it up to date, because it will be under a constant barrage of exploit attempts. Then there are DDoS attacks (people have tried to used my webserver as a way to DDoS my ISP in the past). Then there's the crazy people who will email you demanding why you broke their IPv6 or that you urgently fix some issue that and they are "losing money" because of it.
I get that popularity comes with problems, but I don't see how the attack surface is any larger than a normal website?
It looks like the entire site is implemented in Javascript, which tries to fetch resources from various HTTPS URLs, some of which are configured to serve only over IPv6, others only over IPv4. But that just requires configuring a normal webserver to serve regular HTTP traffic, which is the bare minimum exposure to exploits any website has.
What I actually said is that it's a chore to run a small website, and that applies even to a simple static site (although you're right, way more if your site runs backend scripts). Bad actors are still going to try to DDoS you, attack your static webserver, and send you entitled emails.
Geolocation queries are probably one of the bigger costs. Google is a rip-off here but to use them as an example, they charge $2.83 per 1000 lookups for the first 90k/month. You could easily spend a few hundred per month that way.
If you were trying to set up a replacement for this site that's cheaper to run, you could probably drop the geolocation feature, it's not really necessary.
I work for IPinfo, and this is a tangent note on a tangent note. We offer a free IP geolocation database, and we recently started providing an unlimited API query service for free against that database.
Maintaining an IP geolocation database requires some upkeep. You have to download the database regularly (in our case, daily) to keep the data fresh, and you need a system in place to make it useful.
That’s why we created a dedicated API tier that offers unlimited requests. The data is being used by many open-source projects, so we’re simply doing our part to support them by providing both the data and the API infrastructure service. Last year, we processed over 2 trillion API requests across all our API services. There are many projects, Open Source and Enterprise, that are making billions of requests daily, and they are on a free tier plan.
> We don't train or retain anything related to your codebase.
It would be good to have this mentioned on the website somewhere, as part of a privacy policy. Right now I can't find any details on the site, which is preventing me from trying this out with a production repository.
I want ai agents controlling my laptop, my desktop and my phone. I'm tired of doing everything manually. These personal devices should be brimming with intelligence, anticipating my every move, offering to complete my tasks, touching up photos and videos automatically, having a perfect memory and awareness of my online and offline life. I think the real barrier right now is cost. But i can't wait to get to that future.
Example: sometimes i start working on a thing on my laptop in the living room, realise I would rather finish it on the desktop. My laptop has a camera, the desktop has a webcam, my phone has multiple cameras. An ai agent should be monitoring all these and more sensors and my laptop screen and be able to deduce that I want to continue on the desktop. By the time I reach the desktop it should be awake, and in the same state I left off on the laptop.
