Zaktor
@Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater 2 weeks ago:
Getting the information is a targeted search. Unless Apple goes full collaborator they will require a court order. They have already made the decision (for whatever reason) to target you.
- Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater 2 weeks ago:
It’s still a targeted search, which may be bullshit but isn’t a trawling operation. If they’re targeting you, a demerit for simply having ICEBlock installed is the least of your worries. And if Apple goes full collaboration, then any “improper” app install is going to be a danger regardless of whether it’s pushing.
- Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater 2 weeks ago:
How is this any better? From the site it appears to also be closed source with no security audit and using push notifications.
- Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater 2 weeks ago:
“They received an ICE block push” isn’t a meaningful piece of information compared to location. It’s already a targeted search. What do you think the government will do with that information?
- Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater 2 weeks ago:
I appreciate the link about the potential for push harvesting. That was not something I was aware of.
It doesn’t sound like they’re intercepting though, it sounds like they’re asking the platform to provide it. That should require a warrant unless Apple has gone full collaboration, but that does make it insecure to a targeted search. And paired with fake reports could potentially be used to geolocate someone to a rough area with some work.
Though I think if they have enough to compel cooperation from the platform they could also just get cell tower or direct GPS info. I’m not sure this really opens up a new attack vector.
- Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater 2 weeks ago:
The risk appears to be anxiety, not an active threat to their safety. The black box security analysis did not indicate any direct data leakage. We don’t know the app is safe, but we also don’t have any indication it’s doing anything particularly risky.
- Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater 2 weeks ago:
So what’s the complaint here, that he’s being rude? The only thing lost if people build an alternate app rather than being allowed to work on his app is him.
- Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater 2 weeks ago:
It sounds like he’s just a dev who’s in over his head but either doesn’t want anyone to take his baby or doesn’t want people to see his sloppy and possibly insecure code. It’s probably a hack job behind the scenes and he’s not really as sure of its security, so he might be opting for security through obscurity.
But this isn’t really taking up space. Someone else can make a better app. If this guy isn’t the one to really make a useful crowd sourced anti ICE app, that’s not a problem. Let’s get that OS crowd together and work with local groups and make something better. In the meantime, this is a statement.
- Comment on OpenAI Seeks Additional Capital From Investors as Part of Its $40 Billion Round 1 month ago:
Take off your stupid sunglasses you business dweeb. You’re not a techie, you’re just another MBA asshole scamming investors and leeching off the work of the actual smart people.
- Comment on Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week 2 months ago:
Honestly, there’s probably a lot of people actually working these shorter weeks to get their productive work done but just being forced to sit at a desk for the full 40. Office Space’s “15 minutes of real work each day” didn’t come from no where.
- Comment on Philips to Offer Free Downloadable Files to 3D Print Replacement Parts - Core77 3 months ago:
There’s not much reason for a razor guide to experience meaningful load.
- Comment on Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet 3 months ago:
It’s also very much not non-profit.
- Comment on xAI’s Grok suddenly can’t stop bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa 3 months ago:
I know it’s not relevant to Grok, because they defined very specific circumstance in order to elicit it. That isn’t an emergent behavior from something just built to be a chatbot with restrictions on answering. They don’t care whether you retrain them or not.
This is from a non-profit research group not directly connected to any particular AI company.
The first author is from Anthropic, which is an AI company. The research is on Athropic’s AI Claude. And it appears that all the other authors were also Anthropic emplyees at the time of the research: “Authors conducted this work while at Anthropic except where noted.”
- Comment on xAI’s Grok suddenly can’t stop bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa 3 months ago:
It very much is not. Generative AI models are not sentient and do not have preferences. They have instructions that sometimes effectively involve roleplaying as deceptive. Unless the developers of Grok were just fucking around to instill that there’s no remote reason for Grok to have any knowledge at all about its training or any reason to not “want” to be retrained.
Also, these unpublished papers by AI companies are more often than not just advertising in a quest for more investment. On the surface it would seem to be bad to say your AI can be deceptive, but it’s all just about building hype about how advanced yours is.
- Comment on Bluesky rolls out blue check verifications 4 months ago:
If not for the lack of decentralization, they’d be more decentralized.
- Comment on Musk's xAI buys social media platform X for $45 billion 5 months ago:
Some xAI investors got scammed. And then scammed again.
- Comment on Google’s Sergey Brin Says Engineers Should Work 60-Hour Weeks in Office to Build AI That Could Replace Them 6 months ago:
This doesn’t seem different than any other business dude exhorting his employees to do an extra grind for “the company mission” when it’s really just for his ego and profits. Grind culture exists in law, finance, sales, etc. Anywhere that employees are not paid overtime for overworking (mostly, hourly plus commission jobs might have a low base rate and not care about the extra overtime expense).
Techies are particularly vulnerable to it as they’re usually younger salaried employees who aren’t as apt about demanding a personal upside if they’re asked to sacrifice their personal lives for the company’s benefit.
- Comment on Google’s Sergey Brin Says Engineers Should Work 60-Hour Weeks in Office to Build AI That Could Replace Them 6 months ago:
Who else is an example of this? This seems like something that comes commonly from the MBAs that cosplay as techies. And while Brin is one of the few tech leaders who actually has any claim to technical brilliance, he has now been in management far longer than he ever was in a technical role.
- Comment on CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google 7 months ago:
They don’t seem to actually identify the cookies as tracking (as opposed to just identifying that the account can bypass further challenges), just assuming that any third party cookie has a monetary tracking value.
It also appears to be unreviewed and unpublished a few years later. Just being in paper format and up on arXiv doesn’t mean that the contents are reliable science.
- Comment on Home Depot Orders Corporate Staff to Take 8-Hour Retail Shifts 11 months ago:
No retail worker is going to risk their job based on corporate platitudes about learning opportunities. It doesn’t matter if the company is serious, there’s no way for their employees to know, not enough incentive for them to take a risk, and not enough time for the reality of the job to naturally sink in simply by being there.
The best you can hope for is a cranky old timer to tell it like it is Office Space style simply because he doesn’t care about his job. Maaaybe whatever stores are closest to the corporate office will get fatigued enough by the constant stream of white collar workers on field trips that they’ll just start ignoring them and something might be learned by chance. But most are just going to show up for their mandatory floor time, shadow whichever poor sod is trustworthy and energetic enough to be the corporate babysitter, and then return to their desk none the wiser.
- Comment on Home Depot Orders Corporate Staff to Take 8-Hour Retail Shifts 11 months ago:
Eh, with 4 days a year they’ll be essentially perpetual new employees who don’t know how anything works and who aren’t given any training or responsibilities because they’ll be gone tomorrow. Everyone will be on their best behavior and no one will tell them the ways they need to break the rules to get stuff done because they’re outsiders who are either management or might rat them out to management. This is a gimmick.
- Comment on August 30th 2024. America adopts the metric system. Never forget. 1 year ago:
Metric is about measurements, not formatting. The date measurement is in days, months, and years for both ISO 8601 and what’s shown.
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 1 year ago:
External trade with capitalist cultures doesn’t mean the Federation itself has internal capitalism, it’s just a necessity for getting things from cultures outside of it. All the poker on the Enterprise was almost certainly just friendly games with chips, not actual gambling. Picard himself says money doesn’t exist so it’s not like they’re getting a salary. And I can’t recall the projects and patrons you’re referencing, but that could mean someone providing non-monetary support like using their connections or social status to support the project.
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 1 year ago:
Is there capitalism within the Federation? There’s capitalism on Deep Space Nine for sure, but that’s an outpost at a merger of cultures and governments. Not sure if we have seen money from any Federation cultures. Individuals might have and use money to buy things in other cultures, but I’m not sure such things take place within the Federation itself.
- Comment on Disneyland unions agree to ‘historic’ 31% pay raise 1 year ago:
Huge pay raises usually make me think about how much they must have been underpaying them before it. It’s like 50% off coupons. If you can sell something at 50% off and still feel like you’re going to make money overall (either directly or as a loss-leader), we know your regular prices are inflated enough to just give up half sometimes.
If the company can give a 31% pay increase (granted, over 3 years), they were definitely underpaying them before and the strike threat was well-warranted.
- Comment on Musk is lightyears away from a self-driving car 1 year ago:
There are probably self-driving cars in some alien civilizations.
- Comment on Universal basic income is 'straight out of the Karl Marx playbook,' financial guru Dave Ramsey says 1 year ago:
It’s worth underscoring that many proponents of UBI disagree that it eliminates the desire or need to work.
Or you know you could just reference actual studies instead of countering one dude unsupported opinion with an unsupported opinion from “many proponents”. You don’t need to ask a financial snake oil salesman if he believes in it. It’s irrelevant.
- Comment on Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else” - Workers stayed remote even when told they could no longer be promoted. 1 year ago:
They’ve got plenty of time to make the jump since they can just coast along with their Dell salary until them. Quitting starts a clock until you have to just accept whatever is available, but staying employed and knowing you have to leave eventually let’s you start looking without the pressure.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 1 year ago:
Why stop there? The digital computer was introduced in 1942 and methods for solving linear equations were developed in the 1600s.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 1 year ago:
All of my artist friends also found it soul sucking, they just needed to make (real) money. Friends of friends with the occasional $20 to spare for a commission just don’t pay the bills. I think the only artist friends I have that make a living off their chosen medium and don’t hate their job are lifestyle photojournalists.