rottingleaf
@rottingleaf@lemmy.world
- Comment on EU Possibly Emerging As One Of The Greatest Threats To Privacy 2 days ago:
Started reading the Kademlia paper, then tried writing a minimal realization in a file named “min.tcl”, it got big with something like e-news and contact directory, then “clean.tcl”, it got messy and grew something like a chat and a buddy list, then the new revision was called “dirty.tcl” and now I’m fixing what turned into horrible mess since it initially worked.
Not that I’m going to share a terribly messy one 2360 line tcl/tk script.
Just - how is this even happening, there are plenty of people smarter, there could have been a compelling standard, dozens of usable applications, herds of apologists and widespread usage of something that doesn’t take, say, 4 competent people more time and effort than this exercise took me.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 4 days ago:
Yes, yes, I know all that. I meant that all this conversation is rather useless because when actually compelled to do something, most people ignore principles.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 5 days ago:
While pedophile hunters seem barbaric to me, I don’t have kids.
I do have a dog, and dog hunter hunters, as in “people hunting dog hunters”, seem all right for me.
Cowards really like to inflict pain on creatures not well enough protected by the law. So hunting them is maybe good for the society.
So deontology and principles and morals only matter when they are challenged by one’s own impulses. Innocent until proven guilty in the court of law.
- Comment on FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado 5 days ago:
or fucking off the country
… and then your descendants end up living in something like Louisiana …
Sorry, associations with Murrica and Frenchies.
Anyway, thinking you are different makes you learn the hard way that you are no different. I thought Russian state is too cowardly to actually invade a big enough country for a real war (Georgia just doesn’t count, they simply don’t have strategic depth, they barely would even if they somehow annexed East Pontic mountains and Artvin from Turkey, that is, Tao or Tayq, the latter is the Armenian name for this and I’d prefer it to be annexed by Armenia, but neither will likely happen, anyway, a separate republic would be better, it seems some people there are chill enough). Oops, got excited. Back to “too cowardly”, murdering and torturing those infinitely weaker than them - yes, bombing Chechnya - yes, betraying allies - 100% yes, but 2022-now was unexpected.
Same with ISIS-like groups being now preferred to Iran and Shia militias for the west. If we kinda remember why the latter are supposed to be bad, that’s because they are threatening Israel and are a theocracy and against freedom and rule of law and all that. I mean, if HTS is about democracy then I’m an alien. If HTS is more democratic than IRI (which still has traces of being founded by both mojahed and left-liberal groups), then I’m a donkey. And in any case it kinda went unnoticed how groups formerly part of ISIS suddenly became better than Iran in western media. So the (military-wise associated) west supports groups clearly worse than their adversaries everywhere except Ukraine. And nobody questions that. I think the part about “free media in the free world” in western worldview should be revised too.
While your average Russian still thinks their state is just dumb\incompetent\evil-but-cowardly, and your typical European still thinks EU and NATO and such are on the right side of history. While the Russian state has already grown that meat grinder mechanism it lacked in Russian public conscience (Chechnya was considered something both unintended and in the past), and the EU and NATO are quite clearly on the strong side of history, sometimes officially congratulating jihadists with massacring whole towns.
OK, I went into politics, just - a nice joke, but tables may turn overnight and Americans may start giving out such advice.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
That’s not what their roots are, that’s the branches that became prevalent in every one mentioned (Judaism least of all, but with the state of Israel existing there are attempts to make Jewish religion suck just as badly as others).
Say, gnostic sects of Christianity and Judaism had this sometimes inverted, sometimes different from how you describe it. Natural world was considered wonderful, but bigger than our existence, in some, and the way to divine was to take off your mortal existence, like clothes, and embrace it in full. In Judaism it’s almost mainstream that natural sexuality is good and actually sacred when in marriage, and only outside of marriage is it bad, but not on the degree of murder or theft.
I’m not very knowledgeable on Islam, but I think even Shia Islam is not so cruel on that part, though since Iran is Shia, I guess nobody will believe me. Alawis being massacred right now have a pretty tolerant to life religion, and Druze too, though they have that weird relationship with death similar to Latin American Catholics. Smaller branches like Nizari-Ismaili are very tolerant. It’s just that Islamic mainstream of today is barbaric genocidal Wahhabism or Salafism, and generally Sunni Islam is not nice.
My point was - restrictive rules correlate somehow with strong organization, so such branches win the struggle for power.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
I think at some point they were on the same level, then something happened and murder became less important, maybe with justification that it’s not shown directly, or that it’s aimed at bad guys somewhere far away, or I dunno. Outright gore like in Total Recall subway shootout scene became what’s equal to pair of tits.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
Especially in a country that’s known worldwide for its hyper sexuality
After all the hentai in the interwebs and some Shaman King and Naruto characters, I’m not sure.
Where does this prudishness come from?
Christianity, I’d guess.
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 6 days ago:
Agree, one of the reasons I haven’t even started trying
- Comment on Signal downloads spike in the US and Yemen amid government scandal | TechCrunch 1 week ago:
Bad actors are sowing distrust by implying that Signal is not secure. Always remember that the powers that be don’t want the public to have encrypted comms and would love to ban private messaging apps altogether.
Wrong logic, trying to guess what they are doing. I mean, if you were a god-level poker player, then maybe, but most people are not and god-level players lose too.
and Signal is in fact a fed honeypot
Being competitive and protected from network effects (decentralized, p2p, federation, one standard and many implementations, all that) can hurt being secure. The complexity of being both may not be practical.
The point of Signal is academic level security. It has a clear model and is not doing anything to make it more complex.
Which is why it is centralized, leading to suspicions and accusations of being a honeypot.
The code is open-source though, and I’m hoping that individuals more learned than I would surely alert us if there were any backdoors/exploits…
That’s a wrong hope in any case.
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 1 week ago:
I don’t think Rust is a bad language for doing same things people do with C++, but with a smaller standard and less legacy.
But yep, that’s the kind of people.
About dinosaur things - I’ve started learning Tcl/Tk and it’s just wonderful.
- Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse 1 week ago:
That happens. Even if said new programmer had seen before that IRL the important part of that codebase consists of specific domain area quirks, scarcely documented and understood. They have an advantage in doing something good for the specific stage of that system’s evolution, but a huge disadvantage in knowing what the hell it really does.
- Comment on 'An Insult To Life Itself': Hayao Miyazaki’s AI Criticism Resurfaces As OpenAI’s Ghibli-Style Image Trend Takes Over Social Media 1 week ago:
I think it’s intentional. Where you had to think to do something, you’d inevitably learn to think. Where you had to put soul and wisdom and aesthetic feeling into your work, you’d inevitably touch those things for other parts of your life.
There are people higher in the society, who think lower castes shouldn’t have that and will be fine with knowledge and expertise just sufficient to do their jobs.
They wouldn’t be so hellbent on this particular technology, if they didn’t see how relatively recent progress changed that curve of expertise for radio, electric engineering, all engineering, computer science, automobiles, home appliances, and what not. So they see this consistently works for 25+ years.
So they work to deprive us of practice that allows to do more in all those directions. There’s a moat that could as well be an abyss between what we know and what we’d need to know to make relevant things. That moat wasn’t there 25 years ago. The path from a novice computer user to someone knowing all DOS interrupts and what DMA and IRQ are was less than the path from a novice computer user today to making a simple GUI application.
(I’ve got executive dysfunction, so feel these things more, but I’m certain they are true.)
- Comment on JPMorgan researchers say they have generated and certified truly random numbers using a quantum computer, a world-first with potential security and trading uses. 1 week ago:
It’s probably not truly random, when two centuries from now people have descended a few more levels down. Just like their result
- Comment on LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs | The free open-source Microsoft Office alternative is being downloaded by nearly 1 million users a week 1 week ago:
OpenOffice 3 had the best office suite UI I can imagine.
Dunno where all this “MS is good” comes from.
Don’t like today’s LO UI.
- Comment on LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs | The free open-source Microsoft Office alternative is being downloaded by nearly 1 million users a week 1 week ago:
OpenOffice’s old branding from Sun times was so nice though. Felt like modernity and magic in the sense of Star Wars prequels, Stargate SG-1, that warm kind of thing.
- Comment on Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users and employees 1 week ago:
Pain in all holes to use as a daily WYSIWYG-edited format.
- Comment on Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users and employees 1 week ago:
Most applications would be fine with plain text, some could use markdown, some would need org-mode, a bit further something like HTML or word-perfect format.
- Comment on 'For too long, Apple has operated a walled garden around its products': The EU forces Apple to open its closed system to third parties 1 week ago:
There should be a porn movie with that headline
- Comment on Cloudflare turns AI against itself with endless maze of irrelevant facts 1 week ago:
I think this is it - eudl.eu/doi/10.1145/1460877.1460907 .
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 1 week ago:
Funny how everyone around laughs at free speech when it’s for humans, but when it’s a text generator, then suddenly there are some abstract principles preventing everyone to sue the living crap out of all “AI” companies, at least until they are bleeding enough to start putting disclaimers brighter than in Vegas that it’s a word salad machine that doesn’t think, know, claim, dispute, judge or reason.
- Comment on I've tried nearly every browser out there and these are my top 6 (none are Chrome) 1 week ago:
Except your data not being safe with Brave doesn’t depend on who owns it. It’s a technical conclusion that should follow from technical traits of a system. Those are such that using a modern web browser to do modern web things is not secure period.
- Comment on Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people” 1 week ago:
Not solving any of the stated goals at the same time.
It’s a diversion. Its purpose is to divert resources and attention from any real progress in computing.
- Comment on Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people” 1 week ago:
Here we are using recycled bags, banning straws, putting explosive refrigerant in fridges and using led lights in everything, all in the name of the environment, while at the same time in some datacenter they are burning kwh’s by the bucket loads generating pictures of cats in space suits.
That’s, #1, fashion and not about environment, #2, fashion promoted because it’s cheaper for the industry.
And yes, power saved somewhere will just be spent elsewhere. Cheaper. Cause that means reduced demand for power (or grown not as fast as otherwise).
- Comment on Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people” 1 week ago:
Dunno, the part about generative music (not like LLMs) I’ve tried, I think if I spent a few more years of weekly migraines on that, I’d become better.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 1 week ago:
Infuriating. It’s like an oracle. Except in late antique literature you can see that nobody that firmly believed in what oracles say (that’d be disciples making notes according to some procedure kept secret, probably involving mind-affecting substances, but also mathematics - you can already see how this is similar to LLMs), it was like visiting a known attraction, interesting - wow, I’ve been at the Delphi oracle, I’ve received an advice there.
And today those herds of unbelievable fools are less sane that that antique public.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 1 week ago:
State propaganda works by gaslighting you to think everyone around thinks some way, or at least a select set of people, and that you should adjust your behavior accordingly. It’s more complicated, some people are conformists, some are contrarians, but it works, there’s their won kind of working trap for everyone.
But it still has efficiency that can be improved.
With LLMs all your interactions are by default through such influence. They are averaging the bullshit, and information produced by them is fed to us all. That’s the opposite of what any talented or just useful person does, useful people try to increase the entropy, LLMs kill it.
It’s a dream of thieves, bullies, useless people, politicians, that kind of crap.
Basically “Us”, “1984” and whatever else has been written is being attempted via this tool. It’s not misdirected I think, but I also think it’ll fail, because evolution works in shorter feedback loops and those doing such things succeed in them, but fail in other directions which could use energy.
OK, I should stop writing such texts, they repeat, don’t help with migraines, they are obvious and probably wrong.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 1 week ago:
Humans hallucinate. These things extrapolate tokens statistically. In average his tone of requests would be likely to lead to some murder story.
Nothing is wrong with the tech (except it doesn’t seem very useful when you firmly know what it can’t do), but everything is wrong with that tech being called artificial intelligence.
It’s almost like calling polygraph “lies detector”.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 1 week ago:
When do we start suing makers of fortune cookies for lucky coincidences?
“Claim”.
I mean, the guy is right, because it’s advertised as “artificial intelligence”.
Were it advertised as word salad generator, a Markovian chain grown big and scary, something in principle similar to programs for generation of fantasy language texts and spells and names (if someone remembers 00s good old web) for roleplaying, - then there would be no problem.
But if to sell something better you lie what it is, and that lie has social consequences, you should get sued to freezing hot inferno with mustard-greased giant-cockroach-dildo-covered walls. You should also probably face criminal charges.
- Comment on Tech Guidelines For Europeans 1 week ago:
In any case this (the pic) is the dumb ape “A is bad, so I replace it with something by B, B is my friend, B won’t poison it” thought. For whatever reason stupid people always think it’s better to look at social context of something and not the actual thing.
That’s the reason a lot of dumb bastards use Telegram for things that would have already gotten them in jail if law enforcement in their countries cared enough. They “trust” Telegram because of different roots than American\European corporate. By the way, due to these different roots probably some of more high-ranking dumb bastards who’ve been using Telegram are under control of some intelligence services via blackmail, or whatever.
There are layers of defense and sane expectations of anything’s security. If you are afraid of US corporations and state, then using any downstream of a big FOSS project is not normal unless it’s done by some Chinese project with a lot of very qualified hands. Scratch anything based on Chromium and Firefox.
If someone still remembers Cryptonomicon the book, and the rest of smart things Neal Stephenson wrote, people in these never trust tech they use. Neither do people doing secure things in real life. In the beginning of Cryptonomicon they are trying to create some electronic currency mapped to a real-life currency backed by a lot of gold yet to be found, in the end they blow up that gold with no conclusion, which may or may not symbolize exactly what I’m saying.
That’s because it’s nonsense, someone else made magic paper to protect your letters and you just trust it? It’s really sad Rowling didn’t develop the idea enough in HP, not with Riddle’s diary, but with Snape’s spells (or any spells). I mean, she did in the fifth book, but that was a special connection, should have been something like recipes.
By the way, it’s strange people rarely bring up HP as a book about computers. It really is. That’s the reason electronics don’t work in Hogwarts, world-building wise. There’s the usual outrage about terfs, bad emotional patterns, relationship between fate and logic, negative stereotypes of minorities manifested in characters, - but that’s not all those books are.
And LOTR is usually brought up by wrong people, so is The Napoleon of Notting Hill (I often call my dad a stupid man, but without him I would never have read it), while they are relevant for any new mechanism, and when new tools arise, people sometimes make new mechanisms where they could do with old ones, for the lack of understanding of applying the old mechanisms with the new tools.
That was a rant.
- Comment on Cloudflare turns AI against itself with endless maze of irrelevant facts 1 week ago:
“No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense,”
Looking for porn me with red eyes swearing at the screen.