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Comment In ur radar, hacking ur storm cloudz (Score 5, Interesting) 70

It's nuts. The muppet in the hot seat, Bureau CEO Stuart Minchin, cited switching from HTTP to HTTPS as one of the main points during one of the regular grillings he has been getting from the media over the past few weeks, because apparently the data of Australians was on the line. On a website which requires precisely zero PII, or even general information (short of location) to use. Unless a giant infrastructure also went ahead in the background (like, from the feed horns on the radar back) it makes no sense if you're not living in the pork barrel yourself. If that did in fact happen, they need to fire whoever is in charge of their PR.

Meanwhile, just for shits and giggles, at least three consultancy firms have come out with their own versions of the front end which are objectively better in all regards than this new piece of junk, just to demonstrate how hard web dev isn't.

Gotta justify your budget somehow I guess.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 287

That's a good point. Here on /. I can assume people know what open world games are. Out in the real world movies are probably the better analogy.

Comment Re:Newegg (Score 3, Informative) 19

> It used to be my go-to site for all things computer related.

Me too.

They were slightly cheaper than Amazon for the same product, then I did a big project which got slightly downsized and I wound up with $400 in "restocking fees" for a couple of pieces of factory-hologram-tape sealed network gear, after I paid $100 in return shipping.

Learned my lesson real fast.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 287

The movie analogy is old and outdated.

I'd compare it to a computer game. In any open world game, it seems that there are people living a life - going to work, doing chores, going home, etc. - but it's a carefully crafted illusion. "Carefully crafted" in so far as the developers having put exactly that into the game that is needed to suspend your disbelief and let you think, at least while playing, that there are real people. But behind the facade, they are not. They just disappear when entering their homes, they have no actual desires just a few numbers and conditional statements to switch between different pre-programmed behaviour patterns.

If done well, it can be a very, very convincing illusion. I'm sure that someone who hasn't seen a computer game before might think that they are actual people, but anyone with a bit of background knowledge knows they are not.

For AI, most of the people simply don't (yet?) have that bit of background knowledge.

Comment Re:PR article (Score 0) 287

And yet, when asked if the world is flat, they correctly say that it's not.

Despite hundreds of flat-earthers who are quite active online.

And it doesn't even budge on the point if you argue with it. So for whatever it's worth, it has learned more from scraping the Internet than at least some humans.

Comment Re:Wrong Name (Score 2) 287

It's almost as if we shouldn't have included "intelligence" in the actual fucking name.

We didn't. The media and the PR departments did. In the tech and academia worlds that seriously work with it, the terms are LLMs, machine learning, etc. - the actual terms describing what the thing does. "AI" is the marketing term used by marketing people. You know, the people who professionally lie about everything in order to sell things.

Comment Re:What is thinking? (Score 1) 287

professions that most certainly require a lot of critical thinking. While I would say that that is ludicrous

It is not just ludicrous, it is irrationally dangerous.

For any (current) LLM, whenever you interact with them you need to remember one rule-of-thumb (not my invention, read it somewhere and agree): The LLM was trained to generate "expected output". So always think that implicitly your prompt starts with "give me the answer you think I want to read on the following question".

Giving an EXPECTED answer instead of the most likely to be true answer is literally life-threatening in a medical context.

Comment Re:Deflecting adulthood responsiblities (Score 1) 37

Like buying booze, renting a car, purchasing a handgun, buying a lottery ticket, getting a tatoo?

(some of these vary by state)

I don't see how you're too immature to order a Chianti with your steak dinner but you're mature enough to go $200K in debt based on a sales pitch of returns after investment.

These aren't even reasonable equivalents from a neuroscience perspective.

Comment Re:Can one recharge them? (Score 1) 79

A read is supposed to be fine. At read time the firmware *should* rewrite the cell if the read is weak.

The firmware also *should* go out and patrol the cells when idle and it has power.

you can dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=2M once a year if your firmware behaves.

If your drive is offline you could
dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdX bs=2M iflag=fullblock conv=sync,noerror status=progress

to be sure, though write endurance is finite.

If you're running zfs you can 'zpool scrub poolname' to force validation of all the written data. This is most helpful when you can't trust the firmware to not be buggy crap. Which only applies to 90% of drive firmware out there.

Comment Re: And just like that, everyone stopped using Ple (Score 1) 76

> I have found that streaming directly to my Plex home server over TLS is generally smoother without going through Wireguard. Not quite sure why.

I recently had to solve this.

Wireguard should work with a regular 1500byte MTU connection at 1440 or 1420 bytes (the default) --- however --- if your ISP is routing your IPv4 using 4-in-6 internally (like my major cable company) everything goes to hell.

Try dropping your wg MTU to 1360, MSS at 1320, and set up a mangle table to clamp MSS to PMTU (e.g. iptables rule).

I got a 10x bump in TLS over wireguard throughput.

Total pain in the ass and lightly documented.

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