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sammax

72 karma · joined November 24, 2020

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sammax··on HP printers should have EPEAT ecolabels revoked, trade group demands
I expect it doesn’t matter if you only print occasionally, but toner exposure from operating printers seems to be a significant health risk: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29233006/
sammax··on EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones
> cables haven't improved since USB-C, 9 years ago

Not to distract from your point, which I agree with, but that is just plainly untrue. A USB-C cable from 9 years ago almost certainly doesn’t support current standards for power delivery and data transfer.

sammax··on Study: ChatGPT outperforms physicians in quality, empathetic answers to patients
The tests are done using proprietary hard- and software, though it is generally made by biotech and not pharmaceutical companies.
sammax··on iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone
I fail to see the net loss to society in this scenario.
sammax··on Xanax and Adderall Access Is Being Blocked by Secret Drug Limits
What a shitty take. There’s only so much ibuprofen you can take before the risks start outweighing the benefits, and there’s plenty of pain that is much stronger than that.
sammax··on Bizarre and unusual uses of DNS
I’ve set up an AuthorizedKeysCommand that uses unbound to get the authorized keys for the server via DNSSEC, with the ability to specify keys for whole servers, users on servers or globally for all servers. This is pretty neat for my few private boxes, I wouldn’t advise it for something bigger or enterprise, an ldap or similar seems better for that.
sammax··on How to own an airline in 3 easy steps and grab the TSA nofly list along the way
They originated around the same time, but singular you was initially only used for addressing superiors/showing respect (using the plural second person pronoun as a singular for this purpose is still a thing in a bunch of languages), a few hundred years later “you” became the standard second person singular pronoun while “thou” fell out of favour.
sammax··on How to own an airline in 3 easy steps and grab the TSA nofly list along the way
I fail to see how any of the mentioned pronouns are ungrammatical.

As for competing needs and such, in this case it’s as easy as using she/her (as maia lists that as one of its pronouns), in other cases it’s usually acceptable to use they/them or no pronouns at all. The only thing that is generally absolutely unacceptable is (knowingly) using the wrong gendered pronouns or using gendered pronouns when the person only uses non-gendered pronouns.

sammax··on ChatGPT scores 80% on SAT reading/writing with collective chain of thought
> test of reasoning

My experience is that ChatGPT is not particularly good at reasoning, so I assume that either the test isn’t a particularly good test of reasoning or the result was a fluke.

It’s a text model, not a reasoning model, so I wouldn’t expect reasoning ability in the first place.

sammax··on Bra size calculator
The numbers in that table are the numbers from the bra sizing system, not necessarily actual measurements. The EU system for some reason uses band size numbers about 10 less than the actual underbust size.
sammax··on ChatGPT is a ‘code red’ for Google’s search business
Oh yeah it’s not always wrong, just often enough and convincing enough that it would be dangerous to rely on it.
sammax··on ChatGPT is a ‘code red’ for Google’s search business
You can generally “convince” it to agree with anything, how difficult that is depends on how strongly it “knows” that what you say is wrong. Making it agree that violence is cool is harder than making it agree that 1+1=3 is harder than making it agree that <obscure chemical process> is <completely wrong explanation>.
sammax··on ChatGPT is a ‘code red’ for Google’s search business
Same with anything ChatGPT tells you, except it manages to sound much more convincing than Google does.
sammax··on Woman sues after DNA from rape kit used to arrest her
I did actually miss that. But my point is that none of the papers established a limit at 10 years and it’s not clear at all how the authors came up with that number.
sammax··on DuckDuckGo, Proton, Mozilla back bill targeting Big Tech ‘surveillance’
What does child labour and slavery being profitable have to do with whether “without regulations we’d still have child labour” is a compelling argument?
sammax··on Woman sues after DNA from rape kit used to arrest her
I don’t know why they write that, but one of the papers they quote for that claim reported success with samples up to 19 years old and in turn cites a paper that reported “genotyping whole-genome-amplified DNA” from up to 25 year old blood spots. I don’t know what this means exactly, it definitely isn’t the methylenation thing, but I think it’s a good indication that blood much older than a decade is viable. Both of these papers also report no differences in results between older and younger samples, only between different extraction methods and amounts.
sammax··on Namecheap vulnerability they refuse to fix: no 2FA on support portal login
I’m quite happy with Glauca [1], they’re not quite as cheap but their DNS stuff is pretty good and they are friendly and helpful. Only downside is their website being a bit slow sometimes.

[1] https://glauca.digital

sammax··on Copilot sells code other people wrote
Microsoft has evidence that the code they are reproducing is MIT licensed, so are they intentionally violating that license or does this AI thing include the license and attribution in every snippet it generates?
sammax··on Copilot sells code other people wrote
Don’t most licenses require at least attribution? I don’t believe GitHub is restricting themselves to only licenses that don’t. In fact the only software licenses I can think of that don’t require attribution are 0BSD, WTFPL, CC0, MIT-0 and Unlicense, and they all aren’t super popular. Also in some countries creators have inalienable moral rights which can be enforced regardless of the license. For example in Germany it is impossible to relinquish certain rights you have as the creator of a work, including the right to attribution.
sammax··on New UK Law Mandates Organ Donation by Default Unless Explicit Opt-Out (2020)
Sounds a bit like you weren't an organ donor because it's the right thing but because it makes you feel good. And now that good feeling is taken away from you because everyone is an organ donor by default and you're not doing anything special anymore.
sammax··on How to find a job as Software Developer in Germany
It has historical reasons. Back when Napoleon conquered Europe, the HRE redistributed some land from the Church to the secular rulers and in return promised to fund them via taxes and compensate them for the land. The church tax has since become more of a membership fee (you can just leave the Church and stop paying it), but the state still collects it for the Churches.
sammax··on Replace Google Analytics with a shell script
> The target may feel much safer clicking a link to knowntrustedsite.abc than yourunknownphisysite.xyz

Big doubt honestly, at least for the vast majority of people. Just set up some blog with some contest that interests them (can be copied from other blogs) and they're not gonna suspect a thing. People might notice if you pretend to be their bank but are actually a phishing site, but they don't notice if you pretend to be a blog and are actually a blog that harvests their data just like any other website.

sammax··on Two people killed in fiery Tesla crash with no one driving
> Any traffic incident here always involve two people who failed to comply with traffic laws.

Are you sure about that? It would mean that it's technically illegal to cross a road unless you're absolutely certain that there can't be a speeding driver around the next corner who's gonna get to you faster than you can react. Or that you aren't allowed to cross the street at a green light even when all the cars are waiting because you can't actually be certain that a car isn't gonna start driving suddenly and run you over. Or that someone tailgating you is somehow caused in part by you.

It's pretty ridiculous to claim that both sides failed to comply with the laws in every incident.

sammax··on Replace Google Analytics with a shell script
> Yes, and _that's it_! Just by getting someone to click on a site they find trustworthy, you are now able to extract country, device, browser, OS, time of access

So you'd be using this as an overly complex IP geolocation lookup and UA header parser? All of this information is either already known to you when you trick someone to click on that link (because they are on your website so you get the same data) or can instead be obtained by tricking them into clicking on a link to your website instead of that one (if it's an email for example).

sammax··on 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online
Your private email that you don't use for signing up anywhere is irrelevant except for phishing and spam. Your secondary email address will become the foreign key that is used to correlate the datasets from everywhere you signed up with it. The +tags can just be removed since it is known how they work. Might give you a small protection against attackers who don't know about email address tags.
sammax··on Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong
So whenever the program used for extracting ZIPs has a vulnerability any website could force-download a malicious ZIP and it would automatically be extracted and trigger the vulnerability...

Why is "force-download" even a thing? IMO the browser should always ask before downloading any file. Though this is not a unique Mac thing, I believe Chrome does that everywhere.

sammax··on Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong
> I found another browser trick that lets force-downloaded TXT files to be opened without user interaction or warning

I wish there was more elaboration on this. Opening a downloaded file without user interaction sounds pretty bad.

sammax··on Supreme Court expands meaning of 'seizure' under 4th Amendment
Other nations somehow manage with prison systems that don't just shoot convicts who are trying to escape. I believe there are even nations where trying to escape from prison (or successfully escaping) is not a criminal offense itself.
sammax··on YouTube blocked chess channel after mistaken detection of racial slurs
It's even more insane how willing people are to say "both sides do X" when one side does X a thousand times more than the other side does.
sammax··on McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source
The whole point of UBI is that everyone gets it, unconditionally. There is no not using it or not staying on it. You just get the UBI, and it should be enough to pay for basic living costs, and most people also want to be able to afford luxuries so the incentive to work is not gone.
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