teawrecks @ teawrecks @sopuli.xyz

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4

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1,686

Joined

2 yr. ago

If more of you would have voted for Jill Stein, we wouldn't be in this mess!

/s in case that wasn't obvious

So, I guess this means smart, ethical, and charismatic. I feel like this is one of those cases where I get to pick two one of those traits, and it has to be charismatic.

That seems to accurately describe where we find ourselves. To quote Men in Black, "A person is smart, people are dumb."

I think we don't get out of this situation by thinking real hard and convincing people to vote based on a theoretical future; people will only change their behaviour in the face of an actual failure. I'm not a historian, but I have to assume the appeal of fascism was alive and well in the US during the great depression. We just had the opportunity to learn from Germany and Italy's mistakes before we went down the same road. Now WE are the example that will hopefully sway other countries' democratic behaviors.

Ex. the conservative party was heavily favored to win the Canadian election after Trudeau stepped down, but ever since Trump took office, the polls have completely reversed. Still unclear where it will land, but I think Canada's voters are getting that much needed opportunity to learn from our failures.

I feel like this question is as useful as asking "when is it ok to downvote someone?" You can theorize about how a downvote should only be used when someone is not contributing to the discussion honestly, and how you should never downvote someone just because you disagree with them....but at the end of the day, people are gonna downvote others for whatever random reason they feel like.

Similarly, is it useful to ask what a vote "means" in a democracy? Or is it a waste of time to try and apply reason to, or derive reason from, the behavior of a hivemind? Unlike individuals who can learn from hypothetical failures, I personally believe hiveminds (groups/societies/whatever word you'd like to use) can only learn from actual failures.

The people could elect a perfect model citizen who will represent the people's best interests, but if what's best for the people in the long term comes with too much discomfort in the near term, the people will happily vote against their own interests.

Hah very different themes I'd say.

On the Beach is about all the people who thought it'd be a good idea to move to Australia in case all the nukes drop during the Cold War, and then the nukes drop and everyone in the northern hemisphere dies and they survive, but then they realize they're just waiting for the natural wind patterns to bring all the radiation over to them to kill them too. The only way to win is not to play.

So similar in that they're both very dismal.

Don't say Linux then. If they already barely know windows, that's an ideal situation, it's going to be similarly confusing either way.

If your concern is that you think they would run into more stability issues when using a linux-based OS vs Windows, that's a reasonable concern. But if we're comparing against a sufficiently stable distro release, I don't think it's well founded.

Well at least the physical key works for the doors. What year is that?

Yeah, I wish there was a company that made a fully dumb electric car, but there's just no incentive to do that. I have a 2014 gas car with a normal physical key that you use to turn start it, but I don't think I've ever seen an electric car where you have to use the physical key to start the car.

has a real physical key that has to be in the cabin to drive

🤨 the way you say "has to be in the cabin" makes me think it's not a real physical key, and is actually a wireless smart key that you leave in your pocket when starting the car.

It did really take off about 5 years ago.

Ever read the book On the Beach?

And don't forget, we also gotta get our children involved. It's outrageous that government regulations are preventing their small fingers from taking advantage of lucrative opportunitues. They yern for the mines!

It's neat that this exists, but not neat if someone hosts it for a year, a bunch of fed users rely on it and share a bunch of links using it, and then the hoster takes it down for whatever reason, and now there are a bunch of dead links littered all over the place.

Even less neat if some malicious group can then buy the lapsed domain and forward all those dead links to ads and viruses.

Please host responsibly, is all I'm saying.

Oh, honey...

I would go a step further and say that any time one of these MAC systems has to resort to user interaction to do its job, it's a straight up failure case: the system simply didn't have enough information to do its job, ended up doing no better than a blanket "block everything" config, and is asking the user to do 100% of the heavy lifting of determining what should happen.

So, when I hear

If someone is lazy or not knowledgeable enough to make the right decision...No automated system can protect [them].

I hear: "every access control system is fundamentally broken". Which is fine, maybe that's true, there's a reason social engineering is so useful. So then all these systems should prioritize streamlining that failure case as much as possible: Tell the user what is accessing what, when, how, and then make it trivial to temporarily (with well defined limits), permanently, (or even volatile-y using CoW/containerization/overlay fs) grant or deny access as quickly and easily as possible.

Every other system you're comparing SELinux, AFAIK, handles this case better, which is why users tend to prefer them.

For the record, I'm not arguing that SELinux is bad at the actual access control part, I'm only answering why people don't like using it, which is how it handles the failure case part. Now it's been a while since I've used SELinux and I've never used setroubleshooter, but if you tell me it actually streamlines all of this to be smoother than every other tool, then I'll install it tonight!

How do you know when you're letting through a valid access, an unnecessary one that could be a vulnerability, and an actively malicious one?

I don't think anyone is saying throw out all access control, they're just saying SELinux adds too much unproductive friction for everyday usage. You said it takes 15m to troubleshoot. But that's not a one time thing, that's 15m that scales with the amount of new programs and updates you're running. And 90% of people aren't even going to be able to tell they're looking at a malicious access if they're in the habit of always working around blocks that show up.

Yes, and I don't like the common comparison to binary blobs, and I'm attempting to explain why.

It is inherently safer to blindly run weights than it is to blindly execute a binary. The issues only arrise if you are then blindly trusting the outputs from the AI. But you should already have something in place to sanitize outputs and limit permissions, even for the most trustworthy weights.

It's basically like hiring someone and wondering if they're Hydra; no matter how deep your background check is, they could always decide to spontaneously defect and try to sabotage you. But that won't matter if their decisions are always checked against enough other non-Hydra employees.

If you are familiar with the concept of an NP-complete problem, the weights are just one possible solution.

The Traveling Salesman Problem is probably the easiest analogy to make. It's as though we're all trying to find the shortest path through a bunch of points (ex. towns), and when someone says "here is a path that I think is pretty good", that is analogous to sharing network weighs for an AI. We can then all openly test that solution against other solutions and determine which is "best".

What they aren't telling you is whether people traveling that path somehow benefits them (maybe they own all the gas stations on that path. Or maybe they've hired highway men to rob people on that path). And figuring out if that's the case in a hyper-dimensional space is non-trivial.

Ah that's fair, I didn't look closely

"Open carry prohibited, concealed carry without a permit" is Chaotic Evil energy.

Is this running in your rc (i.e. every single time you open a terminal)? Even if it's safe, I'd be annoyed by any delay.

I'm going to say it's not a "you" problem, but a "who you're surrounded by" problem. Is this something you're used to percieving accurately? Do you have friends or family who would actually mean it rudely? Because, as others have mentioned, I simply would not be able to function at work if I interpreted 👍 as rude/sarcastic.

I have to assume you're young or your work doesn't involve communicating with coworkers or clients over text. I'd also be curious if you look back at this post 5-10 years from now and think "wtf was I on about?" (I'd also be curious if civilization still exists 5-10 years from now, but I digress...)