vacuumflower
@vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 6 hours ago:
There are far more seconds in your life than hundreds of millions dollars.
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 6 hours ago:
11.4 bln is 100 mln away from 11.5 bln. I’m not sure “so close” is correct here.
- Comment on Rise of the Killer Chatbots 12 hours ago:
It’s typical, a bit how Russian politicians and members of their families often touch criminal folklore (the higher kind related to student culture, not the lower kind about homosexual ranks) with their mouths, despite being dirty by default for any carrier of that. They also love to similarly spoil patriotism.
In this case a bunch of stinking orcs is showing that they are the elves you’re gonna get. Get used to it. They’re in control.
- Comment on What We Talk About When We Talk About Sideloading 15 hours ago:
This was never about security. That’s just the excuse.
Every technical decision is an excuse to fulfill a social desire.
There was a time when I was 14 and happy and saw such things in everything around me, and all the fiction I was reading often touched that trait of the surrounding reality. Those books are not considered something for intellectuals or artists, and I have nothing to discuss with such people - that is, strictly speaking not true, but I never know why some things I know and mention are interesting or not, and why some my opinions meet hearty agreement and some are politely ignored. And I never find continuations for those agreements and interests. But I feel as if that planted something deep in my head that has endured all the degradation.
So. You should also look at things where it seems that technical decisions were made for technical reasons.
The desktop paradigms, the platform paradigms, the OS paradigms, the ergonomics, - of course. But also aesthetics and visibility, how separate or mixed with the offscreen reality everything is. Also why the Internet is built as it is, why multi-user operating systems and Java really exist, what really is Unix and what really is Windows. About software design and why what embedded developers make when allowed is considered bad design, while what web developers make is considered rather good design, yet the former is usually more stable, secure and maintainable than the latter.
Not just software, but why is our consumer hardware is what it is, what do we need such complex systems for.
Not just computers, but construction design - the world now is very different from the world where that brutalist idea of making apartment buildings having a terrace as a “street” to which you have another exit from your apartment was bad due to all the crime. And also there are plenty of covered passages and malls with the same idea, except the framework building is always privately owned, having a different juridical status than a street or a bridge. While Soviet-style microdistricts, and things similar to them, are similarly bad due to crime, yet honestly the “right and good” modern European urbanism moves in that direction.
All the choices around us are made by humans, driven by social stimuli - that’s the meaning of the word “social”, all the stimuli are there, and economics and technology act more like framework of the possible for the social.
- Comment on This mom’s son was asking Tesla’s Grok AI chatbot about soccer. It told him to send nude pics, she says 19 hours ago:
Just treat whatever “advice” these things “give” as given by the person who made the decision to host them.
Should be simple.
Instead they are already being treated as some magic, not a tool inseparable from the owner, or as a living thing. It’s idiotic.
- Comment on ‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS 1 day ago:
Ye-es, but wouldn’t that be kinda slow?
- Comment on Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales isn’t worried about Elon Musk’s Grokipedia: ‘Not optimistic he will create anything very useful right now’ 1 day ago:
There’s an element of vibe contrarianism in any pronounced political ideology. Meaning that libertarians often hate what they perceive as anti-libertarian, communists often hate what they perceive as anti-communist, and so on.
In that regard yes, there are plenty of libertarians who just want to kill anything with leftist vibes with fire.
But the world of ideas is far richer than the existing conventions and established ideologies, and every person has their own trajectory in that.
- Comment on Study Claims 4K/8K TVs Aren't Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes 1 day ago:
Selling TVs and monitors is an established business with common interest, while optimizing people’s setups isn’t.
It’s a bit like opposite to building a house, a cubic meter or two of cut wood doesn’t cost very much, even combined with other necessary materials, but to get usable end result people still hire someone other than workers to do the physical labor parts.
There are those “computer help” people running around helping grannies clean Windows from viruses (I mean those who are not scammers), they probably need to incorporate. Except then such corporate entities will likely be sued without end by companies willing to sell new shit. Balance of power.
- Comment on Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House 1 day ago:
Well, suppose it’s some stew on low fire, with some meat, lots of cabbage and potatoes, some beans … Takes time to do right.
Yes, except I meant leaving and turning it off.
- Comment on Quantum Attacks on encryption will probably be feasible by 2030 1 day ago:
I was being sarcastic. An if you are layering it, you better use a different secret.
- Comment on ‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS 1 day ago:
No, DHT is just a way of determining paths and priority of value lookup by key in the network, so that the load were distributed predictably, while allowing you to find, well, what you are looking for. BTW, while everybody uses Kademlia with modifications, I’d argue that Chord is better for anything related to security and anonymity.
Storage and serving of anything big is another thing. I take it you mean that I2P nodes cache messages relayed via them when the target node is unavailable. That doesn’t have anything to do with DHT.
- Comment on ‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS 1 day ago:
What are you talking about?
I’m saying that the parts of infrastructure needed to accept a message to the service from the client application, encrypted or not, associated to a user or not, are under same requirements for Signal and Telegram.
I don’t know if you understand that every big service is basically its own 90s’ Internet self-contained, and what accepts your messages is pretty similar to an SMTP server in their architecture.
- Comment on ‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS 2 days ago:
For the purpose of “shoot a message, go offline and be certain it’s sent” it’s the same service.
- Comment on ‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS 2 days ago:
Eh, no. A DHT doesn’t solve offline storage of data, when the source node is already offline, and the target node is not yet online.
- Comment on ‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS 2 days ago:
It’s weird for Signal to not be able to do what Telegram does. Yes, for this particular purpose they are not different.
- Comment on Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House 2 days ago:
BDSM is a thing
- Comment on Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House 2 days ago:
Yes, they are, it’s very convenient to have the same thing boil the water and make tea for you, or do the laundry and dry it, or do the floor and the windows when you can be busy with something else, same with cooking. Especially remote-controlled when you are an hour away. And it’s not a slight convenience, it’s life-changing like remote work.
- Comment on Quantum Attacks on encryption will probably be feasible by 2030 2 days ago:
… Which is why we all should immediately switch to post-quantum encryption possibly much weaker against conventional cryptanalysis. Thank you, NIST, NSA and other such respectable official bodies. Of course I believe you.
In general the whole “everyone should use standard state-of-the-art cryptography” turned out to be a con. And somehow the more “standard state-of-the-art” things were broken, the more was the confidence that they are what should be used. In the 90s “standard state-of-the-art” things were being broken casually, and non-standardized ciphers were made and used far more often than now, and somehow that was fine.
I dunno, we’re all using AES with even hardware implementations of it, potentially backdoored, and with approved recommended S-boxes, without explanation how were these chosen (“by the criteria of peace on earth and goodwill toward men” is not an explanation, a mathematical paper consisting of actions you repeat and unambiguously get the same set would be that).
I think if you are afraid of your cryptography rotting, embracing some pluralism outside of cryptography is what you should do. Like maybe partitioning (by bits, not splitting into meaningful portions god forbid) the compressed data and encrypting partitions with different algorithms (one AES, one Kuznetchik, one something elliptic, one something Chinese).
- Comment on Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House 2 days ago:
It’s funny how these “smart” appliances are all addressing things radically important for households, but in a poisoned way from the beginning. As if those making them were just trying to get there first and win the bank.
There’s a problem of scale in industrial innovations, where bigger scale makes cost of production of something and cost for the consumer and network effect power better, meaning that there’s no market feedback to help those who came first get old and die to make space for those who come next.
I think this tendency is actually the solution - there is a feedback, it’s that lacking feedbacks on one level prohibits those undying monsters from being competitive on the next one. The niche of non-poisoned smart appliances won’t be filled by anything big, for example.
That’s also another funny moment - instead of dedicated appliances it makes it useful to have one universal one (basically a butler robot) that can be programmed. It’s an incentive in the direction of universal machines programmed by customers.
BTW, imagine a frame with various manipulators and sensors attached to an RPi via GPIO, where every manipulator/sensor can be whatever thing at all, just needs to have a manipulator/sensor description template. The OS of the RPi itself runs tasks of the “move those items of fragility categories such and such to such and such locations, remove dust and dirt from that surface, wash that window”, for which the existing set of manipulators/sensors and task sequence are optimized without user’s involvement (other than attaching them and providing the right description templates, though I suppose manipulator controllers can provide them too, and confirming the resulting jobs). That’s also where those LLMs etc are good enough, to interpret instructions and display the sequence of actions they are going to perform to get user’s confirmation. This way you won’t have to fear that you tell it something harmless and it starts a fire in the room.
Such a system needs a set of standard protocols for the sensors\manipulators, their description templates, and the representation of commands deciphered from human speech to a set of tasks, and the spaces and traits of objects. The programs visualizing the resulting offered set of tasks, deciphering the order, optimizing one set of tasks into a better one, and so on, should be pluggable. Suppose everything’s already made, just nobody really needs a thing that they can’t just buy and turn on.
OK, I like imagining, should work better instead and start my toy the weekends after the next ones (I suspect I won’t start it even by then, at least not in the initial ideologically good form ; nothing about robotics or home appliances). Spent these weekends on making a POV-Ray scene instead.
Why did I even write this.
- Comment on Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world together 3 days ago:
The Internet is fine. It’s not going anywhere and working as intended. The services over it, however, are centralized and crappy, and in part that’s due to the Internet being built for the big centers - militaries, corporations, - to impose their policy. It’s by design that it’s no use to you if the big guys don’t want it to be.
if you want something else, you need to reinvent the Internet, this one was made with a clear purpose. For militaries and universities, both quite hierarchical structures. I guess a Lemmy instance is a bit similar to such a thing.
Anything connection-oriented creates chokepoints in attempts to make it a truly open system. So if you want that, you need a data-oriented system. Such worked over the Internet once (technically still works), meaning Usenet. It was hierarchical, but its architectural principles don’t mandate hierarchy.
It’s just the way the world is.
People at some point hoped to make radio communication what the Internet was in the 90s. Yet radio eventually settled on being for one-way stations serving many people first, for professionals in aviation, military and hiking second, and for ham enthusiasts third.
People at some point dreamed of videophones, before anything digital became common, and there were such two-way communication solutions built and demonstrated even in 60s. Yet analog video settled on cable TV. Sometimes radio.
While the open and alive communication happened, like before, in public places like libraries, parks, thematic events.
It feels nice to type this comment here, but some kinds of magic just don’t work. Today’s possession of some people, me included, with digital communication being a liberating tool to change everything is similar to early XX century possession with flying machines. The machines are real and change the world, but the possession is irrational.
- Comment on "It’s not about security, it’s about control" – How EU governments want to encrypt their own comms, but break our private chats 3 days ago:
Politicians are systemically miserable scheming cowards, and what’s worse - they are usually far stupider than they appear. They don’t care about devastating effects.
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 4 days ago:
Sometimes documentation is inconsistent.
- Comment on New Japan PM vows to take US ties to 'new heights' with Trump 5 days ago:
Weapons are always needed and have to be designed, tested and mass-produced. Militaries have to be funded, manned, trained, equipped.
Yes, it’s a job. In a sphere of economy just as necessary as all others.
- Comment on New Japan PM vows to take US ties to 'new heights' with Trump 6 days ago:
Are there many parties there which don’t?
Rearmament campaigns create jobs. And, especially in today’s world, they don’t create more risk of war.
About numbers and PPP, all that works in China’s favor during prolonged peace. War has different laws.
Anyway, you might have noticed how Japan is increasingly (if that’s possible LOL) nationalist and angry the last few years. They need to revitalize their economy, start fixing their demographics and do something with their old security arrangements which mean complete reliance upon US, because US is increasingly erratic. Meaning rearmament makes them more independent from US, not less.
These “new heights” are diplomacy.
- Comment on How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral 6 days ago:
The way I use it that is, any other relevant sense?
- Comment on New Japan PM vows to take US ties to 'new heights' with Trump 6 days ago:
It’s a moment for Japan when anyone can be stupid or not. Inflation in particular might be even good.
Rearmament is honestly long overdue, it makes them less dependent upon the US.
If they don’t fix their demographics, it’ll be bad anyway. And to fix demographics, things of the sort that happened in European and American 50s are needed, of the “mass housing construction and welfare state” kind, except now that’ll be far more expensive.
- Comment on How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral 6 days ago:
“Basically invented” here meant the last huge leap, to having one cluster of narratives perceived as “normal and clean” almost globally. Of course literally not. The roman catholic church didn’t have such means.
- Comment on Nvidia and TSMC produce the first Blackwell wafer made in the U.S. — chips still need to be shipped back to Taiwan to complete the final product 6 days ago:
Transoceanic pipe cargo lines could be nice. Vacuuming cargo out, pushing in. Like trains, except with no life support concerns.
- Comment on Nvidia and TSMC produce the first Blackwell wafer made in the U.S. — chips still need to be shipped back to Taiwan to complete the final product 6 days ago:
I mean, if you compare a ton of tropical wood or fruit to a ton of microchips, the value of the latter is so much better, that this is not such a problem. There will still be some logistical overhead even if much of the processes will happen in the USA. These are supply chains more complex than anything in our daily lives.
- Comment on Nvidia and TSMC produce the first Blackwell wafer made in the U.S. — chips still need to be shipped back to Taiwan to complete the final product 6 days ago:
Meaning China is doing what Lenin wanted to do at some point - to use some basic laws of globalization (then imperialism) to kill its source. Formulated as “they will sell us the rope to hang them”, and didn’t transpire. But, well, Lenin planned for NEP to last till 80s, and then start all the socialist reforms in the society. Then he died. Together with most of those famous Bolsheviks from Soviet movies about the revolution. All from different reasons in a few years.
In this case rejecting the logistical and power benefits from using Chinese labor and facilities seems impossible as of now for Western economies.