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AstralStorm

5,851 karma · joined July 15, 2015

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AstralStorm··on Filming ICE is legal but exposes you to digital tracking
Seems like uninformed bull. Your recording is protected by the usual copyright. It may not be used without permission except as permitted by law. If the law is being violated, sue the heck out of the state.

Now if you post it on social media, make sure you read the content privacy policy. They often suck.

AstralStorm··on Covid-19 leaves a lasting mark on the human brain
Well, even the antibody titre isn't foolproof (some people do not react or have their immune system later wiped). However having no antibody titre is pretty good sign you never had it. Not sure if there's a portable cheap blood test for it yet. Should be one, like for the active disease.
AstralStorm··on Europe's New War on Privacy
It will be challenged in the Tribunal if it passes, and will lose as it is incompatible with baseline EU laws.

Specifically, the charter: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/treaty/char_2012/oj/eng

Article 8 point 2. They're missing the provisions of data retrieval. If available, that would immediately take down the whole monitoring system as a full message history request would have to be available since they don't know which data is private or personally identifying.

Additionally, this falls under GDPR legitimate concern category so must be possible to reject by the user. Otherwise it's an involuntary measure making the law contradictory.

With this in mind, it's toothless if corrected.

AstralStorm··on Things that aren't doing the thing
If you haven't started doing the thing while researching it, you're doing archeology or historiography, not research. (Different scientific fields. Research requires experiment.)
AstralStorm··on Things that aren't doing the thing
It's called documentation. Somehow people forget to include a non-external service dependent version with their code these days.

Probably because "nobody is paid for doing that".

AstralStorm··on Things that aren't doing the thing
Yeah sure. The tricky part is if you even know which action to take. To actually do that you need to research enough, conceptualize the end goal and envison a rough but workable plan.

Most people don't and blindly stumble going after short term to mid term reward. Then later life crashes them hard, except for the lucky few.

And the truth is, now some people have many more luck coupons to spend than others.

AstralStorm··on Things that aren't doing the thing
Who's paying to school them at googling? Certainly not you...
AstralStorm··on Things that aren't doing the thing
Unless you wasted years by going in the wrong direction which could have been avoided by a week of serious thinking and planning... (Or even a year. Some mistakes are extremely costly.)
AstralStorm··on Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
It's even more legally funny than this. They are also allowed to enact entrapment to some degree and it passed court muster in the US. That because it's extremely hard to use it as a defence.

Note that these actions are illegal in most continental jurisdictions as stings must be devised ahead of time against specific groups of people. There's also Article 6 of ECHR.

In other words, FBI cannot run a sting off an EU site like this, at least definitely not a German one.

AstralStorm··on Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
How can you even sue without any legal identity? This website and an organisation does not happen to have any. Might as well be some shell company in the Carribeans with no legal standing in France. It's not even good enough for public prosecution, as the tip would then go through French services.

This law is completely backwards, and worse than a SLAPP. If you cannot respond to a report in any way, it should be null.

AstralStorm··on Firefox expands fingerprint protections
The store owner visibly responds to the customers differently. Fingerprinting is invisible. It's more like the store owner recording everyone on hidden camera.

So no, you cannot steelman a broken analogy.

AstralStorm··on Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself
It's not even that. Only a kernel of the LLM is trained using RLHF. The rest is self-trained from corpus with a few test questions added into the mix.

Because it still cannot reason about veracity of sources, much less empirically try things out, the algorithm has no idea what makes for correctness...

It does not even understand fiction. Tends to return sci-fi answers every now and then to technical questions.

AstralStorm··on Keep Android Open
Still waiting for someone to make a tiny token sized phone. Unfortunately the smallest around, Unihertz Atom, is both outdated and too low resolution for some apps to work.
AstralStorm··on Keep Android Open
Now that is more of a problem than a bank. Which is why someone beeds to integrate OTP tokens into ID cards, closing the issue.
AstralStorm··on Keep Android Open
Uh, banks still provide separate tokens and one time pad cards last I've heard.

If yours doesn't, pick one that does.

AstralStorm··on Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders
Warrant canary depends on agreed upon inaction, which shields it somewhat. You cannot exactly compel speech by a gag order.

This, being an active process, if found out, is violating a gag order by direct action.

AstralStorm··on New attacks are diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel
TPM itself is a simple data container with slow encryption/decryption capabilities. It cannot hide anything really.

You might have mistaken it for say Intel ME and the AMD equivalent.

AstralStorm··on New attacks are diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel
No, these should exist in the TPM and highly volatile memory like CPU cache. This including the decryption code. This can be achieved using mechanisms similar to what Coreboot does before RAM is initialized.

No need for the keys or decryption to touch easily intercepted and rowhammered RAM.

AstralStorm··on The new calculus of AI-based coding
Don't worry, you're going to be searching for logic vs requirements mismatches instead if the thing provides proofs.

That means, you have to understand if it is even proving the properties you require for the software to work.

It's very easy to write a proof akin to a test that does not test anything useful...

AstralStorm··on Poison, Poison Everywhere
You might have just filtered off all the nutrients and have yourself a dietary deficiency. Oops.

And your supplements might well be contaminated...

AstralStorm··on Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state
Thing is, because the whole design is closed as well as firmware, the security of it is near zero, even for sealing firmware device images (e.g. option ROM), much less bootloaders. Multiple security holes have been found.

There's no issue booting a boot rootkit with the standard Windows bootloader unless you manually seal the image with command line or group policy, and even then it's possible to bypass by installing a fresh bootloader because the images are identical and will boot after a wipe.

AstralStorm··on The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain
Yeah right. Because building a freezer that goes to -30 C is as cheap as going to -18 C. It's much beefier hardware with a lot more insulation.

Likewise a heat pump can only boost so much.

This, like other environment related changes never happen by market forces. Not once. And small tweaks even on large scale produce small effects, insufficient for our needs.

AstralStorm··on Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years?
You can do the basic continuous blood pressure monitoring. Not super precise but should work for categorizing.
AstralStorm··on The Asus gaming laptop ACPI firmware bug
Well those are just so underpowered it literally hurts. All of disk size, expansion options and memory.

And booting something that isn't a funny variant of a locked down OS is relatively hard.

AstralStorm··on Ask HN: Generalists, when do you say "I know enough" about any particular topic?
When it is possible, when you can afford it and when such an expert existsand you know of them and can contact them.

Interesting factoid is that for many fields, such experts do not really exist. Unfortunately we do not get hired as researchers at this particular rabbit hole.

Tax and accounting is not one of those things.

AstralStorm··on Ask HN: Generalists, when do you say "I know enough" about any particular topic?
So what happens when you can't find a solution to your problem and hit the edges of current research even specialists cannot buckle?
AstralStorm··on Public static void main(String[] args) is dead
How to compile a C or C++ program is also a turnoff, right?
AstralStorm··on Public static void main(String[] args) is dead
And now to know what it does you have to read a book.

The IO class is good. The rest is information hiding. Now if you could write anything else in Java in this form,it would make sense.

AstralStorm··on Why We Spiral
Except this is self sabotaging, because you have no deep connection you stay alone and feel alone, ultimately spiralling.
AstralStorm··on Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
Interesting. Did it get eaten by general baseline interests and lost the focus, ultimately moving to cater to lowest common denominator? Failed or sold?
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