TehPers

@TehPers@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as Protection⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  What? You don’t normally call capitalists “Tankie”. That would be a weird insult for one, to say the least. Usually that term is reserved for a certain kind of pro-authoritarian “communist” (in quotes of course because I don’t believe it’s actual communism).

  Anyway, not sure what any of this has to do with the post. What a weird comment thread…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My favorite quote from a post-surgery instruction packet (which required not smoking due to the location of the operation) was something along the lines of:

  Can I start smoking again?

  You have been nicotine-free for 10 weeks. You do not need to start smoking again.

  If you’ve been locked out of your Twitter account and haven’t had access to it for a while because of that, then you’ve already gone that long without it. You don’t need to go back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I also should correct myself - it’s not C(n, k), it’s P(n, k) (which is n! / (n-k)!). It’s been a minute since I took a statistics class lol.

  In any case, it’s a lot of entropy with just a few words.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The entropy stems from the words, not characters. With random words and no repetition, you have C(n, k) combinations (or n^k with repetition), where n is your dictionary size and k is the number of words you chain together. These passwords tend to be longer, but not by much. A big enough dictionary can yield some pretty high entropy with only a few words.

  I’ve had passwords as limiting as 16 characters for some services (unfortunately)…

  16 characters is hardly enough for random characters unless you include Unicode (which rarely works for those same services that usually have shitty implementations).

  Not much can be done there, sadly. You’re lucky if they even hash their passwords anyway - you’ll probably just get your password emailed to you if you click “forgot password” like it’s 2003.

  I would never, ever want my users relying on their brain…

  I never would either. People should just use a password manager. I was just mentioning an alternative that generated more memorable passphrases, but I wouldn’t advocate for it over random high-entropy strings saved in a password manager.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You can actually generate high entropy passphrases by chaining random words together. You just need to make sure the phrases are actually random and not just whatever comes to your head at the moment.

  Naturally, words help with memorization, but memorizing hundreds of these is impractical at best, especially because long-term memory for infrequently used accounts is subject to “bit rot”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They are free…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DuckDuckGo’s AI Feature Is Telling Users That Trump Died of Rabies Earlier This Month⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure where you live, but here in the US, bats tend to be one of the biggest carriers of rabies alongside various animals that depend on the state. You can actually look up which animals are the primary carriers within a state (if you’re here). Outside of the US, naturally it varies from country to country, but you’d still be looking at bats, plus potentially stray dogs and such. It’ll take some effort, but you should eventually be able to find a carrier.

  ---

  I would expect with the nondeterminism and the regular evolution of search results that reproducing the output would be difficult even if DDG didn’t make a patch already. It’s really easy to get these “AI overviews” to make up random shit, though. All you have to do is search normally about a topic that the model wasn’t trained on, and there’s a good chance it’s making shit up, even if only in part of the answer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have over 300 different passwords for different accounts. I’m not remembering that many passwords.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bill that would mandate AI chip location tracking gains industry support⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The Chinese splice 4090 dies onto boards with 48GB VRAM on them. I don’t think this will be very hard for them to circumvent.

  Rather, I’m hoping whatever “safeguard” they implement accidentally causes some fuse to pop in all the unmodded chips, turning all but the Chinese “black market” ones into paper weights. Maybe that’s what it takes for this idiocy to end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “We will only re-enable MCI when we are confident in the effectiveness of our data protection controls,” Kasriel said.

  This should have been an obvious concern from the start. All the data would go to Meta, who are known to be the most reliable, privacy-focused data stewards in the world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US AI stock sell-off shakes markets from Wall Street to Asia⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not financial advice of course, but I don’t know anyone who has wanted to touch the bubble at all. I also don’t know anyone who could invest billions into the industry either, so maybe it’s just a matter of greed clouding judgement here (“maybe” is pulling a lot of weight because we all know the reason is greed).

  The whole thing reeks of crypto scams, just on a higher scale. With companies investing in each other circularly to pump their valuations, we’re just waiting to see who tries to cash out first.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Samsung's SSD warranty policy scammed me so I'm taking them to court.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  FYI Rossman has videos on his own stance on influencers and whether he considers himself one. You can just search his channel for “influencer”. It comes up a bit too in his videos on Linus Sebastian.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judge Learns Lawyers on Both Sides of Case Used AI, Cancels Trial, Kicks Everyone Off the Case⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To make things even more confusing:

  The case in question involved a contractual dispute between lawyer Tom Withers and the city of Aberdeen, Mississippi, over apparently unpaid legal fees (Withers was not representing himself and was not sanctioned by the court).

  This case is comedy at its finest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG apologizes for emailing Nazi runes to its followers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I also would find it difficult to believe that a Polish company’s public stance is in support of the Nazis.

  What they sent is obviously unacceptable, and shit should happen so they never make that mistake again. But it’s hard to jump to the assumption that it was intentional based on one instance. If it’s a pattern, then I’m more interested to see evidence of that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any good indie games on steam? Can be any genre.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Months is an understatement. Just remember to eat, drink water, and sleep now and then. It helps to keep a window nearby so you can track when it’s day/night as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Searching for 'Disregard' Breaks Google AI overviews; Similar command phrases, including "ignore," "quit," "skip," and "stop,"; "look" and "forget" are also prompting chatbot-like responses.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Normally, yes. That always seems to be one of the results.

  I specifically forced it to do a quick answer, and it still gave me a definition. Interestingly, for “disregard”, it also covered a bit about the Google nonsense results after defining the word.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Searching for 'Disregard' Breaks Google AI overviews; Similar command phrases, including "ignore," "quit," "skip," and "stop,"; "look" and "forget" are also prompting chatbot-like responses.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  FYI when I tried Kagi’s Quick Answer out of curiosity, even that gave me a dictionary definition for “disregard”. That being the case, I’d trust it about as much as I trust Google’s AI overviews (which is to mean “not at all”). It just doesn’t show up for me unless I prompt it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone created a public domain version of Netflix⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, I agree with them. All the skilled programmers are getting fired by a bunch of companies with poor financial sense who want to blame everything on AI. Also, if this thread shows anything, then it’s that prospective skilled programmers would rather ask Claude to do their homework for that quick dopamine hit than actually learn that they’re supposed to use parameterized queries so that some random kid’s mom doesn’t delete their production database.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone created a public domain version of Netflix⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds to me like you haven’t worked on a team before.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Someone created a public domain version of Netflix⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No actually. It’s because I ran pyright and there are nearly 1000 type errors. It’s because your LLM decided to setattr and getattr all over these Pydantic models. It’s because for some reason you’re using protocols where an ABC would make more sense. It’s because I told you all this on your last PR, you fixed it that time for the most part, then you’re doing the same thing again on this PR. And it’s because now I have to open a PR that conflicts with one of the 200 files your PR touched fixing all the problems your LLM introduced. All this because you refused to read the docs for two packages and follow the examples.

  Look, I’m not calling you out specifically. I’m just ranting about my day job.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  almost everything else tends to be encrypted with SSL/TLS by default nowadays

  FYI DNS supports DNS-over-HTTPS. You still need to trust the DNS server, but you can run one yourself at least if you’re worried about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game Consoles Are Pricing Themselves Out of Relevance⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This. Everything’s more expensive.

  The nice thing about PCs, though, is you can use the same machine for gaming and productivity. You don’t need to buy two different machines. If you have a PC, you can play games on it.

  The best approach for most people right now is to play games on whatever they already have. If you already have a console, then you don’t need to buy one. If you already have a PC, then you don’t need a console. Play games on what you already have. PC gamers do have the advantage of new releases being available on computers built even two decades ago (if you ignore the more demanding releases), but there’s plenty of games to play on all platforms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SHL0MS(famous prankster on X/Twitter) baited AI haters by posting a real painting by Monet, claiming it was AI generated. The post got viral(>6M views) as art critics started deleting their replies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  art isn’t just what’s on the canvas

  In fact, it often has nothing to do with what’s on the canvas, and entirely to do with the context the art was made in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It would be very easy to write a script that burns tokens when your leaderboard position changes. The problem is competition, which if scripted, would result in tokens burned going through the roof at an accelerating pace.

  Naturally, even with people, that will still happen. It’ll just be a little bit slower instead.

  Eventually they will run out of money. The real question is whether the planet survives while they drain their bank accounts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That codebase must be abysmal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why aren't non-selfhosed AI models/apps private?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  recovery email which they did not hash

  How do you recover an account on the other providers? Do you have to provide the same recovery email you set before during account recovery? If you hash the email, you have no way of reading it anymore, so someone has to provide it to you again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Previewing the Framework Wireless Touchpad Keyboard⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve had laptops where this is a BIOS setting. A simple switch on the side of the keyboard to flip which keys are on the fn layer solves the problem too. Same with key remapping, for keyboards that support that (and really any nice keyboard should or it’s not worth the cost).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gamer's Nexus has been Blacklisted by AMD⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In good news, we got a summary of his 9950x3d2 review, which was basically that it’s a ripoff at $900. Unironically, if you’re somehow in the market for a CPU like that, consider either the 9950x3d for productivity and core count, or the 9800x3d for gaming. The 9950x3d2 brings nothing to the table for anyone outside of maybe some niche applications which need both core count and cache size and can afford the latency for data transfers between CCDs.

  Or, I guess, don’t buy anything because all the companies suck and everything is unbelievably expensive. Who needs a computer anyway?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tim Cook to step down as CEO of Apple: ‘the greatest privilege of my life’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s hoping John Apple does what it takes to make me actually consider an Apple device! Like, I don’t know, making user-friendly decisions without the EU getting on their ass about it first.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Valve’s cost of hosting is pennies.

  Surely you can’t mean this literally. They host downloads of hundreds of GB that get served to tens of millions of users. The bandwidth costs alone are going to be insanely high, putting aside the storage costs as well.

  But anyway, I’d love to see them lower it to 5%. I think if they can afford to do that, they should take the lead.