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stvltvs

978 karma · joined June 13, 2023

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stvltvs··on Silicon Valley 'sex assault list' with 'over 100' names circulated
The video is more widely accessible on YouTube https://youtube.com/watch?v=KvanHITPNEc
stvltvs··on Suspension of the de minimis administrative exemption for imports $800 or less
And we don't realize that we are the poor just because we can point to poorer people.
stvltvs··on AI is an elite crime spree
FWIW I don't agree with Wilhoit, just explaining where the idea came from.
stvltvs··on AI is an elite crime spree
Which is basically Wilhoit's Law, an attempt to define conservatism.

edit: For those who don't want to look it up, Wilhoit's law is usually stated like this: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

stvltvs··on How, Exactly, Could A.I. Kill Us?
Because they know that many of our most intractable problems are primarily political, not technical. Climate disruption and peace in the Middle East for two examples. I don't expect an LLM to offer a workable plan for either. Would love to be wrong about that though.
stvltvs··on Why Germany Is Building an Ark for U.S. Climate Data
Trump et al. being in control of US government data honestly feels like vikings have been put in charge of the Anglo-Saxon monasteries or Christian zealots in charge of the Library of Alexandria.
stvltvs··on USPS Failed to Properly Handle Some Primary Election Ballots, Audit Finds
That's not the story the whistleblower tells. The plan, for example, is to reject entire batches of ballots if a single ballot doesn't pass USPS's criteria.
stvltvs··on Proof of Capture: Apple Reference Image, but open source and using steganography
The idea is to be able to prove that a photo you took was captured by a camera, not generated. That would be helpful in the context of a disputed news story, a court case, etc.

Would that ever be relevant for a screenshot?

stvltvs··on Proof of Capture: Apple Reference Image, but open source and using steganography
Signing the raw image data wouldn't require also signing the EXIF metadata. For privacy, you could later strip out everything except the raw image and the camera's signature and still prove that the image is unaltered.
stvltvs··on USPS Failed to Properly Handle Some Primary Election Ballots, Audit Finds
To clarify, if the postal service can choose which ballots to deliver, then whoever controls the postal service has a powerful lever to suppress voters they don't like, especially those who have difficulty voting in person due to bad health, work obligations, distance to polling places, etc.

Nothing about the FEC.

stvltvs··on USPS Failed to Properly Handle Some Primary Election Ballots, Audit Finds
As long as the barcode is not then used to reject delivery of ballots because a flawed federal voter verification system guesses the voters are illegitimate.

I have grave concerns about creating a single lever that will allow bad actors to steal elections.

stvltvs··on LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby
You should have told them the required phone was missing from the box.
stvltvs··on C*: Unifying Programming and Verification in C (2025)
Funny I think of Perl as Bash with slightly saner syntax plus robust regexp. (said with love)
stvltvs··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
Censorship of things I don't like or don't care about doesn't count. /s
stvltvs··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
I boycotted with the API nonsense a few years ago and noticed I didn't miss it that much. Haven't really been back since. When a web search leads me back, it seems to have gone downhill with lots of low effort and bot-ish posts.
stvltvs··on One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed
Hengist and Horsa
stvltvs··on The planet now has more trees than it did 35 years ago (2018)
Tell that to the desert-dwelling species that rely on that habitat for survival. Deserts aren't empty wastelands that are valueless without human development.
stvltvs··on AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
Ideally, but we know that LLMs will get the blame because of course they will.
stvltvs··on Devices with GrapheneOS support should be available in 2027
Highly location dependent. This is more true in Europe than in America.
stvltvs··on Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix
The impact is highly geography dependent.

For example, the lower Colorado River basin is facing heavy drought, extremely low reservoirs, and federally mandated cuts in water shares. Awkward time to build water intensive infrastructure, even if the usage is relatively low.

stvltvs··on Rethinking Database Programming
Can you elaborate?

It can't express every mathematical set operation, but it does have UNION, EXCEPT, and INTERSECT.

stvltvs··on I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore
I'm getting old, but it seems like we're all more ambivalent about new tech. Maybe I'm projecting, but we don't expect tech to be the solution to human problems as much as we used to. The boundless optimism about the World Wide Web has putrified into techno-pessimism for at least half of us.
stvltvs··on It's time Amazon played by the same rules as everyone else [video]
Are these really local businesses or are they employees forced to take on liability as a condition of employment? Tech has been mislabeling employees as independent contractors for years.
stvltvs··on Lake Mead hits historic low water level as Colorado River struggles
Maybe I'm thinking too literally, but alfalfa isn't grass. It's a legume.
stvltvs··on Lake Mead hits historic low water level as Colorado River struggles
Over half of Colorado River water goes to agriculture, about half of that irrigates alfalfa for animal feed. It's not clear if that's what you meant by capitalism, but lawns are a very small portion of what the water is used for.

https://watereducationcolorado.org/fresh-water-news/most-com...

stvltvs··on All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
Even better a single video frame because the OCR is demonstrably fallible.
stvltvs··on Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
This could be more targeted, like a no-fly list for the internet. Political dissidents, journalists, etc. could be effectively exiled from online activity.
stvltvs··on Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
I'm not saying age verification is a good idea, just that a centralized government-mandated implementation is a bad way to do an already bad idea.
stvltvs··on Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
Data ownership is just one area of concern. Controlling our access to the internet is another.

If age verification was an open standard, we could hope for competition so that we could jump ship from a bad actor. If one blocks our access, we would have alternatives. In theory.

Not so with a centralized government-mandated service.

stvltvs··on 1,741 "informed" consents with one click? GDPR complaint filed
Anecdotal but my laptop just found 2 open WiFi networks out of 20. One's enough though.
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