trailee
@trailee@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets 3 weeks ago:
Software engineering is so often dominated by a move fast and break things mentality, driven by a rush to deploy and scale and profit, with the ability to fix problems with later updates. It’s a very immature process compared to every other engineering domain, because fix-it-later is much more difficult, expensive, and dangerous when it’s a bridge, building, airplane, or anything else tangible (although Boeing did a great job of destroying engineering process and accountability after the MBAs took control away from the engineers).
The work detailed in this Signal blog post is clearly slow and methodical, with continual checks for correctness and curiosity for optimal solutions driving careful experimentation. Building on existing proven PQ standards and keeping their refinements open for public academic feedback is wonderfully responsible. Building formal correctness proofs into CI and blocking trunk merges is spectacular.
They’re doing everything right, even years after Moxie Marlinspike’s departure. Bravo! Working this way is very expensive and requires absolute support from upper management. I’m definitely a fanboy for Meredith Whittaker and the direction she’s running the organization. Hell yeah!
- Comment on Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets 3 weeks ago:
Of course I don’t have any concrete proof.
serious discussion about security merits.
Those two don’t go together, bud.
It just comes down to if you trust the devs and those doing the hosting.
Ok so let’s talk about Brian Acton walking away from nearly a billion dollars due to his moral stance on private communication. Or Meredith Whittaker’s determination to pioneer a tech business model other than surveillance capitalism.
You’re absolutely right that it comes down to trusting the devs, which is why WhatsApp is a nonstarter even though it uses Signal’s E2EE. Europe’a chat control proposal doesn’t need to break E2EE, it just needs to demand that the messaging client app scans all content locally before encrypting and has a way to tattle. Meta could also be scanning everything you type into WhatsApp and feeding it into a local AI advertising interests summarizer or whatever else, and still claim E2EE. The open source client is far more important than an open source server when there’s proper E2EE.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Hoover dam’s water release schedule is driven by requests from water rightsholders further downstream. Power generation is great, but the dam’s primary design purpose has always been facilitating agricultural irrigation.
That said, I bet you’re right that the water flow rate could be varied throughout each day to help balance electric grid needs. I assume that will likely come into play as we get further along the path to intermittent green power generation.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
nuclear power is the only thing that can threaten fossil fuel primacy
Solar and wind are cheap and easy to build now, and a huge threat to fossil fuel primacy, which in turn makes them a threat to the dominance of the petrodollar as the world’s reserve currency. That’s why the Trump administration has gone all-out to quash their momentum.
Spent nuclear fuel reprocessing is theoretically possible but not politically or economically viable at present. Neither is 100,000+ year storage that has been the concept of a plan of record in the US for decades. I’m not saying that nuclear is inherently unworkable, but your net viewpoint doesn’t seem to be based in reality.
The disaster response in Chernobyl was absolutely heroic but also incredibly lucky. If the melted core had reached the water underneath the concrete pad, the steam explosion would have spread the core atmospherically with devastating results. You’re making light of the disaster that was, and ignoring how close it came to being so much larger. Furthermore, the enormous irresponsibility of the Russian military’s damage to the sarcophagus cannot be overstated. If maintaining isolation for a few decades is difficult, there’s just no chance over 100,000+ years.
But I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith, so I’m done here. I hope you can find your way to more nuanced views in the future.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Pumped hydroelectric storage obviously works with the same kind of turbines as dams located on rivers, but the land use is far from “literally identical”. For one, I agree with you that damming rivers is generally a bad thing. Large dam sites are chosen to min-max construction effort and reservoir capacity, and usually double as flood control. A grid storage project only needs to hold enough water for its daily power use, and it doesn’t need to be located directly on a water course. That’s not to say that there are unlimited suitable sites, but it’s more flexible.
Pumped hydro storage is quite green in its lack of carbon emissions and ability to time-shift green generation capacity to match grid demand timing. Land use is a consideration, but large anything requires land. You haven’t actually attacked the weakest part of pumped hydro, which is that there just aren’t very many geographically suitable locations for it.
You’ve also neglected to acknowledge the pesky spent nuclear fuel storage problem, which is unsolved and distinctly not eco-friendly. There are potentially better paths available such as the thorium fuel cycle, but they all either have no economic traction or are actively opposed by various governments (which don’t have any good solutions for existing spent fuel).
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Unclear if you’re misinformed or disingenuous.
Hoover Dam does generate power, but it’s not an energy storage project to time-shift intermittent clean energy generation to match grid consumption. That’s known as pumped hydroelectric energy storage, and it requires having paired reservoirs in close geographic proximity with a substantial elevation difference. It’s not an ideal technology for several reasons, but it’s the largest type of grid-scale storage currently deployed. Fundamentally it’s gravitational potential energy storage using water as the transport medium.
A higher-efficiency but not yet fully proven technology also uses gravity and elevation differences, but relies on train rails and massive cars. Here’s one company leading the charge, as it were.
Nuclear isn’t a good option to balance out the variability of wind and solar because it’s slow to ramp up and down. Nuclear is much better suited to baseline generation.
There are plenty of other wacky energy suave ideas out there, such as pumping compressed air into depleted natural gas mines, and letting it drive turbines on its way back out. That might also be riddled with problems, but it’s disingenuous to claim that chemical energy storage is the only (non-) option and therefore increasing wind and solar necessarily also increase fossil fuel scaling.
- Comment on Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions. 1 month ago:
Neither the article nor the RSL website makes clear how pricing or payment works, which seems like a huge miss. It’s not obvious if a publisher can price-differentiate among content, or even choose their own prices at all.
Collective licensing organizations like ASCAP and BMI have long helped musicians get paid fairly by working together and pooling rights into a single, indispensable offering.
I’d like to get excited about this because AI companies suck, but if the best example they have is that ASCAP helps “musicians get paid fairly” I’m afraid this isn’t a that solution most content creators will celebrate.
- Comment on Department of War Doesn’t Defend its Web Streams From Hackers 1 month ago:
That’s why it’s spelled Froot.
- Comment on Pentagon to start using Grok as part of a $200 million contract with Elon Musk's xAI 3 months ago:
The new offering includes custom national security tools, AI-powered science and health applications, and cleared engineering support for classified environments.
What happens in the SCIF stays in the…oh fuck it, never mind - send it to the cloud for processing. What could go wrong?
- Comment on An analysis of 15M+ biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 finds researchers using AI to write abstracts use certain words far more often than those who don't 3 months ago:
Very interesting paper, and grade A irony to begin the title with “delving” while finding that “delve” is one of the top excess words/markers of LLM writing.
Moreover, the authors highlight a few excerpts that “illustrate the LLM-style flowery language” including
By meticulously delving into the intricate web connecting […] and […], this comprehensive chapter takes a deep dive into their involvement as significant risk factors for […].
…and then they clearly intentionally conclude the discussion section thus
We hope that future work will meticulously delve into tracking LLM usage more accurately and assess which policy changes are crucial to tackle the intricate challenges posed by the rise of LLMs in scientific publishing.
Great work.
- Comment on Apple announces iOS 26 with Liquid Glass redesign 4 months ago:
Almost everything in that list of new features sounds negative to me. A few are neutral, and one might be positive depending on how it’s implemented (having the phone monitor a phone call while sitting on hold). Pretty disappointing, Tim Apple.
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 4 months ago:
It might! But the article I linked also suggests it might destroy ozone and have a net warming effect. We just don’t know. The upper atmosphere has never before had this level of direct pollution injection.
- Comment on We Should Immediately Nationalize SpaceX and Starlink 4 months ago:
Even though it’s not a space trash problem, it is a regular upper atmosphere polluter of aluminum oxide ash. We don’t yet know the long term consequences.
- Comment on Brazing Copper Plumbing Pipe? 4 months ago:
Copper won’t be chewed by rodents that unexpectedly gain access to the attic or crawl space, and it doesn’t degrade in sunlight.
- Comment on The FDA Is Approving Drugs Without Evidence They Work 4 months ago:
From the article:
While drug companies profit from the sales of unproven drugs, everyone else — patients, insurers, and the government — pays a heavy price. In just four years, from 2018 through 2021, the taxpayer-funded health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid shelled out $18 billion for drugs approved on the condition that their manufacturers produce confirmatory trials that had yet to be delivered.
I’m guessing their citation only includes Medicare and Medicaid because those have publicly-available data for the study to review, but I have to assume that private insurers pay a ton as well. I can see your point that insurance denials result in angry sick people, but there’s not really a lot of nuance in “that medication has never been shown to be safe and effective for your (or any) condition.”
I dunno. Everyone sucks here.
- Comment on The FDA Is Approving Drugs Without Evidence They Work 4 months ago:
American health insurance companies are famously miserly, and this seems like a great area to use penny pinching for good. Where the hell are the insurance CFOs who should be demanding efficacy proof instead of being swindled along with the masses?
- Comment on Connect Mini Split to Air Circulator system? 4 months ago:
Mini splits are sized for single rooms and the expected expansion path is to add more of them. That’s not too expensive if you are a handy DIYer who can deal with electrical and mechanical, but it’s not great if you’re paying installation labor. Similar story with everything else in the home improvement space.
- Comment on Network question...Some sort of AP or directional antenna to connect a bit distant shed? 6 months ago:
Ubiquiti is a pretty good answer, but the airMax line is better for this sort of thing than UniFi. A pair of Nanobeams would be perfect, and standalone without need of an additional controller.
- Comment on Spotify begins accepting AI-narrated audiobooks recorded using ElevenLabs' software; Spotify already allows AI-recorded audiobooks, with several restrictions. 8 months ago:
Yes! Read a book out loud, preferably to your kids, recording each chapter as a file. Then use m4b-tool to combine all the chapter files into a full audiobook.
- Comment on California governor vetoes bill to create first-in-nation AI safety measures. 1 year ago:
Meta: I’ve noticed a lot of VOA links on Lemmy lately, and I’d like to understand why. As I understand it, VOA is essentially a national propaganda news organization targeting an international audience (similar to RT). Why is that a good source for article sharing? Especially in the case of the article at hand, which is just a VOA republication of an Associated Press piece that could have been linked originally.
