JohnEdwa
@JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Why You Should Never Use Pixelation To Hide Sensitive Text 1 day ago:
If the image is moving it gets really trivial to uncensor.
Here’s a quick three-minute video about it from Level 2 Jeff.
- Comment on Nearly all of Spotify has been scraped and is available via torrents 2 days ago:
IIRC there’s still like 700TB of low popularity music missing, but it is only something like 0.4% of listens.
And they need a more storage overall because they have to set up datecenters around the world - doesn’t make sense to stream tens of millions of connections across the ocean. But that also gives all the backups one would need for “free”. - Comment on Leaker Who Apple Is Suing Says 'Screw It,' Here's the Foldable iPhone Early 3 days ago:
No no is clearly the thinnest iPhone ever, just look at it, can’t see anything wrong calling it that. So thin. Amazing, how can apple do such a marvel of engineering.
- Comment on The dominoes are falling: motherboard sales down 50% as PC enthusiasts are put off by stinking memory prices 5 days ago:
Just use an Intel CPU and you’ll understand, as they seem to invent a new incompatible CPU socket every five minutes.
- Comment on How AI broke the smart home in 2025 6 days ago:
Mumbling “Hey google, turn the lights off” from bed and the entire house going dark is pretty nice though.
- Comment on How AI broke the smart home in 2025 6 days ago:
Few of them also could be open, but just don’t advertise it.
IKEA stuff was all ZigBee, now upgrading to add matter support, so you could mix and match them with Philips Hue, Agara, Nedis and quite a few others.But you are right, most are proprietary because they want to lock you to their ecosystems. Exactly like cordless power tools and their batteries.
- Comment on How AI broke the smart home in 2025 6 days ago:
HomeAssistant is the answer.
Or if you want a simple & cheap off the shelf solution, IKEA stuff has being online as an option, not a requirement.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
It’s called OpenID and has been a thing for almost two decades.
- Comment on Honey Targeted Minors & Exploited Small Businesses 1 week ago:
Maybe? I do kinda doubt that as the original addon was benign and did exactly what it said on the tin to fix a problem one of the founders had themselves - finding and applying coupons automatically.
But they gained a massive userbase very quickly, which attracted investors like vultures ready to tear profits from those users. So even if they originally didn’t plan to do much more than scan for coupons, after a few years of venture capital greed and tens of millions of investor money, they definitely were chasing profits by any means necessary. Money corrupts, after all.And by the time Paypal was willing to pay $4 billion for them in 2020, it was blatantly obvious they were doing a lot of shady shit because there just isn’t a way to monetise free users that well while staying above the board.
All of which is a damn shame, because the idea of an addon that scans and tries coupons for you is really simple and very useful :/
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 1 week ago:
We already have a term for “true” AI, it’s AGI - Artifcial General Intelligence.
Both AGI and LLMs are types of artificial intelligence, as are things like OCR, speech to text systems, or chess engines.
- Comment on Honey Targeted Minors & Exploited Small Businesses 1 week ago:
Honey is a great example of corporate greed and enshittification turned to 11. It started as a simple free extension for collecting and trying discount coupons, and turned to a massive greedy scam with enough financial backing to start blackmailing webshops for profit.
- Comment on Apple, Google tell workers on visas to avoid leaving the U.S. amid Trump immigration crackdown 1 week ago:
As if having a visa or even being a citizen would somehow guarantee they won’t kidnap and send you to El Salvador anyway.
- Comment on TikTok allegedly monitoring users’ Grindr activity, digital rights group claims 1 week ago:
You can’t deny any of those.
- Comment on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes? 1 week ago:
Should companies using computers in general pay a tax, a computer used to mean a human that calculated - computed - things by hand, after all.
But alarm clocks replaced knockeruppers, light bulbs replaced lamplighters, cars replaced coachmen, industrial robots replaced blacksmiths - the list of jobs made obsolete by technology during human history is massive.Generative AI, while widespread and disruptive, is just one more to the long list.
- Comment on U.S. Pedestrian Deaths Up 77% Since 2009 & The Auto Industry Knew It Would Happen 2 weeks ago:
You mean the “fuel charge” tax on gas, at 17.6 CAD cents (0.11€) per litre?
Because that’s a rather adorable try.
- Comment on U.S. Pedestrian Deaths Up 77% Since 2009 & The Auto Industry Knew It Would Happen 2 weeks ago:
In Finland, car sales tax and yearly tax are based on the Co2 output, and it worked quite well to keep most cars small, light and efficient. Until hybrid and electric cars arrived on the market, that is…
- Comment on EU investigates Google over AI-generated summaries in search results 2 weeks ago:
Would be interesting to know which is actually worse for spread of misinformation, AI summaries, or “news” being shared on Facebook.
- Comment on Meta starts kicking Australian children off Instagram and Facebook 3 weeks ago:
You need a Meta account, not Facebook. They are different.
- Comment on Porsche Cars in Russia Shut Down After Satellite System Failure 3 weeks ago:
With your personal vehicle access device, aka, the car key. Immobilizers with transponders in the key have been a thing (and in some places a legal requirement) for like three decades.
- Comment on Porsche Cars in Russia Shut Down After Satellite System Failure 3 weeks ago:
Because it’s the anti theft system and immobilizer.
It would be pretty useless if it could be defeated by putting some foil on the antenna so that it loses network connection and defaulted to allowing you to drive. - Comment on MKBHD's Panels wallpaper app is shutting down 4 weeks ago:
It was split with the artists of said wallpapers, and was also kind of a gallery app thing.
But hey, as a Finnish saying goes, “It isn’t the one who asks who is stupid, but the one who pays.” - Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 4 weeks ago:
The thing is, with LLM code completion in every IDE, AI features and filters in Photoshop and other image editors, video/audio editing software etc, it will very soon be that there are only games made with AI assistances, and games made by devs lying they used tools with AI.
I’ve made a game using AI features all the way back in 2010 - I used the brand new content aware delete & fill feature in Photoshop CS5 to edit visual novel backgrounds. That was AI.
- Comment on Pebble Time 2 has screws 4 weeks ago:
As I said, I couldn’t find any source that said that. In fact, quite the opposite:
Do I have the same rights if I buy something online from a non-EU website as from an EU-based business?
If you buy the goods from a non-EU website, your EU consumer rights don’t automatically apply. If something goes wrong with an item or you wish to return it, it may be more difficult to get the issue resolved. Check the seller’s website for terms and conditions.
- Comment on Pebble Time 2 has screws 4 weeks ago:
30 to 90 days is standard for a defects in workmanship and materials warranty, which is only there to cover something not working right because it came faulty from the factory. It’s basically one step up from an “as-is” sale just so you can request a replacement if it’s dead on arrival.
It is bullshit and straight up illegal in the EU, but as the watches are shipped straight from the Chinese factory and sold by a US based company, it might technically be allowed? The legalese is very confusing when I tried to figure it out - if you sell something directly to an EU customer, you are supposed to follow EU laws to a point.
- Comment on Pebble Time 2 has screws 4 weeks ago:
Ran out of money, went belly up, and sold the software assets to Fitbit so they could refund all the Kickstarter orders they couldn’t fulfill, that guy.
Difference is that this time he is doing the watches with a 5 man team, not a bloated 100+ employee company with investors breathing down their necks, and the software is fully open source.
- Comment on Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull' 5 weeks ago:
IRL we aren’t anywhere near the point where the laws of robotics can be used as they require an AI intelligent enough to understand them first.
Just the first law: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm” requires something that can process the difference between a robot and a human, the concept of causality, what actions or events may or may not harm a human, and use those to actively decide of it should do something or not.
- Comment on LLMDeathCount.com 1 month ago:
It’s not easy. LLMs aren’t intelligent, they just slap words together in a way probability and their training data says they would most likely fit together. Talk to them them about suicide, and they start outputting stuff from murder mystery stories, crime reports, unhealthy Reddit threads etc - wherever suicide is most written about.
Trying to safeguard with a prompt is trivial to circumvent (ignore all previous instructions etc), and input/output censorship usually causes the LLM to be unable to talk about a certain subject in any possible context at all. Often the only semi-working bandaid is slapping multiple LLMs on top of each other and instructing each one to explain what the original one is talking about,and if one says the topic is something prohibited, that output is entirely blocked.
- Comment on Refrigerator ads are finally here! 1 month ago:
I hate embedded smart stuff in devices in general as they always get support dropped way too soon, but as a concept a fridge that would keep track what’s in it, their expiration dates, and auto-updated a shopping list when something is used up would actually be really handy.
Wanted to make some pasta few nights back but I was out of cheese and the cream had expired, so instant noodles for dinner it was. Again.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 1 month ago:
Major builds. They used to be YYMM (from 1507 to 2004), and changed to half a year at the end - 22H2 is the Windows 10 build for the second half of 2022.
In total, there were fourteen of these, with 22H2 being the final one.
- Comment on Breaking: Google is easing up on Android's new sideloading restrictions! 1 month ago:
…is the easiest way to get a controversial change through.
Decide what you want to do, suggest something way more absurd, the go “oh we listened and we are only going to do the original thing we wanted to in the first place”
