joshcodes

@joshcodes@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer("An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me"); pulls story⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay fair enough, first bit made sense to me at the time but I was having a weird day. There are things you can’t prove was the point of that, doesn’t make a lot of sense rereading it.

  Rest of it is saying that there is no debate worth having: they are not conscious, nor sentient, and trying to quantify what exactly they are. I’m just talking into the void and arguing against opinions ive seen. Dont mind me. I get passionate and am prone to long-winded rants.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer("An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me"); pulls story⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You can’t prove all ravens are black. The discovery of even one white raven would disprove the “fact” that all ravens are black, and we can by no means be sure that we gathered all ravens to test the theory.

  However, we can look around and comment that there doesn’t appear to be any white ravens anywhere…

  Do you know about the ‘bobo’ and ‘kiki’ study - can’t remember the name? People made up words that don’t exist in English and asked people whether round objects are more bobo or kiki. AI can’t answer this question - not without being fed how to. Toddlers could answer it. It comes down to how it consumes information and if there’s no pattern… When asked to define words it had been rarely fed, I.e. usernames people had made up, the AIs apparent consciousness breaks down. As soon as something isn’t likely followed by another word, the machine breaks and no one would pretend it has consciousness after that.

  Learning models are just pattern recognition machines. LLMs are the kind that mix and match words really well. This makes them seem intelligent, but it just means they can express language and information in a way we understand, and tend to not do so. Consciousness gets into the “what is the soul” territory, so I’m staying away from it. The best I can say of AI is its interesting that language appears to be a system constructed well enough that we can teach it to machines. Even more so we anthropomorphise models when they do it well.

  AI doesn’t have memory, it can’t think for itself - it references what it has consumed - and it can’t teach itself new tricks. All of these are experimental research areas for AI. All of them lend to consciousness. Its just very good at sentence generation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer("An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me"); pulls story⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Right, a question that literal neuroscientists couldn’t answer.

  I believe the technical term is “your brain is way more fucking complex”. We have like 50 (I’m not a neuroscientist, just studied AI) chemicals being transmitted around the brain, frequently. They’re used and passed on by cells which do biological and chemical things I dont understand. Ever heard of dopamine, cortisol, serotonin? AI dont got those. We have neurons that don’t connect to every other neuron - only tech Bros would think that’s an acceptable expression. Our brain forms literal pathways, along which it transmits those chemicals. No, a physical connection is not the same as a higher average weight, and the people who came up with AI maths in the 50s would back me up.

  AI uses floating point maths to draw correlations and make inferences. More advanced AI does this more per second and has had more training. Their neurons are a programming abstraction used to explain a series of calculations and inputs, they’re not actually a neuron, nor an advanced piece of tech. They’re not magic.

  High schoolers could study AI for a single class, then neurobiology right after and realise just how basic the AI model is when mimicking a brain. Its not even close, but I guess Sam Altman said we’re approaching general intelligence so I’m probably just a hater.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cheap or free periodical externals scans⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  OpenVAS is a vulnerability scanner. Metasploit is a penetration testing framework.

  First one does what OP wants. Second one less so, and is more hands on.

  See dirbuster for automated dumb searching of web directories, gives you response codes to tell you if a page is accessible to the outside world. See nuclei which I haven’t used myself but seems to get good reviews for automated vuln scanning from the command line - has nice output and seems simple to use.

  They’re both easy to use and install on something like Kali Linux.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dutch authorities seized one of Windscribe VPN's servers – here's everything we know⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So obviously its not a foolproof plan but wouldn’t you just dump the RAM while the machine is on? Dont you just copy /tmp or something and analyse that?

  I suppose I’m assuming they can get shell access now that I think about it so probably a stupid question

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends what you want to do.

  On distrobox, I installed a containerised version of Ubuntu that can interact with my host, sort of like WSL on windows. Anything I put in it remains isolated so I can’t install packages that break my system - and I can use apt to install whatever in want rather than rpm.

  You could develop in a VM or container like distrobox, and tbh, the host can be whatever you need it to be. You dont actually have to move off Mint.

  That being said, I dont see why you couldn’t just develop on Bazzite/atomic distros of your choice using flatpaks for IDEs. I believe it has c++ installed and you’d be able to layer whatever language you needed onto your atomic distro of choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You won: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I really do suggest using Bazzite if you don’t want to wait for steamOS.

  I previously used Mint, haven’t had to install an nvidia graphics driver or new kernel since moving to Bazzite and I’m now learning distrobox so I can make my usual bad computing decisions in a safe space. Its a very stable base, and with container tech layered on, you can have all the fuck around you want with minimal find out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s the honorary kings bday in June/July (lazy and dont remember which). Then there’s the one in October, Melbourne cup I think idk? So there’s two in between. I think 3 would be nice. Thats one every couple of months. Others to many early on in the year anyway. It fucks up January to have one again that soon, having been working somewhere that doesn’t close over Christmas + new years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day 552 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They didnt have time to playtest the game. So the AI can fire faster than a human. It was one of the things they sorted for Halo CE but never got to due to constraints. It is literally the hardest Halo game because of this. I think on legendary youre even the weakest character entity in the game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Phrasing!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thomson and Thompson from Tintin

  This you?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hi, I’m engaged to someone who studies chickpea and other legumes. Shitloads of money goes into agriculture every year and from my understanding, what you’re describing is being done by some brilliant people (I’m a bit biased). However there’s so many concerns around GMOs doing damage to the environment that it is tightly regulated. Doubly also, Americans don’t have the same ready access to grocery stores that other first world countries have.

  Plus the equivalent of flat earthers exist that believe that GMOs will kill us all and we need to go back to eating only what nature created (somewhat hyperbole, there are valid concerns but people have been irrational).

  An example is that chickpea and other legumes reintroduces nitrogen into soil after it the soil loses vitality, which makes chickpea a good intermediate crop that can be grown in between others. Its high in nutrients. So yeah, stop eating corn and eat legumes.

  (I’m not the molecular biologist so if I got stuff wrong, sorry, I will pay more attention when my partner speaks)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you say you don't like linux on Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, you’re also heading the right way for a ban… Not liking Linux on Lemmy smh

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Its for the tutorial I think, you can hear the voice if you go to the steam store page for it, just watch the first trailer in the queue. If you cant be bothered, its a male british robotic voice with a helpful tone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For me its Stellaris

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Perspective⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thought something was weird here. The contrast and colour is making it difficult. If you turn up shadows it changes the entire feeling, including where the obvious light source is. I wouldn’t expect the dark side of the mattress unless there was a bright light directly above it.

  Also the banister/handrail arm wouldn’t be horizontal. Most importantly, congrats, you got me invested.

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beat down with the sickness⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Little confused by the second link. It’s not about Draiman, its just one of the band members saying assassinating trump wouldnt do the US any favours (I somewhat agree for different reasons, killing him would have started civil war 2 most likely).

  In case you missed it/didn’t think of it, there’s a rather notorious tweet about student loans (unless he deleted it) that rubbed me the wrong way so I’d use that instead personally. He basically said “you took out a loan, pay it back” which ignores all the context for those who got one.

  Plus there’s the fact their lyrics in the last album seem very “can’t we all just get along” and tends to trivialise many of the issues in the US right now. It’s this idea of “if we all just talked we’d see we have common ground” bullshit like no one has had a real conversation in the last 25 years cos they’re all on their phones etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can someone explain Australian parties to me?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll preface this by saying I’m not as informed as some so if I get something wrong, apologies.

  We don’t have first past the post.

  Australia has federal, state and local government elections. This election was federal. Each state is subdivided into large federal regions, and we vote on representatives for our area (green ballot and lowe house). We also vote on which party we want to see in control (white ballot and upper house).

  The green ballot is just counted up, and the person with the most votes wins. The white ballot is harder to explain, but basically you need a majority of seats to take government and have to win 76 seats. There’s a transfer system you can read about on wikipedia.

  Idk about Albonese being a cunt but every politician in Australia is considered a bit of a dickhead. We don’t worship them here. So we vote out the biggest dickhead (Peter Dutton) most of the time (some could be lovely but most people are aware how many do very little and earn $400k salaries).

  Dutton ran a campaign on nuclear power and other things I won’t go into. Nuclear power has 0 infrastructure in Australia so we’d be starting from scratch. It would take 15 years to begin powering Australia. We will have a crisis in 5 years due to population growth. This is extremely easy to point out as stupid, and hard to argue against, especially when half the country already has solar power on their roofs. They also told everyone they’d make fuel cheaper and buy more military equipment even though we have a deal to get military equipment from the US and UK. It’d be nice to have but stupid to run on it.

  They didn’t have many other policies that made it to me, but I largely block ads so you could go read more about it online.

  Conversely, Albonese ran on things like healthcare, the housing crisis and affordable living. Things people actually care about given the times.

  Parties:

  • Labor is pro union, and commonly quite centred with a slight lean left. They won the election in a landslide.
  • the coalition is two parties, they’re supposed to be centred-right and conservative but they were going off the deep end and going with America/trump style politics. They ran a bad campaign is what I can say with stat’s to back me up.
  • greens party is very progressive, sometimes a little to aggressive with that stance.
  • there’s the trumpet of patriots who were meant to be Aus MAGA and are just annoying.
  • there’s one nation who are basically racists who want white Australia to be strongly enforced again.
  • independents will vote with whatever they think is right, but will often align with one party more than the others. They can win seats in government and work with all parties as they want.

  TL;DR Most people would probably say the liberals ran a bad campaign, hence they lost badly. Albo is likely a cunt but he’s better than the guy we voted out who wanted to force the country to go with nuclear power, which would start producing energy 10 years after we had a shortage. At least Albo is going to do things with healthcare and affordable living. And if he fails, we’ll vote him out and get someone who will because we aren’t a cult.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep sorry, I said a dumb thing.

  My point is probably more to do with the marketing around VPNs than anything else. As you very nicely put, there are a thousand ways to track someone without having their IP address. VPNs don’t cover all bases but the marketing teams talk about them like they do.

  Amazon can still sell your info to data brokers without having your home ip address: they have your email, name, delivery address and search history as a start.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I am not OP, I just decided to reply.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oooo close. It’s a shit algorithm that favours the company that paid the most for the spot. So people rely on paying for a good spot to get promoted on the most minor fucking chance of someone buying their shitty item. I heard someone say the average best item you search for is found 17th place.

  They’re scamming the buyer and the seller and profiting off of being terrible for everyone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That)⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are definitely some VPN providers to worry about.

  VPNs are a security tool but they don’t protect people as much as they think. They hide DNS traffic your ISP would have received, so that your ISP can’t tell everyone which cuckold or affair site you access (except you probably forgot to turn the VPN on one time or another so…)

  Your ISP can still see IP addresses you connect to, they forward all your traffic. Good opsec is a nightmare. Ad blocking does more for less cost than getting a VPN will ever do (except for certain human rights circumstances but I’d wager they’re actually going to be careful).

  My personal tip is use DNS over HTTPS/TLS where possible, and don’t use Cloudflare or Google. Ad an ad blocker and it’s far easier to setup and way more cost effective than VPN.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any opinions on Cozystack?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve got no experience with it but at first glance it seems like a very positive direction for the project:

  Collaborate, not Compete

  We are proud of our community and closely interact with projects around it. If we build a platform feature that can be useful in an upstream project, we prefer to contribute it to that project, rather than keep it in the platform.

  You don’t hear that often enough these days, everyone seems to be siloing information.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨From $30 parmigianas to $15 pints, can Australia still afford the pub?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Parma sounds like a phrase uttered by the absolutely deranged. Even the children here know it’s parmy

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨woag⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I lost the game

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I had no idea y cunt was this powerful⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Steve Hughes did a pretty good bit on this - “Go play with your girly tits you Gaylord, I’m going to fuck a man.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is my server using all my Swap but I have RAM to spare?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Counter point, set the ‘swappiness’ lower than the default 60. I’ve set mine to 30 and the system boots a lot faster. You could research and consider 10-20.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to harden against SSH brute-forcing?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  100% agree, that is a “totally for fun” exercise

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to harden against SSH brute-forcing?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For added funs run an SSH tarpit to fuck with the attackers, something like endlessh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Russia-aligned hackers are targeting Signal users with device-linking QR codes⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Reliance on security by obscurity is unacceptable, except when the obscurity method is the oceans entire fucking surface area.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey mate, so this comment is just not productive. I’m going to be a little hyperbolic here: if everyone alive is being advertised to then your “unrelated ways companies making suckers out of their customers” comment isn’t correct or honest. It’s the norm, everyones going through it is totally related.

  I talked about companies that lock you into their ecosystems and force you to have a stake in their business model. They do this for two reasons: you make money and they want it, and if you spend your money elsewhere they don’t get it. Name one phone manufacturer that isn’t stealing your data. Name one social media app that isn’t spyware. Name one online store, review site or fucking cooking blog that isn’t loaded with ad trackers and cursor monitoring shit that tells you to subscribe as soon as you go to close the tab.

  Sure some smaller examples exist (I love lemmy, this place is awesome), sure I can download a free open source os, or just install an:

  Adblocker User agent spoofer Anti track-sender Set my browser to stop allowing targeted ads or download a privacy browser

  but everyone is still stuck using the other products in some capacity just the same. I’m happy for you if you fall outside this, seriously. However, most people do not. We are stuck and it’s because we got prayed upon. So yeah, everyone is the product. Always. No exceptions.