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Hizonner

3,730 karma · joined November 6, 2018

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Hizonner··on Flock worker calls police on reporter filming public camera installation
Yes, they should be different. In almost all cases, they should be less.

But what I really wanted to mention is that flock is not the government, and flock's services are not exclusively available to governments.

Same goes for their competitors.

Hizonner··on I refuse to let SPICE die
People who know what both of them are (hello) still won't know which one the headline is talking about.

The circuit one is definitely older, probably has more users, and is just as relevant in this forum.

Hizonner··on Compiler Can Undo Your Security Checks
> doesn't want me opening the console

Whoa. That's not even something it should be able to detect. What's the gaping security hole that lets it do that?

Hizonner··on Compiler Can Undo Your Security Checks
> The compile can transform your code if the result of the computations it makes is the same (plus any ordering guarantees you've encoded with the correct primitives, etc.). "Interact with the outside world in exactly the same way" is way too strong a guarantee.

The word "result" is doing a lot of work there. `printf ("%d\n", 2+2);` isn't interesting because 4 appears in a memory cell; it's interesting because 4 appears on stdout. Which one is the "result"?

If you're going to make assumptions about what's "inside" the program and what's "outside", you have to make them explicit. And they have to be reasonable assumptions. An assumption that memory is "inside" has to be justified in the presence of shared memory, virtual memory, debuggers, or whatever. You have to actually explain what you mean in a lot more detail than I think the average spec has a chance of doing.

If I create an unlinked temp file, and the compiler can observe that I'm holding the only FD open on that file, should that file be seen as "inside the computation", or as "a collection of results and inputs"?

Without reading the specs, I can be 95 percent sure that they don't nail down all the issues... and 100 percent sure that if they do nail down all the issues, or even all the possibly important issues, the corner cases are unknown to almost all actual programmers. Which means either that it's not appropriate for the compiler to rely on just any rule regardless of what the spec says, or that it's not reasonable to write code in the language.

Hizonner··on Compiler Can Undo Your Security Checks
The compiler is allowed to transform your code if it can prove that the result would interact with the outside world in exactly the same way as your original code would, right? You can optimize on "I already checked the value of X" if you can prove that nothing could have changed X.

Well, it sounds like a lot of compilers are making unjustified assumptions about what the outside world is allowed to affect or observe. Maybe with the encouragement of specs, maybe not.

Hizonner··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
Lack of access to take a bus or permission to walk anywhere is another form of the same disease.
Hizonner··on Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies
Starlink has 12 million subscribers, or about 0.14 percent of the population of Earth. In addition to paying for Starlink, those subscribers are externalizing costs to everybody else on Earth... for instance by screwing up radio astronomy.

It is unreasonable to talk about allowing 0.14 percent of the people on Earth to have Internet as if "Internet for people on earth" were at stake. I mean, yes, they are people, and they are on Earth. You could say the same if it were two people... but that's not the slant intended by phrasing that way.

It's especially unreasonable when many of those 0.14 percent want Starlink because of their personal lifestyle choice to live in the middle of nowhere. Yes, I know, somebody's grandpappy built his farm with his own two hands and the help of his trusty plow goat, Irving. That doesn't mean that person is entitled to infinite subsidies in the form of satellite access, fiber, roads, electricity, hospitals, or anything else. Economic activity can justify some of those things (and a lot of that can be priced in by markets). If you're not doing something useful, and you can't pay for all that stuff including traditionally-externalized costs, then move.

Hizonner··on Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies
That might be dispositive if we didn't already have almost everybody on Earth wired up without using satellites.
Hizonner··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only. Leave the companies and governments out of it.

You do understand that in order to do that, something or somebody has (a) know that the person being decided about is a minor, (b) know who that minor's parents are, and (c) have some way to get input from the parents.

You get that, right? Right?

"Make it the parents' decision" doesn't solve the privacy problem. It's also probably wrong as a universal answer to anything; parents aren't infallible, incorruptible oracles.

Hizonner··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
I'm a parent. I care about children. That's why I hate this wave of hysteria cutting them off from everything. It's way more damaging to children, and especially to teenagers, than any of the stuff it's supposed to protect against. And frankly that's obvious if you haven't let yourself get worked into a frenzy.
Hizonner··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
It's not just Claude. It's being cut off from every part of society except a carefully curated "child ghetto". In which you stay until the day you turn 18. At which point you're shoved out into the outside world. Possibly cut off from all your existing contacts, in fact, since now you're an "adult" and it's presumed dangerous for you to interact with a "child" in any noninstitutional way.

Yes, most of society is online nowadays, or at least is hard to engage in if you can't access the online stuff that organizes it.

Hizonner··on Claude is no longer available for minors
Another example of AV doing serious damage to the people it claims to "help". Must be a day ending in 'y'.
Hizonner··on Instagram's head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm
Is that supposed to be bad?
Hizonner··on Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
By "open models", do you perhaps mean the approximately trillion-parameter open models that have been getting released recently? Because basically nobody can actually self-host those. And even at that size it's debatable that they're closing the gap.

Talk to me when you can do it with a 24B model quantized to 8 bits.

Hizonner··on Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
... and the advantage of the frontier models over anything you can possibly self-host continues to increase at an even more insane pace.
Hizonner··on Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
Sure it is.

The question is whether maybe some people need more stress.

Hizonner··on Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists
Getting an unjustified drug approval would not be "victimless".
Hizonner··on Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?
If it's legal, you can do it. Figuring out whether it's legal is a giant error-prone jurisdiction-dependent pain in the ass.

Even if it were illegal, you could have done it by releasing anonymously (on edit, and reworking the code to remove Fable's fingerprints)... if you hadn't first blown it by publicly posted a traceable question.

Hizonner··on Google Antigravity TOS: 3rd party usage can get Google account suspended
If your Google account is precious, you've already done something wrong...
Hizonner··on Anthropic banned me for "suspicious signals"
Yes, when a company dumps risks and costs onto its users, that sort of excuse is usually what we hear.
Hizonner··on Anthropic banned me for "suspicious signals"
> Every closed source software has the potential to centralize and lock you out of it.

... and you can write your own alternative software.

But you can't provide your own 2TB GPU to help you (or to run it, if that's what it needs). So if They(TM) don't like what you're doing, They(TM) can put you at a vast disadvantage compared to everybody else.

Hizonner··on Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones
Seems kind of contrary to the point of a navigation device...
Hizonner··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
Counting the cost of creating the company so you can actually deal directly with a NIC?

Every. Single. Individual. End. User. Device. Should. Be. Addressable. Given that there are more such devices out there then there are IPv4 addresses to begin with, cost doesn't even come into it.

Hizonner··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
... and NAT was a big part of giving them the market power they now use to enforce that.
Hizonner··on Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones
I'm sorry, but a multi-kilogram (at a guess), five-figure-priced (at a conservative guess) device with kilometer-scale error (per their actual press release) is not a substitute for a GPS.

And you probably can't improve on many of those specs no matter how much "inventing" you do. There's just not that much information in magnetic fields, especially if you don't spend an infeasible amount of money on keeping maps up to date. You're probably jammable, too.

The same applies to the gravitational hacks, and the mapping issue applies even to visual navigation.

Those guesses, by the way, are because not only is AQNav's "data sheet" worthless fluff, but they seem to be allergic to letting anybody even see a picture of the product. Which makes me doubt that they actually have what a normal person would think of as a "product" to begin with.

Hizonner··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
... because people (by which I mean software vendors who should have known better) irresponsibly failed to create secure systems for those average users to use. A whole lot of which came to be justified by "it'll be behind a firewall" thinking.
Hizonner··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
> "No one wanting to bother with port forwarding" is largely a matter of shitty UX on the home gateway side and laziness on the side of the operator. Same with UPnP.

If you try to use those port forwarding hacks, you force every single piece of software to deal with the fact that the IP address it sees for itself is not the IP address its peer sees for it. And you force every single protocol design to allow for that possibility. Add in UPNP, and now you have to implement a whole extra (badly designed) protocol in parallel with the actual application.

It's not trivial to even discover the address your peer is seeing; even now there's a huge diversity of nasty unreliable hacks for doing it.

HTTP isn't the world. In fact, HTTP becoming "the world" was another part of the problem.

Hizonner··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
I was alive and don't think I've forgotten. What distinguished large from small users was the width of the pipe. Address space charging was never important as a revenue driver. There were some attempts to charge for address space to keep people from getting huge blocks they didn't use. The long term solution for that was, of course, supposed to be IPv6.

If I wanted to blame large corporate "users" for NAT (which I actually do), I would blame their obnoxious intransigent refusal to upgrade to IPv6. That part wasn't the ISPs' idea, but it had nothing to do with the cost of address space and everything to do with shortighted laziness. They were, in fact, willing to pay for IPv4 space to avoid having to do anything.

Hizonner··on European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy
> IMHO, it's the only way to force the proponent(s) of these proposal(s) to see the folly of their ways (and it's no guarantee that they will).

I'm pretty sure they'd see it as a win, at least unless it led to massive public backlash. So why not skip that step and just give them the backlash?

Hizonner··on US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"
> Is characterizing them as cultists also a slur then?

In the original sense, probably yes. In the more current sense, no.

The original sense was something like "unanswerable libel, especially around group characteristics". The most common present sense is closer to something like "disparaging epithet aimed at a group, meant to have universalized negative and/or libellous connotations". A slur in this sense roughly means "a member of this group, which, I chose this particular word as a way of reminding you, makes the person despicable and omniwrong regardless of anything else". That's what "pejorative" means.

If you call TESCREAL, or a component of it, a "cult", you're first evoking the idea that anybody who falls under "TESCREAL" umbrella is already bad (as all right-thinking folk already perceive). Then you're perhaps proposing or emphasizing a particular way everybody should think they're bad (it's a cult)".

It's also wrong and dumb. Some of the components of "TESCREAL" may have shared weird beliefs, and even shared weird social rituals. That's not what a cult is, not even close. Not in modern speech outside of academic history and folklore. And even if they were cults, they would not all be the same cult.

> Or calling out the outsized, malign impact they're having?

That kind of frothing is a better example of the original sense, if still not of the new sense. Vague imprecations that can't be defended against.

Nobody identifies with "TESCREAL". If you look at all the people who do identify with any of the labels that go into it, you end up with a pretty diverse group. It's even possible that that diverse group has more fascists in it than there are in the general population. Fringe groups tend to have fringe members who are members of other fringe groups. But fascism is neither a majority characteristic nor a defining one.

By the way, "fascist" itself is a slur when used to mean "anybody whose politics I don't like in certain ways", or when used to imply that fascists are universally bad or wrong in some way not directly related to their fascism.

"Fascist" is not (usually) a slur when applied to say, Elon Musk. He's actually in the group; his publicly avowed politics are largely compatible with Mussolini's version (with probably some minor quibbles about business independence)... and even more compatible with Umberto Eco's definition, which is what a lot of people go for these days. More importantly, when people call Musk a fascist, they are pretty clearly calling him out for the particular stuff he has personally said or done to earn that particular label, not about some unrelated issue. And most of them are doing it in conjunction with saying, or at least alluding to, something identifiable and substantive about policies, not just throwing it out there in an unrelated context.

If you were arguing with Musk about the best flavor of ice cream, and you suddenly came out with "What do you know about ice cream, anyway, you fascist", then you'd be using it more as a slur.

As another comparison, if you called Musk a "rockspider", that would be a slur. The word carries specific meaning; beyond marking "a member of this group", it adds "of which, I chose to use this particular word as a way of reminding you, you are supposed to automatically dislike all members". Also, insofar as it does have a well-defined meaning in terms of who falls in the group, you'd obviously be stretching to apply it to him, which would make it especially obvious that you were trying to use it as a per se insult. Actually I think he may be far enough outside the group that the insult wouldn't even land; no actual Boer ancestry, and too upper class to boot. I'm not up on South African slang.

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