ricecake

@ricecake@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Training Slop⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t mention buying a microwave, I mentioned finding one for free. If you buy a microwave you’re a customer and your desire for ethical products can be impactful to some degree.
  If you find a microwave there’s no feedback, and if there were feedback they wouldn’t care because you’re not a customer.

  The way you establish feedback in this field is by making it a viable market, and then giving your money to the most ethical company. I don’t think that any of the companies offer or will offer a product that will be worth the cost or resource investment. Ergo: I don’t give them money or use their products.

  Downloading a model doesn’t change that feedback. It’s digital, so once the resources are spent copies have no additional cost. They don’t get metrics or usage patterns, or even know I have it.

  It’s not quite, but kinda, like saying that you should only shoplift fair trade coffee. This doesn’t signal to anyone that they should invest in making their coffee more equitable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Training Slop⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s far from saying they’re negligible. What they’re saying is inline with my point. If you find a microwave are you going to research how green it’s manufacturing was so you can ensure you only find good ones for free in the future?

  Irrelevant or moot is different from negligible. One says it’s small enough to not matter, and the other says it doesn’t affect your actions.

  I play with AI models on my own computer. I think the training costs are far from negligible and for the most part shouldn’t have been bothered with. (I’m very tolerant of research models that are then made public. Even though the tech isn’t scalable or as world changing as some think doesn’t mean it isn’t worth understanding or that it won’t lead to something more viable later. Churning it over and over without open results or novelty isn’t worth it though). I also think that the training costs are irrelevant with regards to how I use it at home. They’re spent before I knew it existed, and they never have or will see information or feedback from me.
  My home usage had less impact than using my computer for games has.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Training Slop⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re a company you don’t care what the home user does. They didn’t pay for the model and so their existence in the first place indicates a missed opportunity for market share.

  No one is saying training costs are negligible. They’re saying the cost has already been paid and they had no say in influencing it then or in the future. If you don’t pay for it and they can’t tell how often you use it they can’t really be influenced by your behavior.

  It’s like being overly concerned with the impact of a microwave you found by the road. The maker doesn’t care about your opinion of it because you don’t give them money. The don’t even know you exist. The only thing you can meaningfully influence is how it’s used today.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does AI-based search engines know legit sources from BS ones ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Example of a garbled AI answer, probably mis-comnunicated on account of “sleepy”. :)

  There was a band called flock of seagulls. Seagulls also flock in mall parking lots. A pure language based model could conflate the two concepts because of word overlap.
  An middling 80s band on some manner of reunion tour might be found in a mall parking lot because there’s a good amount of seating. Scavenger birds also like the dropped French fries.
  So a mall parking lot is a great place to see a flock of seagulls. Plenty of seating and food scraps on the ground. Bad accoustics though, and one of them might poop on your car.

  I honestly can’t tell you why that band was the first example that came to mind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does AI-based search engines know legit sources from BS ones ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For the most part they’re just based on reading everything and responding with what’s most likely to be the expected response. Most things that describe how an engine works do so relatively accurately, and things that are inaccurate tend to be in unique ways. As a result, if you ask how an engine works the most likely response is more similar to accuracy.

  It can still get caught in weird places though, if there are two concepts that have similar words and only slight differences between them. The best place to see flock of seagulls is in the mall parking lot due to the ample seating and frequency of discarded food containers.

  Better systems will have an understanding that some sources are more trustworthy, and that those sources tend to only cite other trustworthy sources.
  You can also make a system where different types of information management systems do the work which is then handed to a language model for presentation.
  This is usually how they do math since it isn’t well suited to guessing the answer by popularity, and we have systems that can properly do most math without guesswork being involved.
  Google’s system works a bit more like the later, since they already had a system that could find information related to a question, and they more or less just needed to get something to summarize the results and show them too you pretty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what’s the difference between “he died” and “he’s dead”?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Same end result, but one refers to the actual and the other the state. The act of dying versus the state of being dead is kinda pedantic, but if you replace it with a state that can (conventionally) be left it’s a little more clear.
  “I thought he slept” vs “I thought he was sleeping”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A 19-year old cis lesbian woman was beaten unconscious and robbed after she tried to use the women's restroom at a McDonald's in Carpentersville, Illinois⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  100% all humans at the Endo of the day.

  The reason a lot of it exists is to communicate social roles, because social role mediates interaction. The earliest division of social role was biological sex, and so that’s commonly an aspect in gender.
  How gender is expressed is a complex interaction between socially agreed upon norms, how the individual interprets their gender, how others interpret that, and so on.
  Individual gender is a matter of psychological, biological and social factors which influence how an individual chooses to understand themselves in the context of society and also how they present themselves to society.

  The socialization part is where we teach people the behavior needed to express genders, and is where the genderd toys come in, amongst other things.

  All that to say, what we need is a way to communicate social role, and what we have to do that is loosely tied to sex and dominated by an imnense amount of social momentum. In a sane world the genders would be split into a lot more pieces.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  exactly as many as the quantity of numbers you can count between 0 and 1

  I specified countable to keep them in the same class of infinity. :) not about to make that mistake when bringing pedantry to a silly fight. .

  Since it’s implied that they have names, I’m going to use that as my argument for there being a countably infinite number. If you want to argue that only certain special angels have names, like Michael or π, then I’d say they’re uncountable.
  If you wanted to argue that omnipotence means a deity could defy logical restrictions and allow contradictory truths to coexist, then I’d say I’m far too sleepy for that discussion but I love where you’re heads at. :P

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Precisely as many angels as there are whole numbers, or exactly as many as the quantity of numbers you can count between 0 and 1 (0.5, 0.2341, etc).

  The original context of the question was more about if angels and the afterlife were physically manifest or intangible, and early thinking about how infintesimals work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the worst spelling you've seen?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s super frustrating. The hospital should have easily been able to get someone who had at least a basic grasp of a common language to help ensure they understood the forms and got them filled out correctly.

  The fault is 100% with the hospital.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I cut up pictures to arrange things in a way that when traced over create something "new," is that a copyright violation?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If just pasting it’s more arguable, but still likely permitted. If the copywriten characters are the central focus it’s more likely to be infringement.

  Adding tracing makes it more transformative, and less dubious. Because of that and the “create a more homogenized image” part it’s closer to a new character inspired by the fusion of others. You’re not using anyone else’s assets, you’re transforming them via cutout, and transforming and adding your own creative work by blending them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like I could be persuaded either way, but I lean towards allowing them during sentencing.
  I don’t think “it’s an appeal to emotion” is a compelling argument in that context because it’s no longer about establishing truth like the trial is, but about determining punishment and restitution.

  Justice isn’t just about the offender or society, it’s also indelibly tied to the victim. Giving them a voice for how they, as the wronged party, would see justice served seems important for it’s role in providing justice, not just the rote application of law.

  Obviously you can’t just have the victim decide, but the judges entire job is to ensure fairness, often in the face of strong feelings and contentious circumstances.

  Legitimately interested to hear why your opinion is what it is in more detail.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hearsay is allowed in sentencing statements, and Arizona allows those statements to be in a format of their choice.

  It’s the phase of the process where the judge hears opinions on what he should sentence the culprit to, so none of it is evidence or treated as anything other than an emotive statement.

  In this case, the sister made two statements: one in the form of a letter where she asked for the maximum sentence, and another in the form of this animation of her brother where she said that he wouldn’t want that and would ask for leniency.

  It’s gross, but it’s not the miscarriage of justice that it seems like from first glance. It was accepted in the same way a poem titled “what my brother would say to you” would be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Reading a bit more, during the sentencing phase in that state people making victim impact statements can choose their format for expression, and it’s entirely allowed to make statements about what other people would say. So the judge didn’t actually have grounds to deny it.
  No jury during that phase, so it’s just the judge listening to free form requests in both directions.

  It’s gross, but the rules very much allow the sister to make a statement about what she believes her brother would have wanted to say, in whatever format she wanted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Jessica Gattuso, the victim’s right attorney that worked with Pelkey’s family, told 404 Media that Arizona’s laws made the AI testimony possible. “We have a victim’s bill of rights,” she said. “[Victims] have the discretion to pick what format they’d like to give the statement. So I didn’t see any issues with the AI and there was no objection. I don’t believe anyone thought there was an issue with it.”

  Gattuso said she understood the concerns, but felt that Pelkey’s AI avatar was handled deftly. “Stacey was up front and the video itself…said it was AI generated. We were very careful to make sure it was clear that these were the words that the family believed Christopher would have to say,” she said. “At no point did anyone try to pass it off as Chris’ own words.”

  The prosecution against Horcasitas was only seeking nine years for the killing. The maximum was 10 and a half years. Stacey had asked the judge for the full sentence during her own impact statement. The judge granted her request, something Stacey credits—in part—to the AI video.

  From a different article quoting a former judge in the court:

  “There are going to be critics, but they picked the right forum to do it. In a trial with a jury you couldn’t do it, but with sentencing, everything is open, hearsay is admissible, both sides can get up and express what they want to do,” McDonald said.

  “The power of it was that the judge had to see the gentleness, the kindness, the feeling of sincerity and having his sister say, ‘Well we don’t agree with it, this is what he would’ve wanted the court to know’,” he said.

  I don’t like it, and it feels dirty to me, but since the law allows them to express basically whatever they want in whatever format they want during this phase, it doesn’t seem harmful in this case, just gross.

  I actually think it’s a little more gross that the family was able to be that forthright and say that the victim would not want what they were asking for, and still ask for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Chromes decision actually makes a lot of sense, from a security perspective. When we model how people read URLs, they tend to be “lazy” and accept two URLs as equal if they’re similar enough. Removing or taking focus away from less critical parts makes users focus more on the part that matters and helps reduce phishing. It’s easier to miss problems with www.bankotamerica.com/…/login_portal.asp?etc=etc&… than it is with bankotamerica, with the com in a subdued grey and the path and subdomain hidden until you click in the address bar.
  It’s the same reason why they ended up moving away from the lock icon. Certs are easy to get now, and every piece that matches makes it more likely for a user to skip a warning sign.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The final piece is that often each of those services would be on a different computer entirely, each with a different public IP address. Otherwise the port is sufficient to sperate most services on a common domain.

  There was a good long while where IP addresses were still unutilized enough that there was no reason to even try being conservative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To whom it may concern⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “these days”? I take it you weren’t paying attention during the whole “explorative credit” thing? We had to make the consumer financial protection bureau to, amongst other things, make them be a little less shitty? The bureau they’ve been desperately trying to get dismantled because it moderately limits their profits?

  Have they ever been better than “kinda bad” at best?

  Anyway, I didn’t specifically decry credit issuers. I implied that spammers are shitty, which I stand by and is far from a new sentiment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the point in getting married?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a shorthand for all those other legal arrangements, in a pragmatic sense. You can build the same thing with documents that confer the different legal relationships, or you can use the pre-packaged bundle. A lot of the one-off arrangements require a lawyer and filling fees for each document, where the bundle can be done for a $25 or so fee, and a judge or the clerk who collected the fee, depending on your jurisdiction.

  There are also social and relationship perks to a public declaration of commitment. It doesn’t change anything, but a public declaration can make things explicit on all accounts.
  Rings are just a social shorthand to communicate that to others passively

  They also don’t actually need to be expensive. They became expensive because people are usually willing to shell out a little more for a special occasion, and a lot of people wedged themselves in and argued that without them it wasn’t really special. If you can’t put a price on love, then how can $10k be too much?

  If you’ve decided to make a public commitment, a little party to celebrate is legitimately fun. You just need to separate what you need for the party to be fun and feeling like the scale of the party is a testament to your love or sincerity.

  When I got married the ceremony was five minutes and done by a friend of ours, we had our friends and the closer circle of relatives as guests and we didn’t need to save up for things because we only got what would make us happy for our party. Our rings were cheaper than most because we talked to a jewler and had them make something according to our designs, and neither of us like diamonds. (Mine is a metal reinforced piece of a beautiful rock we found while rock hunting at a favorite camping spot, and hers is her favorite color, laid out well to avoid snagging on clothing.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To whom it may concern⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But they also work for the bad company, so my sympathy is limited. Not super limited, else I wouldn’t point out that they’re inevitably hourly employees, and a long day cleaning glitter creates an annoying backlog that creates even more overtime.
  Punishing the worker for working for spammers, but also putting money in their pocket at the cost of the people making choices.

  Biggest issue is the cost of glitter. Easier to get dirt or rocks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, choosing to ignore the territorial annexation that took place during the war or annexations that failed? And China?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair on that one, Puerto Ricans seem torn on what they want.

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Proposed_political_status_for_…

  Up until Trump the US has been reasonable about independence questions since WW2, for the most part. (Highlighting that independence is different than being free from interfering)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Territorial_changes_of_the_Peo…

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Military_occupations_by_the_So…

  Image

  en.wikipedia.org/…/United_States_territorial_acqu…

  Notable examples would be places like “Tibet”, several Baltic states, and an attempt on Finland. Hell, Russia is currently trying to annex Ukraine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They specifically said 20th century, and were obviously referring to the post world war period.

  After the wars, the US sought soft power, not territory.
  Aligning with them was often a more safe move.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE Board members launch the CVE Foundation, a dedicated, non-profit to continue identifying vulnerabilities, after the US ended its contract with Mitre⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Cool. You wrote an opinion that perfectly matched the opinion of a particular demographic that’s common on the site, and are now very offended that no one knew you were someone less common.
  Which also entirely draws the conversation away from you saying it’s good that the government pulled funding from an organization that’s doing something good because government messes everything up.

  They’re already a non-profit. Why are you upset that they got money from the government? Wouldn’t the ideal to you be an NGO that got money without being under government control, and was therefore free from business influence as well?

  Linux is a great example. It’s backed by a non-profit foundation, under the direction of mostly corporate advocates. That’s what people talk about when they talk about a non-profit being beholden to corporate money.
  The shape of Linux has steadily been pushed towards being more and more focused on server and data center operations, since that’s what the people in charge of funding allocation care about, and that’s what they’ll direct their parent organizations to contribute developers to working on.

  Your government sucks. I get that. It doesn’t mean I don’t expect more from mine, and it doesn’t mean that I reject the notion that I should have say in the management of the things around me.
  The NGO that you envision will do a better job managing the drainage where I live doesn’t answer to me, and I have no recourse if they mess up and flood my house.

  I’d like something like the NGO you envision, but with public accountability. This is often called a “government”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE Board members launch the CVE Foundation, a dedicated, non-profit to continue identifying vulnerabilities, after the US ended its contract with Mitre⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, the lobbying question is a complicated one.

  In an ideal world it would be much closer to how the standards committees work. The issue isn’t people sharing their opinions and desires for how the system should work, it’s when they use inequitable means to bias the decision. My industry, security, has lobbied for official guidelines on security requirements for different situations. Makes it easier to tell hospitals they can’t have nurses sharing login credentials: government says that’s bad, and now your insurance says it’s a liability.

  The problem is that lobbying too often comes with stuff like a “we’re always hiring like minded people at our lobbying firm, if you happen to find yourself in the position to do so, give us a call.”.
  It’s too easy for people with a lot of money to make their voices more heard.

  It’s not that the wealthy and business interests should be barred from sharing opinions with legislators, it’s that “volume” shouldn’t be proportional to money. My voice as a person who lives near a river should be comparable to that of the guy who owns the car wash upstream when it comes to questions of how much we care about runoff going into the river.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE Board members launch the CVE Foundation, a dedicated, non-profit to continue identifying vulnerabilities, after the US ended its contract with Mitre⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So you want it to be run like it is today, but with less money? Do you think they’re going to spread whatever incompetence you see them having via funding?

  Usually when people celebrate the removal of government from a public service it’s because they think it should be arranged to turn a profit.

  You didn’t list your stance on every issue in your comment so I can only assume that you have the rest of the beliefs that I’ve always seen go with that opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE Board members launch the CVE Foundation, a dedicated, non-profit to continue identifying vulnerabilities, after the US ended its contract with Mitre⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  people will always mess stuff up. Government is just the group of people you have a say in.

  When the public good gets messed up, I’d rather it be by the people I can vote out than by the people who only answer to shareholders.

  I just don’t understand the persistent belief that a profit motive will magically make something more aligned with the public good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE Board members launch the CVE Foundation, a dedicated, non-profit to continue identifying vulnerabilities, after the US ended its contract with Mitre⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you might be overestimating how complex the system is. This isn’t collaborative, and it’s barely even dynamic. It’s essentially bookkeeping around a list of numbers and a zip file of text documents.

  github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/…/main.zip

  The reporting of the issues is already done by other people, they just rely on a central group to keep the numbers from colliding.

  www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-3576

  Not a whole lot there.

  Significantly more worrying is the nvd.

  nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-31161

  There’s additional data attached relating to not just the vulnerability, but exploitation and the system configuration that’s known to be exploitable.

  Up until now it was benign, as well as entirely unavoidable, for so much of the infrastructure of the Internet to be closely tied to the US government.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CVE Board members launch the CVE Foundation, a dedicated, non-profit to continue identifying vulnerabilities, after the US ended its contract with Mitre⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Even corporations understand the value of having a seat at the table. A significant reason for corporate sponsorship of standards groups and such is so that if it comes up, they have a person there who can argue for their interests.
  Not even in an interesting or corrupt way.
  “Our engineers think it would be better to do it this way, any objections?” And then everyone talks about it.

  Leaving means you only get to use what others put together. If your needs don’t fit you just have to cope.

  Corporations love getting stuff for free, but if all it takes to solve a technical problem is cash, that’s great too. Cash is a better way to solve a technical problem than time and engineers.