MangoCats
@MangoCats@feddit.it
- Comment on Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation – OSnews 1 week ago:
Well, the home folder was encrypted, and the hard shutdown had borked the headers in such a way that the decryption was failing. I suppose a few hundred hours of technical analysis might have retrieved the files, but luckily it was a new PC and I only had about 100 hours of work on it to start with.
- Comment on Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation – OSnews 1 week ago:
OS-X (they still use that, right? Not iOS desktop or somesuch nonsense, yet?) seemed pretty much a middle ground between Windows and Linux the last time I used it. Kinda slightly more polished and uniform presentation than Ubuntu-du-jour, a little less mysterious than Windows, but in the end: just as screwed up.
I tried enabling Home folder encryption. After about 3 days a hard power-off shutdown (needed due to a driver error in their walled-garden hardware MacBook Pro, it wouldn’t power off or restart any other way) then the encrypted home folder was toast, unretrievable - laptop wouldn’t boot. Tech support was very nice, reassuring that they knew what was going on, and their best solution? Reinstall the OS from physical media, start over fresh, your files are so secure that not you or anybody else on the planet will ever see them again.
- Comment on Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation – OSnews 1 week ago:
People should really consider if the mental models they have in their heads about different operating systems are actually based on reality.
These people’s reality is: they are familiar with Windows, and anything else is scary and perceived as even more difficult to learn to use. 20 years ago a colleague asked me about changing to Linux, I told him he could do all the same things he was doing, just use Open Office instead of MS Word and Excel, GIMP instead of Photoshop - he didn’t even dive as deep as the differences between GIMP and Photoshop usage, his response was: “You mean I’ll have to learn all new icons and names for my software?” “Well, yeah, that’s part of moving.” “In that case I don’t think Linux is for me.” “I have to agree with you there.”
- Comment on Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" 1 week ago:
I notice that the “internal thinking” of Opus 4.6 is doing more flip-flopping than earlier modelss like Sonnet 4.5, and it’s coming out with correct answers in the end more often.
- Comment on Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" 1 week ago:
which shouldn’t be considered a good thing.
Good and bad is subjective and depends on your area of application.
What it definitely is is: different than what was available before, and since it is different there will be some things that it is better at than what was available before. And many things that it’s much worse for.
Still, in the end, there is real power in diversity. Just don’t use a sledgehammer to swipe-browse on your cellphone.
- Comment on I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day 1 week ago:
This article is to push legislation to kick her off
Her and all her friends.
And the article was written by a man.
- Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE 4 weeks ago:
Around here the used DVD market (thrift stores, used book stores) has been collapsing - prices down below $1 per disc, and everybody trying to get rid of their old stock. Selections are getting thin.
- Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE 4 weeks ago:
Is TOR a practical alternative for VPN - never tried it, but it seems tempting…
- Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE 4 weeks ago:
The cool thing about USB HDDs - when one dies, you just plug in another one - no issues with funky formatting, windows/linux compatibility or whatever. I had the power supply die on a QNAP NAS once… only once because even though the HDDs inside the NAS were fine, QNAP basically made the data on them inaccessible from any other system - no more proprietary NAS systems for me, thanks.
- Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE 4 weeks ago:
Do you ever use any of the Bluray “connected” features where your disc wants internet access to fulfill the function? I must say, that’s a major turnoff for me.
- Comment on DVDs and public transit: Boycott drives people to ditch Big Tech to protest ICE 4 weeks ago:
Newegg Commerce, Inc. (NASDAQ: NEGG) is a publicly traded company. It is majority-owned by a Chinese multinational technology firm. Key ownership details include:
Majority Shareholder: Hangzhou Lianluo Interactive Information Technology Co., Ltd. (also known as Liaison Interactive) owns approximately 54.5% to 57.4% of the company.
Founder Stake: Fred Chang, the company’s founder and former CEO, retains a significant ownership stake of roughly 22.1%.
Significant Individual Shareholder: Vladimir Galkin owns about 22.5% of the shares.
Public Float: The remaining shares (approximately 11%) are held by the general public and institutional investors.
- Comment on It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines 4 weeks ago:
Waymo knowing when it is stumped is actually a pretty good thing. Better than just running over cats & small children.
- Comment on The AI boom is so huge it’s causing shortages everywhere else The $700 billion AI spending spree has few precedents. Good luck finding an electrician or a reasonably priced smartphone. 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” 4 weeks ago:
No, that’s like saying that it’s inevitable that indoor plumbing and air conditioning will continue to spread and be adopted by everyone who can afford them. Or that the police will use national computer databases to track criminals, and helicopters for urban surveillance and pursuit. Or that the military is going to use more drones in the future.
Even before everyone carried GPS trackers in their pockets and digital cameras became dirt cheap, you were being tracked and analyzed by your credit card: forbes.com/…/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-w…
- Comment on Ubisoft Fires Team Lead For Criticising Stupid Return-To-Office Mandate 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, that kind of worker protection pretty much died in 'murica 25+ years ago.
- Comment on Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” 4 weeks ago:
I believe the collection of the information is inevitable. What I would push for instead of driving them to make the cameras and databases more clandestine than they already are is for the information that they collect to be made openly available to all.
As things are, it’s a very asymmetrical power tool for the advantage of the (government) operators.
When ALL the information is available to everyone, we can talk about where the cameras do and do not need to be. And any unapproved cameras can be suppressed as evidence against private individuals.
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 4 weeks ago:
Can you say: “conflict of interest”? We’re at trial, the cop(s) who performed the arrest made a judgement call in the field - of course they’re going to double down. What would it do for the career of a cop on the stand to say “you know, I think we made a mistake that day…”? The fact that the case has gone to trial basically makes the cop’s testimony redundant, what they’re going to say is basically a foregone conclusion, why waste time making them say it again?
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 4 weeks ago:
Maybe bodycams should randomly record
For what memory chips cost these days, they should record continuously anytime the camera (accelerometer in the camera) detects motion within the previous 10 minutes. If they’re on-body, or in a moving car, they should be recording.
The “save” button could work the same: mark 30 seconds before until “save” is deactivated to be “do not delete this for rotation” - but otherwise, save everything anyway, only rotate out after 2TB of memory card is full, and download at the end of every shift.
Better still, download continuously to the car and 5G it to a cloud server where the department can’t delete it.
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 4 weeks ago:
I took a speeding ticket to court, had the officer sitting behind me pre-trial talkin’ smack with a colleague “why are you here? Speeding, ha, how hard is that?” Yeah, so he gets on the stand and “reads from his notes” every single thing he said was fabricated, only my location was accurate, his location was a lie: in reality he “witnessed” me from a side street 3 blocks back from the intersection he crossed but in his testimony he “observed me passing a line of five cars” - yeah, except that never happened, what I was passing was a single gardening truck doing 10mph for the past 3 blocks, the other 4 cars were stacked up behind me.
Maybe he really thought that’s what he saw, which is all the more reason his dashcam should have been the evidence, not his notebook. restonyc.com/can-you-not-be-a-police-officer-with…
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 4 weeks ago:
I’d be in favor of a “private” button that they can press for such circumstances. The video is still recorded, but marked private - plays back black and silent on ordinary playback software. If it’s ever in legitimate question of whether or not “private” was pressed inappropriately the private video can be restored to full picture and sound with the appropriate code key.
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 4 weeks ago:
Single events do not define a whole country. We get the changes we fight (vote) for.
- Comment on Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 | Look. All technology comes with a learning curve. 4 weeks ago:
The technical solution is: body cam footage is automatically, frequently, uploaded to cloud servers that the department does not control. The department gets read-only access, nobody gets the ability to delete footage for 7 years, and defense attorneys get automatic access to everything remotely related to their case.
Also: planting evidence and sending the falsely accused to prison for 6 months is a misdemeanor punished with suspended sentences and probation? That department owes the falsely accused damages for lost wages and damage to their ability to obtain future employment. That’s actually a “superpower” cops know all too well: if you’ve never been arrested they can seriously screw up your life with absolute impunity just by arresting you - charges never have to be filed, that arrest on your record - however baseless it may be - can hurt you in all sorts of ways, especially employability, for the rest of your life.
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 4 weeks ago:
LLM, unlikely. ML, probably
ML already has demonstrated tremendous capability increases for automated machines, starting with postal letter sorters decades ago, proceeding through ever more advanced (and still limited, occasionally flawed - like people) image recognition.
LLM puts more of a “natural language interface” on things, making phone trees into something less infuriating to use and ultimately more helpful.
LLMs, which are too costly to train and run
That’s a matter of application
inherently too unreliable for safety-critical or health-critical use
Yeah, although I can see LLMs being helpful as a front end, in addition to the traditional checklist systems used for safety regulation, medical Dx and other guidance, an LLM can (and has, for me) provided (incomplete, sometimes flawed) targeted insights into material it reviews - improving the human review process as an adjunct tool, not as a replacement for the human reviewer.
too flaky for any use requiring auditability
Definitely. Mostly I have been using LLM generated code to create deterministic processes which can be verified as correct - it’s pretty good at that, I could write the same code myself but the AI agent/LLM can write that kind of (simple) program 5x-10x faster for 10% of the “brain fatigue” and I can focus on the real problems we’re trying to solve. Having those deterministic tools again makes review and evaluation of large spreadsheets a more thorough and less labor intense process. People make mistakes, too, and when you give them (for this morning’s example) a spreadsheet with 2000 rows and 30 columns to “evaluate” - beyond people’s “context window capacity” as well… we need tools that focus on the important 50 lines and 8 columns without missing the occasional rare important datapoints…
So far, with LLMs, the game ain’t worth the candle,
The better modern models, in roughly the past 10 months or so, have turned a corner for some computer programming tasks, and over those 10 months they have improved rather significantly. It’s not the panacea revolution that a lot of breathless journalists describe, but it’s a better tool assisting in the creation of simple programs (and simple components of larger programs) than anything I have used in the previous 45 years, and over the past 10 months the level of complexity / size of programs the LLMs can effectively handle has roughly tripled, in my estimation for my applications.
even without considering the enormous environmental damage caused by their supporting infrastructure.
When it’s used for worthless garbage (as most of it seems to be today), I agree with this evaluation. Focused on good use cases? In specifically good use cases, the power / environmental impacts range from trivial to positive - in those cases where the AI agents/LLMs are saving human labor - human labor and its infrastructure has enormous environmental impact too.
- Comment on Ubisoft Fires Team Lead For Criticising Stupid Return-To-Office Mandate 4 weeks ago:
Curious: Does Montreal allow “employment at will” like most states in the US does? If it does, I can’t imagine an UbiSoft contract not including it. The article definitely makes it sound like a termination for cause, but what’s written on his termination paperwork may be entirely different.
- Comment on CEO of Palantir Says AI Means You’ll Have to Work With Your Hands Like a Peasant 4 weeks ago:
Not just that, but “working with your hands” has been automating people out of jobs for the past 50 years, AI/LLM will only make automation more capable, and more undercutting of people’s manual labor costs.
- Comment on Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers 4 weeks ago:
True.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
It doesn’t have any significance when talking about copyright.
I agree, but that doesn’t stop journalists from recognizing a hot button topic and hyper-bashing that button as fast and hard and often as they can.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
That’s what I read in the article - the “researchers” may have had other interfaces they were using. Also, since that “research” came out, I suspect the models have compensated to prevent the appearance of copying…
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Just give me the prompt and model that will generate an entire Harry Potter book so I can check it out.
Start with the first line of the book (enough that it won’t be confused with other material in the training set…) the LLM will return some of the next line. Feed it that and it will return some of what comes next, rinse, lather, repeat - researchers have gotten significant chunks of novels regurgitated this way.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
You may not have photographic memory, but dozens of flesh and blood humans do. Are they “illegal” to exist? They can read a book then recite it back to you.