RickRussell_CA @ RickRussell_CA @beehaw.org

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10

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210

Joined

2 yr. ago

Although you don't have to be smarter than the experts, just smarter than police. Few local PDs can bring the kinds of resources to bear to do a decrypt on a properly encrypted data store.

Obviously if you're pissing off major state actors, all bets are off -- they are probably already surveilling you and saw you type your password through a zoom lens pointed at your window, or worse.

It's layers on an onion. Every extralegal step they take provides a possible mitigation if you go to trial.

Obviously, if they straight up murder somebody, that's a whole different problem. But in general, you should invoke your rights at every step of the process, so that if they trample over those rights you'll have an argument in court to get evidence or charges thrown out.

Well, you can work on a Veracrypt partition.

Even if everything is encrypted when powered off, and decrypted while running, if you get raided while everything is running, it’s irrelevant.

Well, you can hit the power switch. The local constabulary isn't gonna be smart enough to plunge the computer into liquid nitrogen and work on extracting the symmetric key from the frozen memory (although, federal authorities might be).

Short version:

• Police chief was accused of sexual impropriety, and the newspaper was investigating.
• A prominent local restaurant owner got caught in a DUI and the newspaper got a tip and investigated. On investigation, they decided the story was not newsworthy.
• Police raided the newspaper claiming that the DUI tip was the result of illegal computer hacking, and that they had to confiscate the computers to analyze for evidence of hacking.
• The judge who signed the search warrant also had a history of DUI.
• Critics believe that the police used this hacking claim as a thinly veiled excuse to cripple the newspaper and check to see what they really had on the chief.
• Critics have also suggested that the police themselves may have leaked the information to set up the flimsy excuse for the search.

Google Drive eliminated its full sync default a long time ago. Ironically, I have the opposite complaint -- I'd like some folders to be synchronized ALL the time, and some NEVER, and Google Drive no longer gives you any direct control over what gets synchronized. It's all controlled by some implacable internal algorithm with no exposed preferences.

Look at the timeline. LTT went silent for weeks until GN called them out.

Also next time maybe put a label on the thing “Prototype Not for Sale. Property of Billet”, like every other prototype.

Gimme a break; LTT knew it wasn't for sale, that's 100% clear from the emails before they auctioned it off.

Why not buy another plug? You can get USB cables at the dollar store. Make sure to check continuity on the damaged connector, and the new cable & connector, so you can match up the pins.

With respect, whether it can properly be called "intellectual property" or not, is not the point.

It was a one-of-a-kind engineering sample that LTT agreed to send back when they were done with it. LTT did not fulfill their obligation, and when Billet Labs asked about it, they got stonewalled.

But they couldn't find a 3090 to test it with! Not even the 3090 that the company sent with the cooling block. Cough.

we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity

Jesus. It doesn't matter whether you sold it or auctioned it. It doesn't matter if it was for charity. What matters is that IT WAS A ONE-OF-A-KIND PROTOTYPE THAT DIDN'T BELONG TO YOU AND YOU AGREED TO RETURN IT (and the RTX3090 they sent with it), and you didn't do what you promised.

Everything wrong with LTT is summed up in this response. Instead of going to the company's CEO and composing a response on behalf of the company, we get a bunch of over-personalized complaints about hurt feelings and imperfection, fired off only 3 hours after the GN video, that make it 100% clear this is all about Linus' personality rather than a dispassionate review of the facts.

Chip Wilson admitted that he chose the name Lululemon because he thought it would sound exotic and Western to Asian customers, and because he thought it was funny to hear Japanese people pronounce it.

When Wilson was CEO, he made comments in 2005 saying that it was funny that Japanese people couldn't pronounce the "L" in Lululemon.

"It's funny to watch them try and say it," he told Canada's National Post Business Magazine when asked about the Japanese pronunciation of his company's name.

Wilson denies saying it, according to the New York Times.

source

Don't worry, in a few years, they'll just use an AI trained on copyrighted music to write an "original" score, declaring the training inputs to be "fair use" and the output to be "transformative", and all those pesky concerns about licensing will go away.

As well as a fair whack of cash.

And by choosing to let AI take your stuff and use it however, you're facilitating the economics that will allow AI to take the jobs of artists, and by extension, replace art all around us with mediocre pap spewed from the orifice of AI for the price of a premium subscription to ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion, or similar.

In the real world, artists pay their way by doing commercial work, or holding down a day job as a graphic designer, etc. Actors do commercials and Hallmark specials while looking for their break into serious theater. Writers put in hours writing ad copy or translating or speechwriting while trying to sell the Great American Novel. You call it poison, but ultimately it puts food on the table for artists and their families.

These roles can ONLY be displaced if AI is allowed to steal everyone's work, and flood all available channels with mediocre AI paraphrases and transcriptions of that work. That's the decision point we're facing right now -- do we stand idly by and allow big tech to replace workers by copying the fruits of human labor without compensation?

We can debate whether AI output is "good enough" for various use cases. And in some cases, you'll be absolutely right that AI will never produce a convincing product for particular use cases. But that's not the issue. The issue is whether it's right for companies to steal the work of humans to use as training inputs, and flood the market with that mediocre output. AI producing shtty output doesn't make it morally acceptable to steal, and to profit from the stealing.

I won’t minimize or dismiss that in any way

Err, yeah, but you kind of are doing exactly that.

The threat to art (writing, visual arts, and music) is that AI tools will be "good enough" that the average person can't tell the difference on cursory examination. And they only get "good enough" because they're training on YOUR STUFF. And my stuff, and all the other stuff that was written, drawn, painted, composed, played, by real human people. And you're not getting compensated for that training at all. None of us are.

So you absolutely should care if your work is scraped and appropriated by LLMs, because we're not far from a time when businesses fire all their copywriters and graphic artists because the $30/month AI subscription gives them results that are "good enough".

IMO, the issue isn't so much that chat AIs will produce "better than human" prose.

The issue is that scam artists will FLOOD the world with so much content that finding human-authored works -- books, news articles, art, code samples, anything -- will become nigh impossible. I think we'll soon reach a point where 90%, 95%, 99% of search results on ANY topic will be mediocre AI-authored garbage.

• the recent case of somebody posting AI-written books attributed to author Jane Friedman: https://qz.com/amazon-ai-generated-books-using-real-authors-names-1850720961
• AI-generated titles taking over Amazon bestseller list: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7b774/ai-generated-books-of-nonsense-are-all-over-amazons-bestseller-lists
• Browse any art platform and you'll see AI-generated garbage getting posted at an alarming rate

It's a brand new Eternal September, but instead of college freshmen, it's AI.

TIL you can turn off Youtube history. Done!

Asus TUF started freezing on games

But what did you do to diagnose it?

ASUS isn't responsible for software, except to guarantee that the laptop can run the version of Windows that it came with. They're just going to run standard hardware diagnostics, and if it passes, it's golden.

Were there errors in the event logs? Did you remove unneeded startup programs and disable unneeded services? Did you do a full OS reset/reinstall?

I've been happy with my gaming laptops. I used to be like 80% travel for my job, so portable gaming was essential.

I still use a gaming laptop as my primary desktop, because it's physically small, (relatively) quiet, and I don't need to keep a honking big UPS to give me 20 minutes of time to save work and shut down. The battery's not great, but it's more than enough to get me through power interruptions, or to move the machine between power outlets.