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Comment No more spyware (Score 5, Interesting) 29

The key point here is the ability to disable all telemetry leaving the car. We need open sourced EV car software that does not spy on you or sell your information. It sounds like they're on their way.

Guides to disable the cellular modem or antenna in all popular model EVs would be a good way to start as well. Using wrecked examples from a junkyard would be an economical way to experiment.

Comment I would stop burning wood, but... (Score 4, Interesting) 103

The cost of propane and electricity has become so expensive in California that we use our wood burning fireplace insert during the winter whenever possible. It's the kind that has a blower that will heat up the whole house quickly while exhausting all the fireplace gasses up the chimney. If you want to encourage environmentally friendly behaviors amongst us regular folk, make electricity cheap and plentiful, and sourced from non-greenhouse gas generation itself. Modern, safe nuclear as a primary, stable source backed by wind and solar, or eliminate the nuclear component if battery storage is sufficiently advanced and plentiful. (it's getting there...) We like our fireplace but would prefer to use it only when we want to feel cozy once in a blue moon, not consistently to save money.

When the price of owned solar comes down, that is an option as well. (leased solar is a scam) We plan to include owned solar in our next home, whether if it comes with it or we leave out money from the down to purchase it. We are in the process of selling our current home and it's easier financially to do that transaction when changing homes.

There are two camps out there, people who want artificial scarcity and a lower quality of life for no good reason, and those of us who think that energy can be both environmentally friendly AND abundant. Contrary to what you have been led to believe, those two things are not mutually exclusive. But the whole nature of how semi-public utilities (at least in California) are run needs to change, and decentralize. It's a huge mess.

Comment Meh...just a vector for foreign espionage (Score 1) 33

LinkedIn is primarily a convenient platform for state sponsored IP theft, hacking and espionage via asset recruitment of highly positioned individuals, and funding of totalitarian regimes (North Korea) through remote work scams. And just when you think it can't get worse, video and audio spoofing by AI has made it much worse. You can pin the blame on the HR departments not doing their due dilligence, but LinkedIn sure is a big enabler.

Comment "internal leader boards" (Score 3, Insightful) 68

Those kinds of shenanigans are a good example of why I remain self employed to this day. You can keep your Office Space style bullshit. Modern corporations, especially aggressive companies like Amazon, have gamified the workplace into just sucking every last ounce of energy out of their 'human resources'. You're more a slave and less an employee every year.

Comment We need a clearinghouse for disabling car modems (Score 1) 41

Some intrepid sould would be forever thanked if they hosted a site (offshore, safe from DMCA takedowns) with user-contributed instructions on how to remove or disable the cellular modem on popular car models.

If they want my data, they need to pay for it. By, for example, making the car free or steeply discounted. Until then, fuck off.

Businesses

Challenging UPS and FedEx, Amazon Opens Its Shipping Network to All Businesses (geekwire.com) 81

This week Amazon opened up its parcel shipping, fulfillment, and distribution "to businesses of all types and sizes." Any business can now ship, store, and deliver "using the same supply chain that supports Amazon," according to Monday's announcement of "Amazon Supply Chain Services."

The move sent shares of UPS and FedEx "tumbling" Monday writes GeekWire. And though both stocks bounced back as the week went on, GeekWire sees this as the latest example of Amazon "turning its internal capabilities into products and services for sale..."

"Amazon had already surpassed both carriers to become the nation's largest parcel shipper by volume, according to parcel-analytics firm ShipMatrix." Initial customers include Procter & Gamble, which is using Amazon's freight network to transport raw materials; 3M, which is using it to move products to distribution centers; Lands' End, which is fulfilling orders across sales channels from Amazon's warehouses; and American Eagle Outfitters, which is using Amazon's parcel service for last-mile delivery. The service can fulfill orders placed through platforms that compete with Amazon's own marketplace, including Walmart, Shopify, TikTok, and others... Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services, compared the launch to the origins of Amazon's cloud business...

In addition to putting Amazon in competition with existing players in the logistics industry, the move also raises questions about data privacy. Amazon has faced accusations of using nonpublic seller data to compete against merchants on its marketplace, which it has denied. Larsen told the Wall Street Journal that the company prohibits using supply chain customer data for its own marketplace decisions, noting that hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers already trust the company to fulfill orders placed on rival platforms.

The article notes that in his annual shareholder letter Amazon's CEO "said the company is also exploring selling its custom AI chips and robotics to outside customers."

Comment Re:Copyright issue? (Score 1) 88

Posting a commit message is not a legally binding authoring attribution and doesn't magically change things.

It's just like if I published a git tutorial site that had "coauthor: my_actual_name_here" hidden in an automation file. That would not magically give me copyright of every piece of code submitted by anyone who followed my git tutorial.

Comment YouTube Audio Quality - Bad Production (Score 1) 100

It's just that the entire YouTube is appallingly bad.

A lot of the audio production in individual videos is really bad. This isn't anything to do with YouTube per se, not their compression algorithms or other features. A lot of YouTubers have absolutely no concept of microphone placement, of using audio compression, of reducing background noise. All of which are things which will drastically affect audio quality and the ability of a speech-to-text model to create subtitles.

It would be nice if YouTube would normalize all the uploaded videos to one set standard. Note I'm not suggesting that they compress the videos as that might change the intended presentation of professional audio productions. I just mean peak-finding normalization which could be implemented losslessly and without breaking existing video links.

Having said that, when I look at my own channel - and I am not claiming to have great audio; I have a host which would destroy a lavalier microphone in mere seconds. YouTube's subtitling is really good. It automatically switches between English and French and Hebrew, and even with a fair bit of background noise (welding, grinding, cooking, crowd noise, music) it generally gets the text correct. So I don't know what the original complaint is, except that it's not perfect. Well, guess what, neither is human hearing. How about that famous Jimi Hendrix line, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy."

Comment pareidolia at its finest. (Score 5, Interesting) 124

This is something like The Face on Mars, where author Richard C. Hoagland went down a rabbit hole and connected the dots on a whole bunch of other landscape features nearby to back up his theory that the face was actually a face. Then a later mars satellite went by and photographed it from different angles in different lighting, and lo and behold it was just light and shadow. Along with the rest of the rocks that made up his 'alien civilization'. You see what you want to see, and find patterns where there aren't any.

In the case of the JPL scientist shot to death, that one is local to us. It involved a crazy guy who was known to be causing problems around the Crystalaire community of Llano in the previous week, and when he trespassed on the scientist's property, the cops were called, crazy guy was arrested, and then he bailed out and came back a few days later and shot Carl Grillmair, the scientist, blaming him for his arrest. It's the high desert of Los Angeles County and there's a lot of methheads and tweakers commiting breaking and entering on rural properties in order to find things to steal and fence for their next hit. A property we're involved with nearby has been broken into three times. Everyone here knows this one was totally random, and very unfortunate. Carl had the property for the unobstructed views of the night sky, and it's fairly convenient to LA, being just on the other side of the San Gabriels from JPL. It's very unfortunate, but there is no bigger story therein. Can't speak for the other cases.

Comment Yea we used them (Score 1) 180

We used ZIP drives in a post production facility doing computer animation and early non-linear editing. I think I had a SCSI ZIP drive on one of my Commodore Amigas at home and used them for a while They are essentially a hard drive in a cartridge, so of course the failure rate is going to be higher than a fixed, sealed disc. They very capably filled a brief niche before thumb drives and easily removable eSATA and USB connections etc become popular. Before that it was kind of a pain to move and re-mount a disk reliably from one PC to another.

Comment Fix the commercials problem first (Score 1) 52

I avoid going to the movies these days purely because of the insane amount of commercials shown beforehand. I paid money to get in. And you are showing me commercials on top of that. I don't do commercials. They are not something I want to waste my life watching. I am not your target market. If I can't pay for a commercial-free experience I'm not doing it.

There are precious few theaters out there that don't show commercials. And none near us. I am down to 1 - 2 visits to a theater per year for films I really want to see on a big screen. I didn't stop liking going to the movies, but they've driven me away and the at-home experience is now excellent.

Larger screens and better sound are good. But they're not addressing the elephant in the room. I'm happy to pay a few extra dollars for a commercial free experience.

Comment All war is for control of land and resources (Score 2) 49

When humans have wars, it is always over land and resources. With these chimps, it is probably the same. The land is overpopulated, and there are no longer enough resources to go around. They will kill each other until the ones strong enough to survive have the land and resources and the rest are dead.
AI

Claude Code Leak Reveals a 'Stealth' Mode for GenAI Code Contributions - and a 'Frustration Words' Regex (pcworld.com) 38

That leak of Claude Code's source code "revealed all kinds of juicy details," writes PC World.

The more than 500,000 lines of code included:

- An 'undercover mode' for Claude that allows it to make 'stealth' contributions to public code bases
- An 'always-on' agent for Claude Code
- A Tamagotchi-style 'Buddy' for Claude

"But one of the stranger bits discovered in the leak is that Claude Code is actively watching our chat messages for words and phrases — including f-bombs and other curses — that serve as signs of user frustration." Specifically, Claude Code includes a file called "userPromptKeywords.ts" with a simple pattern-matching tool called regex, which sweeps each and every message submitted to Claude for certain text matches. In this particular case, the regex pattern is watching for "wtf," "wth," "omfg," "dumbass," "horrible," "awful," "piece of — -" (insert your favorite four-letter word for that one), "f — you," "screw this," "this sucks," and several other colorful metaphors... While the Claude Code leak revealed the existence of the "frustration words" regex, it doesn't give any indication of why Claude Code is scouring messages for these words or what it's doing with them.

Comment Dumped Grok over this (Score -1) 72

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

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