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shadowfacts

982 karma · joined November 12, 2015

https://shadowfacts.net
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shadowfacts··on Show HN: Building a Markdown editor for Mac, iOS and web
What on Earth is a “greco-roman Markdown editor” and if I’m not someone who writes RETVRN posts on X, the everything app, why is that a desirable attribute?
shadowfacts··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
Then you overpaid a year ago. A 2x16GB DDR5 kit was around $90 a year ago and is over $400 today.
shadowfacts··on The Eternal Sloptember
When people write blog posts about how LLMs failed for some particular task, the responses from boosters invariably fall along the lines of "just use this other model/just tweak your prompt like so/you're just not skilled enough—you can't make fundamental arguments about AI by citing specific examples."

So we can't make arguments by citing specific examples, and also can't make arguments by not citing specific examples. Whelp, I guess that's the ball game.

(yes yes, I'm committing a group attribution error, but still)

shadowfacts··on Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras
It’s listed on the agenda here as “Automated License Plate Reader Contract.” https://mountainview.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1352...
shadowfacts··on Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online
> The Constitution of the United States was a layman's document, not a lawyer's contract. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-constituti...

The Supreme Court is not the ultimate decider of what the layman's document means. It was wrong when it decided, for instance, Plessy v. Ferguson. The law that the Court upheld patently violated the Fourteenth Amendment and was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court was simply wrong.

shadowfacts··on Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
... yes, that's the complaint. The prompt engineering they did made it spew neo-Nazi vitriol. They either did not adequately test it beforehand and didn't know what would happen, or they did test and knew the outcome—either way, it's bad.
shadowfacts··on Should we design for iffy internet?
The big digital music stores are DRM-free these days (iTunes and Amazon both are). There's also Qobuz if you want to avoid the tech giants (though most of your money ends up going to record labels, so does it really matter?).
shadowfacts··on The 12-bit rainbow palette
Four characters counting the pound sign.
shadowfacts··on Out of the Fog
The Verge has been publishing non-tech related stories for ages. Technology still seems to be their main focus, but this isn't new.
shadowfacts··on Whistleblower details how DOGE may have taken sensitive NLRB data
They did not have "every right to remove him." As the article you linked says, Abrego Garcia was specifically granted a withholding of removal order.
shadowfacts··on Obituary for Cyc
A beanbag is a chair? Perhaps a chair should be something on which one can comfortably sit without breaking that has a back and four legs. I suppose then a horse would be a chair.
shadowfacts··on FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
In my case, no small fraction of the traffic was from OpenAI and Anthropic. There were also other user agents that literally said "AI".
shadowfacts··on I ate and reviewed every snack in our office kitchen
> He straight-up ate someone else's salad?

... no, it's clearly a joke.

shadowfacts··on Apple squandered the Holy Grail
Soulver has indeed been doing this without large language models (so far as I know) for many years: https://soulver.app/
shadowfacts··on Why is Apple Rosetta 2 fast? (2022)
It is not directly accessible from user-space. Making it so requires kernel support. Apple published a set of patches for doing this on Linux: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/acc...

Without that kernel support, all processes in the VM (not just Rosetta-translated ones) are opted-in to TSO:

> Without selective enablement, the system opts all processes into this memory mode [TSO], which degrades performance for native ARM processes that don’t need it.

shadowfacts··on DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
There is a separate, ongoing antitrust lawsuit over Google’s adtech business. Closing arguments in that case are scheduled for Nov. 25, next week: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/google-antitru...
shadowfacts··on Maybe Bluesky has "won"
> When you run a mastadon instance you're not mirroring the entire network, so its a bad comparison.

That's the point, though. You don't need (nor, I imagine, would most people want) to mirror the entire network. If not needing to mirror the entire network makes self hosting simpler, then that is an advantage for the people interested in self hosting.

shadowfacts··on OpenID Connect specifications published as ISO standards
Yes. This is how, for example, Tailscale implements bring-your-own identity provider: https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc

It is, to date, the only non-selfhosted service with which I can use my self-hosted SSO setup.

shadowfacts··on Trump wins presidency for second time
If you genuinely believe that number, you have fallen for the propaganda. Ten million people did not enter the country in such a short time. DHS estimates the _total_ unauthorized immigrant population at around 11 million as of 2022.

https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/2024_0418_o...

shadowfacts··on Trump wins presidency for second time
> Can you name a policy of today's republican party that is further right than the republican party of 20 years ago?

Sure I can: "mass deportation now"

shadowfacts··on Trump wins presidency for second time
In principle, that is true. But that is simply not the reality on the ground. States ban abortion with such exceedingly narrow exceptions that doctors and hospitals delay until the point of actively endangering women.

Four deaths, reported on by one outlet, in the past couple months:

- A Texas teenager died after going to three emergency rooms and being misdiagnosed and denied treatment: https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-...

- Another Texas woman died after a miscarriage as a result of doctors not treating her due to the state's fetal heartbeat law: https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-mis...

- A Georgia woman with chronic health conditions, which can make pregnancy highly risky but did not exempt her from Georgia's abortion ban, died of complications from a medication abortion: https://www.propublica.org/article/candi-miller-abortion-ban...

- Another Georgia woman died because doctors delayed 20 hours after she arrived at a hospital—9 hours after she was diagnosed with sepsis—before treating her: https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-ambe...

shadowfacts··on Lawsuit challenges Virginia City's use of cameras for warrantless surveillance
The police following one person’s car isn’t unconstitutional, but following everyone’s cars very much is. The IJ press release mentions this: the 4th Circuit (which covers Virginia) ruled several years ago that Baltimore’s near-continuous aerial surveillance was unconstitutional in part because it “ transcends mere augmentation of ordinary police capabilities.” I think there’s an entirely reasonable argument to be made that what the City of Norfolk is doing by contracting Flock to create a database of where every car has been for the past 30 days similarly crosses that line.

https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.p.pdf

shadowfacts··on US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash
It's not a random blog making some conjectures, Rick Hasen is a law professor who is an expert in this area and, moreover, he cites specifics statutes and DOJ information that's not all that ambiguous.
shadowfacts··on Bluesky adds direct messages
I'm a little bit sympathetic, but they've also kinda tried to have it both ways. They spent ages inventing a new protocol for decentralized microblogging, and then ages more before you could actually use a server other than theirs. But DMs is now where they don't want to spend the time up front to do it the right way?
shadowfacts··on Bluesky adds direct messages
Not only are they not end-to-end encrypted, Bluesky's DMs seem like they're entirely centralized. From their 2024 roadmap:

> We looked closely at alternatives like linking to external services, re-using an existing protocol like Matrix, or rushing out on-protocol encrypted DMs, but ultimately decided to launch a basic centralized system to take the time pressure off our team and make our user community happy.

https://docs.bsky.app/blog/2024-protocol-roadmap

shadowfacts··on AI copilots are changing how coding is taught
Yes, it does matter. While there are plenty of situations where it's foolish to forbid calculators, that's not universally true.

Forbidding calculators and requiring students to do mental math for absolutely everything is unnecessary. But requiring students to solve integrals by hand when they're learning about integrals? Entirely reasonable.

If your goal when teaching coding is to teach the mechanical process of writing code: sure, go ahead and use LLMs for that process. But if your goal is to develop a deeper understanding of how to code, then LLMs can very easily obscure that. The end goal is not always just the answer.

shadowfacts··on US appeals court kills ban on plastic containers contaminated with PFAS
The article says, "However, Peer noted Section 6 states health risks should be weighed “without consideration of costs or other non-risk factors”."

Peer is not the court, it's a non-profit involved in the litigation. You can read the opinion, and the court doesn't tell the EPA to use section 6, just that they can't use section 5: https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-60620-CV0.pd...

shadowfacts··on Apple Vision Pro review
It is permitted on the App Store. The developer had a thread on the fediverse several days ago.
shadowfacts··on On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
You may believe it's the future and be happy to be included, but that's certainly not for everyone.

> I don't get the complaint here.

> Sure their ability to choose whether or not their art was commercialized was taken away

That is exactly the complaint: that their agency was taken away. It's entirely reasonable to lament that loss.

shadowfacts··on First Apple M3 Pro Benchmarks Show Surprisingly Low Multi-Core Gains over M2 Pro
That's not surprising at all? The M3 Pro has 2 fewer performance cores than the M2 Pro.
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