It's not going to get any easier to find definitely bot slop free software as time goes on; but we can be fairly sure about this stuff. Like hunting for low background steel.

I can't say that I'm entirely surprised, given what else they've been getting up to; but it seems downright crazy to just unleash a slop engine without even giving your volunteers a heads up; then patronizingly ask if you can perhaps arrange a meeting to understand their concerns.

If your options are 'nothing' and 'hire bilingual tech writer' you can see the attraction of having a not very good but extremely cheap option; but just tossing away the expertise you already get for nothing out of some sort of weird technophilia? Is there actually some nutjob out there who was all "Oh, but machine translation makes my CI pipeline so efficient" or something?

Has it been determined whether the IT situation was related to the theft that occurred?

Obviously it sounds like basically no bad option was left unchosen when it came to their IT config; but I'm curious whether this was a situation where the perps were actually sophisticated enough (or unsophisticated at traditional smash-and-grab/balaclava-when-on-camera techniques) to incorporate the bad IT into the heist; or whether the entry was more or less pure physical access control failure that happens to put the general state of the system in stark relief?

Obviously if it were a heist movie there'd be a hoodie kid using the power of fast typing to haxx0r the cameras and guide the operatives while using a precociously cobbled-together AI to selectively delete them from the surveillance footage; but if the overall physical security posture was bad, and the building is largely accessible to the public, it seems entirely plausible that someone just cased the joint and walked in much as they would have 50 years ago; though a different interested party is probably hosting a C2 server or some exploitation payloads on their DVR.

This is the part in the bad summer blockbuster where it turns out that there was some sort of alien organism involved in the collision; and now people are quietly scrambling to ensure it doesn't make it back to earth, right?

Just got email yesterday from Belkin, to tell me Wemo devices including their hugely popular Wemo mini plug and Wemo wall switch, outdoor switch and 3-way switch were on a list to be shut down in January, 2026. They're yanking the cloud server support required to make them work, and saying the only thing they'll still do after that is work on a LOCAL network via HomeKit.

It's not just Apple. Any of these vendors of "smart" devices get to dictate when they kill off the functionality. If it requires cloud servers, then all you did was buy some hardware that works with THEIR systems, on THEIR terms and conditions.

I use an Arlo video doorbell on my front door, and initially? I was fine with not paying for their optional monthly subscription that allowed uploading video to the cloud. I was content to use it so I could view live video when someone rang the bell, and to get push notifications when people walked within range of it. Well? After some relatively recent update they did, it seems I lost the ability to configure the zone the camera monitors for motion. They just monitor the whole darn thing if you don't pay for their subscription to "unlock" that capability. Worse yet? There's nowhere in their software to configure it to just stop alerting for motion. I had to suppress it on my iPhone app via the phone's own application settings.

It sucks but I don't see any alternative except buying only devices that give YOU full control over them on your home network. And a lot of those reduce the usability and convenience vs ones utilizing the "big cloud" offered by players like Apple, Google or Amazon.

I'd be curious what the breakdown is between 'addicts', in the compulsively-does-thing-despite-knowing-it-is-contrary-to-their-interests sense, and sad but locally reasonable behavior from people with tepid options.

'Addict' is a comparatively easy call to make when people are getting fired because they no-showed to play WoW; or spending all their time scrolling tiktok despite having a school or college worth of peers to socialize with; but if you are retired, less physically able to get out and about than you used to be, and at the age where your friends and peers are starting to die off, it seems like a much more open question whether having an engaging if ultimately rather hollow hobby is an 'addiction' or just a kind of depressing local maximum.

It's obviously not some ideal of perfected human flourishing; but if you are doing it because you don't really have things to do, rather than at the expense of things you have to do, that's not really classic addict behavior; just a mediocre hobby.

Could you help me understand the 'irony' here? Is saying impolite things about a dead guy the moral equivalent to being perhaps the most pivotal figure behind a war with an estimated half-million dead and a causus belli that was transparent bullshit; not to mention the elevation of extrajudicial torture to official policy? I'm not sure I follow.

And, if you'd like to expand on the 'political leanings' thing; I'd be more than happy to call anyone whose politics involve thinking that Cheney did a great job a monster as well; especially when it's so hard to argue that any of Cheney's ugliest aspects even paid off. Flirting with more expansive theories of the ends justifying the means can be a dangerous business; but, bare minimum, you can attempt to rank means by degree of atrocity and ends by degree of effectiveness; and on that score Cheney's work was honestly pretty shit.

Remember the 'Pax Americana' that the neocons assured us could be bombed into the fractious elements of the middle east? Lol. Bin Laden? Dude was chilling in an upmarket suburb in Pakistan while we were pissing away blood and treasure on hitting a mixture of hapless civilians and 'insurgents' who had the temerity to suggest that our puppet government was not the legitimate local administration in one peripherally involved country and one uninvolved one.

So, go ahead, please, explain your other level of irony. Tell us whose political loyalties are to this grade of not-even-effective violence. What'll it be?

Luckily, reliable sources assure me that he will be greeted as a liberator in hell; so things should go fine.

It's possible that we'll see more given the generally geriatric trend among people who actually have money in the developed world; but a lot of 'smart' stuff is almost weirdly aggressive about squandering assistive potential.

It seems like it would be an area with a fair amount of promise; if only because not being able to do it yourself does answer a lot of the "why would I need a probably-unreliable and ad-riddled computer to do that for me when I could do it myself?"; but then you see them give the product to a UI designer whose contamination OCD is triggered by readable levels of contrast who replaces all the scrollbars with invisible grey hints; or a product manager with no real sense of UI at all who just churns things randomly or decides that blind copying of UI elements from phone-sized touchscreens to high resolution PCs with mice or large but lowish resolution TVs with remote controls is totally sensible.

Even users of average or better cognitive flexibility tend to be somewhat unhappy about that; and people who are not any the better for age tend to cope with the change less well, especially if compounded by visual or fine motor issues.

What seems even more concerning is that this is how he acts when he knows he's on camera and speaking to a relatively poor railroading candidate.

Because of their enthusiasm for working at or beyond the limits of their actual authority; you normally expect even dumb cops to have a decent instinct for the informal sociology of what they can get away with and against who. Columbine Valley, CO, household median income of ~$130k, over 50% over-40, most of the young under-18s presumably attached to households, 95% white, population a bit over 1200, is not quite at "my police department can do things for me my private security can't" levels; but it's pretty far toward 'customer service' on the "are police customer service workers or occupation forces?" continuum; and it's at least an inner suburb of the ff-course-they'll-fucking-lawyer-up-dumbass metro area.

If this is the sort of attitude that this guy brings to this situation it's hard to imagine him reacting well to encounters with the public in general. Hopefully he's more of a mall cop losing his mind for want of the stimulation promised in police academy; not the sort with a suspiciously stained large flashlight and a favorite rural ditch.

I don't think that the relationship is that straightforward.

You can, absolutely, build bureaucracies to resist accountability and avoid transparency; where nothing is every anyone's fault in particular, and all the records are classified, and the department in charge of checking its own work invariably concludes that procedure was followed. It takes some doing because the amount of formalized process required to keep a large org from just disintegrating means that you can't help but leave a paper trail, meeting minutes, policy documents, etc. that all need to be sanitized or kept out of reach of discovery and meddling reporters; but is certainly doable, especially if you can apply steady pressure over a prolonged period of time.

The high-cohesion/small-size case, though, tends to degrade into the 'if the mayor, the sheriff, and the DA get along they can basically do whatever; if the sheriff is prickly enough they might not even need the DA' awfully quickly and easily. Crumbles more quickly if there's a falling out internally or something Bad happens that has FBI agents sniffing around, since there's no entrenched apparatus designed to create the impression that organizational norms are being upheld; but, if that doesn't happen, it can be very opaque since it's small enough that no formal management and only very limited recordkeeping are required; and accountability is effectively nonexistent.

It may be pathetic; but the 'make america great again unless it sounds like actual work might be involved' attitude is, at least, consistent.

It's possible that the summary is missing an important qualification; but wouldn't it only be possible, even in principle, to conclude that something could or couldn't be a simulation on a specific type of computer rather than in general?

If, say, you were able to demonstrate that you had an actual RNG, not a pseudorandom number generator, you'd know that it isn't being simulated on a turing machine; because those do determinism only. However, in practice, we build computers with what we think are RNGs all the time; because connecting the deterministic finite state machine to a peripheral that's full of thermal noise or radioisotopes or lava lamps or whatever is a totally doable design decision. Were someone in one of our simulations to conclude that non-deterministic behavior falsified the simulation theory they'd simply be wrong; because (it appears) that the reality in which we construct our computers is a little stingy when it comes to things like infinite state storage; but reasonably helpful on high quality entropy.

In the case of this 'non-algorithmic understanding'; it sounds like you may be successfully demonstrating that the simulation would only be viable on a somewhat more exotic machine; but basically just one that has a lookup table attached that it can use to check whether an unprovable statement is true or not. I would not want to be the one stuck building such a device; but it doesn't sound any more exotic than quite a few of the various 'oracle machines' that are supposed, for purposes of theorizing about computability and complexity, to have a black box capable of solving certain classes of problem.

We even interact with a much humbler example of an analogous thing more or less all the time: the reason we bother with storage devices is that there's no way to know what a given series of bits "should" be. Absolutely trivial(assuming sufficient time and RAM) to go through all possibilities for what it might be; but no way to decide between the possibilities. So we suck it up and plug in our flash drive; then copy off the cat picture that we actually want. Essentially a block device is an oracle that answers the otherwise algorithmically impossible question of "what is the state of those n bits?".

I don't say this out of any particular affinity for, or belief in, 'simulationism'; and further acknowledge that the authors may have made a meaningful(but rather narrower) statement by formalizing certain requirements for what a simulator would be required to be capable of; I'm just unclear on how you could make the claim to have disproved simulation, in general, unless you managed to come up with something that could not be implemented as an oracle even in principle, which it doesn't sound like they have.

It does seem to at least suggest the possibility of excluding 'trivial' nesting of simulations: someone simulating us would appear to need hardware that we would not be able to implement under the rules we are provided; just as someone in a deterministic simulation wouldn't be able to implement an RNG, which we at least appear to be able to do(at least, if they are PRNGs, they hide their state somewhere very cryptic); so if there is anyone out there who thinks that it's totally possible that, like, the universe is just big 486s all the way down, man, it would appear that they are on thin ice theoretically, with at least some details suggesting that the simulator need be fundamentally more capable, rather than just bigger, than a system that can be implemented within the simulation; but my impression is that any serious consideration of trivially nested simulations had foundered purely on the size problem among all but the densest rocko's baselisk bros already.

I'm a little unclear on what anyone thought this elaboration was getting them; unless it was purely pessimism about the existence of any sort of untapped channel where cute but relatively crude steganography wouldn't be necessary or could be better-handled by any of the myriad excuses to send bits of encrypted information(altering the agreed-upon portions of encrypted JWTs returned by some auth endpoint or the like).

There's the very specific case of 'warrant canaries', for which there's some US case law around compelled speech vs. compelled nondisclosure that might given them better constitutional coverage vs. just ignoring gag orders; but even that is a matter of some uncertainty; and this sounds like it's both more expansive in terms of what jurisdictions could take a dim view of it and much more overt in just being an obfuscated disclosure.

Clearly if the obfuscation keeps you from getting caught that can work; but as a legal strategy this seems to be a straightforward "just flout the order" that would be relatively simple for any peevish feds to prosecute accordingly; quite possibly even providing a few extras to throw in because doing financial transfers to facilitate crime sometimes counts as an additional issue.

As someone else here already commented earlier; "Call the lawyer!" isn't always the most financially smart move. I mean, in this particular case? Just dumping the shared family Apple accounts and setting up new ones would be a quick, self-service way to break free of the controlling ex. If the loss of all the purchased content is the sticking point? It's very likely they could repurchase all of it for less money than a divorce lawyer would bill for the time to sort this mess out.

Is there some collection of important photos stored in iCloud? Could be a real problem here, BUT, you also really should have been making a backup elsewhere. Anyone with a Mac probably has their photo library backed up via Time Machine, for example? (Just because the Photos app uploads new photos to iCloud automatically doesn't mean it doesn't store the originals on the Mac hard drive and they all get backed up.) Besides, it's probably a far more clear-cut "ask" to demand the ex turn over a copy of the photo collection on a USB memory stick or whatnot, if you want to address that one thing in court later.

I say all of this as someone who went through "the divorce from hell" a long time ago. Despite my ex literally cleaning out my entire house (got a full size moving truck and gave away some of my electronics and furniture to friends, in trade for helping move everything) AND taking my sports car and forging my signature on the title to sell it off without me knowing? It *still* made more long-term financial sense to just have a settlement hearing with her, vs a lengthy/costly divorce trial. The fact is - anything a judge would have declared she owed me or had to return would have gotten me nowhere. She already liquidated all of it and was a deadbeat after that who owed thousands to her landlord too, and spent the rest of her life sponging off other people. The lawyers are the only ones who really "win" in divorce cases.