ricecake

@ricecake@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they’re the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
  They’re basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.

  My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨One in five Americans want their state to join Canada amid escalating trade war: poll⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That tracks. I currently have better regard for Canada than I do the US, and while Canada has problems like anywhere else, they’re not charitably described as “your countrymen elected a felon who already did a bad job” as president. And the healthcare system is just… Better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Your Threat Model Is Being a Moron⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually wouldn’t be shocked if it was possible with modern smartphones. A significant amount of money is available to be made from federal security work, and meeting the NSA criteria has benefits that extend to companies that work in the federal security space as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How exactly are people lighting Teslas on fire?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s most likely gasoline. It’s very difficult to engineer upholstery and rubber to be resistant to prolonged exposure to an open gas fire. Usually the best you can do is get to a minimum safe time for certain temperatures.

  The highest standards you’ll run into day to day are baby clothing, bedding, and residential wall insulation.
  The reasons for those being specifically regulated should be relatively obvious, and are respectively heartbreaking, scary, and sensible.

  Cars tend to be going fast when they encounter issues, and there’s a lot less ability to make a lot of assurances. As a result, cars tend to be designed for controlled failure rather than resilience. This allows to car to fail around the passengers, hopefully resulting in the car, which is totaled anyway, absorbing the damage the passengers would have otherwise gotten.
  We can make a car that can take a 45mph collision with an oak tree. We just don’t know upfront that that’s how it’s going to crash, and the squishy people inside can’t be made to tolerate a 45mph collision with the dashboard. So instead of making a perfect fuel tank, we just make sure that if it breaks it tries to rupture the fuel away from the passenger compartment. Instead of making the upholstery incapable of burning (which comes with downsides like “expensive”, “uncomfortable”, “ugly”, “smelly”, or “even more toxic than current flame retardants”) we make it able to resist burning for as long as it would take for the air inside the vehicle to become deadly hot. It doesn’t matter if the seat fabric is unscathed if the fire is hot enough to warp the metal.

  Beyond all that, Tesla’s are notoriously poorly engineered, and in that category the cyber truck is best in class. I do not know, but would not be surprised, if accelerant was simply able to seep into the more flammable parts of the car from the outside.

  As for surveillance catching the people, covering your face, obscuring identifying marks, and simply being far away by the time anyone notices the fire is a good bet. The police might try a bit harder because it’s an expensive property crime, but it’s ultimately a property crime where no one is going to be building their career on it, so there won’t be real incentive to go above and beyond.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  … What?

  Your screenshot has the founder saying it’s reparable. It also has him telling someone with unreasonable expectations that they would be disappointed.

  If you literally take his comment out of context you can construe it as him saying they didn’t consider repairability or lifetime. But why wouldn’t you look at the context that’s right there?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In the context of him saying the device is repairable, the top comment talking about repairing it, and the comment in question replying to that thread, it seems a bit weird to say “he didn’t say it in this comment, so the comments where he says it’s repairable don’t count”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure have!

  He told someone not to buy it if they expect more than five years without repairs. That person seemed to think spending more than $100 should get them a product that lasts a lifetime, and was irritated the founder said he thought it was pretty good that a piece of low cost consumer electronics made it five years before needing repairs.

  What part of that says to you that it’s not reparable or won’t last five years?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Image

  Image

  How does that read to you like him saying it’s not replaceable?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Epaper and eink are different. Eink consumes no power when idle, and epaper consumes almost no power.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Pebble Has Been Brought Back⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It reads to me like he’s saying that if you expect 5+ years without maintenance if it’s more than $100, you should look at a different product.
  The top comments are someone saying that after five years they needed to repair it due to battery failure, and the founder saying the repair process is the same.

  Five years is longer than the average lifespan of a liIon battery. Expecting to be able to skip repairs that long is unreasonable for a $150 product.

  It reads like the founder actually giving realistic expectations. A $150 product will likely need repairs to last longer than five years, and you’ll be disappointed if you expect otherwise.

  Can you point to a similar product that costs about as much that fits your criteria?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Get your new PebbleOS watch⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They do need to protect their branding, but only if it’s likely to be viewed as “similar”. there’s no reasonable risk of people thinking that a watch and an old processor are the same.
  There’s a lot of products with similar names that haven’t had issues.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The big one there is food and housing subsidies. The way way we have it set-up can create a situation where a raise can cost you benefits that are worth more than the raise. With disability benefits there can actually be limits on the amount of money you’re allowed to have in general, which means that disabled people can find themselves in places where not only do they need to avoid trying to find work that they might be able to do, since trying and failing can still make them need to restart the benefits application process or even pay back historical benefits, but they also need to reject gifts above a certain value and can’t prepare for any type of emergency, like a car breakdown.

  It’s annoying because it creates a disincentive to do the things that would help people on assistance actually get off of it, when the people who push for those limits purport to want them for exactly that reason.
  Tapering off benefits as income grows, but at a slower rate than the income growth creates a continuous incentive for a person on benefits to increase their earned income. (If you lose $500 in benefits for every $1000 in income, your $1000 raise still puts $500 extra in your pocket, instead of potentially costing you your entire $8000 food subsidy)

  Can’t do that though, because it doesn’t punish people for the audacity of needing help.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is 33 cents a small amount of money?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have never been invited to burn peanuts with a bunsen burner. Showing the relationship between chemical energy and thermal energy and the sometimes surprising differences between foods?

  I think we had too much separation between diet classes and physical science. I think I recall doing something like a puzzle, with physical pieces, where you tried to make a days food using different foods. The point was that it’s easier and you get more if you pick the healthier foods. Instead everyone knew what the point was and then fucked around making the dumbest possible meal that fit the defined criteria.
  I seem to recall the teacher not being amused with my solution that only has one food group per meal. (What’s for breakfast? 9 eggs. Lunch? 3 unseasoned grilled chicken breasts. Dinner? Six baked potatos, plain)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are Google's Assistant(s) so bad nowadays?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t address most of it, but under gesture navigation there’s an option to swipe from the corner to invoke the assistant. I entirely agree that the power button is for “power”, and I don’t know why you would try to change that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to design a (pen and paper) cipher that is secure against government cryptanalysis for at least 10 years?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So, the size of the key doesn’t directly relate to the size of the cipher, which also doesn’t directly relate to security. AES is 128 bit , can have 128, 192, or 256 but keys and is currently not known to have any workable weaknesses.

  Largely a cipher isn’t weak if guessing the key is the only weakness, since every cipher is vulnerable to brute force. It’s weak if you can figure out the message without needing the key.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to design a (pen and paper) cipher that is secure against government cryptanalysis for at least 10 years?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s no longer a one time pad. That’s closer to a homebrew stream cipher with the weakness of having a key that you just hope no one notices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to design a (pen and paper) cipher that is secure against government cryptanalysis for at least 10 years?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You need a way to generate a psuedo random sequence that’s synchronized. You can then use that random stream as something that works like a stream cipher.

  Getting synchronized sources of random numbers like that isn’t trivial, but it can be done.

  To spitball a notion: get something like a small microcontroller that can drive a small screen, no wireless capabilities needed. Putting an implementation of something like the hotp algorithm on it will let you get some random data with each button press. That data can basically be used like a one time pad where you press a button each time you need more data. People decrypting the data just need to start at the same point in the sequence.

  There are so many issues with this that I haven’t thought of, but it’s the most reasonable approximation of a pen and paper algorithm that has modern security levels and can be done in a reasonable amount of time.

  Basically, you’re going to want to look into stream ciphers. Since those can be done without feeding the data into them, it’s possible to have a more disconnected system.

  It’s worth noting that against a governmental adversary, you’re far more likely to be revealed via poor application of a custom crypto system than by a targeted bypass of a commonplace one.
  If you’re under suspicion, a cop can grab the piece of paper you did your work on out of the trash if you forgot to burn it and no decryption is required. Being physically readable, the key material can be seized and it’s lost. If they have a warrant they can put a camera in your house and just record your paper.
  With a cellphone, the lowest level of scrutiny that can use a backdoor that we know of would be a sealed fisa court order. Anything less official would require more scrutiny, since the NSA isn’t going to send a targeted payload to the phone of a generic malcontent/domestic subversive.

  Widely used crypto systems address an extremely wide array of possible attacks, most of which aren’t related to the cipher but instead to issues of key management and rotation. This can give you guarantees about message confidentiality being preserved backwards in time if the key is stolen,cand only new messages being readable, as an example. (Perfect forward secrecy)

  What you’re looking for can be made, but you need to strongly consider if it actually makes you more secure, or less. Probably less.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know that I’d agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
  I’ve read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?

  I don’t think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.

  Ratings should be informative and harm based. “This game is full of violence” and “this game has gambling”. Factual.
  A game being prone to being played alot isn’t factual, it’s just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you’re just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I was a Health Care CEO after Luigi and felt in fear of my life from someone else how would I hire security? What would be a good deal? And does security act like the Secret Service to take a bulle⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So, for the actual answer to how you get private security: you hire a company like constellis (formerly blackwater, or Iraq war crime fame) or the honest to God pinkertons, who are actually still around.
  You pay them unholy amounts of money and get some burly people to follow you around, with skills proportional to how much you’re paying them. If it gets to the six figure a month range, they also get more war-crime-y because you’re going for the highly qualified special forces folks who miss the fun of combat and murder.
  If you try to pay what feels like a reasonable sum for private security you’re getting a cop working a second job who is definitely not taking a bullet for you, and probably not doing anything more to keep you alive than what’s coincidental to keeping themselves alive.

  The company I work for does business in countries where kidnapping foreign business people is a common and lucrative way to make money (it’s effectively IT consulting, we’re not evil beyond the baseline capitalist level). We hire security people for preposterous sums and basically get former special forces who drive a car, make sure the person who showed up to the meeting is actually who they should be, orders delivery food, and tells you not to do stupid things. They try to keep you from getting kidnapped in boring ways, and if you do get kidnapped they coordinate the ransom exchange. (That I know of the most that’s ever happened was someone made the phone call to verify that the car they were about to get into at the airport was the pickup, and were told that it was not, abandon your bag if they’ve already loaded it and immediately go back into the airport and wait for the guard who showed up a minute later and handled the police interaction)

  In general just try to avoid being in a position where you feel like you need to have hired a hero.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Digital Fingerprinting: Google launched a new era of tracking worse than cookie banners | Tuta⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  blog.lukaszolejnik.com/biggest-privacy-erosion-in…

  This article actually shares what changed, as opposed to just asserting that there was a change.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Gemini: Fascist AI for the plebs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, yeah. That’s what it said.

  It’s trained by reading the horrible morass of stuff on the Internet. Topics with larger amounts of disinformation are areas where they’re very prone to making mistakes. Crossing those topics with ones that misinformation or the appearance of misinformation are particularly damaging to the world or to their reputation and you have a good list of topics that are probably not good candidates to let your chatbot talk about.

  It doesn’t do “reasoning” or “critical thinking” in the way you might expect for something that can communicate articulately. It doesn’t know what’s accurate or not, only what’s likely to be stated on the Internet. Unfortunately, it’s very likely for people on the Internet to say some bonkers things about the 2020 election in specific, and anything political in general. Even in sources that normally might be ranked higher for factuality, like a news publication.
  It’s not just trump, it’s anything political.

  This type of AI isn’t an expert, it’s a mimic. It knows how to mimic patterns, and it’s been told to mimic something knowledgeable and helpful based on all the text on the Internet, where people regularly present themselves as knowledgeable regardless of their basic sanity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Though the headnotes were drawn directly from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court analogized them to the choices made by a sculptor in selecting what to remove from a slab of marble. Thus, even though the words or phrases used in the headnotes might be found in the underlying opinions, Thompson Reuters’ selection of which words and phrases to use was entitled to copyright protection. Interestingly, the court stated that “even a headnote taken verbatim from an opinion is a carefully chosen fraction of the whole,” which “expresses the editor’s idea about what the important point of law from the opinion is.” According to the court, that is enough of a “creative spark” to be copyrightable. In other words, even if a work is selected entirely from the public domain, the simple act of selection is enough to give rise to copyright protection.

  The court distinguished cases holding that intermediate copying of computer source code was fair use, reasoning that those courts held that the intermediate copying was necessary to “reverse engineer access to the unprotected functional elements within a program.” Here, copying Thompson Reuters’ protected expression was not needed to gain access to underlying ideas.

  natlawreview.com/…/court-training-ai-model-based-…

  It sounds like the case you mentioned had a government entity doing the annotation, which makes it public even though it’s not literally the law.
  Reuters seems to have argued that while the law and cases are public, their tagging, summarization and keyword highlighting is editorial.
  The judge agreed and highlighted that since westlaw isn’t required to view the documents that everyone is entitled to see, training using their copy, including the headers, isn’t justified.

  It’s much like how a set of stories being in the public domain means you can copy each of them, but my collection of those stories has curation that makes it so you can’t copy my collection as a whole, assuming my work curating the collection was in some way creative and not just “alphabetical order”.

  Another major point of the ruling seems to rely on the company aiming to directly compete with Reuters, which undermines the fair use argument.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think that’s the best argument in favor of AI if you cared to make that argument. The infringement wasn’t for their parsing of the law, but for their parsing of the annotations and commentary added by westlaw.

  If processing copy written material is infringement then what they did is definitively infringement.
  The law is freely available to read without westlaw. They weren’t making the law available to everyone, they were making a paid product to compete with the westlaw paid product. Regardless of justification they don’t deserve any sympathy for altruism.

  A better argument would be around if training on the words of someone you paid to analyze an analysis produces something similar to the original, is it sufficiently distinct to actually be copy written? Is training itself actually infringement?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Iraq War was preceded by the largest worldwide non-violent protests in history and the war happened anyway.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was a bit skeptical as well, but there’s at least one seemingly reputable academic researcher who says as much: en.wikipedia.org/…/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot… (first citation).
  So even if it wasn’t, one could easily be forgiven for the mistake.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Rejects Sale of Infowars to The Onion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The estate has a duty to maximize the value of the liquidation, and pay back creditors as best it can. Specifically to settle the debts.

  While a creditor can’t dictate the value of the estate, they can offer to forgive debt, which is the same for the purposes of the estate.

  If the cancelled debt would have been worth more than the cash, then the creditors would be rightfully furious if the state instead sold the asset for less cash and paid them that way.

  If you owe me $50k, and I tell you your watch is worth $5k to me, and instead you sell it for $250 and give me that while declaring bankruptcy so I don’t get anything else, that’s a terrible outcome for me, and great for you if you sold the watch to your friend who then gave it back to you in exchange for $250 later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Rejects Sale of Infowars to The Onion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, that’s actually still the market deciding. It’s a perfectly standard type of auction that discourages low-ball bids. Bidding is secret, you only get one bid, and you don’t know who or if anyone else is bidding.
  If you want it, you make your best offer for what you’re willing to pay for it, and if someone else bid more they get it. If you would have been willing to pay more with more rounds of bidding, you should have bid that from the start.

  Open-bid auctions get better prices for sellers when there are a lot of bidders, and better prices for buyers when there are few. Given there were two bidders, it’s fair to seek the most either party will bid, rather than seeking $1 more than the maximum the loosing party will pay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Rejects Sale of Infowars to The Onion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So it’s unfortunately not actually a sale until the judge approves it, it’s just an accepted bid.
  Sorta like when buying a car. The salesman tells you the price for the vehicle, overpriced perks, and how much your trade in is worth, and you accept the final price. Then the salesman has to get the floor manager to agree, which they always do, because they’re the ones with authority to approve the sale. Then you can sign the paperwork and exchange money and you’ve actually processed the sale. Until then either party can walk away for any reason.

  In this case, it’s like the floor manager rejected the sale because the cash part of the sale price was less than MSRP, and they didn’t think the trade in value mattered.
  It’s not common for the sale to get rejected, and it’s even weirder for them to reject “not cash” instead of paying attention to value.

  The judge saying the estate can’t accept debt forgiveness in lieu of cash is just odd, since it reduces the debt more than the cash would.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Rejects Sale of Infowars to The Onion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sealed buds are usually better for that.

  www.investopedia.com/…/sealed-bid-auction.asp

  Each party is incentivised to make the highest offer they’re willing to pay from the beginning, as opposed to negotiating the best price they can get.

  Additionally, the families forgiving a significant amount of money as part of the bid should factor in, since the responsibility of the estate is to get the best deal, not the most cash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Petrichor⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s worth remembering that evolution doesn’t select for the best as much as it selects against the worst.

  The reason we have such sensitivity doesn’t have to be particularly game changing as long as it doesn’t make us less likely to reproduce.

  You can plainly see our big niche adaptations being used everyday. We think good. We recognize patterns. We use tools. We walk a lot, efficiently and upright. We communicate with high precision. We have a surprisingly efficient digestive system.

  We’re not busting out the ability to smell rain super often, which hints that it might be more in the “doesn’t hurt” category instead of being a big advantage.

  My guess is that being able to smell disturbed soil is helpful for tracking, either where an animal has run or where something has been buried. Our ancestors were not above digging up a fresh-ish dead animal a canine had buried for later.
  But it could just be that rain sense slightly more accurate than looking towards the horizon was as useful then as it is now: vaguely, I guess? It just doesn’t hurt anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨turned them into their final form!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And they’re delicious. ~Although usually not just plain meat, but filled with wonderful spices~