qantravon @ qantravon @lemmy.world

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3

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251

Joined

2 yr. ago

Most absurd was from a job I had in college. This was the password to log into an ancient dumb terminal (literally a monochrome black and green display) on a local-only network that only handled our time clock.

Requirements:

• 8 characters exactly
• You supply the first 4, the system generated the last 4
• I can't remember if it allowed numbers, but there were definitely no special characters and I think it was also case-insensitive

Required to change password every 30 days.

I've definitely had one that was 8-12 characters before...

Honestly, it's probably more about being realistic. By the same logic of the presidential immunity that SCOTUS invented, you wouldn't be able to imprison a sitting president. The other option for a punishment is a fine, which Trump likely would refuse to pay, and then what? They can't jail him for the refusal because presidential immunity. So, the judge is admitting that nothing he tries to impose is going to stick.

It's because SCOTUS also said anything in the aura of an official act can't be used as evidence. So if the president, as a private individual, does something illegal, but the only evidence is from an official presidential communication, sorry, can't use it. It's bullshit, but that's what they ruled.

Trump's team was claiming that key evidence was subject to this immunity. But the judge completely shot them down.

It's not just about traffic.

Driving requires sitting, which we do too much already and, at these levels, is bad for our health, both mental and physical. Cars also make the world around them noisy and polluted, which also negatively affects health. Even being near the streets and not in a car is taking your life into your hands. Roads take up space that could be (and often was, in the past) devoted to housing or park space.

Our overdependence on cars has radically altered the shape of life in America, and basically none of it for the better.

You think Trump cares about that? Or the cronies he's bringing in to run DoJ? They'll find a way.

Or, you know, the lead that we put into the air for decades burning leaded gasoline...

Even though we've (mostly) stopped doing that, the effects are cumulative, and there are still plenty of people alive who were around when that was still a thing.

I really hate that people keep treating these LLMs as if they're actually thinking. They absolutely are not. All they are, under the hood, is really complicated statistical models. They don't think about or understand anything, they just calculate what the most likely response to a given input is based on their training data.

That becomes really obvious when you look at where they often fall down: math questions and questions about the actual words they're using.

They do well on standardized math assessments, but if you change the questions just a little, to something outside their training data (often just different numbers or a slightly different phrasing is enough), they fail spectacularly.

They often can't answer questions about words at all (how many 'R's in 'strawberry', for instance) because they don't even have a concept of the word, they just have a token that represents that word, and a list of associations that they use to calculate when to use that word.

LLMs are complex, and the way they're designed means that the specifics of what associations they make and how they're weighted and things like that are opaque to us, but that doesn't mean we don't know how they work (despite that being a big talking point when they first came out). And I really wish people would stop treating them like something they're not.

Propaganda. People have been told their whole lives that socialism is pure evil, nevermind what socialism actually is. Public healthcare is socialism, therefore it's evil.

I think it's just secular prosperity gospel. He's rich, therefore he must be smart. Right?

State crime

Depends, some are some aren't.

However, in my opinion, the thing that makes student loans crazy is how the payments are structured.

With other big lifetime loans (mortgage, car, etc.), they are structured with a fixed term and the interest is factored in from the beginning. You pay $X a month for Y years, and that's it, it's all paid off. All you have to do is keep up with those payments, and you know how much they'll be from the time you agree to the loan.

Student loans are structured more like credit cards. If you just pay how much they tell you to, interest will accrue, the loan grows, it capitalizes, and the term is indefinite. You can pay on it consistently for decades and never make any progress.

There's practically no assistance to figure out how much you really need to pay, and sometimes even attempting to overpay to cover the interest doesn't help, as they'll apply the extra towards the next payment instead, and so extra interest still accrues.

The rules for using copyrighted content are the same on FOSS platforms as for the big players, legally speaking. The difference is the FOSS platforms simply don't have the same enforcement mechanisms in place, so they won't give you warnings directly and automatically. If a rights-holder comes across something that uses their content, however, they can still come after you under the law using things like the DMCA.

The whole point of a corporation is so that the people involved don't get held personally responsible when bad things happen. It's virtually impossible for them to be held accountable with our current laws.

A few quibbles.

1. I would argue that Insurrection also qualifies as a feature-length Star Trek episode. It has good moral quandaries, an interesting sci-fi premise, all the hallmarks of classic Trek.
2. Code of Honor is the worst Trek episode.

This is pretty much what I used to do before I got a password manager. Only difference is I would take that short phrase and randomly drop letters or replace them with numbers or symbols, and also random capitalization. Then I'd just practice typing it for 5 minutes until it was muscle memory. After about a week, I could no longer consciously remember the specifics of the password, just the key phrase and the associated muscle memory.

Being a master isn't just about skill, it's also about wisdom and experience, perhaps even more than skill. It's perfectly reasonable that they wouldn't want to elevate him to that rank yet, given his behavior.

Yeah, that's why he's putting several of its chief architects in his cabinet...

The problem with that is, if we were to detect them even attempting a launch, we also launch. Meaning even if their missiles turn out to be duds, millions still die.