i_am_not_a_robot
@i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on There's No Reason to Buy a New Phone Anymore 1 day ago:
This is not good for security.
- Comment on The offline messaging apps challenging internet shutdowns 2 weeks ago:
It would be nice if these mesh projects worked together. There are at least three major incompatible LoRa mesh ecosystems. I think only Reticulum has both LoRa and Bluetooth, but Reticulum is possibly the least mature, and it’s even more obscure than Meshtastic. A few phones with Reticulum over LoRa could relay messages from Reticulum over Bluetooth phones over a longer distance, and potentially reach the internet from some distant location.
Columba looks like the app you’d want. I’ve never used it.
- Comment on The offline messaging apps challenging internet shutdowns 2 weeks ago:
This is the real reason Google is locking down Android. Either this was always the goal, or they are aware of this consequence and think it’s a good thing.
- Comment on At colleges, the AI boom means everyone wants to dabble in computer science 2 weeks ago:
If everyone had a degree of AI literacy we’d already be out of the AI bubble.
- Comment on Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests 3 weeks ago:
“My product is so dangerous that it caused me to unknowingly commit three times as many crimes as you did with your product.” Great marketing strategy. The same marketing strategy that got their product shut down for weeks.
- Comment on Copyright Is Not Enough: Why writers need new strategies to stand up to AI. 3 weeks ago:
They say it might not be good for authors. It definitely won’t be good for readers.
- Comment on LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent 4 weeks ago:
It’s more complicated than that. At this point, a Dell/Alienware branded monitor with an LG panel is preferable over an LG branded monitor with an LG panel. Even if Dell doesn’t make any panels, the parts they do contribute and their quality standards can make their monitors better quality than other brands that do make their own panels. I think it’s the same with Apple. They don’t make panels either but their monitors are generally regarded as high quality, if overpriced.
- Comment on LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent 4 weeks ago:
Alienware monitors are Dell monitors, which are usually pretty good in my experience. I don’t know what the deal is with Alienware Control Center. It’s kind of annoying but it’s not spyware.
- Comment on 62 Percent Of Countries Won't Have Access To The PlayStation Store On Digital-Exclusive PS6 5 weeks ago:
Like the XBox DRM everybody hated where you couldn’t use your XBox while traveling to certain countries?
Even worse, besides Sony having a history of stealing back content that you have purchased, the countries that Sony does business with will change. If your government gets into a war or maybe just a disagreement with Sony’s government, your console becomes a brick and you lose all your games and other content.
- Comment on SpaceX Is Junk. That’s What the Bond Market Says 1 month ago:
It may be junk stock, but if you live in America and have any money, chances are that you are buying it because of government corruption.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
It’s not winnable. The same politicians continuously reintroduce the same bad ideas and governments are increasingly authoritarian and decreasingly care about the opinions of constituents. Companies participating in fascism voluntarily censor and collect unnecessary identifying information to share with governments and advertisers because it benefits the share holders. Investors throw money at business models that depend on creating new markets for rent-seeking, leading to users sending their private data to more and more cloud services. Other companies without malicious intentions are pressured by the flood of bot traffic and content to collect verifiable user identification or use user-hostile services like Cloudflare or Recaptcha.
- Comment on Steam Machine costs more than I hoped but the price isn’t crazy 1 month ago:
Gamers Nexus already has benchmarks out. My interpretation is that the performance is about what you would expect for a modern console, and the cost is about what you would expected to have gotten this kind of performance a few years ago. It’s not powerful by today’s PC standards, and you could have gotten a more powerful PC for less last year, but because of ongoing global economic collapse it’s competitively priced. If you weren’t fortunate enough to buy a computer shortly before companies started wasting all the manufacturing capacity on “AI” and you want to have a very compact and quiet computer with just okay gaming performance, it might be worth getting.
- Comment on "There's a Secret Backdoor in Netgear" Routers, ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs - GamersNexus 1 month ago:
They said something about Netgear claiming to have removed the ability to administer your own device over SSH in the name of security, but that the option could still be turned on by sending some special network request.
- Comment on Assume You Will Be Hacked: AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before. 2 months ago:
Maybe you can issue some sort of note so that people don’t need to carry around bars of gold and scales. That sounds really inconvenient.
- Comment on Updates to our Privacy Policy | Antrophic 2 months ago:
Was it really or is this all a publicity stunt to make it seem like it’s more capable than it is?
- Comment on As A.I. Makes Strides in Mathematics, Mathematicians Urge Caution 2 months ago:
This is the reason why conventional AI can’t make strides in mathematics. The LLM is a statistical model that generates human text. The training data is the output text divorced from the process that generates it in humans. If you feed an LLM lots of mathematical text, it will confidently produce mathematical texts of its own, but the LLM can’t add two numbers together, and it doesn’t know that it can’t add two numbers together. It can be trained to use a calculator, but humans don’t interrupt their writing to say “And now I’m using my calculator to determine the value of 1 + 1” so the LLM is just going to draw upon its training data to predict that "1 + 1 = " is followed by “2” or maybe “3 (for large values of 1).” Maybe someday it will learn that “9 + 10 = 21.”
- Comment on A security researcher says Microsoft secretly built a backdoor into BitLocker, releases an exploit to prove it 2 months ago:
A second backdoor. Windows also uploads your BitLocker keys to Microsoft’s servers by default, just in case somebody needs to get in later.
- Comment on RIP social media. What comes next is messy. 3 months ago:
Why RIP? It’s still alive.
- Comment on AI layoffs backfire as cutting staff doesn't cut it, firms warned 3 months ago:
This isn’t new. Even before AI, failing companies would use layoffs as a sort of loan on their quarterly numbers. If you lay off your employees, you’re really profitable for as long as you can continue collecting money for the work the employees had already done.
- Comment on Introducing Google Cloud Fraud Defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA | Google Cloud Blog 3 months ago:
Phishing campaign authors will love this. It normalizes users scanning barcodes they can’t read to go to unknown locations on a device where it’s harder to see the URL and there’s no IT watching for phishing activity.
- Comment on Gemini can now create personalized AI images by digging around in Google Photos 4 months ago:
I already switched to Immich. It’s pretty good at finding pictures, it doesn’t require a subscription, and it isn’t Google.
- Comment on Cannot play games b/c Internet is needlessly required. Starcraft, Age of Empires, Civilization.. 4 months ago:
Starcraft is from before ubiquitous home internet. You could use your modem to directly dial your friend without an ISP. There’s no way it requires online activation.
- Comment on Apple's chips are winners, but Windows fails help it most 4 months ago:
My old phone was constantly recommending that I send YouTube videos with spy query parameters to the e-mail address of a dead relative instead of Untracker. It’s like they designed the system to push users towards doing what they want users to do instead of helping users do what users want to do.
- Comment on Apple's chips are winners, but Windows fails help it most 4 months ago:
I have to use a Mac and I can confidently say that the experience of using a Mac has not gotten better every year. It just doesn’t get worse as quickly as Windows. It may be true that Apple Silicon has gotten better every year, but so has AMD.
- Comment on The White House App’s Propaganda Is The Least Alarming Thing About It 4 months ago:
Give it a few months and your phone will helpfully install it for you.
- Comment on ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI 5 months ago:
The education system has been killing critical thinking for decades. Why start trying to save it now?
- Comment on Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check 5 months ago:
Techdirt says 2,456 files as if it’s 2,456 separate things, but it’s actually just the source code for their web frontend and that source code is comprised of 2,456 files. Normally, the source code for the web frontend isn’t a big deal, but apparently the frontend that they’re exposing is for a service that normal people aren’t supposed to be able to see, and the capabilities of the service are made public. There’s still a lot that could be going on behind the scenes and not surfaced through the frontend.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
I think this is an important feature for religiously observant Jews. There’s a loophole where you’re not allowed to use appliances or something, but if the appliance just happens to operate itself on a prearranged schedule then apparently that’s okay. In the manual it may be called Shabbat or Sabbath mode. Without a battery backup it adds next to no per-unit hardware cost if the device already has a cooking timer or automatic safety shutoff feature so it’s probably standard on most ovens and microwaves in markets that have Jewish customers. You may also notice this behavior with elevators that automatically travel on a schedule.
- Comment on Sam Altman’s make-or-break year: can the OpenAI CEO cash in his bet on the future? 6 months ago:
He’s CEO of a large American company. Whether the company succeeds or fails, he’ll be left with more money than most people see in their life. It’s not make-or-break for him.
- Comment on Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products — as Google's AI growth begins to outpace Copilot products 8 months ago:
Google Search being replaced by Gemini makes it easy for Google to have big AI numbers. Bing never got over its reputation of having bad result quality, and it’s only the default search engine on Windows PCs that don’t have Chrome or Firefox installed. My friend uses Windows and iOS and always sends me links to Gemini results, which normally are only slightly worse than “I’m feeling lucky.”