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GamingChairModel

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Microsoft Chose Profit Over Security and Left U.S. Government Vulnerable to Russian Hack, Whistleblower Says | ProPublica Investigation (www.propublica.org)

Former employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others....

GamingChairModel ,

I read the article as criticism of the lack of defense in depth, where compromise of a specific server gives access to keys that give near-untraceable access to all servers. Yes, Solarwinds fucked up by putting their keys in a place where someone could access it, but Golden SAML is the technique that makes a breach worse.

GamingChairModel ,

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on this (I worked in cybersecurity in 2000’s but was only entry level, and changed careers before cloud/mobile made things way more complicated), but the general point still seems true: security requires conscious design that discourages poor configuration by client IT, and makes bad practices unviable by not only end users, but also the sysadmins who manage the actual IT resources. Then, things should be limited in impact.

In other words, the manufacturer doesn’t get to wash their whole hands of this thing if their design makes it easy for clients to screw up. In this case, it does sound like these systems were deployed by clients that didn’t have a solid understanding of the relationships between on-prem AD and ADFS and didn’t know how to configure them securely, that’s also a significant documentation/education issue that Microsoft owns some responsibility for.

(Plus in the case of the Solarwinds hack, there were a few other Microsoft vulnerabilities exploited to get to the point where the hackers could traverse the system looking for keys/certificates.)

So I don’t think this particular dude was warning about a non-vulnerability, and it sounds like the “security boundary” response he met with internally is similar to how you’re responding to this report.

GamingChairModel ,

Instances don’t actually own the copyright to comments. The poster owns the copyright and licenses it to the instance. Which lets the instance use it, but not sublicense to others.

GamingChairModel ,

“Biblically accurate models”

GamingChairModel ,

I can see an argument for artists choosing to use chaotic processes they can’t really control.

Setting up a canvas and paints and brushes in a particular arrangement in the woods, and letting migratory animals and weather put their mark on the work, and then see what results. That could be art.

And if that can be art, then I guess chaotic, unpredictable AI models can output something that can be art, too.

GamingChairModel ,

They don’t pass US federal crash tests, probably because of the lack of crumple zone, so they can’t be imported until they’re 25 years old. Which doesn’t make them any safer, but I guess rules are rules:

Because the trucks don’t meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, they’re legal to import only 25 years after having been manufactured. Then, it’s up to each state to decide whether to allow them on public roads.

GamingChairModel ,

Traditionally they’ve been banned because they don’t do well in crash testing, as they don’t have crumple zones or airbags. Here’s some testing from 2010 by the insurance industry arguing that they shouldn’t be on highways.

Apple is bringing RCS to the iPhone in iOS 18 | The new standard will replace SMS as the default communication protocol between Android and iOS devices (www.theverge.com)

The long-awaited day is here: Apple has announced that its Messages app will support RCS in iOS 18. The move comes after years of taunting, cajoling, and finally, some regulatory scrutiny from the EU....

GamingChairModel ,

Fi has two different, incompatible options for how to sync your messages to a computer or other device that isn’t your primary phone with your SIM (or e-SIM): the so-called “option 1” is RCS compatible, but treats your phone as the canonical device that has the primary copy of all messages, voicemails, etc. “Option 2” is device agnostic, where all messages and voicemails live on the cloud, and your phone (and all other devices) merely syncs with that primary copy in the cloud.

If your phone breaks or dies or is lost/stolen, Option 2 keeps chugging along with all your logged in devices, but the dead phone is the single point of failure for Option 1.

Ideally there would be a device agnostic way to access RCS through your account, but every implementation seems to require a specific SIM.

A PR disaster: Microsoft has lost trust with its users, and Windows Recall is the straw that broke the camel's back (www.windowscentral.com)

It’s a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The headlining feature of its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which is supposed to drive millions of PC sales over the next couple of years, is under significant fire for being what many say is a major breach of privacy and security on Windows. That feature in question is Windows Recall, a...

GamingChairModel ,

When they announced Win7, I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06, “Dapper Drake”.

Windows Vista was so bad that it gets forgotten even in a retrospective about how Windows versions sucked. But yeah, Win7 didn’t come out for another few years after that, to rescue the world from Vista.

GamingChairModel ,

What chips were we making in China? Unless you’re counting Taiwan as China, but I’d point out that we’re still making the top of the line chips in Taiwan.

GamingChairModel ,

Yes, but I don’t think the CHIPS Act was aimed at the not-so-cutting-edge processes and getting those reshored onto US soil. The US already has a bunch, and the strategic value of those supply chains are less critical to national interests.

GamingChairModel ,

I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation.

It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there’s essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We’ve seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.

Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we’ll all still be able to interact.

GamingChairModel ,

Or, if you want something smaller, they have a watch.

GamingChairModel ,

Targeting the preindustrial level of atmospheric CO2 is such an ambitious target, trying to undo 300 years of emissions. Then again, it’s not like we’ve stopped emitting.

If we instead try to calculate the energy requirements to simply offset the average emissions of that particular year, using this formula of 652 kJ/kg CO2, and average annual CO2 emissions, against the current numbers of about 37 billion tonnes, or 37,000,000,000,000 kg, we have 2.4 x 10^16 kJ, or 2.4 x 10^19 joules. Which converts to 6.7 x 10^12 kWh, or 6,700 TWh.

Total annual US electricity generation is about 4700 TWh per year.

Global electricity generation is about 25000 TWh per year, about 40% of which is from low or zero carbon sources.

So basically if we’ve got 6700 TWh of clean energy to spare, it would be more effective to steer that into replacing fossil fuels first, and then once we hit a point of diminishing returns there, explore the much less efficient options of direct capture for excess energy we can’t store or transport. Maybe we’ll get there in a decade or two, but for now it doesn’t make any sense.

GamingChairModel ,

they have such a monopoly

The major weakness in their desktop OS market dominance isn’t from other desktop OSes. MacOS, ChromeOS, and traditional desktop Linux distros prevent Windows from being a total monopoly, but there’s no doubt that Windows has quite a bit of market power.

The real competitive threat to Windows is from people who decide to not use a desktop computer at all. Between tablets and phones, there are a lot of people who no longer feel the need to have a laptop or desktop at all, for personal use.

And on that front, Windows being shittier than phones and tablets will cause people to slow down their upgrade cycle and maybe avoid using a traditional personal computer at all.

GamingChairModel ,

For my personal devices:

  • Microsoft products from MS DOS 6.x or so through Windows Vista
  • Ubuntu 6.06 through maybe 9.04 or so
  • Arch Linux from 2009 through 2015
  • MacOS from 2011 through current
  • Arch Linux from 2022 through current

I’ve worked with work systems that used RedHat and Ubuntu back in the late 2000’s, plus decades of work computers with Windows. But I’m no longer in a technical career field so I haven’t kept on top of the latest and greatest.

GamingChairModel ,

Scientology with Chinese characteristics

GamingChairModel ,

When costs are level per kilowatt over lifetime Nuclear is cheaper thanks to economies of scale

Citation needed.

Vogtle added 2000 megawatts of capacity for $35 billion over the past 15 years. That’s an up-front capital cost of $17,500 per watt. Even spread over a 75 year expected lifespan, we’re talking about $233 per watt per year, of capital costs alone.

Maintenance and operation (and oh, by the way, nuclear is one of the most labor intensive forms of energy generation, so you’ll have to look at 75 years of wage increases too) and interest and decommissioning will add to that.

So factoring everything in, estimates are that it will work out to be about $170/MWh, or $0.17 per kwh for generation (before accounting for transmission and reinvestment and profit for the for-profit operators). That’s just not cost competitive with anything else on the market.

Economies of scale is basically the opposite of the problem that 21st century nuclear has encountered, which is why the current push is to smaller reactors, not bigger.

There’s a place for extending nuclear power plant lifespans as long as they’ll go. There’s less of a place for building new nuclear.

GamingChairModel ,

Up our storage game, big time

I think this can be expanded out a bit, to the more generalizable case of matching generation to demand. Yes, storage can be a big part of that.

But another solution along the same lines may be demand shifting, which in many ways, relies on storage (charging car batteries, reheating water tanks or even molten salt only when supply is plentiful. And some of that might not be storage, per se, but creating the useful output of something that actually requires a lot of power: timing out industrial processes or data center computational tasks based on the availability of excess electrical power.

Similarly, improvements in transmission across wide geographical areas can better match supply to demand. The energy can still be used in real time, but a robust enough transmission network can get the power from the place that happens to have good generation conditions at that time to the place that actually wants to use that power.

There’s a lot of improvement to be made in simply better matching supply and demand. And improvements there might justify intentional overbuilding, where generators know that they’ll need to curtail generation during periods where there’s more supply than demand.

And with better transmission, then existing nuclear plants might be able to act as dispatchable backup power rather than the primary, and therefore serve a larger market.

GamingChairModel ,

We can’t talk about things like this like they’re free.

Some shifts genuinely are free, though. Wholesale prices for electricity follow a pronounced “duck curve,” and drop to near zero (or even negative) in areas where there’s a substantial solar base, during the day at certain parts of the year. People will shift their demand for non-time-sensitive consumption (heating, cooling, charging of devices/EVs, batched/scheduled jobs) in response to basic price signals. If a substantial amount of future demand is going to be from data centers performing batched/scheduled jobs, like training AI models or encoding video files, a lot of that demand can be algorithmically shifted.

There are already companies out there intentionally arbitraging the price differences by time of day to invest in large scale storage. That’s an expensive activity, that they’ve determined is worth doing because there’s profit to be made at scale.

At household scale, individuals can do that too.

Put another way, we shouldn’t talk about current pricing models where every kilowatt hour costs the same as if that arrangement is free.

Plus, the timing of consumption already does naturally tend to follow the timing of solar generation. Most people are more active during the day than at night, and work hours reflect that distribution. Overcapacity in solar can go a long way towards meeting demand when it naturally happens.

GamingChairModel ,

So why don’t we do it? FUD.

A consortium of Utah’s utilities (UAMPS) literally just pulled out of its commitment to backing NuScale’s modular reactor in November 2023. It was a problem of cost, when the construction looked like it was going to become too expensive, at a time when new wind construction is dropping the price of wind power. It basically just couldn’t compete on cost, in the specific environment of servicing Utah.

geothermal is probably expensive due to hard rock

I wouldn’t sleep on geothermal as a future broad scale solution for dispatchable (that is, generation that can be dialed up and down on demand) electrical power. The oil and gas fracking industry has greatly improved their technology at imaging geological formations and finding places where water can flow and be pumped, in just the past decade. I expect to see over the next decade geothermal reach viability beyond just the places where geothermal heat is close to the surface.

GamingChairModel ,

When they say modules, does that mean mainboards?

They mean each part. Here’s their store for individual parts.

This announcement includes a new display, so anyone with the old display can swap out their old one for the new one. People can swap out batteries. Keyboards. Touchpads. It’s a modular design so that each module can be swapped out if broken, or if there’s been an upgrade the user wants.

GamingChairModel ,

3-2-1 backup is important. I’ve been burned with lost files before, so I now make sure they’re available in multiple places.

I also encrypt everything. My laptops can’t be unlocked by anyone except myself: Apple Filevault on my Apple laptop, LVM on LUKS on my Linux laptop. If something happens to me, my laptops must be wiped completely to be useable as a used device.

My NAS keeps my backups of all my documents and media (and as a hobbyist photographer, I have over a terabyte of photos and videos I’ve taken). It’s encrypted, but I’ve written the key down on paper and put it in my physical documents. If something happens to me, someone who goes through my physical documents will have access to my digital files.

I pay a cloud service (Backblaze) for cloud backups. I trust the encryption and key management to not actually give the service provider any access to my files.

GamingChairModel ,

I sync if I have a good Internet connection, like from my hotel room or whatever, by VPNing into my home network where my NAS is. There are distributed DNS type solutions for a lot of the big NAS brands, where they’ll let you access your data through their service, but I never set that up because I already have a VPN. So my NAS and firewall are configured not to allow outside connections to that device.

But if I haven’t synced laptop to NAS yet, then copies exist on both my camera SD cards (redundant double SD card) and my laptop.

GamingChairModel ,

Oh I actually know this one. Mostly historical accident and path dependence.

In medieval England, kings wanted to make sure that taxes and fines to the crown were properly paid, so they had their own officials in each county, who reported to the King rather than to any local officials. Sheriffs were responsible for tax collection, law enforcement (both arresting people before they could be tried and carrying out the rulings of the court). But they’d have to wait for the king’s courts to actually come to town and hold trials and what not, so in the meantime the king’s financial interests weren’t necessarily aligned with the sheriff’s.

So coroners were appointed to watch over county matters and represent the king’s financial interests whenever the courts came to town.

When someone was convicted of a capital offense, their property escheated to the crown. That was an important source of revenue for the crown, so coroners would determine whether a dead body was the result of a crime or not, in order to make sure the crown wasn’t missing out on some convict money.

Both the Sheriff and coroner positions survived the transition into American governance, but independence and democratic reforms meant that these previously crown-appointed positions needed to become elected positions. Most states kept Sheriffs and Coroners as county officials, and preserved some of their traditional roles and duties. Many coroners offices were renamed to “medical examiner” but basically still preserved the role of keeping stats on deaths. And without appointment by the crown, most states just chose to make these elected positions.

GamingChairModel ,

In this house we obey Ohm’s law!

GamingChairModel ,

I’m still a skeptic of the Nova system into the 4 categories (1: unprocessed or minimally processed, 2: processed ingredients, 3: processed foods, 4: ultra processed foods), because it’s simultaneously an oversimplification and a complication. It’s an oversimplification because the idea of processing itself is such a broad category of things one can do to food, that it isn’t itself all that informative, and it’s a complication in that experts struggle to classify certain foods as actual prepared dishes being eaten (homemade or otherwise).

So the line drawing between regular processed food and ultraprocessed is a bit counterintuitive, and a bit inconsistent between studies. Guided by the definitions, experts struggle to place unsweetened yogurt into Nova 1 (minimally processed), 2 (processed culinary ingredients), 3 (processed food) or 4 (ultra processed food). As it turns out, experts aren’t very consistent in classifying the foods, which introduces inconsistency in the studies that are performed investigating the differences. Bread, cheese, and pickles in particular are a challenge.

And if the whole premise is that practical nutrition is more than just a list of ingredients, then you have to handle the fact that merely mixing ingredients in your own kitchen might make for a food that’s more than a sum of its parts. Adding salt and oil catapults pretty much any dish to category 3, so does that mean my salad becomes a processed food when I season it? Doesn’t that still make it different than French fries (category 3 if I make them myself, probably, unless you count refined oil as category 4 ultra processed, at which point my salad should probably be ultra processed too)? At that point, how useful is the category?

So even someone like me, who does believe that nutrition is so much more than linear relationships between ingredients and nutrients, and is wary of global food conglomerates, isn’t ready to run into the arms of the Nova system. I see that as a fundamentally flawed solution to what I agree is a problem.

The countries with the most Fediverse servers are rich and former/current colonial powers. One of the best true barometers of the success of the Fediverse is how quickly we can turn that on its head. (sopuli.xyz)

In the end I don’t think internet users in rich powerful countries are the users most likely to benefit and invest their time into in the fediverse. They might be the ones with the most free time, money and privilege around computers which makes being on the leading edge of niche technologies far easier, but I don’t think...

GamingChairModel ,

Our data centers and backbone internet/Tier 1 internet providers are basically the best in the world. The US Department of Energy maintains a network with 46 Tbit/s connections between its labs.

GamingChairModel ,

Yes but can you prove by evidence that there is no milk in my cup, if I won’t let you look inside?

GamingChairModel ,

Yes, but an absence of a proof of the positive is itself not proof of the negative, so if we’re in the unprovable unknown, we’re still back at the point that you can’t prove a negative.

Apple's Wifi router database: Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning Systems (www.cs.umd.edu)

Apple’s huge database, which usually records the locations of Wi-Fi base stations to the nearest metre, has apparently been exploited without hindrance: With little effort, attackers are able to create a ‘global snapshot’ of all the location data of the WLANs recorded there. This allows them - over a longer period of time...

GamingChairModel ,

Apple’s got one, so does Google, and Microsoft.

They’ve got beacon location data, yes, but Apple is the only one that gives up that information without first conforming that the query is coming from someone who sees that BSSID. As OP notes:

In this respect, Apple’s Wi-Fi database also differs fundamentally from other Wi-Fi databases, such as the one operated by Google.

If you click through to the paper, it describes 2 approaches for using BSSIDs to identify location:

  1. Client submits a query listing each BSSID and its signal strength, and the server calculates position and returns where it believes the query is coming from.
  2. Client submits a query listing each BSSID it’s interested in, and the server responds with the location of each BSSID so that the client can calculate its own position.

See the problem there? Approach 2 gives more raw information away, by outsourcing the positioning calculation to untrusted clients.

And the paper outlines how Apple goes even further than that:

Apple’s Wi-Fi geolocation API [4] works in the latter manner, but with an added twist: In addition to the geolocations of the BSSIDs the client submits, Apple’s API opportunistically returns the geolocations of up to several hundred more BSSIDs nearby the one requested. These unrequested BSSID geolocations are presumably then cached by the client, which no longer needs to request the locations of the nearby BSSIDs it may soon encounter, e.g., as the user walks down a city street.

It goes on later:

Apple’s WPS API is free and places few restrictions on its use. It requires neither an API key, authentication, nor an Apple device; our measurement software is written in Go and runs on Linux. Moreover, Apple appears to make no attempt to filter physically impossible queries. The BSSIDs submitted to the WPS need not be physically proximate to each other nor to the device submitting the query; Apple’s WPS will respond with geolocations for BSSIDs on two different continents in the same request to a querier on a third.

That’s the discussion here. Apple keeps a large database, like many other big tech/mapping firms, but does nothing to keep that database hard for strangers to scrape in bulk.

In contrast, Google uses the first approach and keeps the information a bit more restricted by performing the location calculation at the server:

Han et al. reverse-engineered Google’s WPS’s method of operation [17]. Google’s WPS functions differently than Skyhook’s and Apple’s insofar as Google’s service attempts to geolocate the device submitting the query, providing it with only the device’s computed position given a list of BSSIDs from the client.

So it’s possible to run this type of service with this type of database, without sharing BSSID locations with anyone else who asks.

GamingChairModel ,

It seems that Apple may be interested in at least requiring authentication that the query comes from an Apple device (or even an Apple-approved API key), which would go a long way in alleviating the security flaw.

I can see some value in the server returning BSSID location data directly (especially with risk of intermittent or slow data connections), but the combination of all the factors seems sloppy.

GamingChairModel ,

I’m having a hard time seeing why one is fine but the other isn’t.

I think the law says that neither is fine, in the context here. The law allows celebrity impersonators to engage in parody and commentary, but not to actually use their impersonation skills to endorse products, engage in fraud, and pretend to be that person being impersonated.

GamingChairModel ,

I’m mostly going off of this article and a few others I’ve read. This article notes:

Celebrities have previously won cases over similar-sounding voices in commercials. In 1988, Bette Midler sued Ford for hiring one of her backup singers for an ad and instructing the singer to “sound as much as possible like the Bette Midler record.” Midler had refused to be in the commercial. That same year, Tom Waits sued Frito-Lay for voice misappropriation after the company’s ad agency got someone to imitate Waits for a parody of his song in a Doritos commercial. Both cases, filed in California courts, were decided in the celebrities’ favor. The wins by Midler and Waits “have clear implications for AI voice clones,” says Christian Mammen, a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson who specializes in intellectual property law.

There’s some more in there:

To win in these cases, celebrities generally have to prove that their voice or other identifying features are unregistered trademarks and that, by imitating them, consumers could connect them to the product being sold, even if they’re not involved. That means identifying what is “distinctive” about her voice — something that may be easier for a celebrity who played an AI assistant in an Oscar-winning movie.

I think taken with the fact that the CEO made a direct reference to the movie she voiced an AI assistant when announcing the product, that’s enough that a normal person would “connect them to the product being sold.”

GamingChairModel ,

Chess has roughly 10^44 positions. Checkers has roughly 10^20.

That means under that metric, chess is roughly 24 orders of magnitude more complex as checkers.

Tic tac toe has roughly 10^3 positions, or 17 orders of magnitude simpler than checkers.

In other words, the complexity gap between chess and checkers is larger than the gap between checkers and tic tac toe.

iPhones And Androids Can Now Warn You of 'Secret Trackers' (www.ibtimes.co.uk)

In a collaborative effort, Apple and Google have developed an industry-standard detection feature called “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers” (DULT) for Bluetooth trackers. This standard allows users on iOS and Android devices to be alerted if an unknown Bluetooth tracker is monitoring their location.

GamingChairModel ,

The service already excludes any geographical tracker that is within range of its owner (as determined by whether the owner’s primary device is moving with the tracker).

They could probably use a few other rules, too, like excluding trackers that are moving with more than 10 other people simultaneously, so that some keys left behind on a bus, train, or plane don’t trigger the alert for a bunch of strangers.

GamingChairModel ,

users hand over over ownership to reddit the moment you post

Not ownership. Just permission to copy and distribute freely. Which basically is necessary to run a service like this, where user-submitted content is displayed.

And since there’s no such clause on Lemmy, they’d have to ask the actual authors of the comments for permission instead?

It’s more of a fuzzy area, but simply by posting on a federated service you’re agreeing to let that service copy and display your comments, and sync with other servers/instances to copy and display your comments to their users. It’s baked into the protocol, that your content will be copied automatically all over the internet.

Does that imply a license to let software be run on that text? Does it matter what the software does with it, like display the content in a third party Mobile app? What about when it engages in text to speech or braille conversion for accessibility? Or index the page for a search engine? Does AI training make any difference at that point?

The fact is, these services have APIs, and the APIs allow for the efficient copying and ingest of the user-created information, with metadata about it, at scale. From a technical perspective obviously scraping is easy. But from a copyright perspective submitting your content into that technical reality is implicit permission to copy, maybe even for things like AI training.

Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term?

I’ve been wondering for a bit why during the time the Democrats controlled the legislature, executive, and judicial branches during Obama’s first term in 2008 more wasn’t accomplished. Shouldn’t that have been the opportunity to make Row V Way law and fix the electoral college? I understand the recession was going on but...

GamingChairModel ,

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here’s a list of major legislation.

  • Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
  • The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
  • The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
  • Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
  • School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
  • Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
  • Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That’s a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn’t include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

GamingChairModel ,

The agency’s manager sent me a background memo about the woman I’d be playing, a purported 21-year-old university student blessed with physical proportions that are in vogue these days.

In vogue these days? That just reminds me of how every generation thinks they invented sex. Or the Simpsons quote where Mr. Burns describes a past encounter: “We expressed our love physically, as was the style at the time.”

GamingChairModel ,

Are we talking about high fashion models doing runways and magazine shoots for glossy fashion magazines, or are we talking about porn?

The bodies that you’re talking about weren’t exactly featured in the leading porn magazines or studio films, or even lad mags like Maxim/Stuff/FHM that didn’t do full nudity.

For porn, erotica, and other risqué content, there’s been significantly less shifts in trends and preferences.

GamingChairModel ,

Well this article and line of comments is specifically about porn and women as objects of sexual desire, that would cause people to want to chat with OnlyFans models. I don’t think that’s changed over the years, if you look at the body types that were featured in Playboy, Hustler, Perfect 10, or lad mags like Maxim, Stuff, FHM, or even things like Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issues. Pretty much across the board, from the 70’s through the 2000’s, these types of magazines featured young women of what I’m assuming are the “in vogue” proportions alluded to in the article. And I assume aren’t that different from things like the Raquel Welch poster featured in the Shawshank Redemption.

Speaking of posters, the 90’s included Baywatch and Pamela Anderson, who was on a lot more dorm room posters than Jennifer Aniston (who, by the way, wasn’t that far off of what I’m describing as the standard across multiple decades).

GamingChairModel ,

Those small USB drives are too slow anyway, often limited to USB 2.0 interfaces or slow flash modules. I’ve switched over to an SSD specifically because of how slow booting and installation is from a standard 10-year-old USB stick.

What is a good eli5 analogy for GenAI not "knowing" what they say?

I have many conversations with people about Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Copilot. The idea that “it makes convincing sentences, but it doesn’t know what it’s talking about” is a difficult concept to convey or wrap your head around. Because the sentences are so convincing....

GamingChairModel ,

Harry Frankfurt’s influential 2005 book (based on his influential 1986 essay), On Bullshit, offered a description of what bullshit is.

When we say a speaker tells the truth, that speaker says something true that they know is true.

When we say a speaker tells a lie, that speaker says something false that they know is false.

But bullshit is when the speaker says something to persuade, not caring whether the underlying statement is true or false. The goal is to persuade the listener of that underlying fact.

The current generation of AI chat bots are basically optimized for bullshit. The underlying algorithms reward the models for sounding convincing, not necessarily for being right.

GamingChairModel ,

The idea that these models are just stochastic parrots that only probabilisticly repeat their training data isn’t correct

I would argue that it is quite obviously correct, but that the interesting question is whether humans are in the same category (I would argue yes).

GamingChairModel ,

The worry isn’t that HFT stops working. It’s that it causes a failure state that brings down the legitimate parts of the financial sector.

Like how we’re not worried about AI pilots malfunctioning and being grounded, the same way we’d worry about AI pilots malfunctioning and bombing humans.

GamingChairModel ,

When something is both universally hated and almost always chosen above less hated competitors, that’s usually a sign that there’s some kind of market failure. Maybe it’s anticompetitive conduct by the provider (like Microsoft using its market power on Outlook/Exchange to push other services like Teams over its competition), or a principal-agent problem (like the person paying for Teams not actually having to live with most of the shittiness).

GamingChairModel ,

hyper intense color perception

So shouldn’t your perception of people’s subtle/muted aurora pictures also be hyper intense, making those muted colors more accurate?

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Google Voice Actions for Android released in 2010, well before Siri did. Voice search as an in-browser function on the website in summer 2011, and even had a phone number for people to call in with Google queries by voice. From what I remember, Google’s speech to text recognition was much, much better than Siri’s at launch, and the gap only widened over time.

And then Google Now in 2012 was the version that started having fuzzy smart functionality, where it would link things together as an “assistant.” The then-Google-owned Motorola released its Moto X in 2013 with an always-listening touchless trigger word for Google Now functionality.

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