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  • 19 Posts
  • 366 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 14th, 2023

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  • Ngl, it’s kind of cool! I put one of the two public facing images I have published of myself and it’s trying to guess some details, some right, a few hilariously wrong.

    A human or AI sleuth could probably figure out where I live within 10km with information on the internet, but I just have to live with that. It’s a tricky balance between putting enough out there to show you’re not just an AI vs. not giving out so much info that an AI could convincingly impersonate you.

    Information about me is scattered across the Net like horcruxes, and you’d have to know someone I know to easily piece things together. I am worried that AI has the ability to analyze these large datasets faster than ever before, whether it is my writing style or anything else, but it will still be computationally intensive with a large dataset to be able discern any details with confidence.




  • Perhaps, but it all depends on the judge’s decision whether X corp’s argument is completely bullshit or not.

    For your Valve example, in the Subscriber Agreement you can terminate the agreement, or Valve can terminate it for a violation of the Agreement rules, with no refunds. For a termination without a valid reason, “no refunds” does not necessarily apply. I’m not saying it would be hard for Valve to come up with a bullshit reason to cancel anyone’s account on a whim or to change the terms so that they get broken easily, but it’s not automatic and courts can assign value to a specific license you have access to, based on the jurisdiction, in particular in places like Quebec, Australia, and the EU.

    9C. Termination by Valve

    Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.

    Addendum: I wasn’t totally serious with the second paragraph, nothing may stop X from banning The Onion/Infowars or whatever after the transfer is complete. But trying to disrupt the transfer itself over it seems a little ridiculous.



  • Technology like the loom, the steam shovel, the aeroplane, rocketry, computers, nuclear energy, the internet, and now AI, are each tools that have really changed our world, and put many different people out of work, but it has also reduced a lot of back-breaking, time-consuming work, so it has allowed our world to go a lot faster. From an excavator being able to move a lot more dirt in a day than 5 men with shovels, AI can help with getting the initial ideas of the creative process, can help with parsing initial queries from customers, a first pass filter of a huge repository of legal documents, be a patient teacher for beginner programming or other subjects, and so on. Each tool can have been overpromised to do everything, but that doesn’t mean it had no purpose.

    With that said, any of these tools and technologies can be used for bad as much as they can be used for good. And combatting that doesn’t just mean waiting around hoping for the people entrenched in power using tech to satiate their own personal gain, to suddenly reject their gains to commit them for the good of society. It means organizing to protect your neighbour. It means sharing the benefit of these tools with others, using them for good, and improving them for others.

    My point is that it’s not AI that will cause society to crash, it’s greed and corporate greed, who are being assisted by the unrealistic hype over AI.







  • You probably know most of it so just some advice: Don’t format the Partition table (MBR to GPT etc.) on the disk whose data you wish to keep.

    Shrinking a partition or moving it carries a small risk of data loss and will take significantly longer than creating a new partition (since data needs to be cut and pasted from one area of the disk to another). If your old laptop has an empty slot for another SSD or NVME drive you can plug that in, and still dualboot and having the new drive Linux only.

    Also to deal with the occasional Windows cockups, just carry a boot-repair USB, the auto repair has fixed the Windows issue for me 90% of the time (the other times are usually boot order priority or other BIOS setting)






  • The bad firms are going to lay off most or all of their juniors, hire AI leash-holders or something and do fine to code everything their hearts dream of, but at some point (5-10 years my estimate) enough of the seniors have left and shit hits the fan in a way where AI models can’t save the company from its own creations.

    The thing that ChatGPT doesn’t have (at least right now) is the ability to tell management to piss off. I assure everyone that this is what the recipe for disaster for many firms will be, if any.

    The smarter firms will have a keep a sizable contingent of juniors, who will work with help from LLMs, but have seniors teach them to have a bullshit detector in their industry.

    Or, we start up all the coal power plants to keep the ever-hungry AI chatbots alive so humanity is fucked in the end anyway.


  • I am very shitty on security (I would not write this reply on a post on the cybersecurity community), and I resisted MFA for several years as being too annoying having to login to mail/SMS. After finding open source apps supporting TOTP, I feel better about it and I manually do the syncing by just transferring the secrets between my devices offline.

    Passkeys are another foreign thing that I think I will get used to eventually, but for now there are too many holes in support, too much vendor lock-in (which was my main distaste for MFA, I didn’t want MS or Google Authenticator), and cumbersome (when email and SMS were the only options for MFA, difficulty of portability for passkeys).