SlightlyCyberpunk

@concretedog@mastodon.social Good to know! I'll probably still use DuckDuckGo though tbh since I've always got a browser open lol...if you just type "QR Code [url]" into the search box it'll hand you a clean one.

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io Whet I was in highschool they taught us that the benefits of the free market relied on having "fully informed and rational consumers" -- otherwise they can't/won't spend their money on the best solution. Ever since I've wondered if such a thing has ever existed. I'm pretty sure that shit is a myth.

@svavar@masto.svavar.com @rysiek@mstdn.social Impossible to use without renting as well. Endlessly brittle, hard to maintain software means you need constant bugfixes, which means permanent subscription fees. Once upon a time you could buy software on a CD and keep using that same version for a decade or more. They *want* something different broken every month so you have to keep paying them to "fix" it.

@cstross@wandering.shop @DJGummikuh@mastodon.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange Not sure if Google's intention is to *stay* an AI company though. That market is starting to fail. There's no profits in these kinds of AI search responses -- especially with these kinds of legal concerns. Have you seen Google's paper on token auctions for those AI responses? Is Google still the one liable if they're just forwarding the response written by an advertisers' AI? And who is liable if that response is written by four different advertiser AIs? Google has never been a content production business. They're a distributor. But AI threatens to merge the two and they've now been forced into the production business just to keep up. Killing that merger might not be so bad for Google...

@zzt@mas.to @davidgerard@circumstances.run I looked into Framework a number of times because it *sounded* so good...but honestly those dongles are one of the things that never made sense to me and kinda made the whole thing feel like it was more promise than reality. The options available always looked pretty basic (I was always waiting for the StarTech serial port or GPIO dongles or something lol) and they take up so much space that it felt like there was no reasonable configuration where you didn't just end up with worse I/O than any other laptop. Expansion cards made sense in the PCMCIA days, but if it's all USB-C anyway then there's no difference between those cards and an external dock, and you're more likely to need that dock on a framework because you get less overall I/O! I'd need nine of those cards to recreate the I/O on my current laptop and they support four. Unless you have some super niche use case where you need an "oops, all Ethernet ports!" laptop, I don't see the benefit. And even then, if you've got three ethernet cables plugged in you aren't mobile enough that a USB to ethernet dongle is gonna be a huge issue! The ability to swap a new motherboard into the old chassis seemed cool, but the chassis is often what wears out first anyway IME and the new boards aren't always compatible either... So then the only practical benefit is ease of repair...but my System76 laptops have always been pretty easy to repair too. I would absolutely pay more to buy into an open ecosystem, but that never really materialized, and I guess I know why now...

@futurebird@sauropods.win I wonder if it's AI...the site has existed for less than a year (registered from Lithuania?), they post like four blog articles a day all allegedly written by one guy (and it's been several per day since it started)... I think it's a (pretty bad) SEO scam to get Amazon affiliate revenue. The page with affiliate links to bug killers seemed potentially legit, but then I found one selling and reviewing MATTRESS COVERS... https://waspworld.com/best-mattress-cover-for-queen-size-bed/

@aj I'm less sure that would work on its own. All of the corporate enshittified networks they already use started out that way too. To make those points I think you have to focus on the community side. Shit like @FediPact -- I've got the stats somewhere but off the top of my head I think it was something like 30% of servers had Meta blocked before they'd really even *tried* to join, just from the announcement that they might. The fact that, unlike corporate networks where they do what they want and users whine about it until they get bored, around here it feels like debating the future of the network *actually shapes it*. Everything is built by consensus, not cash. By donations and volunteers and passion. Any VC startup can be slop free for a few years but that stuff is what *keeps* Fedi slop free.

@bitinn@mastodon.gamedev.place Kind of? I was questioned about why I wasn't using AI last year, so I installed it, told the AI "this is stupid", and immediately uninstalled it again. Haven't used it since and nobody seems to care. Pretty sure they spent a month or two checking who had zero tokens used and then stopped caring.

@jonesmurphy@mastodon.social @davidaugust@mastodon.online OK, and what exactly have those billionaires done that's so great? Donating millions to "team blue" war criminals? Extracting billions of taxpayer dollars by investing in market collapses? There is no such thing as a good billionaire.

@mhoye@cosocial.ca Yeah, my workplace migrated to Azure a couple years back. Allegedly some exec got a kickback from Microsoft for that, they got fired but we're still stuck with it. Never even fully migrated before we started moving the newer stuff to Google instead (which sucks too but whatever, not my money) But my god...we get their techs on the phone and half of it is "well I've never really worked with this before..." and the other half in "well, if it was a Windows box what I would do is..." -- motherfucker, you sold us RHEL boxes, figure out what you do ON THOSE! ...which is why we have issues like files randomly becoming inaccessible, which has been happening for YEARS. But these motherfuckers can't fix shit. Except a contract negotiation apparently.

@Sarahw @NicksWorld @Lana thanks, I read all my instance had loaded before commenting but apparently that was not enough! Still...I've been coerced into using the AI a couple times at work for code generation and always give up on it in a fit of rage at how it takes ten times as long to produce...nothing even remotely usable. You will *always* get better output from a human. The fact that so many humans don't give a fuck about things like alt text is a problem we've gotta keep working to correct. Because AI does not seem like a real solution in my experience...even if it *can* describe the image, it misses all context.

@signalapp Can we get a way to stop important chats from constantly being buried under others next? Pins kinda work but being artificially limited to 4 isn't enough. Why can't I make the default view a specific folder and move the less important stuff off of that screen?

@noboilerplate Only problem is I'd have to sign up for github to do this lol

@RoseThorndyke Printers like the 2D kinda?? My Brother has served me well for decades, I have no complaints! 3D printers on the other hand...my god I hate Creality... :) LLMs are definitely worse than either though. I think if it were HP in particular vs LLMs it would be a more difficult choice though :)

@Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange They've been working on that since ~1976 when they realized how much money could be made through that control...and yes we should all be pissed.

@jaystottmusic Protest events and video essays lol

@RickiTarr@beige.party The trick is to spend three to four hours laying in bed staring at the ceiling getting all the night math and internal octuple-checking of todo lists done *before* falling asleep, then you'll be able to sleep peacefully through whatever hours you have left!

@tokyobybike @cheziceman @adapalmer Yeah but in this case they can recycle and get the same result for less money and pocket the difference lol

@peter_slwk@mastodon.social @mhoye@cosocial.ca Do we *have* chatbots that do what they're asked? Certainly not the ones my company is using. Ours seem to just fuck up working code and shit out the most inefficient obfuscated scripts I've ever seen.

@tante@tldr.nettime.org It ain't democracy, it's dictatorship. A sloptator (wait that sounds delicious...) Democracy is a visibly collective effort. Everyone has to participate for it to really work. That's the opposite of what AI does, AI absorbs that collective effort and spits it out as its own individual achievement. Like a dictator or a CEO claiming credit for the entire country or company.

@_L1vY_@mstdn.social See, when Trump ordered redactions of the name "Trump" from those files he wasn't protecting *himself*, he was protecting his wife from these nasty bullies! That'll probably work on Fox at least...

@benroyce @painting_squirrel @bridgeenjoyer @aho Sure, but that's easy for this privileged middle class white guy to say. If ICE is deployed to the polls, people who don't look white enough *will* be hauled off and jailed for weeks or months without charge (possibly even disappeared entirely) -- just like they're already doing to folks on the streets. I hope that won't scare off too many folks but it's hard for me to sit here and tell people with families to worry about to just ignore that risk.

@benroyce @painting_squirrel @bridgeenjoyer @aho That's why they're planning to start sending ICE to the polls as an intimidation tactic. Even in Minnesota they're still sending state and local cops out to protect and support ICE no matter what those thugs do...

@dresstokilt@mastodon.social @grimalkina@mastodon.social @amydiehl@mstdn.social If we're just throwing in random quotes vaguely relevant to AI here I'd like to nominate the classic "Fuck you, Nvidia!" :) The AI's programmed bias is only relevant if one is comparing the AI's output. Sure, they were comparing resumes that were *suggested* to be AI output, but given that those resumes were "identical", there's no room for comparison there even if that were true. And since there's no room for any AI generated bias, your favorite quote there is quite the non-sequiter.

@smallcircles Mine's gotten a bit *too* busy...so I've started muting the folks who never add alt text :)

@patatas@social.patatas.ca @mattsheffield@mastodon.social @timjan@social.linux.pizza Ever heard of Jim Bell's "Assassination Politics"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell#%22Assassination_Politics%22_essay https://dn720002.ca.archive.org/0/items/bell-jim-assassination-politics-1997/Bell%2C%20Jim%20-%20Assassination%20Politics%20%281997%29.pdf

@3x10to8mps@mastodon.social @briankrebs@infosec.exchange No website is compromised, only impersonated. And a list of sites that have been impersonated so far would be useless because the entire point is that it could be any site.

@gh0sti@mastodon.social @briankrebs@infosec.exchange Pretty sure the defense would need to be in the browser. You could block whatever domain the hackers are using in your DNS but they could easily switch to a new one at any time.

@Njord As the guy who often gets roped into "fixing" (deleting and rewriting) the LLM slop of my coworkers...definitely worse than useless.

They have now dispatched a second tow truck. Current status: "75 minutes left on prior job" Fuckin hell. Busy day for the tow companies I guess. Maybe I'm low priority because it's only going a mile so they can't charge much lol

@i0null Huh, I would have thought more would have changed since then! https://mastodon.slightlycyberpunk.com/@admin/116279326185073889

@petergleick For humans, sure...but this stuff is, of necessity, pretty light so I bet we could use something like spinlauch to chuck some better armored satellites up there that could survive for a bit -- and then leave even *worse* debris up there because of course we won't learn shit from the first time...

@SeanCasten@mastodon.social ...which is blatantly unconstitutional to begin with. These restrictions as written apply to the government conduct in general, without exception. The rights belong to "people", not "Americans". These rights were asserted to be given by god to all of humanity. But I guess foreigners have never really been human in the eyes of our government... This is merely the next attempt to throw one more exception onto a whole damn mountain of them...

@distractal@hachyderm.io LLMs are just a complex scheme to launder collective effort and make it appear to be individual achievement. Which is exactly why the executive class loves it so much. That's their whole deal.

@benroyce@mastodon.social @PizzaDemon@mastodon.online @infobeautiful@vis.social @ourworldindata@vis.social Same argument could be made for the other diseases listed too. How much heart disease is caused by corporations insisting on a "right" to push cheap, addictive, harmful foods? Or by insurance companies refusing to pay for preventative care? How much of that cancer is caused by the obscene profits made by dumping carcinogens into our environment? How many of those strokes are...actually I dunno enough about the causes of that one...but I'm still pretty sure the billionaires have *something* to do with it! lol

@aks@scalie.zone A plural furry is also a pretty solid choice tbf :)

@3x10to8mps@mastodon.social @briankrebs@infosec.exchange I think "compromised" generally implies that someone has gotten access to the servers or other internal systems, but that's not what this is. Which is part of the problem. A list of affected websites won't do you any good because they could have a dozen new fakes set up the next day. That scale is the only thing that is new here. You *can* tell the difference if you examine the URL carefully and if you know what to look for. They just have tricks to make it look right at a glance. Like using that "@" symbol -- that's not used much these days so a lot of folks won't be familiar with it, but the site you are actually visiting is whatever comes after it. Whatever is before the @ is a username it is sending to that website.

Aaand second tow truck has been "on the way" with an ETA of 25 minutes for 25 minutes now but according to the map they've been sitting at a park Are these things like pots? A watched tow truck never arrives?

@NicksWorld @Lana @Sarahw And you'll get what you pay for -- trash.

@QasimRashid@mastodon.social @bontchev@infosec.exchange They've been handing data to cops without much constraints for many years now so unfortunately most people who have one were already fine with that. That stuff has been in the national news periodically since early 2019. Amazon bought them in 2018. So pretty much if the device has Amazon branding you can be pretty confident that it was purchased after the whole thing was already known to be a poorly controlled government surveillance network.

@dthompson@toot.cat Yes. We've been telling people not to write shit themselves for *decades*! When we starting saying that, finding the relevant library was a pain in the ass. There was a good chance you'd be looking it up in a book. I wouldn't be surprised if that advice pre-dates search engines entirely! Nobody was *actually* jumping to a library for something trivial, unless the library was also pretty trivial. Now? Fuck, people import twenty gigs of libraries that they aren't even using! People import ten random packages they found on various questionable websites just to avoid writing three lines of code! It's past time we stop saying "always use a library" and instead start asking "do you actually need that library?"

@wink@sup.f5n.org @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I think it depends on the individual too though. Sometimes you gotta actually prevent yourself from using the other stuff or you'll just keep going back to it. Part of my transition to Linux was a second old PC and a crossover ethernet cable because I couldn't get the wifi working and I had to find a way to make it feasible :) (That was also about 20 years ago when that sort of compatibility was a bigger issue!)

@davidgerard@circumstances.run How the fuck did that patent even get approved?? It's a goddamn generic USB dongle!

@deviantollam@defcon.social My Android 15 LineageOS device just opens this in Firefox like any other link, while my inherited stock Motorola Android 11 device opens it in Firefox but then immediately asks if I want to "open in Google" before the page even loads. If I click yes it then pops open the usual app picker asking if I want to use Google or Firefox, and if I say Firefox it immediately prompts again to open in Google :) At first I was thinking maybe Play services intercepting something but might just be pre-installed Chrome associating itself with particular URLs like any other app could...seems pretty obnoxious though lol

@mondoweiss ...but she also says she never had and that this is consistent with her voting record so far. And if that were true this would not be news. So which part is she lying about?

@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange There is *absolutely* software I use for my job that I would recommend! It's just not the ones that harass us with surveys, it's the ones management keeps trying to get rid of. JMeter is pretty great at what it does. If you *must* use Windows, Notepad++ is pretty nice too. Also...uhh...*struggles to find a third example* I guess Command Prompt is pretty sound?