Me too. From duckduck's search result excerpt it seems to be something of a departure from the normal string theory skepticism at Peter Woit's blog:
> The US/Israeli wars and threats to end Iranian civilization with massive bombardment have drawn attention away from the ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Looking back, the Columbia students with their encampment were very much right about what was going on.
Baseline epistemic hygiene would tend to preclude taking llm advice seriously, on any personal matter of consequence, in my view.
However "baseline" epistemic hygiene seems to be a somewhat distant goal for the vast majority now we live in an infosphere essentially comprising a Darwinian nightmare of competing agnotological agendas.
Personally, as a gmail user of about 2 decades, this is the first I've heard of this particular issue, probably because for some years I don't even read past the word "smart" before disabling whatever feature du jour is being pushed in my face.
I'm just now migrating away from gmail for a different kind of inanity[1] all the same.
I mean the implications and ramifications are fascinating, but .. I just need to take a few moments to absorb the sheer spectacular stupendous glorious DUMBNESS of a multibillion dollar corp with its generously paid staff utilising $multibillion SOTA tech to ignore any reasonable security checks and give prized accounts away for nothing to random hackers. It is difficult to comprehend in its enormity.
A breach which surely will go down in computer history as one of the most egregious and avoidable corporate IT failures of all time.
Personally it seems mostly about prizing the phone number out of my cold clammy hands.
I recently tried to access my google account on a new browser install. Google did not believe my login/password was sufficient, and insisted on me surrendering my phone number:
> To help keep your account safe, Google wants to make sure it’s really you trying to sign in [...]
> Enter a phone number to get a text message with a verification code.
I have never given my phone number to Google for that account (I have a separate account on my Android phone).
So how on earth this will "make sure it's really you" I have no idea.
I am unable to access Google from my new browser install so am stuck with using my old one for anything which requires a Google login.
I guess at some point I'll try and resolve it by adding a recovery email or something, but.. my inclination is to throw Google and the account in the trash right now.
You can accomplish "no ads" and arguably substantially less tracking without Premium, though, with (e.g.) firefox and ublock origin. The only downside is an occasional ignorable warning that you're "seeing interruptions".
If browsers have enough low-level access to my storage hardware to carry out timing attacks for fingerprinting, it seems likely they also have enough to maliciously chug the hardware sufficiently to degrade capacity over time and otherwise impact system integrity. I hate the thought of some random website writing and overwriting random bytes in a tight loop in the background while I'm browsing elsewhere to find the cause of my slow disk subsystem.
To that end an option to disable storage access by type would be nice to have. All I see in firefox settings is the ability to block all storage including cookies, and the ability to block persistent storage when the site requests it. It's not clear to me how the OPFS system in TFA relates to either of these, but I'd guess that it's a separate system. There's a bunch of storage quotas in about:config, but nothing obviously related to OPFS (that I can see).
Given the choice I would be happy to allow traditional cookie storage and block everything else with any exceptions I need (none that I can think of) on a per-site basis. If this can be achieved via about:config, I'm all ears!
While looking at my storage data, I see youtube has 174(!) cookies and 57M data stored on my machine. Sigh.
The production of ignorance is booming as its trajectory takes it from roots in advertising, then lobbying, then political campaigns to center stage in political strategy and official government business.
I suspect the academics who study culturally cultivated ignorance will be playing catchup for at least a decade after this administration!
> Perhaps you can tell me what use "3 ∩ 4 = 3" has.
As I said:
> a handy set theoretic implementation of the min() function.
i.e. if you wanted (for whatever reason) to define min(a, b) directly and briefly in your set theoretic reconstruction of the natural numbers, you can just use intersect operator and define it as "a ∩ b".
Perhaps because in terms of the interesting distinction you introduce:
> you have to distinguish things that are true of natural numbers as an algebraic structure, from things that just happen to be the case because you picked some specific representation to use for natural numbers
this particular operation seems to be part of the former rather than of the latter.
Beats me too! Thanks for the heads up.