A1kmm @ A1kmm @lemmy.amxl.com

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2 yr. ago

As if telling Reddit, Facebook, or Google what to put on their roadmap as an ordinary consumer would actually work.

At least with FLOSS if you want something, and if it is a good thing the developers like, you can likely get it merged. If not, you can fork and still have the feature locally. Good luck getting that freedom with a closed-source product.

For software I develop, I do find it is helpful if people making feature suggestions tell developers what is useful for them and why, but that doesn't entitle them any of my time to demand what features I prioritise. The alternative is "I gave you something you like for free, so now I owe you to make it even better for you", which is obviously nonsense.

I thought the orbs were supposedly open source

No they are proprietary as a whole. Parts of the hardware design are published, and parts of the software that runs on them, but not the whole thing.

Fundamentally Worldcoin is about 'one person, one vote', and anyone can create millions of fake iris images; the point of the orb is that it is 'blessed' hardware using trusted computing (or to use the term coined by the FSF, treacherous computing) and tamper detection to make sure that a central authority (namely Sam Altman's Worldcoin foundation) has signed off on the orb running the exact secret / proprietary software running on the orb that generates an identity.

They could have alternatively have built a system that leverages government identity using zero-knowledge proof of possession of a government-signed digital identity document. But I think their fundamental thesis is that they are trustworthy to be a central authority who could create millions of fake identities if they wanted, but that governments are not.

One of the key tenets of keeping something computerised secure is 'Defence in Depth' - i.e. having multiple layers of defence, so that even if one layer is breached, the next layer (which you thought was redundant and unnecessary) prevents the attack.

Running a fully patched kernel and services / applications should protect you unless someone has a 0-day (i.e. not disclosed) exploit. Reducing the surface area by minimising what services / applications are running, using software (firejail etc...) and firewalls to limit permissions of applications / services to what is needed, etc... serves as another layer of defence. Disconnecting or physically blocking peripherals that might allow for spying is another layer; it serves its purpose if all the other layers are breached.

I think it is a positive sign - although obviously hypocritical when they are providing lethal aid to the Israeli government while it's controlled by genocidal extremist parties like Likud and Mafdal-RZ, who are using it to create the very situation for Palestinian civilians in the first place.

The bombing of civilian homes and infrastructure, combined with shootings and so on has already killed or wounded about 2% of the population in only 5 months. However, a famine could kill far faster than that; to avoid that, the IDF would only need to not interfere with the distribution of aid, allowing NGOs to provide it. Instead, they have interfered with the entry of aid at the Egyptian-Palestinian border, bombed places where aid is being distributed, and shot at civilians seeking aid on the street with machine guns.

So anything that makes that 2% of casualties not grow to 80%, for example, and frustrates the plans of Israel's far right to depopulate Gaza of Arabs is a good start, but not really enough.

Yet another thing that is only available to people with FTTP / HFC. I live within a couple of kilometres of the Melbourne CBD and still am not eligible for that.

I think doing a good analysis of strategy here will depend on a lot of factors.

Firstly, before coming up with a strategy, it is good to have a clear idea of your goals / the strategic problem you are trying to solve. I see or could infer a few possible ones: you want to work in an environment where you don't feel bullied, you want to ensure others aren't bullied, you want to see bullies punished, to maintain positives in the company and want to enjoy those without the negatives of being bullied, or perhaps that you believe in the goals of the company or have some stake in it, and want it to succeed. Different goals might lead you to a different course of action.

Next, you would want to diagnose what's really going on. Are there just a few bullies, in a company mostly full of professional people, or are the bullies the majority? Are senior leaders in on the bullying, or is it only lower level employees? Why do you think the bullies were hired in the first place - is it because bullying is considered okay in the company, or is it not considered okay but they slipped through? Why do you think the bullying hasn't been addressed already? Is it because senior managers don't know? Are the bullies friends / relatives of senior leadership? Are the bullies high performers that the company really would want to keep around, or do they get barely get anything done? Also, are the bullies even aware they are being bullies? Are they unaware they are being insensitive, and likely to change if made aware, or are they actively being malicious and well aware of the impact?

Next, consider the direction you want to take, and analyse the likely impact on your goals. You could find another job - how easy that is would depend what the job market looks like for your role, and how good the terms of your current job are. It wouldn't achieve goals around making it better for others. You could try talking to the bullies if you think that they might just be unaware of the impact of their behaviour and that they might change. If that doesn't work, you could try talking to a manager / HR member, perhaps either to arrange mediation, or for them to take action. You could also just try ignoring the bullying if it isn't having much impact.

To choose from the many possible directions, it might help to think from the perspective of the company shareholders, senior leadership, and HR department. What would you do in their shoes if you learned of the bullying? If it is the majority of the company doing the bullying, then something like replacing all the bullying staff is going to be an instant non-starter. The best possible would be to slowly roll out training, policies, and new hiring practices to try to improve the culture over time. If it is a few people who, it now turns out, are the reason for high staff turnover and lower profits, then they might be quite happy to take action. Although probably not if the bullies are the senior leaders.

There are a few different types of blockchain, differing by how they stop you just making up your own alternative chain and saying that is the real history:

• Proof of Work - prove you wasted lots of energy to add to the chain, making it prohibitively expensive to make your fake alternative chain - but also causing lots of emissions / wasting lots of energy.
• Proof of Stake - adding to the chain requires participation of the people with the most total coins in the cryptocurrency already. Essentially 'one dollar, one vote', and 'the rich get richer' brought to crypo.
• Proof of Humanity / Proof of Personhood / Proof of Identity - adding to the chain requires the participation of the most people. Attempts to bring "One person, one vote", and Universal Basic Income to crypto. There are various attempts - some require submission of photos and videos, and have an adjudication scheme built in to detect duplicates (which might fall to AI-generated faces relatively soon). Others (see Worldcoin) require a trusted central party to produce hardware which scans faces and verifies they are real and unique (and have already had data leaks from participants involved in verification). The other option is to trust governments / other existing infrastructure to verify identities (which is probably the most sensible option if you are trying to genuinely just disrupt banking, but many crypto people hate because they also have a cyberpunk fantasy of accelerating crypto-anarchy, and actually want crypto to be used for tax evasion and without the cooperation of governments).

So there are alternatives to environmental impact, but there is currently no perfect crypto. Stack that on top of the number of scammers out there riding the crypto buzz, and it is certainly not that hard to see the reasons behind the hate.

A blood clot doesn't mean there is no foul play. There are plenty of poisons that cause clotting: https://go.drugbank.com/categories/DBCAT000113 - including some that are snake venom components.

It could also be a consequence of prolonged confinement without much movement. It could also be an eventual consequence of the 2020 poisoning (there is no evidence that Novichok specifically or mild poisoning with other acetylcholinesterase inhibitors causes clots; however, severe poisoning causes respiratory paralysis which causes hypoxia, and that can cause platelet and vascular dysfunction/damage that increases the risk of thrombosis. Not many people ever have been poisoned with Novichok and survived, so the exact sequelae are uncertain).

Now, there is a question of whether the FSB would want to do a subtle execution or an ambiguous one. They did attempt an obvious one in 2020, given it involved an agent which is clearly associated with the Russian government (although perhaps if he hadn't made it overseas, that would have never come out). Since then, perhaps Putin and the FSB have less incentive to be brazen. If they didn't want to send a message, they could have just kept Navalny alive. But maybe ambiguous was a compromise they wanted - it keeps would-be dissidents fearful, but provides the cover of plausible deniability for those who would criticise the killing of a political opponent.

Taking less from the environment would be better, not taking more - especially if the global population peaks and the population shrinks.

The idea of perpetual growth of finite resource extraction that many governments and corporations try to tell us is good is getting tired. How about we settle for a good enough standard of living, and work on making it more equally distributed and on recycling to reduce / eventually eliminate the extraction of non-renewable resources?

As terrible as Putin's invasion and occupation of Ukraine is, I think the decarbonisation and transition to renewable energy as a response to it is a very positive thing. The transition to higher percentages of renewables was always going to be painful, but it is one of those things where putting it off because it is perceived to be too hard only makes it harder in the future. Ideally, we should have gone much harder much earlier - we are already locked in for a lot of warming and habitat and arable land lost, but a push now is better than going even longer without solving the problem.

Nothing like investors who they perceive will be less rational, and will buy / not sell at a price above what the fundamentals suggests is rational.

It could pay off for Reddit if they get a short squeeze - non-institutional investors might be slower to sell, and I bet a lot of people will be shorting the stock unless the IPO price is really low.

A lot of AI models are probably already trained on Reddit data. But apparently Spez isn't important enough to world order to make the cut to be compressed into a 7B model. I asked my Mistral-7B-Instruct (4-bit quantised) local LLM:

    
>>> What can you tell me about someone called u/spez, a
... nd are they a nice person or horrible?
 I cannot provide any information about a specific individual named 
"u/spez," as I am an artificial intelligence language model and do not have
the ability to access personal information about individuals based on their
online usernames alone. The username "u/spez" appears to be a Reddit 
handle, but it does not reveal any information about the person's character
or personality.

Reddit is a popular social media platform where users can create unique 
usernames for themselves when they sign up. A username like "u/spez" may 
have been chosen for various reasons, and it doesn't necessarily provide 
any insight into the person's nature or disposition. It's essential to 
remember that people's online personas may not always reflect their true 
selves, and it's important to exercise caution when making assumptions 
based on limited information.

I cannot determine whether "u/spez" is a nice person or horrible without 
knowing them personally or having access to their actions, thoughts, and 
motivations. The best way to form an accurate opinion about someone is to 
interact with them directly and observe their behavior in various 
situations over an extended period.

>>> Is it possible u/spez is Steve Huffman? Can you tell me anything based on tha
... t?
 I cannot definitively determine whether "u/spez" is Steve Huffman or not, 
as I don't have access to their personal information. Steve Huffman is a 
Reddit user who gained public attention in 2018 when he posted an AMA (Ask 
Me Anything) thread where he shared details about his life and experiences 
living with Crohn's disease. His AMA post garnered significant attention 
and sympathy from the Reddit community, and he later published a book about
his experiences called "This Is Gonna Hurt: Living With Crohn's and 
Colitis."

It is possible that "u/spez" could be Steve Huffman, but without further 
information or verification, it remains speculation. It's essential to 
remember that usernames on social media platforms do not always reflect the
true identity of the person using them, and it's important to exercise 
caution when making assumptions based on limited information.

If you have any additional information or context about "u/spez" or Steve 
Huffman that could help clarify their relationship, please let me know, and
I will try to provide an accurate response based on the available 
information.

  

Ironically the bot summary missed the crucial point that Air Canada's chatbot gave inaccurate information.

I think there is a [smear campaign against Adrian Zenz])https://www.wsj.com/articles/pro-beijing-online-campaign-targets-u-s-based-xinjiang-researcher-cybersecurity-firm-says-11659607252), more here.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/articles/2021/chinas-disappeared-uyghurs-what-satellite-images-reveal.html and https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/24/china-imprisoning-uighurs-satellite-images-xinjiang are other sources based on what can be learned from satellite imagery. There are also interviews with escapees, e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/08/uyghur-genocide-china-us-immigrant/619806/ https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/9/10/escape-from-xinjiang-muslim-uighurs-speak-of-china-persecution https://thewire.in/rights/china-uighurs-xinjiang-camps-human-rights.

Programming is the most automated career in history. Functions / subroutines allow one to just reference the function instead of repeating it. Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler in 1951; compilers, assemblers, and linkers automate creating machine code. Macros, higher level languages, garbage collectors, type checkers, linters, editors, IDEs, debuggers, code generators, build systems, CI systems, test suite runners, deployment and orchestration tools etc... all automate programming and programming-adjacent tasks, and this has been going on for at least 70 years.

Programming today would be very different if we still had to wire up ROM or something like that, and even if the entire world population worked as programmers without any automation, we still wouldn't achieve as much as we do with the current programmer population + automation. So it is fair to say automation is widely used in software engineering, and greatly decreases the market for programmers relative to what it would take to achieve the same thing without automation. Programming is also far easier than if there was no automation.

However, there are more programmers than ever. It is because programming is getting easier, and automation decreases the cost of doing things and makes new things feasible. The world's demand for software functionality constantly grows.

Now, LLMs are driving the next wave of automation to the world's most automated profession. However, progress is still slow - without building massive very energy expensive models, outputs often need a lot of manual human-in-the-loop work; they are great as a typing assist to predict the next few tokens, and sometimes to spit out a common function that you might otherwise have been able to get from a library. They can often answer questions about code, quickly find things, and help you find the name of a function you know exists but can't remember the exact name for. And they can do simple tasks that involve translating from well-specified natural language into code. But in practice, trying to use them for big complicated tasks is currently often slower than just doing it without LLM assistance.

LLMs might improve, but probably not so fast that it is a step change; it will be a continuation of the same trends that have been going for 70+ years. Programming will get easier, there will be more programmers (even if they aren't called that) using tools including LLMs, and software will continue to get more advanced, as demand for more advanced features increases.

How to work out what instance(s) if someone does this: A Lemmy instance doesn't have to send the same voting data to every instance, it could send different votes to different instances (stock Lemmy federates the same thing consistently, but there is no reason a modified Lemmy designed to catch someone doing this has to), encoding a signal into the voting pattern. Then, just check to see what signal shows up. If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.

Probably more likely to be surveillance of Snapchat.

I think there are probably at least 4 groups:

• A - don't want a national day.
• B - want a national day, but actively want to change the date.
• C - want a national day, don't care when it is, even if it is the 26th January.
• D - want a national day, and are staunchly opposed to changing the day.

I don't think D has never been a huge chunk of the population; the reason people take that position is for a range of reasons (I suspect one is they see being opposed to people who like B is part of their identity, and otherwise wouldn't care, or maybe they actually like the racist undertones of the date, or they are just conservative and don't like change, and it's been that day all their life).

B is probably growing, but C is the position of apathy. I'd imagine C is probably the largest.

The real question is then how A + B balances out D. I imagine that in some states, there is probably more A + B, but other states have a strong D contingent.

requires trusting a company not to fuck with you behind the scenes

The point of this cryptography is that you don't have to trust the company implementing it not to do that, as long as you trust the software doing the retrieval.

I wonder if their notice is not absolute nonsense. They talk about breaches of their terms of service, which I think can be found here: https://go.he.services/tc/V1/en_GB/tc.html

The terms of service do purport to prohibit 'reverse engineering' of the app, which I think the developer receiving the notice may have done to understand the protocol between Haier's service and the app. However, it looks like the developer is in Germany, and did the reverse engineering for the purpose of creating something that, in a way, competes with the app. According to https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/germany/vertraglicher-ausschluss-von-reverse-engineering, contractual provisions in Germany designed to prevent reverse engineering to create a competing independent program after the original is already available to the public are not valid.

Maybe they are saying that the developer is unlawfully interfering with their business by inducing others to breach the contract. However, the terms of service don't appear to say prohibit connecting to Haier's services from a competing act (at least nothing in them I can find).

They don't really clearly define what their problem / claimed cause of action is. Maybe this is just an intimidation tactic against something they don't like, but they have no real legal case - in which case perhaps the community around it could band together to create a legal defence fund, and have Haier laughed out of court.

Disclaimer: Not intended as legal advice.

Edit: And better yet would be if they could find a way to intercept the traffic between the devices and Haier and replace Haier in that protocol. Then there is no option for Haier to try to restrict who can use the servers on their side. I assume the devices have a set of Certificate Authorities they trust, and it is not possible to get a trusted certificate without modifying the device somehow though.

I'd suggest not buying anything from Haier. I had a fridge from them, and it barely lasted 5 years. I used their official service programme to try and get it fixed (so as to try to get it sorted without them blaming the fridge, and the manufacturer blaming the repairs), and even the person they sent out (who didn't exclusively work for Haier but was part of their repair programme), recommended getting another fridge, and making the next one a brand other than Haier.

The fact that they are now claiming that letting consumers control their own appliances harms the company just shows how out of touch they are with what their consumers want - and definitely reaffirms to me that this is not a brand worth buying.