JohnEdwa
@JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on UK’s Major Porn Providers Agree to Age Checks From Next Month; Aylo, Owner of Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, Will Add Age Assurance Checks by July 25. 3 hours ago:
Was an example of the security, not who is running the service. But I mean, guess who knows if you pay for OnlyFans or stuff like that?
Your bank. - Comment on UK’s Major Porn Providers Agree to Age Checks From Next Month; Aylo, Owner of Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, Will Add Age Assurance Checks by July 25. 7 hours ago:
Depends entirely on how it’s implemented, because the website doesn’t need to know who you are, only verify that you are over 18. Which can be done reasonably securely - you generate a random ID on a secure service, give that ID to the website, and the only communication between the two of them is “Is id 123 valid and an adult? Yes/No”.
Now, if that “secure service”, most likely a government contract done as cheaply as possible turns out not to be, and they keep logs linking those IDs to the URLs requesting verification, then the entire thing goes belly up.
- Comment on Tesla Robotaxi Freaks Out and Drives into Oncoming Traffic on First Day 2 days ago:
Self-driving cars are a thing, Weymo is doing pretty fine.
But you might be able to spot a few (dozen) teeny-tiny (huge, bulky and extremely obvious) differences between a Waymo and a Tesla cybercab.
- Comment on YouTube Will Add an AI Slop Button Thanks to Google’s Veo 3 3 days ago:
the subscription feed still and always has completely bypasses Youtube’s recommended brainrot anyway
Though they are messing with that too, on mobile there is a “Most Relevant” section on top. Though thankfully they are videos from your subs.
…for now. - Comment on France Moves to Classify X as an Adult Site Amid Digital ID Crackdown 2 weeks ago:
Annoyingly many artists still use it, and for some it’s their only platform they post at any regularity, except for paid posts on patreon. I haven’t used Twitter as a social media site for almost a decade now, but my “twitter only” art list still has 18 people on it.
- Comment on Apple announces iOS 26 with Liquid Glass redesign 2 weeks ago:
Major version numbers are used when stuff changes, and especially when shit breaks. Can the latest OS X 10 run the same software and on the same hardware as the first OS X 10? If not, increase the major number.
- Comment on Apple announces iOS 26 with Liquid Glass redesign 2 weeks ago:
That jump at least had a reason, as a bunch of older software checked if they were running on windows 95 or 98 by checking for “windows 9”.
And what it actually feels like is the jump from windows 3.1 to 95. Because it’s literally the same one. - Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 2 weeks ago:
Making up answers is kinda their entire purpose. LMMs are fundamentally just a text generation algorithm, they are designed to produce text that looks like it could have been written by a human. Which they are amazing at, especially when you start taking into account how many paragraphs of instructions you can give them, and they tend to rather successfully follow.
The one thing they can’t do is verify if what they are talking about is true. If they could, they would stop being LLMs and start being AGIs.
- Comment on The Arc Browser Is Dead 2 weeks ago:
That figure is entirely irrelevant when you need to target users who are willing to try a new unknown third party browser in the first place.
And you’ll find orders of magnitude more of those among Linux users than you do on the Mac, which is where Arc launched on. - Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 2 weeks ago:
It is. And has always been. “Artificial Intelligence” doesn’t mean a feeling thinking robot person (that would fall under AGI), it’s a vast field of research in computer science with many, many things under it.
- Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 2 weeks ago:
"It’s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, ‘that’s not thinking’." -Pamela McCorduck´. It’s called the AI Effect.
- Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia 3 weeks ago:
adding a query parameter
udm=14to the url of your Google searchesIt’s also the same as selecting “Web” from the bar that has images, video, maps etc.
- Comment on Whatever happened to cheap eReaders? – Terence Eden’s Blog 3 weeks ago:
The current ad-supported basic Kindle is $109 USD, which is just $12 more expensive than it was back in 2012, adjusted for inflation ($70 in 2012 would be $97 today).
- Comment on Google Shared My Phone Number! 4 weeks ago:
If it’s your personal info, you can ask for it here.
If it’s your own website you want delisted, that’s here.Now do the same for bing, ddg, startpage, yandex, yahoo, kagi, barive, ask, ecosia etc etc…
- Comment on Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users 4 weeks ago:
Any symbol they would have chosen would have ended up as the Nazi symbol. Just like the name Hitler or that specific mustache style.
But the swastika specifically ending as the Nazi symbol you can mostly thank to Heinrich Schliemann and Émile-Louis Burnouf finding swastika adorned pottery at a Troy excavation in the 1870’s, and declaring them to be the ancient symbols of the Aryans.
- Comment on The World's First Mass-Produced Flying Car Is Here and It Costs $1 Million 4 weeks ago:
They fold. So apparently they are - at least supposed to be - durable enough.
- Comment on Tesla Full-Self Driving Veers Off Road, Hits Tree, and Flips Car for No Obvious Reason (No Serious Injuries, but Scary) 4 weeks ago:
They’ve technically had autopilots for over a century, the first one was the oil tanker J.A Moffett in 1920. Though the main purpose of it is to keep the vessel going dead straight as otherwise wind and currents turn it, so using modern car terms I think it would be more accurate to say they have lane assist? Commercial ones can often do waypoint navigation, following a set route on a map, but I don’t think that’s very common on personal vessels.
- Comment on Infrared contact lenses let you see in the dark 4 weeks ago:
Phone cameras have very good IR filters. They aren’t perfect which is why they can still see the LEDs, but they aren’t anywhere near as bright.
I have an old RasPi camera with the IR filter removed, a remote control looks like someone used an old-school camera flash in pitch darkness. Which is how you can control your TV sometimes even from the next room over - especially at night with no ir from the sun - shine the remote at the wall, and the wall blinks bright enough for the TV to see it, often even after a few reflections.
- Comment on Why Balcony Solar Panels Haven’t Taken Off in the US 5 weeks ago:
And this is why the UK has separated hot and cold water taps.
Your hot water used to come from a rainwater tank on the roof, and it was illegal to pipe it to a mixing faucet because if something went wrong with the cold water site it could pull undrinkable hot water from these tanks and faucets and contaminate all the drinking water. - Comment on What does it mean to ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ all cookies, and which should I choose? 5 weeks ago:
Blocking all 3rd party cookies tends to break quite a few things, as websites often use different domains to handle things like logins.
I’ve found addons like Cookie Autodelete to be a more functional option, it allows those cookies to exist until I close the tab, and if the domain isn’t on a whitelist, they get deleted five minutes later. And it works for first party cookies too.
It does take a while to build that whitelist, and sometimes you forget to set it and wipe something you’d rather have kept. - Comment on What does it mean to ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ all cookies, and which should I choose? 5 weeks ago:
You do not need to ask for consent to use functional cookies, only for ones that are used for tracking. Most websites could strip out all of the 3rd party spyware and by doing so get rid of the popup entirely.
They’ll never do it because money, obviously. - Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks 1 month ago:
That’s the benefit of using AI and machine learning - once you have enough source material, you can throw it all in and it’ll eventually spit out a model.
Which is exactly what Meta did with their Massively Multilingual Speech project which supports text -to-speech and speech-to-text for 1107 different languages.Is it actually any good in 99% of them, I don’t have a clue, but it exists.
- Comment on Airlines Are Selling Your Data to ICE 1 month ago:
Maximum GDPR fine is 4% of your revenue. For Lufthansa, that would be ~$1.4 billion, Air France ~$650 million, which is roughly their entire net income for one year.
Not sure if anyone has been hit with the maximum ever though, as everyone just keeps track of the dollars and not percentage of revenue.
- Comment on Tesla bait-and-switch: Cybertruck owners won't get Autosteer feature they paid for 1 month ago:
Fully driverless cars are not legally allowed yet - they all need to have a driver in the drivers seat supervising
- Comment on Tesla bait-and-switch: Cybertruck owners won't get Autosteer feature they paid for 1 month ago:
FSD (Supervised) is not for situations where there is no driver - it’s for situations where the driver wants to just supervise while the car drives itself.
The “(Supervised) Full Self Driving” isn’t for situations where the car is Full Self Driving, yes, because Tesla has no functionality that meets SAE level 3/4/5 requirements for Full Self Driving. If you must supervise the driving, then it’s not full self driving.
- Comment on Things at Tesla are worse than they appear 1 month ago:
But still down 20% from the start of the year.
It’s not going to survive this high for long with the abysmal sales figures coming from the rest of the world, even if the Musk cult currently still keeps pretending everything is going great. - Comment on Tesla bait-and-switch: Cybertruck owners won't get Autosteer feature they paid for 1 month ago:
Supervised self driving would be fine. “Full self driving” means SAE level 4 or 5, which the Tesla autopilot isn’t, and they don’t need “supervised” in the name as they are specifically for a situations where there simply is no driver - like a robotaxi - so there can be no supervision.
- Comment on Tesla bait-and-switch: Cybertruck owners won't get Autosteer feature they paid for 1 month ago:
The actual answer: It should be Level 4 autonomy. It is capable of full self driving, but only in certain conditions, and the driver still has to be ready to take over if something goes wrong.
Do note that Tesla autopilot is actually only SAE level 2, so it’s just a straight up lie :)
- Comment on If you’re in the market for a $1,900 color E Ink monitor, one of them exists now - Ars Technica 1 month ago:
economies of scale
And competition. AFAIK, E Ink Corporation holds all the patents, so they can ask for as much as they want for the tech.
- Comment on If you’re in the market for a $1,900 color E Ink monitor, one of them exists now - Ars Technica 1 month ago:
The same as the M in ATM machine and N in PIN number, V in HIV virus and C in UPC code!
Oh, the dreaded RAS syndrome!.I’m off to read some DC comics.
.png){kind=link}