That current “AI” is not turning into Skynet any time soon.
It might turn into dumb skynet though. Like a version of skynet that does malicious things, but not because it’s trying to hurt people, just because it’s really stupid and we put it in charge of things.
Yeah, the McKittrick effect (remember Wargames?)
We can’t even get them to not be racist when pointedly asked. Billions of dollars have probably been spent on that problem to no avail.
LLMs like ChatGPT have kind of just turned the problem of getting knowledge into a computer, into the problem of getting it back out in a controlled way. It’s still hard and failure-prone but now nobody knows how it works inside.
Oh like politicians and CEOs? Can we try replacing them with AI?
Boards are certainly looking at this. They certainty won’t align with the workers, consumers, or publics interest.
I’ve begun to think of LLMs as compression algorithms for patterns. It can take an existing pattern and apply it on unusual subjects. Like take the pattern of a limerick and apply it to the patterns of Danny Devito, that’s the upper limit of their creativity. So rather than storing information, it stores these patterns making it seem more dynamic.
The way I see it, human creativity is the combination of patterns but in a chaotic non-analytic way. We make leaps of logic that without precise knowledge of our brains can’t be exactly replicated. Meanwhile LLM’s just do the basic combination of patterns that result in the most generic realization of any idea.
However the well dries up as soon as we stop training them. They’ll store the basics of any field but fail to replicate new developments or conclusions until trained.
However the well dries up as soon as we stop training them. They’ll store the basics of any field but fail to replicate new developments or conclusions until trained.
Exactly this is the reason we should prevent any further data collection by these bastards…
Don’t feed the beast!
Nothing about game development is “easy”
I remember my university orientation so vividly, because I was sat next to several people that were taking the “Game Development” degree. They spent the entire orientation talking about what consoles they brought with them.
Two weeks later, they were all gone. The course was arguably harder than my CS course, based on some of the required classes they had to take. I think the dropout rate over the full degree was ~90%. CS was high, sure, but barely anyone actually graduated with the Game Development degree.
Game dev is hard, and I’m yet to meet a game dev that didn’t bemoan how utterly ruthless it was.
The 0.01 alpha fun to build test version is :-D
Yeah, the carefree mood of preproduction is definitely the best part
A thicker, wider bicycle seat is going to be more uncomfortable on longer rides than a thinner, narrower bicycle seat.
What if it doesn’t have the bit that goes between your legs?
I bought a seat like that because I understand that the normal bike seats put pressure on that area in a way that can lead to impotence. I haven’t tried the seat yet because I’m lazy, so I don’t know how comfortable it is. Though even if it isn’t comfortable, it’s a trade-off.
It’s a very small percentage of the population that is affected by bike seats without center channels. It may help you, it probably won’t harm you.
A slight warning there is some concern that the cut out collapses as the saddle ages, causing the padding to pinch your anatomy rather than support it. The less pressing on your saddle the less of a concern this is.
The best place to have padding while riding your bike is against your anatomy. Wear a chamois if you’re planning on riding longer distances. You can get them as either the classic spandex or as a pair of padded briefs you wear under some shorts.
The most important part to bike saddle fitting is thus:
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A saddle designed to support the width of your sit bones
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A saddle designed for the posture you ride your bike with (a euro style city bike needs a much different saddle than a keirin race bike)
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I think seat type depends on riding posture. Wide seat is suitable for a city bike, where you seat upright.
There are different screen sizes. Your monitor isn’t the standard universal size of every other monitor, some are larger and some are smaller. Your phone isn’t the same width and height as every other phone. The website will look different on different devices.
Just because I’m an IT guy, it doesn’t mean I know why your laptop is slow.
I mean if their hardride isn’t full, and their task manager isn’t showing a bunch of bloat, then it’s 95% of the time a hardware issue.
I mean, 90% chance it’s because: still using a hard drive, old ass CPU/heat issues+throttling, OS and software bloat.
And they need to download more RAM
Bloat
“Can you hack my ex-girlfriends Instagram?”
Or, “I have an amazing idea for an app…”
Clearly, if my years on the internet taught me anything, the killer app ID is an app that hack’s ex’s socials with bonus functionality for changing their school grades
My app idea was location based reminders instead of time based.
The next time you’re at the store you’ll get a notification with your notes.
I think it’s a neat idea but i never have location on so 🤷♂️
I think you can use existing software to do that. If your store has wifi (even if you can’t access it, I think), you can geofence an area and have some action (such as popping up a reminder app) trigger. I’ve not used software like this myself, but I remember people describing behavior like this at least on Android. If it might be useful to you, you should give it a search.
I have an app that’s meant to schedule things, but I just use it as a checklist and preface each action with the location. So long as I check it (second home screen on my phone, so not a huge barrier), I’m usually good.
Example
- costco: chicken
- costco: paper towels
- Cainz: sunscreen
- grocery: milk
- grocery: eggs
Apple Reminders does that.
very cool
Was gonna say Google keep has had this feature for years too
“My app idea is that you can see where your girlfriend is at all times.”
“So you’re telling me you want me to build an illegal stalking system? Have you really thought this through?”
(Based on an actual conversation.)
I can’t hack insta. But I can probably hack your ex. Spearfishing is largely just a matter of time.
Eh, you probably do, you just don’t want to spend three hours wading through mountains of malware for free.
I don’t want to do it for money either.
Or how to fix your printer.
Nobody knows how to fix a printer
Did you know they still sell dot matrix printers? Wild.
Everything since then has been a mistake.
Best printer setup experience I’ve had.
I can’t even get my own printer to work.
I had a guy recently ask why his printer wasn’t working after he got a new router, and it turns out it is because the printer only went up to 802.11g. I’m pretty amazed that printer outlived the wireless standard it was using.
I mean… 802.11g is still able to be used. Even b is supported under the radios I’m familiar with.
The router he got did have support for 802.11g, but for some reason I don’t remember we couldn’t turn it on. It was some integrated 5G router. The solution was just to use the printer’s built in AP to print. He has to disconnect from the internet to print things, but it still works.
Also, that software engineer and IT are not interchangeable terms
^ This. So much this. I’m a software engineer, and people will ask me IT questions about software I have no clue how to use.
“I’m a software engineer, not a printer whisperer”
Yeah, but what could it be though?
If you want your chicken extra crispy, it takes longer.
The cloud is just someone else’s computer
But someone who is better at managing computers than 99% of people.
But that someone will have their own priorities that will most likely not always coindice with yours.
This.
Debatable.
Yes, but just by being a conscious that a screen turned off doesn’t mean that the computer is unresponsive, and you still should have care to not smash keys blindly, already puts you on one of the higher branches.
Not if I’m Jeff Bezos.
Next you’ll be telling me Serverless is just code on servers!
I can’t and wouldn’t teach your kid to be gay. I can’t get him to write his fucking name at the top of the page.
I hate that more people don’t understand this. It leads to a bunch of discussion and anxiety about nothing at all.
That’s generally not what they’re really concerned about. “I don’t want teachers teaching my children to be gay” is just code for, “I don’t want teachers teaching my children that it’s ok to be gay.”
Or just tolerating them in front of their kid. In fact, they’d probably prefer the teacher teach Timmy to hate like mom and dad do.
Rough day, huh?
Parents can be overprotective, (I.e. become shitty parents) and you can’t really do anything about that, except hoping that the universe educate them.
Still studying, but I often see people think that WiFi = Internet.
Thankfully, some of them at least acknowledge existence of “Exclamation mark WiFi”.
What is “Exclamation mark WiFi?”
WiFi icon with exclamation mark (no internet access).
!Wifi = not-wifi = there’s no wifi, there’s no internet! 😱
there’s no wifi
Wifi is a lie! screams, starts looting
Turning your computer off and back on again will solve 90% of your problems.
Of the other 10% an additional reboot while on the phone with the IT person solves those.
Yep, I turn off my devices when I’m done with them. I’ll restart my phone from time to time.
Most software isn’t made for patchwork while running. Sometimes even if it’s on a server lol. The stuff that is gets tested quite a bit.
Turning off and back on is not the same as restarting. If you want to force a restart like turn off, hold shift while clicking shutdown.
You have a very strange phone.
Sounds like the windows 10 ‘innovation’ called fast startup. Some genius decided instead of shutting down, let’s just log the user out and put the OS into standby… That’ll save a lot of boot time!
It’s universally hated by IT and made redundant by SSDs
Also it really fucks with some peripherals. I even had a motherboard with RGB lights (don’t judge me, it was actually cheaper than the “normie” version I originally wanted) that didn’t turn off the lights and the fans because of this shitty feature. I never got around to investigating who was doing things wrong between Microsoft and the manufacturer in this case though, I just got into the habit of holding shift while clicking the shutdown button.
I hear you I turn off Linux devices too. Zombie power is a thing as well as software being a house of cards.
Something doesn’t work in a particular piece of software. “Don’t they test their program?”. “All they need to do is X, obviously they don’t know how to code!”.
Sometimes it isn’t as easy as you think.
Though it being difficult doesn’t excuse releasing an untested program or one with known issues…
Sometimes you have to make a tradeoff and focus on the golden path, which means comprehensive testing has to be skipped or bugs have to be explicitly left in.
Yes it’s bad. Yes it sucks. But it’s that or nothing gets released at all.
(I wish it wasn’t that way. I try hard to make sure it isn’t that way at my job, but for now that’s how it is)
Known issues that don’t interfere with the critical user stories are usually not prioritized. They should be disclosed, and even better if workarounds are published, but fixing them usually isn’t in the budget.
Since February the Uber Driver app has had a bug where elements from the “not in a trip right now” UI state render over top of the “in a trip and navigating” UI state.
It means that the user can’t see the text for the next turn, and also can’t see the direction of the next turn.
However there’s a workaround because they can see the distance to the next turn and once they’re close they can see which way route line goes.
Building genuinely secure computer systems is incredibly difficult. You might even be in systems/software and be thinking “yeah it is hard”, but to be really secure it’s 1000x harder than that. So everything you use off the shelf from any vendor is a massive compromise and has holes in it. But on the other hand most people don’t need really secure systems.
Isn’t a true air gap pretty solid though? Aside from someone actually coming into your house and interfacing directly it would be pretty hard to bypass, or am I on Mt. Dunning-Kruger over here this time?
You are correct.
The uncomfortable part is what I’ve learned about the challenges to gain physical access.
Most physical security is equally appalling to most Cybersecurity.
Edit: Incredibly unfun exercise: pick a physical security device you rely on, personally, and do a YouTube search for “device name break in test”. I’ve rarely been able to find a video more than 3 minutes long, for any product, at all. And the actual breaking is usually mere seconds in the middle bit.
The lockpicking lawyer scares me.
Imagine you wake up in the night, you hear your front door rattling. Someone is trying to break in. “No problem” you think to yourself, “I have a good lock on my front door”. Then you hear the five most terrifying words you could possibly hear in that moment:
“This is the Lockpicking Lawyer”
That guy is an exceptional picker/exploiter, and he isn’t even the best.
However, I’ve casually picked locks and always have a set of picks with me for the past 20 years. LPL makes me look like a 10 year old kid trying to open a lock with a pair of chopsticks.
In other words, probably less than 5% of the population have ever picked a lock. Of them, I’m probably better than 90% and I still suck at it. So running across an LPL level skilled person, who’s also a criminal is going to be like a list of names on a single piece of paper. Just by a lock complicated enough that you can’t scrub it open and everyone will be fine.
Air gap is a useful strategy. But what is that system? You don’t really know anything about its origin or what any of its processors actually do. You know really nothing about any of the firmware or software you run on it. Just getting software on to it securely is a huge challenge to prove its origin and the whole supply chain. And then getting data out is a whole other problem. A general purpose computer is not a great choice if you want the best in security. And having it just in your house isn’t that secure. Obviously as I say, most people don’t need the best security.
Allow me to drop a bunch of innocuous looking storage devices in the area, maybe some power cables with hidden microchips, or perform another supply chain attack. What if your computer is probing for wireless devices without your knowledge? Can one be snuck in?
It’s a good step, a major one, but even an air gapped computer can be infected if you have a well-funded, advanced, and persistent adversary.
Aside from someone actually coming into your house and interfacing directly
If any state entity is in your threat model then this would be major concern. If you’re of any interest to the state, first thing they’ll do is raid your home and seize your electronics. Your threat model shouldn’t depend on assuming an attacker can’t physically access your device (I know you never said an air gap should be the only defence, I’m just saying in general).
Most online services would struggle to provide their service to their users if all of their servers were air gapped.
No, replacing your HVAC or control systems will not magically fix the engineering issues present in your home/building. You will have to compensate for poor design indefinitely unless you want to demolish and start over.
Oh fuck, improperly designed HVAC + changes made to a building that really fuck it up… There’s no fixing that folks.
“This one room is always hot!” Well, there’s no return, the door’s always closed, and oh, someone replaced the door 20 years ago and now there’s only a 1/4" gap between it and the floor. No, “turning up the fan speed” isn’t going to fix it.
Transom windows. I don’t know why they aren’t common. But they make it easy to close a door but still allow airflow through the house.
Because modern houses really don’t give any thoughts about airflow or natural cooling. Heck, even getting the AC compressor installed on a side of the house where it doesn’t get baked in the afternoon sun is too much to ask for.
Solution: install a doggy door with weak enough magnets to let the air flow.
Solution: vibrate the air to reduce viscosity
That only works for no-newtonian fluids
Bead curtain, maybe? It’s both practical and groovy. /s
Maybe I am preaching to the choir on Lemmy, but:
Do your security updates and use different passwords for different sites.
I know it’s a pain in the ass, although it’s a much smaller one than you’re making it sound. But yes it is important, yes the “hackers” will come after you (or more accurately their automated systems will that come after everybody).
Especially since password managers are a thing.
The pharmacy is not where the people that stock the front of the store work. They are very busy trying to fill hundreds of prescriptions and deal with doctors, patients and insurance companies.
Don’t ask them where to find the cosmetics that are on sale. We don’t even know. We are not a service desk.
