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BoppreH

6,847 karmajoined 16 tahun yang lalu
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BoppreH
·kemarin·discuss
It's just a syllable of the whole name, which is a German surname in a certain old dialect. And its pronunciation has been mangled after 150 in a country that can't pronounce it properly, so it's a mess all around.
BoppreH
·kemarin·discuss
"Sh" to "s" is simple enough. Sounds horrible to my ears, but maybe not to someone named Stavros ;). I've also been told that the double-p of Boppre looks alien in Greek.

And the "hu" syllable (like the sound an owl makes) was a genuine challenge. I think we went with χού. And now that my name is in the system, that's forever with this spelling, I guess.
BoppreH
·kemarin·discuss
In my experience, every compound given name is made of very traditional names (with some specific combos like Roberto Antonio and Maria Eduarda being especially popular), so it has always been clear where the given name stops.

Though I wouldn't completely rule out a name being ambiguous, either because the family name is strangely casual, or because the parents made a bold choice.
BoppreH
·kemarin·discuss
I'm obliged to mention Falsehoods Programmer Believe About Names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... . As someone who also has two family names, I always dread questions for my "last name".

What's also fun are alphabet differences. Try to interact with the Greek government and they might ask you to spell your name using only their characters. An interesting challenge when your name contains sounds that don't exist in the local language (sh, hu).
BoppreH
·kemarin dulu·discuss
Dropped a folder with a small HTML project, and after 20 seconds got "Something went wrong. An unexpected error occurred. Please try again or contact support.".

Note how the error has zero information.

Looking in the network tab, a POST request to /upload returned 403 and an HTML page starting with "Sorry, you have been blocked", and to "email the site owner to let them know you were blocked".

I'm very tired of this adversarial approach to software coupled with vague errors.

EDIT: it was the file './git/hooks/fsmonitor-watchman.sample' created by default on git init. Maybe because it's Perl. Worse-than-useless "please try again" and "you've been blocked" for committing the sin of uploading a folder that's a git repository. Sigh...
BoppreH
·4 hari yang lalu·discuss
Be careful with new image formats because they also have to be supported by the rest of the user's workflow. The browser might display it, but if it cannot be added to the photos app, or it's not understood by their image editor, or cannot be shared on their preferred chat app, then that's a fail.

WebP is especially hated for this among non-techies (31.8k upvotes, 1 month ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1trpuvr/...
BoppreH
·8 hari yang lalu·discuss
It could have been as simple as "noise infusion" being interpreted as "adding fake data". Especially if you don't trust the people adding the noise.

Wouldn't be the first administrative action taken at a keyword-level of understanding.

This could have also been how the administration got convinced by someone with deeper understanding and specific goals.
BoppreH
·10 hari yang lalu·discuss
This is actually useful for smartphones. Sometimes smartphone malware is capable of infecting a device but not persisting, so reboots clean it back up.

At least if you trust the NSA's advice: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21018353/nsa-mobile-d...
BoppreH
·10 hari yang lalu·discuss
> The situation on the ground is unchanged - the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us.

My understanding is that "fixed" costs like rent and groceries have gone up and taken more of people's budgets, while wages failed to catch up with this inflation.

If that's the case, it's markedly different from "situation on the ground is unchanged". I don't know how the overall pie is doing, but it has not grown enough to compensate for the labor share drops shown in the article. The slice on my plate is certainly lighter.
BoppreH
·11 hari yang lalu·discuss
So when Google bans someone, that person also loses access to all services that require digital ID, forever?

I remember when a Youtuber asked live viewers to "vote" by typing emojis, and a whole bunch of viewers got their Google accounts banned for spamming[1]. Google is also famously averse to user support (understandable given the scale of their free services), so individual remedy is unlikely.

I can already see the new ransomware: "pay us or we'll send spam from your gmail and you'll lose your digital ID".

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019-11-10-youtube-reinstates-banne...
BoppreH
·13 hari yang lalu·discuss
Rockets famously take exponential amounts of fuel to reach higher speeds. I'm a layman, but my guess is that this comes from the exhaust speed being fixed. Orbital speed is higher than exhaust speed, so from a frame at rest the rocket leaves behind a bunch of propellant moving in the same direction as it went. That's wasted energy.

Back-of-napkin calculation says that if you managed to perfectly match exhaust speed with current speed, leaving all the expelled propellant stationary, it would only take quadratic amounts of fuels to reach higher speeds. Like the kinetic energy equation predicts.
BoppreH
·17 hari yang lalu·discuss
I also found it surprisingly easy, starting from my triple "olden, party, music" (calculated years ago for state space coverage and memorability). Followed by "fight", then either "shark, brash" or "brash, shark".

Maybe it's harder if you're a careful player that doesn't waste the first three words.
BoppreH
·30 hari yang lalu·discuss
Good point, maybe that could be done. But that's not what TFA is about, so you're not vindicated yet.
BoppreH
·30 hari yang lalu·discuss
Videos are inherently large. There are better compression algorithms than what phone cameras generate by default, but video reencoding is slow, and the results still too large for "covert data channels".

Normal players would have noticed the bandwidth and CPU usage, and volunteers have already agreed to data sharing, so there's no point in keeping secrets. Same as claims that the Facebook app listens to people talk: someone would have caught it by now.

Also, AR capture was never very popular, mostly a gimmick for new players. The game was already a battery and power hog even without it.
BoppreH
·30 hari yang lalu·discuss
> it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage

But that's not what happened. The data came from very explicit scanning tasks centered about pokestops, not the AR pokemon capture. I used it once or twice to test it out, and it was a drawn out process where it asks you to slowly orbit the pokestop while filming, then permission to upload the (huge) files. You even had to activate a special "volunteer" account flag to even see these tasks.

From TFA:

> Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms.

I'm sure they used GPS data from the players too, but I still hold that it's unlikely the AR pokemon capture yielded any data to them.
BoppreH
·bulan lalu·discuss
Oh, that's clever. It's not just hiding the payload in the Exif, it's hiding the fact that the payload came from the network at all, by reading it from the browser cache (presumably after embedding the image into a page the user visited).

So you have a package that doesn't include (directly) malicious code or make network calls, yet it can still run malicious code from the network. This is much better than simple obfuscation because you can vary the payload, like a command-and-control server.
BoppreH
·bulan lalu·discuss
You're right that shareholder mindset cannot fix this problem, but that's what policy and agreements are for. And leaders can be convinced that AI is a direct risk to their own citizens too. If everyone else agrees to stop, you have less reason to continue when this action is putting yourself at risk.

And note how your argument can also be used against any non-prolifreration agreements, which are demonstrably possible.
BoppreH
·bulan lalu·discuss
In 2023 there was an open letter titled "Pause Giant AI Experiments", signed by almost all the big names on the West. I'd say the public opinion only got worse since then.
BoppreH
·bulan lalu·discuss
Implied in my answer was "and not creating ever stronger AIs", which unfortunately the big 3 labs are failing at. And they might be hampering their own revenue by doing the rest, but they also know that rocking the boat too hard is even more dangerous for their revenue. I wouldn't call it selfless.
BoppreH
·bulan lalu·discuss
Not the direct person you asked, but my answer would be alignment, interpretability, and policymaking. Perhaps improving existing usage? Helping grandma create reminders doesn't require advancing the AI state-of-the-art.