bh11235

@bh11235@infosec.pub

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t disagree, but don’t pretend you haven’t effectively set up the equal and opposite thing here. No mods will ban anyone but other than that every comment section is an implicit competition for best pro-Palestinian talking point, even when decency demands otherwise. We don’t talk about Oct 7, and if we do it was friendly fire, and if it wasn’t it was a natural consequence of Israeli policy in Gaza and that is the real issue. Yeah fine we admit the attack was not a hundred percent morally sound if you insist so much, but we don’t assign a moral weight to it or linger on it because hey when you make innocents suffer, you sow the wind and eventually reap the whirlwind, oh sure Hamas’ response was ugly but what can you do, you know, be a bastard and it comes around. Now it is our moral duty to call loud and clear for a ceasefire – the cycle of violence must stop.

  I know what you’re thinking: that’s not fair! That’s not my opinion! Yeah, the circlejerk doesn’t care about your private opinion. You know better than to contradict any of the above around here in writing, and that’s enough. I’m sure a lot of people privately think “oh… tbh that last IDF strike was unconscionable” before posting on /r/worldnews the part of their opinion they know the crowd will like better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brexit has completely failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In poll land Brexit never happened, which set the stage for an uneventful 4-year Clinton presidency mostly famous for an iconic photo-op pres Clinton took with the zoo animal, Harambe, following a G20 summit where Xi boasted of negotiating Putin off a suicidal scheme to invade Kyiv, and also of successfully preventing a near-miss that would have led Wuhan to become the epicenter of a global health disaster. With me stranded here on the other side at the Berenstain universe, excuse me if I don’t get ahead of myself celebrating this poll.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Research: The Growing Inequality of Who Gets to Work from Home⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The “you will all submit to RTO and like it” machine has finally found a way to package this message in a way that wide eyed internet activists will support. Congratulations to them, I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Over 50 per cent of users may shun social media by 2025 as misinformation, toxicity grow⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Think of this like one of those steam reviews: 4,000 hours played, do not recommend

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Over 50 per cent of users may shun social media by 2025 as misinformation, toxicity grow⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The prime problem is that every social space eventually becomes a circlejerk. Bots and astroturfing exacerbate the problem but it exists perfectly fine on its own – in the early 2000s I had the misfortune of running across plenty of gigantic, years-long circlejerks where definitely no bots or nefarious foreign manipulators were involved (I’m talking console wars, Harry Potter ship wars, stupid shit like that). People form circle jerks in the same way that salt form crystals. It’s just in their nature.

  The thing with circlejerks isn’t that there’s overwhelming agreement on some subject. You’ll get dunked on in most any social media space for claiming that the earth is flat or that Putin is a swell guy, that in itself is obviously not a problem. What makes a circlejerk is that takes get cheered for and upvoted not in proportion to how much they are anchored in reality, but in proportion to how useful they are in galvanizing allies and disrupting enemies. Whoever shouts “glory to the cause” in the most compelling way gets all the oxygen. At that point the amount of brain rot is only going to increase. No matter how righteous the cause, inevitably there comes the point where you can go on the Righteous Cause Forum and post “2+2=5, therefore all glory to the cause” and get 400 upvotes.

  Everyone talks a big game about how much they like truth, reason and moral consistency, but in the end when it’s just them and the upvote button and “do I stop and honestly examine this argument that gives me warm fuzzy feelings”, “is it really fair to dunk on Hated Group X by applying a standard I would never apply to anyone else” – the true colors show. It’s depressing and it makes most of social media into information silos where totalizing ideologies go to get validated, and if you feel alienated by this then clearly that space isn’t for you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How AI works is often a mystery — that's a problem⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I do exactly this kind of thing for my day job. In short: reading a syntactic description of an algorithm written in assembly language is not the equivalent of understanding what you’ve just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of having a concise and comprehensible logical representation of what you’ve just read, which in turn is not the equivalent of understanding the principles according to which the logical system thus described will behave when given various kinds of input.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How AI works is often a mystery — that's a problem⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an issue that has plagued the machine learning field since long before this latest generative AI craze. Decision trees you can understand, SVMs and Naive Bayes too, but the moment you get into automatic feature extraction and RBF kernels and stuff like that, it becomes difficult to understand how the verdicts issued by the model relate to the real world. But I’m sure it’s fair to say GPTs are even more inscrutable and made the problem worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How AI works is often a mystery — that's a problem⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  no ethical people without explainable people

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War Creator Is Unhappy With New Games and Kratos' Story⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a lot of complaints about the HFW plot but the biggest one is the juvenile way they handled Tilda and Sylens in their capacity as prime movers. Aloy herself is a mature character but the story around her takes place in a moral scape of the world as seen by a fifteen year old.

  Sylens goes through the motions of his scheme and keeps the same smug “I’m above it all and don’t owe anyone any explanations” attitude, through setback after setback and reality check after reality check; it seemed like they were poised to deliver a harsh discussion about ends vs means, how the world isn’t a magical fairy tale and sometimes something important needs to be done that requires dirty politics and won’t be magically solved by the one pure hero pulling the sword out of the rock - then squandered it completely and went back to ‘yeah all glory to the chosen one’. Most frustratingly they had their angle right there, already baked in: Aloy fails the first 7 times she tries to do anything, so if Sylens mocked her “this is the real world, you don’t just go ahead and solve things, Hero”, she could legitimately retort “idk, have you tried”. Instead they just don’t have this discussion and go back and forth “screw you I hate you” “behave, girl” again and again in a flat loop.

  Tilda was made in the mold of this cringey moral that’s all the rage now about how everyone’s an abuser and when people say “I love you” they really mean “I own you” (as also seen in Dragon Age: Absolution). It reads like someone’s pent up frustration about their controlling parents, like in his nightmares the person who created this plotline sees his mother taking to the air in that floating exoskeleton and shouting amid a rain of guided missiles “you’re going to college and that’s final, submit or perish”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weapon rarity irks me to no end.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In fantasy settings the traditional explanation for this is “magic” (i.e. the reason an axe+2 can do more damage than an identical plain axe), and people have learned to just accept this. Maybe it’s best to imagine the answer is “nanobots”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blade Runner director Ridley Scott calls AI a "technical hydrogen bomb" | "we are all completely f**ked"⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Jules Verne wasn’t a technical expert either, but here we are somehow. Don’t underestimate a keen and observant imagination.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nier will continue 'as long as Yoko Taro lives', producer says, but don’t expect an Automata follow-up soon⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Makes sense, given the ending of automata. Need to get a whole new dev team now

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you prefer if games had a separate difficulty setting for boss fights?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of games allow you to adjust the difficulty mid game. I’ve played several games on “ultra masochist hard” only to lower the difficulty for the bullshit final boss (looking at you Kena).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With surround sound⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  “God that asshole douche Kazuya is so hot… ugh what is wrong with me”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So proud.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Woah woah woah oh, caught in a bad project

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where the hell does wind begin??⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Based on the 1 shitty course in applied mathematics I nearly flunked, I imagine the velocity of wind is a solution to some kind of differential equation induced by the temperature, and since the sun’s heat is moderately spread around (like you don’t get a hyper-heated cmxcm square or something) these solutions are continuous, so that with ‘one step to the right’ you can feel slightly less wind, but not a huge difference. Maybe five thousand of these can take you from strong wind to no wind at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you know, you know⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Why are people enthralled by mind flayers compelled to act, and not just post about the act on instagram? At this point you’re just arguing for the sake of arguing, because lord forbid you concede your initial take maybe wasn’t so amazing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sure it's artificial, but is it intelligent?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  An old anecdote from my alma mater – in an introductory course to discrete math, the professor was teaching combinatorics and began: “Suppose you have an urn with three balls inside colored red, green and blue…” At this point one of the students interjected: “Half the class are electrical engineering majors, how is any of this relevant to our studies?” there was a beat and the professor corrected himself: “Suppose you have an urn with three resistors inside colored red, green and blue…”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Metaverse could be renamed to escape⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Launch will be held outside in the rain, bring your piña coladas

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Nitrogen malware pushed via Google Ads for ransomware attacks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  In the future your browser will be able to remotely attest that you have no viable security solution to block the infection and no working backups as a condition for being served these malicious ads, increasing the ad value since they can now be more precisely targeted

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Fall of Stack Overflow⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You lack vision, but I see a place where people get blocked and their questions opened then immediately closed as duplicates. Open and closed, open and closed all day, all night. Soon, where the internet once stood will be a string of condescending experts, admonitions that “you shouldn’t do that, do Y instead”, pleas for information closed as off-topic. Passive aggression, spiteful ego contests and wonderful, wonderful karma meters reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But if you close your eyes,⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  How am I gonna be an optimist about this?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man who stole 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs jailed for 18 months⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  About 4 minutes of jail time per egg give or take

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Netflix password crackdown has actually caused a growth in Subscriptions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  With this whole “you pay per screen, love is sharing a password” business they just dug a PR hole for themselves. If they’d had just offered price X per screen from the start, then introduced a “same household discount” or whatever, we wouldn’t have all this outrage. But execs can only see as far as next quarter and here we are.