stsquad
@stsquad@lemmy.ml
FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer
- Comment on “China keeps the algorithm”: Critics attack Trump’s TikTok deal 10 hours ago:
Without algorithmic transparency how can you ensure it’s not a propaganda machine?
That said tilting the algorithm isn’t exclusively a TikTok problem, I would love to know how active the bots have been the last week on all the US owned social media platforms. Is there a push for division? How would we know?
- Comment on Russia targets WhatsApp and pushes new 'super-app' as internet blackouts grow 1 week ago:
I wonder how much this will impact the economy in Russia? It seems they’re is not much point having a smart phone if all you are allowed to access is government controlled services.
Do the major phones get sold in Russia or are they all locally produced?
- Comment on UK Cops 'Ashamed and Sick' of Enforcing Ban on Anti-Genocide Group Palestine Action 1 week ago:
Your talking about their discretionary powers and that’s not going to be relevant on a protest enforcement action where their senior officer in command will have laid out exactly what the criteria to arrest is.
- Comment on YouTube is now flagging accounts on Premium family plans that aren't in the same household 2 weeks ago:
I’m similar - and my kids even more so. As they only watch YouTube on the main TV it’s a pain to get alternate frontends on it I also like the fact there are no ads. I think the creators get a bigger cut per premium view Vs ad views, especially if they get blocked.
- Comment on The Queen was the victim of an attempted indecent assault as a teenager, book claims 2 weeks ago:
I’m not surprised. My mum would tell me stories about dodging creepy old men on the train when going to school in the 50s. She seemed to accept it as just one of those things and I’m sitting there with my GenX sensibilities thinking yikes!
- Comment on Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras 2 weeks ago:
I would be curious if there have been any pen testing against the police and municipal camera networks in the UK. I wonder how many of the vulnerabilities of the system in the video come from trying to use WiFi to save on costs of hardwired setups.
We’ve had them for a long time. In the London the “ring of steel” was installed as a result of the IRAs mainland bombing campaign in the 80s and of course has expanded as the various congestion and clean air zones have been rolled out. I doubt it would be politically possible to remove them now. While potential leaks are an issue at least public sector organisations have some degree of accountability for the cock ups.
- Comment on Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras 2 weeks ago:
Great video and very illuminating about corporatised data surveillance. I wonder how these practices would fly in European or UK data environments. Big cities certainly have extensive CCTV coverage both law enforcement based and private but I’m not sure you could be selling personally identifying data like that.
- Comment on Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told 3 weeks ago:
I mean I don’t think I could pick right now 😂
- Comment on Is 4chan the Perfect 'Pirate Bay' Poster Child to Justify Wider UK Site-Blocking? 3 weeks ago:
I don’t know why we couldn’t have what we already have on mobile. My kids phones have isp enforced restrictions that prevent them stumbling onto most adult sites. At home I’ve got their devices fairly locked down but I’m fairly technical so know how it works. I don’t know why households couldn’t just have a setting with their ISP that allows them to opt in/out of blocking non-OSA compliment sites rather than doing a blanket censorship.
I get the reasoning behind the OSA - a lot of parents don’t know how to protect their kids online and defer to the government to sort it out. However the implementation has been a giant flustercuck.
- Comment on Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told 3 weeks ago:
It’s the free VPNs that are the problem. They are privacy nightmares.
- Comment on A UK government program to address obesity gets major funding from Eli Lilly, the maker of weight loss drug Mounjaro 3 weeks ago:
Looks like 🙂
On the actual topic I know a number of people getting injection privately and swearing by the results. There is a pretty aggressive referral campaign as well which considering the monthly cost is going up you can see why people will sing it’s praises.
- Comment on Flight attendant union leaders ‘ready to go to jail’ as Air Canada strike outlawed 4 weeks ago:
Are airline staff counted as critical workers? In the UK I think it’s only Police, fire and military who are banned from striking.
- Comment on Famous VPN company Mullvald says it will no longer use OpenVPN 4 weeks ago:
Because OpenVPN is fiddly to set up and modern Wireguard setups seem to scale well enough.
- Comment on Trump administration accuses UK of failing to uphold human rights 4 weeks ago:
Not exactly complains about grannies being arrested are they?
- Comment on "I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint 5 weeks ago:
You must make the source available to anyone you distributed the binaries to. Where in Red Hats TOS does it say they will sue you? As far as I understand it the reserve the right to terminate the service you are paying for. But your rights to source for the binaries provided are not affected.
- Comment on Could I just create my own drive format? 5 weeks ago:
So a network version of an acoustic delay line?
- Comment on The Debian project is proud to release Debian 13 "Trixie", a major update that brings new features, updated components, and numerous other improvements 5 weeks ago:
I daily drive Debian and I switched to Trixie once the tooling freeze kicked in. Now the release is stable I’ll be able to enable backports for the few bits and pieces I like to have the latest packages for. Generally I want a rock solid base and I can always use flatpak/snap for more recent apps.
- Comment on YSK: US Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem publically bragged about killing her puppy 5 weeks ago:
For context watching South park?
- Comment on YouTube to be included in Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 1 month ago:
Currently my kids can only watch YouTube on a shared account on the TV. They haven’t been exposed to any of the gift stuff as far as I can tell but we do regularly weed the history and subscriptions to keep it vaguely on track. While each of the kids have their own favourite creators we also have found a number of educational and comedy channels we’ll watch with them on the account.
The bigger challenge comes with homework as once in secondary school the teachers regularly link to YouTube videos as an intro to a particular homework topic. Although their accounts are registered as kids accounts under our indirect control I keep having to move their pc out of the restricted group on the router because for some reason Eero prevents some videos from playing which from my point of view are fine. I dread to think what parents who aren’t comfortable debugging network failures do, probably drop restrictions all together in frustration.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Directors have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders and that includes a legal liability if they don’t do their job. That said if the chairman has a controlling majority of the shares they can run the company into the ground if they want to as it’s their money to waste.
Generally if you want to bring investment into a company it will come with strings attached like nominated seats on the board of directors to prevent this sort of thing. Voting shares can be different normal shares or there can be several share types with different levels of voting rights. However the structure of the shares will be disclosed to the board and for a publicly traded company this will be public.
- Comment on Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower 1 month ago:
You have to ignore the obsequious optimism bias LLM’s often have. It all comes down to their training set and if they have seen more than you have.
I don’t generally use them on projects I’m already familiar with unless it’s for fairly boring repetitive work that would be fiddly with search and replace, e.g. refactor the common code out of these functions and refactor.
When working with unfamiliar code they can have an edge so if I needed a simple mobile app I’d probably give the LLM a go and then tidy up the code once it’s working.
At most I’ll give it 2 or 3 attempts to correct the original approach before I walk away and try something else. If it starts making up functions it APIs that don’t exist that is usually a sign out didn’t know so time to cut your losses and move on.
Their real strengths come in when it comes to digesting large amounts of text and sumerising. Great for saving you reading all the documentation on a project just to try a small thing. But if your going to work on the project going forward your going to want to invest that training data yourself.
- Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea? 2 months ago:
Well Trump had a go on his first term but unsurprisingly didn’t get far.
- Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea? 2 months ago:
Are you familiar with the Korean war? There was a massive conflict which got drawn out into a stalemate and everybody agreed a temporary ceasefire was preferable to even more destruction.
Trying to topple a regime that has nothing to lose and a highly indoctrinated population is not an easy ask. We can only hope that like most authoritarian regimes they eventually succumb to the weight of their own opression. It’s better than torching the whole continent in the name of freedom.
- Comment on AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds 2 months ago:
They can be helpful when using a new library or development environment which you are not familiar with. I’ve noticed a tendency to make up functions that arguably should exist but often don’t.
- Comment on AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds 2 months ago:
Sometimes I get an LLM to review a patch series before I send it as a quick once over. I would estimate about 50% of the suggestions are useful and about 10% are based on “misunderstanding”. Last week it was suggesting a spelling fix I’d already made because it didn’t understand the - in the diff meant I’d changed the line already.
- Comment on Developer interview: my Q&A with a PC game 'repacker' 2 months ago:
So back in the days of the Atari ST we had compact disks (sic).
Most games shipped on a single floppy disk (so 720k or 1.4Mb) and rarely used compression given the base system only has 512k of RAM. The crackers would strip the protection, repack the data and patch the loading routines to handle that. Depending on the games they could fit 3 or 4 games on a single disk.
Nowadays the dynamics are different - games on consoles do use compression but they have to favour speed because they are streaming assets just in time. The PS5 even had dedicated decompression hardware to keep up with the data rate on it’s fast SSD.
- Comment on Microsoft Copilot falls Atari 2600 Video Chess 2 months ago:
I thought CoPilot was just a rebagged ChatGPT anyway?
It’s a silly experiment anyway, there are very good AI chess grandmasters but they were actually trained to play chess, not predict the next word in a text.
- Comment on BBC is Getting a Paywall. 2 months ago:
Seems fair enough, these things cost money and the #BBC is in a race to diversify it’s income in preparation for the license fee going away. The dynamic description sounds like they want to preserve the casual visitors experience of an open site.
I get ads on my BBC podcasts when I’m abroad. I assume that’s all part of it.
- Comment on Majority of children will be overweight or obese in nine areas of England by 2035, study shows 2 months ago:
My eldest understands the need for good diet and exercise. They exercise at home doing various aerobic exercises and crunches to keep in shape. They hate sports at school and there doesn’t seem to be any effort to find the a sport they might enjoy or even just focus on improving their personal exercise regime.
I get teaching time is limited but the impression I get is the kids that want to be in the school teams get the most out of sport and the rest just go through the motions because it’s a compulsory subject.
- Comment on All babies in England to get DNA test to assess risk of diseases within 10 years 2 months ago:
You don’t think having a full genome and medical history of everyone who’d been in contact with the NHS would be useful to researchers?