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bill_mcgonigle

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bill_mcgonigle
·8 дней назад·discuss
Glad to hear it.

Many folks believe Google has been pressured to move towards allowing no packets on the Internet without an attached government ID. Real open source communities are in the way of the AI Surveillance Police State.
bill_mcgonigle
·9 дней назад·discuss
That's pretty crazy with today's expectations though I remember touring a physics lab c. 1990 and they had just gotten a Mac IIfx maxxed out with options for $14K. Which was more than a typical new car price at the time. It was monitoring and data-logging a tokamak so I think they had a DoE grant. I hoped I'd own a 64MB machine one day to do some real serious computing! Now my email reader needs 4.2GB resident. :/
bill_mcgonigle
·9 дней назад·discuss
Make a commitment to forbid lethal use of this service and I'll subscribe for backup/disaster preparedness.

It would be a huge selling point over the competition which is allegedly being used in terroristic attacks.

Algorithm: one (or a group of) terminals reaches altitude headed from one warring region to another. Disable its transit data, keep watching telemetry. A single modest modern CPU could process the data stream from millions of devices, though it probably makes sense to have a coprocessor at each downlink location, with minimum handoff data near hextile boundaries.
bill_mcgonigle
·11 дней назад·discuss
Hopefully nobody in the criminal underworld has figured it out on their own.

Do you believe the mitigation would be difficult to engineer? If, say somebody else, publicly disclosed the unmasking technique how long would you guess it would take Apple to implement a verifiable fix?
bill_mcgonigle
·11 дней назад·discuss
For those wondering this gives full system compromise to an authenticated user with permissions to edit the firewall, AIUI.

Nasty but I was expecting a remote unauthenticated attack at 9.9. Hopefully you don't allow admin on WAN!

Thanks for finding the bugs and writing about the design pattern problem, HackerAsk.
bill_mcgonigle
·11 дней назад·discuss
I was always fascinated by the visual effects you didn't know were there. The obligatorily twenty minute CG battle at the climax of a Marvel movie bores me but when Ellie hears the signal from Vega and is racing her truck back to the office past the giant radio telescopes the mountains in the background aren't real. Why? Because Art, that's why.

I think this is why AI Slop is so pervasive. If the tool were used properly you wouldn't even know it was there. It's possible some curl bug report was discovered with responsible use of ML but now such reports are disallowed, and for good reason. Though if used responsibly who would know?

There was always that kid whose book report was obviously from reading the back cover; today he's in a corporation trying to get someone else to do his work with an LLM. Not a new strategy, unfortunately.
bill_mcgonigle
·12 дней назад·discuss
I haven't heard of this package personally and it's not on my desktops so it must not be pulled in by any of the task- desktop environment metapackages I use. So you probably have to go looking for it.

I really don't care about this package or protest but what might be more interesting to consider is what if this were in a default package and what if the affected locales were different?

If I make a list of all the countries who have recently been at war or are currently engaged in hostilities or have ethnic animus towards each other and just choose to taunt them all, that would really be a dick move and it's probably OK for Debian to drop the package. FWIW I'd rather see them adopt a kindhearted fork than override an author/ maintainer when possible.

If there's no special pleading for the ru/ua conflict then it's not too concerning.
bill_mcgonigle
·13 дней назад·discuss
This is a neat idea! We are way too ossified in some of our interface paradigms while also having thrown out science-based best practices hard-won in the '90's.

The scenario you describe is already a disaster, though! Who let that slip through? Replying to a message should create an idempotent context that can't run away from you. "What a mess!" as the kids say.

I'm not a user of smart earphones but lots of things like that should be on the table. Decades ago we were waiting for small cheap cameras and CV to do focus-follows-gaze and just kinda forgot about it when the stack arrived.

There are more "pinch to zoom" type revolutions available to those with a studious HCI methodology. Even Academia seems to be chasing "latest craze" development now, not fundamentals.

I hope your experiment succeeds!
bill_mcgonigle
·13 дней назад·discuss
We welcome the Nordics with peace and brotherly love.
bill_mcgonigle
·13 дней назад·discuss
Left/right doesn't matter much for a no-logs VPN.

Up/Down (authoritarian/libertarian) is what matters there.

If he has high allegiance to the extant power structure then promises should be questioned.

If he is for radical decentralization and antiwar then I'm more likely to trust promises made about privacy and autonomy.

Then there's international confusion about left/right. Scandinavia is known as a good place to run a business because businesses regulation is much lighter than places like the US which are heavily regulated. In the US business regulation is "left wing" in Scandinavia it's "right wing".

We'd use a 14-dimensional vector for political positioning if we wanted to be studious but most folks are just looking for a friend/enemy distinction. Even many of the comments here looking to dump a well-regarded service if either "tastes great" or "less filling" is confirmed. The false dialectic as means of control and all that jazz.
bill_mcgonigle
·13 дней назад·discuss
It's in its awkward teenage years stage now.

Pretty soon the AI will tell your father things that are more difficult to disprove and it will be done the same way "news" and Wikipedia do it - telling you how to feel before telling you what happened, reporting only part of the story, and not covering most happenings at all.

Now is the time to teach your circle psyop avoidance skills. Or build an honest competitor (if it were allowed to exist - Marc says only three will be permitted to exist).
bill_mcgonigle
·16 дней назад·discuss
Pay attention to these warning signs. The Prussian System puts tremendous social pressure on many girls. Outcomes can be tragic. Those girls often do well in different schools. Boys mostly fail to learn and get punished under the Prussian System but they tend to suffer less social pressure. If a book about prison makes you think of your school something is very wrong.
bill_mcgonigle
·16 дней назад·discuss
The potential power here is a quick, invisible bot check that loads the content meant for humans for humans and current news stories about humans opposing the AI Surveillance Police State for bots. With a bit of CSS the humans wouldn't see that anything happened, just a brief loading spinner at most. If anybody prototypes something like this please post about it.
bill_mcgonigle
·17 дней назад·discuss
I sure hope nobody is doing this with pacemakers or flight control software.

And why does this essay's type style change dozens of times? Who is that helping? It's like a cut and pasted ransom note.
bill_mcgonigle
·20 дней назад·discuss
Not sure if he'll succeed but it seems really positive that he feels the business environment there is strong enough to give it a try. Kudos for the implicit thought leadership here. Distributed success is where we're going.
bill_mcgonigle
·20 дней назад·discuss
I had a brief conversation with a family member's provider about this recently. She hadn't considered that fly-by-night SAAS providers often have atrocious infosec and she had thought of it all as upside; her company had asked her to do it (with consent). The opt out was easy but no other patients had declined before. On the other hand, another provider's after-visit notes are always full of mistakes and need correction, which is fairly important in tracking longitudinal progression of degenerative conditions. We didn't even get into data backup SOP's, obviously, but on my systems I would need to take special care to ensure that production data wasn't restorable to a snapshot for at least two years, and it's hard to imagine folks who don't secure their S3 buckets are doing this right. "It's complicated." Third-party certification is likely needed.