DamnInteresting

This was the main thread about Snowden on the day his identity was revealed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590

The iPhone keyboard is a living he'll.

A couple of years ago I deleted reddit and other social media and news apps from my phone. The only remaining distractions it offers are email and books. It's been wonderful, I've been reading about 2 novels per month. Highly recommended.

I remember buying The Sims when it came out originally. I started a gaming session that evening, and after a little while I noticed the sun coming in the window. I'd played all night without noticing. Since then, I've given that kind of open-ended game a wide berth. It's a bit disconcerting for a gaming session to achieve flow state.

That's too bad, Atlas Obscura is (was?) one of the good ones. It must be heartbreaking to watch capitalism eat your baby.

The author does mention:

> The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts.

This bubble can't pop fast enough. I'm curious to see which actually useful AIs remain after the burst, and how expensive they are once the cash-burning subsides.

> The market wants a lot more high quality AI slop

"High quality AI slop" is a contradiction in terms. The relevant definitions[1] are "food waste (such as garbage) fed to animals", "a product of little or no value."

By definition, the best slop is only a little terrible.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slop

Plagiarism is also "another set of tooling." Likewise slavery, and organized crime. Tools can be immoral.

Video explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu7PJoxaMZg

They did try adding variations to the amount (+0.50-1.00) late in the game, but by then it was ineffective, I could still quickly detect them and turn on the randomized data poisoning. I expect that they want to keep the amount small so most cardholders won't bother to look into the unfamiliar charge.

I do wonder whether these people sold their list of "verified" credit card numbers to any criminal enterprises before they realized the data was poisoned. That would be potentially awkward for them.

I did something similar with someone who was using my site’s donation form to test huge batches of credit cards numbers. I would see hundreds of attempted (and mostly declined) $1 donations start pouring in, and I’d block the IP. A little while later it would restart from another IP. When it became clear they were not giving up easily, I changed tack: instead of blocking them, I would return random success/failure messages at the same rate they were seeing success on previous attempts. I didn’t really try to charge those cards, of course.

I like how this kind of response is very difficult for them to detect when I turn it on, and as a bonus, it pollutes their data. They stopped trying a few days after that.

I remember buying NOLF--it was at retail, in a big box off the shelf at Media Play. I knew nothing about it, it just caught my eye, and the description on the back sounded interesting. I miss that kind of media discovery, our modern always-online world tends to smother serendipity.

It was an excellent game. The idea of a continuation of the series is appealing, but a lot of modern adaptations really stink, so maybe it's better off in the amber of nostalgia.

Unless you are republishing my work, using it to earn yourself a livelihood while depriving me of the same, then you are not part of the problem that I describe.

I can only speak for myself, but mostly the opposite has been true for me. I am a 'peasant' creating original works, and occasionally I must wield copyright to salt the giant thirsty leeches appropriating my work. If it were not for the protection offered by copyright, I would be a desiccated husk.

Published in 2022. I despise this trend of news sites hiding the publication date. It's news, the date is important.

Apart from watching videos, I use mine for making music (podcast scoring) and for drawing (formal illustrations, doodling, and sketching out designs). There are also a few games that I feel play best on an iPad, such as Balatro.

> I'm not by nature a luddite

Our modern view of the Luddites is not a fair shake. The Luddites were not opposed to technology in general, they merely (and understandably) opposed having their own livelihoods replaced by automation.[1] It's a familiar sentiment in these times.

Incidentally, I'm not implying that you don't know what the original Luddites were about; I add my comment for the benefit of anyone else who may be unfamiliar with the backstory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

> Right now, AI has the potential to increase productivity.

The detail many seem to forget is that "AI" is Artificially Inexpensive. It must eventually turn a profit, or collapse. Once providers start charging what they must to remain solvent, and/or the output is burdened with advertising, the gains, real or perceived, will likely evaporate.

Now that is range anxiety.

As LLMs continue to train on their own output, we're going to start seeing some serious Habsburg Jaw[1] effects.

[1] https://history.howstuffworks.com/european-history/habsburg-...

Last year I got a phishing email at my work address, and it was more convincing than most. I knew it was phishing, but it might have fooled me if I'd been less attentive.

When I see these sophisticated phishing messages I like to click through and check out how well-made the phishing site itself is, sometimes I fill their form with bogus info to waste their time. So I opened the link in a sandboxed window, looked around, entered nothing into any forms.

It turns out the email was from a pen testing firm my employer had hired, and it had a code baked into the url linked to me. So they reported that I had been successfully phished, even though I never input any data, let alone anything sensitive.

If that's the bar pen testing firms use to say that they've succeeded in phishing, then it's not very useful.

It's just like spending time with a human bullshitter. At first, their energy and confidence are fun! But the spell is broken after a handful of "confidently incorrect" moments, and the realization that they will never stop doing that. It's usually more work than it's worth to extract the kernels from the crap.

Or perhaps 'Filidelfian.'

I'm in the same boat, watching Google preparing to capsize it. I'm a paying customer, and they keep making my life more difficult.

Thanks for the kind words! It is not at all profitable, but it gives me purpose, and scratches a particular intellectual itch. I wish I could afford to make it my full-time job and just write every day without worrying about day-job income, but alas, the universe currently desires otherwise.

I have a curved monitor on my regular desk, and a flat panel on my treadmill desk. Switching between the two takes a few minutes of adjustment for things to look right.

I had a similar peculiarity with eyeglasses. I'd always had great vision, but middle age recently hit me like a truck, and my eyes have started to go. I got a prescription, and there was a difference between the two eyes. For the first few days, everything looked misshapen, larger on one side than the other, until my brain compensated. Most curious.

A few years back I updated my site[1] so all of the UI graphics (e.g., logos, icons in the menus) are SVG sprites baked into the HTML. It resulted in a lot fewer requests per page, lower overall page size, and sharp navigation on any device at any resolution. It works great, though it was a lot of initial work to get it working.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com

I am a liberal person who lives in a deeply conservative area (Utah). I have had many conversations with staunch conservatives, some of them close friends and family. One-on-one is different from the one-to-many format, or the one-to-one-in-front-of-others format. It's quite possible to have a civil conversation about such things when there isn't an audience.

I have seldom (probably never) seen anyone have a big change of heart from such discussion, but often both sides concede a little, and it feels like progress toward common ground, minuscule though it may be.

Oh no, a spooky ghost!

(Unless, of course, you were saying "Boooourrrns")

I went to college at this place (when it was Utah Valley State College [UVSC], before it was UVU). I spent a lot of time in that part of the campus over several years. How strange to see these events unfolding there. Kirk seems to be a person with whom I have scant philosophical agreement, but I prefer to converse with such people rather than watch them die. What an awful mess this all is.