riskable
@riskable@programming.dev
Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast
- Comment on New study reveals differences between 'Demon Slayer' bamboo muzzle and actual bamboo 15 hours ago:
👹🎍
- Comment on New study reveals differences between 'Demon Slayer' bamboo muzzle and actual bamboo 1 day ago:
In short: The anime left a scientist bamboozled.
- Comment on Finally tried this minecraft thing. Hows my build? 3 days ago:
The most fowl of homes.
- Comment on AI Bros Wanted Trump. Now They Learn What Happens When You Tell Him No. 6 days ago:
I’ve said it so many times: Everyone that’s ever partnered with Trump ultimately regrets it. Always.
- Comment on You know you wanna 1 week ago:
I know someone who tried this. Their ghost still haunts the simulation.
- Comment on It’s Not Just Andrew, the Entire Monarchy Is Rotten 2 weeks ago:
Monarchies are rotten. The entire concept!
- Comment on Having a bad day? This will make you smile 2 weeks ago:
With this upgrade, he can now log in to work!
- Comment on At least one of the 7 letters has still some relevance to my life. 2 weeks ago:
The problem is it’s an arms race! Stop treating LLMs like their existence is the problem and start viewing it via the lens of war:
The enemy has lots of badly-behaving LLMs! Marketers, scammers, and lazy management are equipped with Big AI brand LLMzookas that are sending hallucinations our way!
Captain: “So what do we do about it?”
Soldier: “Captain, there’s FOSS LLMs that we can deploy! We can use them to defeat the enemy’s bullshit slingers! They can be used to search the web on our behalf to filter out hallucinations and advertisements disguised as content! We can set them up to monitor enemy deployments and analyze intelligence to find the truth and stop propaganda in its tracks!”
Captain: “…but can FOSS AI generate boobs‽”
Soldier: “Sir, FOSS has already surpassed commercial AI in that front of the war.”
Captain: “We need to deploy FOSS AI ASAP!”
- Comment on When using rsync to backup my /home folder to an external 1TB SSD, I run out of space, how?? 3 weeks ago:
Simple: Exfat does not support symbolic links. So every file that’s just a symbolic link on your btrfs filesystem is getting copied in full (the link is being resolved) to your Exfat drive.
Solution don’t use Exfat. For backups from btrfs, I recommend using btrfs with compression enabled.
Also don’t forget to rebalance your btrfs partitions regularly to reclaim lost space! Also, delete old snapshots!
- Comment on Sony-led program offers PS5 rentals starting at $13.50 a month in the UK across 12, 24, or 36-month leases — console has to be returned at the end of the contract 3 weeks ago:
Folks here jest, but this business model is coming to PCs next. Bookmark my words!
(Literally, you can right-click the perma-link to this message and have quick access to it later so you can reply, “Damn, you were right!” And post the link to big PC vendors suddenly offering a similar services because DRAM and GPUs have become so expensive, normal people can’t afford to buy PCs anymore)
- Comment on Curb feelers 3 weeks ago:
Forbidden chopsticks
- Comment on Start-up idea 4 weeks ago:
…and burns people’s homes down due to lack of safety features.
…and children choke to death from easily removable small parts.
…and people get electrocuted because of a lack of warning label telling them not to use it in the bath.
- Comment on To USB, or not to USB 4 weeks ago:
Some day, a lucky archeologist will unearth the one true archive from an innocent-looking tarball.
- Comment on Can anyone explain why? 5 weeks ago:
Wait until you see Gen Alpha’s spending on alcohol!
- Comment on UK proposes forcing Google to let publishers opt out of AI summaries 5 weeks ago:
Wrong way to handle AI summaries: Google crawls the article and presents it’s summary.
Right way to handle AI summaries: Your own browser uses a local AI model on your PC to generate the summary.
The first is easy to stop with legislation, the second is impossible to stop and yet, if you try you’re a fucking asshole trying to tell people what they can and cannot do with their own hardware. That’s straight up villain behavior.
- Comment on How would you spell the sound Transformers make when they transform? 5 weeks ago:
Well, there’s five beats, so…
Ts-che-chu-chu-chk
- Comment on [Video] Bunny betrayal 1 month ago:
Now show us “the stick” method.
- Comment on "Not A Single Pixel" Of The New Ecco Game Will Be Generated By AI, Insists Series Creator 1 month ago:
This is my take at well, but not just for gaming… AI is changing the landscape for all sorts of things. For example, if you wanted a serious, professional grammar, consistency, and similar checks of your novel you had to pay thousands of dollars for a professional editor to go over it.
Now you can just paste a single chapter at a time into a FREE AI tool and get all that and more.
Yet here we are: Still seeing grammatical mistakes, copy & paste oversights, and similar in brand new books. It costs nothing! Just use the AI FFS.
Checking a book with an AI chat bot uses up as much power/water as like 1/100th of streaming a YouTube Short. It’s not a big deal.
The Nebula Awards recently banned books that used AI for grammar checking. My take: “OK, so only books from big publishers are allowed, then?”
- Comment on Is there anything of any interests for the tech bros in Greenland? 1 month ago:
It’s cold outside all year round and there’s abundant geothermal energy. Basically, is the perfect place to build data centers.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
Like I said initially, how do we legally define “cloning”? I don’t think it’s possible to write a law that prevents it without also creating vastly more unintended consequences (and problems).
Let’s take a step back for a moment to think about a more fundamental question: Do people even have the right to NOT have their voice cloned? To me, that is impersonation; which is perfectly legal (in the US). As long as you don’t make claims that it’s the actual person. That is, if you impersonate someone, you can’t claim it’s actually that person. Because that would be fraud.
In the US—as far as I know—it’s perfectly legal to clone someone’s voice and use it however TF you want. What you can’t do is claim that it’s actually that person because that would be akin to a false endorsement.
Realistically—from what I know about human voices—this is probably fine. Voice clones aren’t that good. The most effective method is to clone a voice and use it in a voice changer, using a voice actor that can mimick the original person’s accent and inflection. But even that has flaws that a trained ear will pick up.
Ethically speaking, there’s really nothing wrong with cloning a voice. Because—from an ethics standpoint—it is N/A: There’s no impact. It’s meaningless; just a different way of speaking or singing.
It feels like it might be bad to sing a song using something like Taylor Swift’s voice but in reality it’ll have no impact on her or her music-related business.
- Comment on Drive safe 2 months ago:
These are the same people that would download a car!
- Comment on 2 months ago:
You make AI voice generation sound like it’s a one-step process, “clone voice X.” While you can do that, here’s where it’s heading in reality:
“Generate a voice that’s sounds like a male version of Scarlett Johansson”.
“That sounds good, but I want it to sound smoother.”
“Ooh that’s close! Make it slightly higher pitch.”
In a process like that, do you think Scarlett Johansson would have legal standing to sue?
What if you started with cloning your own voice but after many tweaks the end result ends up sounding similar to Taylor Swift? Does she have standing?
In court, you’d have expert witnesses saying they don’t sound the same. “They don’t even have the same inflection or accent!” You’d have voice analysis experts saying their voice patterns don’t match. Not even a little bit.
But about half the jury would be like, “yeah, that does sound similar.” And you could convict a completely innocent person.
- Comment on VR is an absolute game changer for racing games 2 months ago:
I had to share this because no one else in my life will listen.
I’m listening, but more importantly, I completely understand 😭
Also, if you think this setup (with the Xbox controller) is great, wait until the Steam Frame comes out with the new Steam Controller integration (it has IR LEDs on the front of it so you can see a virtual representation of it in the menus). You also won’t need to plug it into your PC as the Steam Frame itself is basically a full PC.
I’m so hyped about it! Finally, a real Linux OS we can customize TF out of instead of locked-down versions of Android that look like they are designed for toddlers.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
I work for a huge bank and we tested voice recognition technology: Even under the best circumstances (high quality microphone with no ambient noise in a sound booth), it was far, far too easy to copy someone else’s voice by simply playing back a sliced up recording a la Sneakers (the movie). We ruled it out as an option over a decade ago.
The problem was fundamental and had nothing to do with the quality of the technology. If your bank is using your voice as a unique identifier they had better be using something else in addition to it! Because it’s super insecure.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
From the perspective of human perception, people’s voices are only unique enough to about one in a few thousand. There’s a few outliers with much more unique voices but believe it or not, there’s a lot of people walking around on this earth that sound just like Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, and other voices people think are super unique.
I view an anti-cloning law as too risky: It sounds exactly like the type of thing that would prevent Grandma from cloning her own voice before going down for surgery because it just so happens to sound a lot like a famous person.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
How do you implement voice cloning prevention? Human voices aren’t that unique. Also, AI voice cloning isn’t perfect. So… At what threshold is a voice considered, “cloned” from a legal perspective?
I mean, people couldn’t tell the difference between Scarlet Johansson and OpenAI’s “Sky” voice which was not cloned.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
Before any of that can happen we need some non-ambiguous definitions of what “AI” is.
- Comment on Why College Students Prefer Socialism—and Why They're Wrong 2 months ago:
Article from someone who doesn’t know the difference between communism and socialism (which actually doesn’t have a universally accepted definition).
I’d love to hear this guy’s take on how to deal with Baumol’s Cost Disease:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Capitalism has no solution for it, but socialism does. It’s almost as if capitalism is good for some things and socialism is good for other things! Then there’s democratic socialism which chooses to use both economic systems, choosing the most appropriate one for any given thing.
- Comment on Makes sense 2 months ago:
Due to cost cutting, norovirus decided to only do the bare minimum.
Quiet quitter!
- Comment on What do other languages use for "magic" words; or names and titles in fantasy and sci-fi novels or cinema? 2 months ago:
In situations like this, it’s best to remember why dead languages are dead: Nobody speaks these languages anymore because everyone kept accidentally casting spells!