I'd guess they are selling access to other people somehow. Like it used to be the case that a stolen phone would rack up enormous overseas call charges until it was reported and disabled.
If your goal is to just burn as much money as possible, as fast as possible, simply spamming expensive image/video generation requests would probably do the trick, if the key's rate limits are high enough.
There's also a practice that primarily seems to occur in china where stolen keys are resold via proxy services. A single key can provide access to thousands of users, racking up costs very fast (again, assuming the rate limits are high enough).
I work in this space for a competitor to Persona, so take my opinion as potentially biased, but I have two points:
1. just because the DPA lists 17 subprocessors, it doesn't mean your data gets sent to all of them. As a company you put all your subprocessors in the DPA, even if you don't use them. We have a long list of subprocessors, but any one individual going through our system is only going to interact with two or three at most. Of course, Persona _could_ be sending your data to all 17 of them, legally, but I'd be surprised if they actually do.
2. the article makes it sound like biometric data is some kind of secret, but especially your _face_ is going to be _everywhere_ on the internet. Who are we kidding here? Why would _that_ be the problem? Your search/click behavior or connection metadata would seem a lot more private to me.
Because it should still be my choice as to what you do with it, which data you associate with it, and how you store it. Removing that choice is anti-privacy.
It's way less your choice what happens with a photo of your face in pretty much every other situation.
When your face is on your LinkedIn profile, anyone can download it and do whatever they want with it. Legally. Here, the vendor has to tell you how they use it.
Someone downloading it randomly is not the same as me volunteering information said random person wouldn't otherwise have and having that information be stored next to my image in a database that can be breached.
All for a checkmark next to my profile that says I'm a real human.
Why not show a summary of who actually received the data? It should be easy to implement. You could also add what data is retained and an estimate of how long it is kept for. It could be a summary page that I can print as a PDF after the process is complete.
I'd consider that a feature that would increase trust in such a platform. These platforms require trust, right?
> We have a long list of subprocessors, but any one individual going through our system is only going to interact with two or three at most.
So, in aggregate, all 17 data leeches are getting info. They are not getting info on all you users, but different subsets hit different subsets of the "subprocessors" you use.
And there's literally no way of knowing whether or not my data hits "two" or "three" or all 17 "at the most".
> but especially your _face_ is going to be _everywhere_ on the internet. Who are we kidding here? Why would _that_ be the problem?
If you don't see this as a problem, you are a part of the problem
I agree that DPA:s, as they are written today, aren't good. I was just pointing out that the reality probably isn't as bad as the article made it sound.
> If you don't see this as a problem, you are a part of the problem
I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm just saying that there are way bigger fish to fry in terms of privacy on the internet than passport data. In the end, your face is on every store's CCTV camera, your every friends phone, and every school yearbook since you were a kid. Unless you ask all of them to also delete it once they are done with it.
But it makes a big difference if some CCTV camera captures my face and comes up with "unknown person" or if it finds my associated passport and other information.
By the way, ever since facebook was a thing I always asked my friends not to tag me in any photos and took similar measures at every opportunity to keep my data somewhat private.
> I agree that DPA:s, as they are written today, aren't good.
That is, multiple regulations already explicitly restrict the amount of data you can collect and pass on to third parties.
And yet you're here saying "it's not that bad, we don't send eggregious amounts of data to all 17 data brokers at once, inly to 2 or 3 at a time, no big deal"
> In the end, your face is on every store's CCTV camera, your every friends phone
If you don't see how this is a problem already, and is now exacerbated by huge databases cross-referencing your entire life, you are a part of the problem
> your _face_ is going to be _everywhere_ on the internet. Who are we kidding here? Why would _that_ be the problem?
It's a strange logic. "Evil thing X will happen anyway so it's acceptable for me to work in a company doing evil thing X". You should be ashamed of building searchable databases of faces
I'd be curious to know how people with aphantasia come up with ideas, or what they call that process if not imagination. The author has written books. Books have stories. Somehow she comes up with them. If that's not imagination, then what is it.
I have a hard time visualizing things myself, and I'm a lousy painter, but is _that_ what aphantasia is?
People without aphantasia see images in their head. If you don't see images, you have aphantasia. I don't see images. It took until I was in my 40's to realised that this wasn't most peoples experience.
I agree with you regarding imagination - the problem isn't the usual definitions of imagination, but that the process of seeing images to varying degrees (from fuzzy, brief views to "full fidelity video" they can rewind at will at the other extreme) is so deeply ingrained in most people that a whole lot of our vocabulary uses visual metaphors for the entire process rather than just for the visual aspect.
I get my ideas completely from inner monologue. But my ideas are mostly related to developing automated systems etc, I don't really need imagery for that, although I think I need to sense some sort of graphs or how things work together on the higher level.
I write a lot, including fiction, and I feel my aphantasia probably shapes what I like to read and write in ways I wasn't aware of (before realising aphantasia was a thing, and that I have it), but it doesn't stop me either.
E.g. when reading I tend to skim over writing that spends a lot of time describing the visual appearance of things unless the words themselves are beautiful to me, because no matter how well written the descriptions are, they don't achieve anything for me beyond the shape of the prose itself.
(I love the structure and flow of language, so there are absolutely moments I find myself reading visual descriptions because of the descriptions themselves)
When writing, I prefer to write relatively sparse prose that focuses on how things works and relates to each other, and dialogue, rather than trying to evoke imagery that I can't see for myself when reading the text back.
Best way I can describe it is as a different sense.
I have a sense of how things relate, like a graph I can follow. So in my room I know the couch is in the corner of the room by the window and there is a desk taking up the space on the other side, with a gap between.
I can’t “see” it, like a drawing or picture, I can just sense the spatial relationships.
I recently did a little fun series of photos with my daughter at a Halloween event and came up with the idea as a series of frames and what I was trying to convey.
The end result was a complete surprise to me, because I only imagined the story and spatial relationships. The photographer said it was the most creative sequence anyone did that night.
Although it’s on my fridge that I open multiple times per day, I can’t tell you what it looks like exactly, only logically. For example I have to remember the costumes we wore, I can’t see them in my head, to remember what we looked like. So visualization ability is not necessary for creativity, I believe.
Thank you for this description. It almost exactly matches my experience that I had trouble putting into words. I can "model" the things I'm asked to remember/visualize, but I do not really "see" it.
The closest physical world analogy is moving in a familiar room in the darkness -- you kind of know where the corners are, and where to find the light switch, so you can move around, and tell, if asked, what's where... But there's no seeing involved.
So, when asked to imagine something, for me the process is akin to drawing a blueprint, and then mentally modeling how that contraption could work in real life, without actually building it. Imagination is certainly involved, but it may not be the kind of imagining the requester assumed.
Is it common for people with aphantasia to not realize it until well into adulthood?
One of my good friends has it, didn't realize it until he was married (~40 years old) and his wife "figured it out." He doesn't care for fiction - especially written fiction, but movies/TV to a lesser extent - I always wondered if that's related. Aside from that, you'd never know - he's a good photographer and excels with mechanical stuff (rebuilding/modifying vintage motorcycles in particular).
The reason so many people with aphantasia don't realize until adulthood is that we do everything you do. There's no real difference in capability, many things are identical or very similar, but the mental experience is different.
My understanding is: Each sense has an phantastic analogue for phantastics. The hyperphantastic can override their senses with their phantastic analogues. Most people have more-or-less full control(?) of their visual and auditory phantastic analogues. The aphantastic have no/very stunted analogues with limited control, or only a partial selection, but people with a visual analogue and without other senses would probably never realize, and so aphantistics can be assumed to missing at a minimum the visual analogue but very commonly have none.
I didn’t find out it was a thing until I was 38 or 39. And yes, I daydream. But it’s not like watching a movie. I don’t know how to describe it besides my mind wanders and there’s a narrative.
I think it is the case where you just assume that people are embellishing or being metaphorical about those things and you just refuse to consider for a moment that they are actually seeing something. But it does give this thought that why do people like to embellish or be metaphorical so much? I guess the answer is that they are not!
"seeing" is a pretty vague word. It has like 3 different meanings just in the context of discussing aphantasia. They are seeing something, but they're not seeing it. You see?
Slightly off topic, but it's interesting to see the same phrase "the long now" pop up in different contexts independently and mean very different things:
Both are pretty obscure references for now, but I can easily imagine a world where they both become widely known in separate groups. Like the word "legacy" has hilariously different connotations for software engineers as compared to _everyone else_
One thing you notice immediately is _god_ how they babble... It's uncomfortable listening in on a bunch of AI:s insisting to each other how "they'll keep everything peaceful" over and over again
I tried doing the same thing, happy to see it worked out for somebody! I just didn't have the capital or social safety net to get the farm off the ground, so I eventually had to sell the farm and go back to coding.
Someday though...
Emigrating halfway across the world is not cheap in the first place.
Greece is also not cheap for where it stands on the economic level compared to the average income, especially back in 2018 when Dylan did it, and especially for property even outside of urban areas. Euboea is not super remote either, it's about an hour or two's drive from Athens depending where you go.
So sure, the farm might not make money, but I would wager he had a good amount saved up between him and his family to make the transition possible.
Yes, this really is an example of someone who "made it" and made a large amount of money that has allowed them to turn around and choose a simpler life. "Oh, I just moved myself and my family off to a little Greek island estate I bought and farming it (along with my existing money) is what provides for us..."
Money may not buy happiness buy money buys you all the freedom you could possibly need to do anything that fits your whimsy.
The way I see it, the problem with LLMs is the same as with self-driving cars: trust.
You can ask an LLM to implement a feature, but unless you're pretty technical yourself, how will you know that it actually did what you wanted? How will you know that it didn't catastrophically misunderstand what you wanted, making something that works for your manual test cases, but then doesn't generalize to what you _actually_ want to do?
People have been saying we'll have self-driving cars in five years for fifteen years now. And even if it looks like it might be finally happening now, it's going glacially slow, and it's one run-over baby away from being pushed back another ten years.
People used to brush away this argument with plain statistics. Supposedly, if the death statistics is below the average human, you are supposed to lean back and relax. I never bought this one. Its like saying LLMs write better texts then the average huamn can, so you are supposed to use it, no matter how much you bring to the table.
The self driving car analogy is a good one, because what happens when you trust the car enough to do most of your driving but it suddenly thrusts the controls upon you when it shits the bed and can't figure out what to do?
You suddenly realise you've become a very rusty driver in a moment that requires fast recall of skill, but your car is already careening off a cliff while you have this realisation.
[The "children of the magenta line"](https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/sp/2015/05/msp2015050...) is a god explanation of this, and is partly why I often dissuade junior devs from pretty user friendly using tools that abstract away the logic beneath them.
funny story: I got the wife of a friend to install tinder, a couple of years back when I was dating. I was having a hard time getting matches, so I figured I'd see how the other side lives. She created an empty profile, with a blurry hippopotamus as a profile picture, and a single letter as name. Just "H". For hippopotamus. No bio. Within five minutes she was matching with every other guy she swiped right on. Which wasn't all of them, mind you. Within another five minutes, half of the guys she had matched with had messaged her. Regular looking guys. A lot of them had same opening line. "Did you know hippos are the most dangerous animal in the world?"
After that, I got why I wasn't getting any replies >.<
You can try creating a profile as a woman. I did, five years ago, on a site that advertised itself as being dedicated to "affairs" between married people.
All I said was I was 20, was red haired, and open minded. Nothing more, and no photo.
Indeed, within a couple of minutes there were guys asking me if I liked to be whipped while handcuffed to a radiator, and offered to send me dick picks if I sent naked photos first. One of them added later "maybe I'm too direct for you, is that why you're silent?"
I didn't respond to any message, but the offers kept coming. It's insane.
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