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RA2lover

219 karma · joined June 3, 2023

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RA2lover··on The Resistor Cube
Thought this was the nerd sniping problem extended to 3D. Oh well.
RA2lover··on The Era of 1-Bit LLMs: Training Tips, Code and FAQ
timeline should have had the last article at 2023, not 2024.
RA2lover··on 'I lost my ability to fly the plane'
https://archive.is/qwFuI
RA2lover··on A type of cyberattack that could set your smartphone on fire
Wasn't this already a thing waiting to happen with usb-pd? What's there to prevent a pwned phone from requesting too much voltage from a charger?
RA2lover··on Tiny, tamper-proof ID tag can authenticate almost anything
What prevents someone from ripping out the surface the tag is attached to rather than the tag itself?
RA2lover··on RoR Debugbar
Thought this was about visualizing the 6502 rotate right instruction problem.
RA2lover··on The 6% Real Estate Broker Commission Could Soon Be Gone. Here's Why
> NAR owns the trademark to the word Realtor, with only dues-paying members permitted to use the title professionally.

I don't know whether i should be surprised that someone managed to trademark a job title or that there don't seem to be that many job titles held hostage under trademark law.

RA2lover··on Hulu is cracking down on password sharing, just like Disney Plus and Netflix
Where can i find more info about those?
RA2lover··on Infinite Craft
achieved with this:

wind + earth -> dust + dust -> sand + fire -> glass + fire -> lens + lens -> telescope + lens -> galileo

glass + sand -> hourglass + sand -> time + gallileo -> einstein + time -> relativity + einstein -> theory + time -> evolution + time -> human

There's probably a shorter and less convoluted path somewhere.

RA2lover··on Delayed Open Source Publication
AFPL has been mentioned in the report as created because exec-linking proprietary software to a GPL-licensed "plug-in"¹ was seen as a major loophole. AGPL is also mentioned as potentially suitable for projects that ultimately chose a non-OSI license, with the report raising the question of why they chose not to use it.

From my understanding, it seems like AGPL tries to close a different major loophole in the GPL by ensuring its viral requirements also trigger in cloud computing uses.

Both AFPL and AGPL appear to try to prevent other companies from getting a competitive advantage by leeching from free software without contributing back, while the report suggests companies wanting to carve themselves a competitive advantage while still enjoying source code release benefits can opt to license under a DOSP regime with a rather long delay (hovering around 4 years based on the table included in the report), while remarking said delay's significance depends on how long older releases can stay relevant and that several pre-BSL DOSP experiments ended up decreasing said delay to effectively zero later on.

While the report leaves that as an open question, What do you think is the extent of this perceived competitive advantage/disadvantage in the decisioning of which license to use?

-----

[1]:https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NFUseGPLPlugins

RA2lover··on Protobuf Is Almost Streamable (But not really)
Footnote recommends other formats that have come since protobuf for new designs, but doesn't provide names. Does anyone have a list of those?
RA2lover··on Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking
TFA is talking about train software that deliberately renders it nonfunctional when it detects it is being serviced by a third party. This isn't about environmental concerns.
RA2lover··on The first results from the biggest basic income experiment
This also depends on population density, which is lower in rural areas.
RA2lover··on Local councillors, unaware, approve law entirely written by AI in Brazil
Isn't this already done with omnibus bills? Having law that needs to pass regularly has encouraged politicians to include completely unrelated things into them without sufficient oversight, long predating AI.
RA2lover··on Uncovered EA patent would use AI to replace professional voice actors
In other news, EA patents speech synthesizers built into games.
RA2lover··on 'Sunspot archipelago' 15 times wider than Earth could soon bombard us
They already lost a few dozen satellites in a previous incident in february 2022.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...

RA2lover··on Awesome Engineering Games
i'd recommend ComPressure (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1528120/ComPressure/) and Infinite Turtles (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1952740/Infinite_Turtles/), though the latter still lacks enough reviews to fit the Steam rating requirement.

I'm also not sure on where something like the Poly Bridge series would fit.

RA2lover··on Anomalous propagation and the sinking of the Russian warship Moskva
Wasn't the Moskva spotted by a drone before missile deployment?

Lock-on after launch is certainly a possibility, and one i see making more sense considering the 1/r^4 nature of radar echo reception and the fact there's not much point in dimensioning a radar system past its expected detection horizon under normal conditions.

RA2lover··on The 'Incognito Mode' lawsuit: a legal blow to Google's privacy-washing tactics
From the article:

>The plaintiffs further claim that Google still collects data during private Chrome sessions that the company can de-anonymize and use to target you with ads. They say the company stores people’s browsing data in the same logs, whether they’re in regular or private mode. When combined, “Google can use them to ‘uniquely identify a user with a high probability of success.’”

RA2lover··on Giving a Shit as a Service (2022)
I wonder how someone could create a jig to plot such a table for arbitrary exponents.
RA2lover··on Woman's Pockets Are Inferior
Maybe they figured selling purses separately was more lucrative?
RA2lover··on Ask HN: What is a failed project that deserves another shot?
OSSIC X headphones. fitting automatic HRTF generation in consumer headphones is something i'm surprised no one else has tried yet.
RA2lover··on DeSo Offers $1M Bounty for Decentralized Reddit Competitor
How would this not end up like steem/hive with "subreddit" tags added on top?
RA2lover··on Apple searlized the iPhone 14 backglass [video]
Waiting for independent replication.

Assuming it is proven true, this is unlike other attempts at crippling repairs from Apple as it's affecting behavior that is completely unrelated to the replaced module(the flash being implementable as a passive component). I wonder if the lawsuit against HP for disabling scanning when low on ink could set a precedent usable against this.

RA2lover··on How to calculate how much water you should drink
Converting the article's recommendations to metric, that's 1/32 of your body weight + 680g per hour of exercise + 680~907g depending on weight if you're pregnant or breastfeeding.
RA2lover··on The Scary Math Behind the World’s Safest Assets
It's being compared with debt interest, which can be converted to $/year.
RA2lover··on My take on Elon Musk's new rate limit policy [video]
For those who can't be bothered with twitter - It's a 9 minute long video of someone talking during a walk.

tl;dr of the talk: whether musk realizes or not, by rate-limiting twitter he's also stalled an AI censorship apparatus and seeing how this plays out is going to be interesting.

Transcript:

Good morning, i am here out for a hike in the beautiful coldwater canyon in hollywood and - but i would record my take on this rate-limit controversy happening right now on twitter, with elon musk limiting twitter access to 6000 and now 8000 tweets per day for verified users and 600 to 800 to unverified, and i'm gonna sort of adress this issue from the perspective of the censorship industry, because it's a really fascinating thing that musk just did, with wide-ranging implications for the science of censorship.

So, uh, for those who've been following me and foundation for freedom online for some time, you know that, uh, AI censorship is where all of the magic happens, you know, the twitter files showed how the FBI might come in and set in, get in, get uh 22 [million] tweets censored, but you know how AI was how uh, EIP and other, third party censorship groups were able to get 22 million tweets censored - so the order, you know- that's 6 orders of magnitude right, there's, it's a completely different animal, you could not censor the internet before 2016 at the kind of scale you do now because you have AI censorship models, that is there is a AI censorship death star that has been under construction and innovation and renovation, uh, every week, every month, every year for the past, 6,7, years now.

And it all relies on massive scraping of twitter data in order to build these models and databases to track trending narratives, to systematically surveil and build sort of intelligence dossiers and to track and to turn down all at once, communities online, you know-political communities, uh, social and public health communities, you know, climate communities, you name it-whatever the sensitive policy issue of the day is, you can use this massive twitter scraping capacity to ingest everyone's tweets, and then disambiguate out all of the words that they're using, the hashtags, the themes, the memes, and to build this sort of codebook of, of online communities that can then be used for mass censorship-that is used for mass censorship.

So, a good example for this is how did EIP ended up getting 22 million tweets classified misinformation. well first, they didn't flag 22 million by hand, this is something that mehdi hasan, the MSNBC host, uh-flagrantly deceived his millions of viewers about, they-when he said "oh, they only flagged 3 thousand, not 22 million heartyheartyheart so you're only off by 21.7 mill-- uh, no, you butthead, uh-actually what happened was is they used AI to designate 22 million because they scraped 859 million tweets, to build their AI model of which they said 22 million constituted, uh, misinformation, okay? so yeah, the 3 thousand was just the tip of the 22 million iceberg, because, back in the twitter iteration before today, these third party censorship consortiums, could just mass-ingest hundreds of millions of tweets all at once, in order to build these vast censorship models in order to control all public conversation all at once.

Now, look, at that time, they also captured the trust and safety teams at twitter, so it was very easy for them to build that model and then, you know, basically target those 22 million tweets and all of the hundreds of thousands of accounts and have those be automatically throttled because they were controlling the actual enforcement arms as well. It's unclear if that continues to be the case, but the fact is is that twiter is, by far and away, the intelligence agency, the state department, the defense department and the NGOplex. um, social media platform par excellence; they much prefer the intel they could scrape from twitter than from any other social media company and there's good reason for this, i guess other than linkedin, i'd say, and they would say.

And part of that is because twitter is not a walled garden like facebook. Facebook is also a social media, you know, platform, obviously, but its most private accounts, you can only access if you are friends with that person, or friends of a friend. Twitter does-did not have that. um, and youtube, there's a giant divide between producers and consumers. umm, consumers on youtube are not content creators. That's not the case on twitter, every twitter user is a content creator when they click the retweet button. And so you can-you can map real-time, narrative emergence on twitter, in a way that you can't do on any other social media platform, and that's been used by the CIA, the state department, the defense department, hundreds of censorship government-funded NGOs, uh, uh, centers, non-profits, foundations, university quote-unquote "research" centers and uh, the works.

It's, uh, in order to build their social media censorship deathstar, they need to be able to scrape hundreds of millions of tweets, and what musk is doing here is very interesting because on the one hand, you could argue it's a sort of form of, i wouldn't say censorship necessarily because it's not like a particualr person that's singled out but you are, you are limiting the openness of the internet by doing this. But on the other hand you are actually potentially preserving the openness of the internet, by preventing the construction of this censorship death star that is getting more and more refined every day and has been funded by, your tax dollars to the tunes of tens of millions from DARPA and the national science foundation, to say nothing about the state department and USA, national endowment for democracy grants.

So it's all very interesting um, that is just one thing to keep in mind on top of the fact that this is obviously, you know going to be a revenue generator for musk as he sees it in the sense that he drew a distinction between verified accounts and unverified accounts, where you can sort of have normal twitter if you got a verified account because that 8000 rate limit is-is pretty substantial but 800 is not a lot, and so it highly incentivizes people to get- pardon me [sound of jet aircraft flying overhead] verified accounts, so obviously this could- i'm not sure that is doing this to throttle the AI censorship death star constructed, out of the censorship industry.

He may just be doing this for cynical business reasons, you know in order to pump up the subscription base. uh, where-whereas, you know, a privacy reason independent of censorship-but whether he knows it or not, uh, there are going to be hundreds of censorship operatives housed within the university research centers this week, howling at the moon. that this is an attack on democracy, for musk to limit their access because, it has been for years now it has been a big bugaboo of all of the-the university censorship operatives, who cloak themselves as so-called "researchers" when what they are is they're operatives, uh that the, that if they lose access to the underlying data on which their AI censorship models are built, then they will not be able to do their jobs as effective fast and precise and comprehensive, social media censors.

So they had, they've been having a big fight about this exact issue in europe because of europe's, uh, GDPR laws, t-their data privacy laws, and and other sovereign european state restrictions on third-party access to, uh, to, social media, user-level data. and so they had to get around that by having, you know, certain "journalists and researchers" they sort of designated privileged class to get so that only they, uh, can be sort of trusted keepers of this, uh, of this information that used to be public but now is not.

So the fact that musk is doing this now here and in the united states, uh you are going to see the censorship industry howl over this, whether musk knows it or not he, uh he has stepped into a rattlesnake, um, and uh. We'll see how it plays out but i am very curious to see how the rattlesnake reacts to this new boot, um, and in a weird way even though the boot may be, may be cutting off some amount of openness of twitter, uh it may also represent in some way, the boot of freedom so, we'll see.

RA2lover··on Ask HN: What’s the one app that’s changed your life?
ILSpy/dnSpy. Being able to see clearly how some software was written(and then modify it) has been an extremely mind-opening experience for me personally.
RA2lover··on Ask HN: Real-life, ridiculous security incidents?
A few years back, a game (Racecraft from Sandbox Games) had client log files point to an admin control panel behind a login page... whose login form had valid credentials inserted into it as default values.
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