wonderingwanderer
@wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
Wherever I wander I wonder whether I’ll ever find a place to call home…
- Comment on Amazon to Shut Down All Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Stores 1 day ago:
You’ll have to take that up with John Roberts regarding Citizen’s United…
- Comment on Amazon to Shut Down All Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Stores 1 day ago:
I used to like Whole Foods :(
I don’t shop at Sprout’s anymore either since I found out they donate to the GOP…
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 1 day ago:
If it’s sending 0.0kb of background data, then the client is not communicating clandestinely with the server.
- Comment on Why are americans taking health advice from a former heroin addict ? 1 day ago:
I never claimed that it happens outside of an acute overdose. I said it can happen, which is factually true. I also said there’s no way to guarantee an addict won’t take a large enough dose to deprive their brain of oxygen. It happens. Pretending it doesn’t is harmful. The cause of death for most opioid overdoses is literally cardiac arrest.
In the clinical sense, doses are administered to stay within safe limits, so supplemental oxygen is not needed.
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 1 day ago:
That’s so interesting. Data kind of blows my mind. Like, how could all that information travel over wires or through the air and not get mixed up with other information on its way to its destination?
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 1 day ago:
Is that vulnerable to an attack if a hacker gets their public key and intercepts the data traffic? Or can it only be used to encrypt but not decrypt?
Or are the added layers of complexity designed specifically to prevent that from happening?
This is why I like open-source, because people who know more about it than I do can check everything over and say whether it’s good.
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 1 day ago:
It sounds like you’re contradicting yourself now. You’re right, signal is more secure because its source code is open-source and auditable. So what’s the issue? It seems you’ve been arguing otherwise, and you’re just now coming around to it without admitting that you were wrong in the first place.
The client-side app is also open-source and auditable, and you can monitor outgoing traffic on your devise to see whether the signal app is sending data that it shouldn’t. It sounds like people have verified that it doesn’t do that, but if you don’t want to take their word for it then why don’t you see for yourself?
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 1 day ago:
Now I’m curious: how does the person you’re messaging get the same key to decrypt the message you send?
I’m genuinely curious.
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 1 day ago:
The “exploit being used” is closed-source, proprietary code sending data where it says it doesn’t.
People have already explained to you how signal’s open-source, auditable, and reproducible code prevents the possibility of a similar exploit.
You’re the smug fool who doesn’t understand cybersecurity. How much is zuck paying you to say “signal’s just as bad as whatapp”?
- Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption 1 day ago:
You’re talking about E2E encryption as if it prevents side-channel attacks
That’s literally what E2E encryption does. In order to attack it from outside you would have to break the encryption itself, and modern encryption is so robust that it would require quantum computing to break, and that capability hasn’t been developed yet.
The only reason the other commenter’s words sound like spam to you is because you don’t understand it, which you plainly reveal when you say "(as long as there isn’t a backdoor in the published [audited] code)
- Comment on Why are americans taking health advice from a former heroin addict ? 1 day ago:
You called it fatalistic bullshit to say RFK jr. has permanent brain damage…
- Comment on Why are americans taking health advice from a former heroin addict ? 1 day ago:
Managed prescriptions are taken in safe doses. There’s no way to guarantee someone addicted to illicit opiates will stay below the threshold of dangerous consumption.
Even alcohol in large enough quantities kills brain cells. Stop pretending addiction is harmless, because it’s not helping addicts the way you seem to think it is.
- Comment on AI bot swarms threaten to undermine democracy 1 day ago:
That’ll be a good use for all the cheap RAM that will become available after the AI bubble crashes and tech companies have to liquidate their data centers.
Self-host a small FOSS LLM, train it on peer-reviewed journals, hook it up to some solar panels, do some programming magic, and save the world!
- Comment on AI bot swarms threaten to undermine democracy 1 day ago:
AI bot swarms threaten to undermine democracy
When AI Can Fake Majorities, Democracy Slips Away
Full article
> A joint essay with Daniel Thilo Schroeder & Jonas R. Kunst, based on a new paper on swarms with 22 authors (including myself) that just appeared in Science. (A preprint version is here, and you can see WIRED’s coverage here.) > > Automated bots that purvey disinformation have been a problem since the early days of social media, and bad actors have been quick to jump on LLMs as a way of automating the generation of disinformation. But as we outline in the new article in Science we foresee something worse: swarms of AI bots acting together in concert. > > The unique danger of a swarm is that it acts less like a megaphone and more like a coordinated social organism. Earlier botnets were simple-minded, mostly just copying and pasting messages at scale—and in well-studied cases (including Russia’s 2016 IRA effort on Twitter), their direct persuasive effects were hard to detect. Today’s swarms, now emerging, can coordinate fleets of synthetic personas—sometimes with persistent identities—and move in ways that are hard to distinguish from real communities. This is not hypothetical: in July 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice said it disrupted a Russia-linked, AI-enhanced bot farm tied to 968 X accounts impersonating Americans. And bots already make up a measurable slice of public conversation: a 2025 peer-reviewed analysis of major events estimated roughly one in five accounts/posts in those conversations were automated. Swarms don’t just broadcast propaganda; they can infiltrate communities by mimicking local slang and tone, build credibility over time, and then adapt in real time to audience reactions—testing variations at machine speed to discover what persuades. > > Why is this dangerous for democracy? No democracy can guarantee perfect truth, but democratic deliberation depends on something more fragile: the independence of voices. The “wisdom of crowds” works only if the crowd is made of distinct individuals. When one operator can speak through thousands of masks, that independence collapses. We face the rise of synthetic consensus: swarms seeding narratives across disparate niches and amplifying them to create the illusion of grassroots agreement. Venture capital is already helping industrialize astroturfing: Doublespeed, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, advertises a way to “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts” and to mimic “natural user interaction” on physical devices so the activity appears human. Concrete signs of industrialization are already emerging: the Vanderbilt Institute of National Security released a cache of documents describing “GoLaxy” as an AI-driven influence machine built around data harvesting, profiling, and AI personas for large-scale operations. > > Because humans update their views partly based on social evidence—looking to peers to see what is “normal”—fabricated swarms can make fringe views look like majority opinions. If swarms flood the web with duplicative, crawler-targeted content, they can execute “LLM grooming,” poisoning the training data that future AI models (and citizens) rely on. Even so-called “thinking” AI models are vulnerable to this, > > We cannot ban our way out of the threat of generative-AI-fueled swarms of misinformation bots, but we can change the economics of manipulation. We need five concrete shifts. > > First, social media platforms must move away from the “whack-a-mole” approach they currently use. Right now, companies rely on episodic takedowns—waiting until a disinformation campaign has already gone viral and done its damage before purging thousands of accounts in a single wave. This is too slow. Instead, we need continuous monitoring that looks for statistically unlikely coordination. Because AI can now generate unique text for every single post, looking for copy-pasted content no longer works. We must look at network behavior instead: a thousand users might be tweeting different things, but if they exhibit statistically improbable correlations in their semantic trajectories or propagate narratives with a synchronized efficiency that defies organic human diffusion. > > Second, we need to stop waiting for attackers to invent new tactics before we build defenses. A defense that only reacts to yesterday’s tricks is destined to fail. We should instead proactively stress-test our defenses using agent-based simulations. Think of this like a digital fire drill or a vaccine trial: researchers can build a “synthetic” social network populated by AI agents, and then release their own test-swarms into that isolated environment. By watching how these test-bots try to manipulate the system, we can see which safeguards crumble and which hold up, allowing us to patch vulnerabilities before bad actors act on them in the real world. > > Third, we must make it expensive to be a fake person. Policymakers need to incentivize cryptographic attestations and reputation standards to strengthen provenance. This doesn’t mean forcing every user to hand over their ID card to a tech giant—that would be dangerous for whistleblowers and dissidents living under authoritarian regimes. Instead, we need “verified-yet-anonymous” credentialing. Imagine a digital stamp that proves you are a unique human being without revealing which human you are. If we require this kind of “proof-of-human” for high-reach interactions, we make it mathematically difficult and financially ruinous for one operator to secretly run ten thousand accounts. > > Fourth, we need mandated transparency through free data access for researchers. We cannot defend society if the battlefield is hidden behind proprietary walls. Currently, platforms restrict access to the data needed to detect these swarms, leaving independent experts blind. Legislation must guarantee vetted academic and civil society researchers free, privacy-preserving access to platform data. Without a guaranteed “right to study,” we are forced to trust the self-reporting of the very corporations that profit from the engagement these swarms generate. > > Finally, we need to end the era of plausible deniability with an AI Influence Observatory. Crucially, this cannot be a government-run “Ministry of Truth.” Instead, it must be a distributed ecosystem of independent academic groups and NGOs. Their mandate is not to police content or decide who is right, but strictly to detect when the “public” is actually a coordinated swarm. By standardizing how evidence of bot-like networking is collected and publishing verified reports, this independent watchdog network would prevent the paralysis of “we can’t prove anything,” establishing a shared, factual record of when our public discourse is being engineered. > > None of this guarantees safety. But it does change the economics of large-scale manipulation. > > The point is not that AI makes democracy impossible. The point is that when it costs pennies to coordinate a fake mob and moments to counterfeit a human identity, the public square is left wide open to attack. Democracies don’t need to appoint a central authority to decide what is “true.” Instead, they need to rebuild the conditions where authentic human participation is unmistakable. We need an environment where real voices stand out clearly from synthetic noise. > > Most importantly, we must ensure that secret, coordinated manipulation is economically punishing and operationally difficult. Right now, a bad actor can launch a massive bot swarm cheaply and safely. We need to flip those physics. The goal is to build a system where faking a consensus costs the attacker a fortune, where their network collapses like a house of cards the moment one bot is detected, and where it becomes technically impossible to grow a fake crowd large enough to fool the real one without getting caught. > > – Daniel Thilo Schroeder, Gary Marcus, Jonas R. Kunst > > Daniel Thilo Schroeder is a Research Scientist at SINTEF. His work combines large-scale data and simulation to study coordinated influence and AI-enabled manipulation (danielthiloschroeder.org). > > Gary Marcus, Professor Emeritus at NYU, is a cognitive scientist and AI researcher with a strong interest in combatting misinformation. > > Jonas R. Kunst is a professor of communication at BI Norwegian Business School, where he co-leads the Center for Democracy and Information Integrity.
- Comment on Why are americans taking health advice from a former heroin addict ? 1 day ago:
When oxygen to the brain is habitually suppressed, brain damage can occur. That’s not fatalist, it’s just reality.
That doesn’t imply addiction is a moral failing. It’s a disease, and diseases can have permanent effects.
- Comment on Why are americans taking health advice from a former heroin addict ? 1 day ago:
Anything that causes respiratory depression lowers available oxygen to the brain and can cause damage over time.
I understand the sentiment of destigmatizing addiction, but let’s not lie and say it can’t cause permanent damage. It’s a disease, right? And diseases can have aftermath.
- Comment on How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet? 2 days ago:
Would something like Anubis or Iocaine prevent what you’re worried about?
I haven’t used either, but from what I understand they’re both lightweight programs to prevent bot scraping. I think Anubis analyzes web traffic and blocks bots when detected, and Iocaine does something similar but also creates a maze of garbage data to redirect those bots into, in order to poison the AI itself and consume excessive resources on the end of the companies attempting to scrape the data.
Obviously what others have said about firewalls, VPNs, and antivirus still applies; maybe also a rootkit hunter and Linux Malware Detect? I’m still new to this though, so you probably know more about all that than I do. Sorry if I’m stating the obvious.
Not sure if this is overkill but maybe Network Security Toolkit might have some helpful tools as well?
- Comment on It's barely a science. 2 days ago:
It’s a soft science at best, but some people try to treat it like it’s a hard science.
I still hold that it displays characteristics of pseudoscience by operating on unsound premises and unverifiable assumptions though
- Comment on A gourmet meal 2 days ago:
I see that you know your judo well.
- Comment on It's barely a science. 2 days ago:
Oh, I see. Yeah, I didn’t think the sociologist’s quote made any sense either…
- Comment on Truth hurts! 2 days ago:
You wouldn’t miss what you never knew. The comfort of modern life creates more problems for every one that it solves.
- Comment on It's barely a science. 2 days ago:
Yup, if someone is simply applying the scientific method without truly understanding its theoretical underpinnings, what are they really doing?
It’s like driving a car with no mechanical knowledge. Not impossible, but if something goes wrong with the internal structures of it then you won’t be able to figure out the problem and fix it on your own without seeking the help of someone who understands it.
And to be honest, I’ve seen a lot of dogmatic assertions from self-proclaimed atheists who view themselves as scientifically-minded while having no understanding of the philosophy of science.
Empiricism is great for what it’s good for, but it’s limited to observable phenomena. And without rationalism, it’s like having a bunch of pieces of a puzzle and being unable to fit them together.
Here’s a fact, here’s another fact, and here’s a third fact, but whether we realize it or not, we can’t construct those facts into a coherent argument which leads to an accurate conclusion without utilizing rational processes. It’s like focusing on factual soundness without paying any mind to logical validity.
And I see so many scientists making logical leaps that are quite simply invalid or fallacious. The most common one I see is “There’s not enough evidence to support this hypothesis, therefore in must be untrue.” It commits the fallacy of negating the antecedent.
If there’s sufficient evidence, then the hypothesis must be true.
There is not sufficient evidence.
Therefore, the hypothesis isn’t true.It does not follow that the hypothesis isn’t true.
- Comment on It's barely a science. 2 days ago:
The global economy is being run by capitalist oligarchs, whose central premises for existing are based on classical economic theories (private ownership of capital, extraction of resources, and exploitation of labor), their operational strategies are based on classical economic theories (infinite pursuit of growth at all costs, externalizing risks while internalizing profits, quarterly profit margins being the sole indicator of growth, cutting costs to minimize expenses and manufacturing scarcity to maximize pricing, etc.), and the policies meant to regulate and/or stimulate economic activity are based on classical economic theories (austerity for the poor, supply-side “trickle-down” economics for the rich including tax breaks, subsidies, and bailouts).
The tariffs are an exception attributable to the overt buffoonery of an extortionist grifter running the show. It doesn’t negate all the other examples of how classical economic theory is destroying society and the planet.
- Comment on It's barely a science. 2 days ago:
And yet the global economy is still operating on the same basic assumptions…
They’ve been made even worse by further developments of those basic assumptions as expounded by neoliberalism and reaganomics, but the underlying premises are still the same.
- Comment on I'm good, thanks 2 days ago:
You mean like natural selection?
That’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.
- Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline 2 days ago:
I don’t support her, I think she’s a self-interested opportunist and doing everything for the wrong reasons, and deep down she’s still a bigot and a grifter, but lately she’s actually had some reasonable takes. I find it mildly annoying whenever she says something I can agree with, but any fracturing of the maga base is a good thing in my view.
Of course, it’s mostly attributable to broken-clock syndrome, but strangely enough, that demonic look on her face has started to fade in recent photos. It’s almost as if breaking with maga is akin to having an exorcism. Weird…
- Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline 2 days ago:
They could route emissions through a system like this directly from smoke stacks, capturing the carbon before it even reaches the atmosphere
- Comment on New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline 2 days ago:
You’re deliberately ignoring the fact that in vernacular terms, “carbon” is used to refer to “carbon dioxide” in contexts where the meaning is obvious.
People using the term that way aren’t “morons” with “no clue about chemistry.” They’re just using a commonly-understood shorthand for saying “carbon dioxide.” They understand perfectly well that carbon dioxide has a molecular structure of CO2. You’re being willfully obtuse.
Also, while there’s a commentary to be made about corporate greenwashing using phrases like “carbon neutral” and “net zero” to mask their true impacts on the environment, there certainly is such thing as “carbon neutral,” and it absolutely is a scientifically useful term.
Going for a walk is a carbon neutral activity, unless you happen to fart. Planting trees to compensate for burning fossil fuels is not carbon neutral, although it may meet the regulatory definition required of corporations to use the term. That doesn’t mean the concept itself is mythical.
Planting trees or sowing a wildflower meadow is carbon-negative. While that can’t displace emissions from regularly burning fossil fuels, it might neutralize the carbon-positive processes of manufacturing a bicycle, meaning riding your bike to work might also be carbon neutral.
A circular-process that only emits as much C02 as it removes from the atmosphere is, by definition, carbon-neutral. And rejecting novel processes solely because the concept didn’t exist previously is nothing short of dogmatism.
- Comment on It's barely a science. 2 days ago:
This one?
- Comment on I'm good, thanks 2 days ago:
So you’re saying there’s a world where Bernie Sanders won in 2016, trump died of covid without the presidential medical suite, americans have universal healthcare, rent control, net neutrality, and free tuition, citizen’s united was repealed, the US never pulled out of international treaties, russia never invaded Ukraine, the latest iteration of the Israel-Palestine conflict never kicked off, the Taliban never took back control of the Afghan government, the resurgence of white supremacy and militant nationalism never took off, criminal justice systems were reformed into data-driven, prevention-first, community-centric public safety models, social and mental health services are fully-funded and effective addiction treatment strategies implemented, reducing demand for the illicit drug market and financially starving out violent criminal syndicates, victimless crimes were decriminalized and regulated for harm-prevention and reduction, nations actually kept their commitments towards climate action and reduced warming to below the target of 2° (possibly even below 1.5°), financial oligarchy was stopped in its tracks, billionaires and corporations are taxed at a fair rate, world hunger has been abolished, and we’re all well on our way towards world peace and prosperity?
