Mikina

If I would've trained a markov chain on a set of cyberpunk novels, and other texts with similar context, I'm pretty sure I would've also gotten an "AI" that would be ready to kill and blackmail, lol.

Any recommendations? My only experience with defcon is through recordings of the talks from there, and they've always been phenomenal, and some videos from the events like various CTFs. Never really looked into it more. I think I also saw a documentary a few years ago that was pretty sick.

The algorithm is probably made to maximize the time you spend on the platform, and is really good at it. (I mean, just look how good are ML algorithms on text -> picture, and add to it that the algorithm that does your info -> engagement has decades of data and training on billions of people).

My theory is that it has misaligned, because it turned out that radicalizing people into right-wing bullshit will glue them to the social network very effectively, so it just started to do that. It makes sense - once you start spewing right-wing bullshit, it will probably isolate you from your IRL friends, you will have an echo chamber on the social network, and it is made to sound like some kind of deep truth no one else knows.

You getting left-wing content might be simply because it would not be efficient to try to convert you, so the algorithm is trying something else that's more effective on the (minority?) of people like you.

If you're going this route, I highly recommend looking into and using OKLAB instead.

The problem with HSL/HSV is that it's not perceptually uniform - if you only move HUE to change color, you will get different perceived brightnesses. This is important especially when procedurally generating color palettes, but also makes it harder to pick a color.

OKLAB solves that issue, and is designed to be uniform. Here is a great article about it, which is funnily enough IIRC a blog post that invented the color spectrum, that got noticed and eventually turned into a new industry standard.

Here is a picture that sums up pretty obviously what is the difference. This is a gradient that moves just the hue.

I've been wondering - how do you make brown? Don't really see it on the spectrum.

Defcon is my biggest regret about the whole "US going to shit" situation. I'm from Europe, and I was planning to eventually attend, but there's no way I'm going there until USA gets their shit together, which I suspect won't be during my lifetime at this point.

They should move it to Europe, especially for this kind of event, I'd suspect that for a lot of attendees and speakers, who tend to be pretty anti-systemic, going into US safely at this point is not an option.

I've been using Graphene for years at this point, and so far it has been amazing.

I have two profiles, main one without Google Play services, and fortunately a lot of apps just work out even without them. Some complain about it, but still work at least as far core functionality I want is considered, and for the few that don't, I have a second profile that runs sandboxed Play Services and just switch when needed.

I'm a little bit worried about Google's push around installing apps from other sources than orignal Play Store, or the new integrity API, but I'm willing to just stop using any app that requires it, and change banks to one that either doesn't require an app for login, or can work without play services. Fortunately, my current one works without, for now (mBank).

For me, it was about gear. I impulse bought a grill that can detect the width of meat, and can pretty reliably grill whatever I put there, assuming I choose the correct program. That made me buy a lot more steaks, since they were super easy to prepare.

Another one was getting an instant pot, and just randomly choosing recipes on the internet, mostly focusing on one-pot recipes. It's so much easier when you don't have to deal with standing there and guarding the stove, which I always found super boring and that was keeping me from cooking.

By not having exactly the correct ingredients, I've eventually discovered that most of cooking is just "stock, veggies, meat and seassoning", maybe cream, and i can just do whatever (within reason, but you can usually guess what works together) and it probably works and tastes good.

On disadvantage my mostly random approach has is that I can make an amazingly good meal, but have no idea how I actually did that, only to never be able to make the same food again. I have a memory of a goldfish on ketamine and hate planning stuff, so my cooking is mostly random. Most of the time it tastes good, but I was never able to exactly repeat the same process twice, hah.

Eh, hotelier and a Princess of Hell, I guess.

This is my favorite sentence from Wikipedia about the trial.

While Wilde won the most laughs, Carson scored the most legal points.

I've had a similar experience at my job, where we've gotten an unlimited access to a few models.

There's one huge problem I've very quickly ran into - skill attrition. You very quickly get lazy, and stop being able to critically think about problems. Hell, I've only had access to it for two weeks, and I'm starting to see the effects. "Can you add this button?" is a very simple change that I could probably make immediately, but AI can make it a little bit faster, and without me putting in the effort. Or it can at least show me the correct script to put it in, without me having to go scouring the code looking for it. It's addicting, and quite scary. YMMV, you might have stronger willpower and be able to switch between lazy and locked in mode, but I very quickly found out I can't.

But is it useful? That very much depends on what do you want out of your job, and both cases have major (and mostly similar) problems.

If you don't really care about the quality of your job, and are there just to work your 8/5 and get money, hoping to just balance effort vs. quality so they won't fire you, the it might help. Especially at this point, where management isn't really used to it that much, you can get away with a lot. But, eventually, you will very probably need to look for a new job, and good luck getting through an interview when you haven't really thought about code without the help of an AI for the past two years. The fact that you started coding before AI is the only advantage you now have against literally EVERYONE who can do the same job with AI. And every day you don't write a piece of code from scratch, you are loosing that advantage.

I have I job I don't particularly care about, but I still use it as a learning opportunity. It might be vastly different in other projects, but my job is mostly just support and bugfixing on a game that has been released for years at this point by a large developer, so nothing really involved, so I can usually afford to use my time to research things I wasn't familiar with, look into things we could do better thanks to new tech or updates that have been released, and how to refactor or rewrite our code into it. Or making tools that would make our testing easier. I could just not do that, easily get my paycheck, and be glad I have a somewhat stable position, but that would not help me much. In this case, AI is actively harmful for what I'm trying to get out of my job, even if it works pretty well. It only erodes my skills I have, which are not very practiced even without AI, since bug fixing isn't really much of development. Adding AI to the mix would just throw away my years of college and dozens of projects I've learned on. And I won't learn anything new.

Obviously, if you care about your job output and want to do it perfectly, you don't want to erode your skills, and you don't want AI output in your code. AI by definition outputs mediocre and average work, riddled with hard-to-spot bugs, and you should not be ok with mediocre if you really care about the work you do and leave behind.

Especially the point about the pretty large probability of having to seek a new job eventually is IMO the most important thing that's really worth considering, before you go all in on AI. It's something that a lot of programmers spend years (and in less developed countries thousands of dollars) in learning, and throwing it away in favor of a service that will very soon need to massively ramp up their costs to get out of red and earn billions they have invested into it is not worth it.

Currently, AI is cheap. It also actively harms your ability to do the job without it. They have also invested billions of dollars that they need to eventually make up, and you will eventually need to pass a job interview. Keep that in mind when deciding to offload your thinking to AI.

Remember that (I think) C++ race condition in RTG software, that killed people with something like 0.0001% probability and it was a huge deal and a reason to immediately retire the devices (or maybe just fix the bug, the point is that in medical, it's super important to have a high success chance)?

I'm sure AI doing diagnosis will be able to get to a higher success chance, lol.

EDIT: From a quick search, it looks like mis-diagnosis chance in doctors is around 10%. I still don't think AI can do better.

I'm also betting on Graphene. Been able to get by with a profile without Play Services, thankfully my bank doesn't require it, but if they ever do (or the new integrity bullshit), I'm immediately switching banks to one that doesn't.

That's the only app I need on my phone, anything else I can get without if they require it.

In a hypothetical situation where you get a law passed in your country, where it's mandatory to perform age verification on all social media apps, it's simple.

No verification? Jail time. Will they go after you? They could, if someone pointed them towards your server. (I think they even have to, at least in our country, the government has to persecute a crime they are made aware of if I remember my college law courses right)

In some states, if I understand it right (based on a quick googling, might be false) failing to do verification for porn can be considered as a felony. It's a slightly different example (porn vs. social networks), but if the laws are written in the same way, there's not really much you can do about it.

Completely anonymous hosting that's in no way tied to you (through IP, credit card, location, domain, logs, etc) is difficult. While you'd still probably be fine if you have a private-use server, you'd still give anyone who doesn't like you and knows about it a pretty easy way how to make your life a lot more difficult. This of course heavily depends on how would (will) the laws be written in your country, but give the track record of lawmakers understanding tech, there is a chance that even small self-hosted stuff would catch flak. If it's written in such a way to not be i.e limited by user count, then there's not much you can do.

A lawyer would probably be able to talk you out of it, but you'd still be charged and it would suck (and be expensive) to deal with.

So, yeah. "How could the government force me to enable it" boils down to "jail time". I mean, it's basically a similar question like "how could the government stop me from using Telegram or VPNs", and IIRC there are some examples for that already.

EDIT: Not having public sign-up enabled could be a way around it, since random people can't make an account there, so you're basically doing age-verification by a veto. However, if someone under-age got into your server, they then have a leverage on you, since they are there illegally (in the hypothetical scenario).

This is a good reminder for people to run Snowflake relay if they can. Just installing the relay extensions is all you need to do.

I've had the extension for a bit now, and I usually get a few connections the moment I open my browser. I quickly forgot about having it installed, and it never gave me any trouble.

Snowflake allows you to connect to the Tor network in places where Tor is blocked by routing your connection through volunteer proxies located in uncensored countries.
Similar to VPNs, which help users bypass Internet censorship, Snowflake disguises your Internet activity as though you’re making a video or voice call, making you less detectable to Internet censors.

I've been a fan of MASH, an ansible playbook that can host a lot of stuff.

I only have experience with their separate Matrix playbook, but it is super robust and I haven't ran into any problems the playbook couldn't deal with (aside from running out of VM disk space once), so I'd expect this would be similarly good.

Time to finally use my https://noyb.eu/'s free one hour of legal privacy consultation that comes with a membership to find out if forging my ID for the purpose of verification will get me realistically in trouble or no. And buy Death Stranding.

Fuck this.

I was pretty confused for a second, since I only saw a screenshot with Linux as OS, and no review, so both comments didn't make sense.

The relevant screenshot is in the post link, not the post content that's shown when you open comments.

The fun part is that it also makes the technical debt a lot worse. It compounds concern, not shifts.

Mikina

@ Mikina @programming.dev

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Mikina

‘It was ready to kill and blackmail’: Anthropic’s Claude AI sparks alarm, says company policy chief

Hacking conference Def Con bans three people linked to Epstein

X’s Algorithm Pushes Users to Lean More Conservative

Why is #FFFFFF white, but mixing red green and blue paint is black?

Why is #FFFFFF white, but mixing red green and blue paint is black?

Hacking conference Def Con bans three people linked to Epstein

GrapheneOS - break free from Google and Apple

How did you learn to cook?

Access to the playtest

What's yours?

Gay agenda!

I tried AI, was impressed by it, and it's embarrassing; Need advice

Dr. Oz pushes AI avatars as a fix for rural health care. Not so fast, critics say

Random or anonymous chat apps no longer welcome on the App Store - 9to5Mac

What's the point of switching to Discord alternatives, if they're going to be subject to the same age verification laws?

Russia is restricting access to Telegram, one of its most popular social media apps.

MOS Is a New Open-Source Server OS Aimed at Homelabs and Self-Hosting

Social media age verification laws by country

Steam added the option to attach hardware specs when writing or updating a Steam User Review

How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt

Self-hosting Matrix is pretty easy thanks to matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

ChatControl has been already happening since 2021 for most common services, does anything change for people who use them?

New Jetbrains Update Dropped

A code execution security vulnerabilty has been identified in all games built with Unity 2017 and later

ZLINQ - A zero allocation LINQ rewrite, with added support for Unity and Godot scene hierarchy, that has a drop-in replacement support.

Looking for a lightweight blog/personal website that can Federate

EDIT: Fake screenshot about some facts from the Palworld development, very loosely based on a really interesting blog post from the dev that's linked in the post body.

What distro you use/recommend as a daily driver for a Cybersecurity job (pentesting and Red Teaming)? Would QubeOS be a good fit?

We've had this Slack emoji ever since we started porting a Unity project and dealing with their bugs or support. I think it's pretty fitting now.

What do you think would be an actually good use of blockchain/smart contracts? What kind of problems (big or small) is it a good tool for?

I'm looking for games with unique or experimental game design

Would a single-user self-hosted frontend for interacting with Fediverse apps be feasible?

Apps/Extensions that feed random fingerprinting data? Something I'd call "offensive privacy tools".

In my understanding of the main principles of the Fediverse, federating with any large corp should never even be considered. Is my understanding wrong? What is the "idea of the fediverse" to you?

ELI5 - What is the difference between headphones, earphones and IEMs?