> /qh->0,uzLCb!51Wlcha4:a?@4Nmr:&^

Well, it's not secure any more!

Tabilizer, do NOT use that password!

> Of course, you'll never be able to remember it. Which is why you store it in a password-keeper, encrypted with a strong passphrase (the only thing you do need to remember) and using a strong encryption algorithm like AES256.

That's the theory. The part I love is that you practically have to store all your passwords in the cloud to make this feasible for most people, which is its own can of worms.

In practice, weaker passwords coupled with TOTP tends to be a better solution, if you can persuade people to use TOTP. If your passwords are compromized, change them before your TOTP keys are, and vice versa.

Kind of difficult to use as the storage for a website like the Internet Archive.

Totally get it, but assuming the bubble bursts and most of the LLM companies just end being sold for pennies to Google and Microsoft, or go bust, what can you possibly do about it?

It's not even as if you can boycott them NOW while they're functioning entities. You can decide you want to, but then Google ensures you can't do a search without AI, your boss refuses to let you code Java or PHP without AI, you're basically fucked.

It's Big Tech we need to rally against. More self hosting. More ad blocking. etc. Switching to GNU/Linux. Encouraging the use of federated social networks, and individual BBSes over Reddit. But look at the anger and hate you get when you suggest any of that.

No, I think he understood the words he wrote. AI companies do NOT make the data publicly available, they insert a slop-generator between the data and the user that means the original data cannot be retrieved.

You think you're being clever, but you're both pretending to misunderstand what's been said, and saying something very stupid and false. You are why Slashdot sucks sometimes. Knock it off.

That underlines the point he shouldn't be calling LLMs "conscious" rather than undermines it. Maybe if someone explained to him that it's roughly the equivalent of saying that LLMs have a soul he might get it.

Or maybe he'd miss the point entirely. My guess is the latter. He'd probably start complaining he's an atheist without understanding that's exactly why we picked that example.

You know, I'm not convinced all humans are conscious. I think some of us are. But I've started to feel the lack of self awareness (the philosophical concept, not the thing related to shame) in so many people means that maybe I'm an outlier.

Oddly Dawkins, who you think would have known better, actually implies he thinks the Turing test is a test of consciousness.

When Turing wrote — and for most of the years since — it was possible to accept the hypothetical conclusion that, if a machine ever passed his operational test, we might consider it to be conscious

and later:

However, the advent of large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others has provoked a hasty scramble to move the goalposts. It was one thing to grant consciousness to a hypothetical machine that — just imagine! — could one day succeed at the Imitation Game. But now that LLMs can actually pass the Turing Test? “Well, er, perhaps, um Look here, I didn’t really mean it when, back then, I accepted Turing’s operational definition of a conscious being”

(Nowhere does he claim critics of LLMs claimed to accept the Turing test as a "definition of a conscious being" at any point in the past.)

Turing literally made it clear that he was avoiding the question of consciousness in the Turing test, choosing instead to determine if it's exhibiting "intelligent behavior".

I know he's popular in some circles, and have odd memories of my computer studies teacher back when I was young (he's been around a long time) promoting his work on memes (no, not those memes!) as a way to explain evolution. It's become clearthough that with a lot of subjects, he doesn't know what he's talking about, but waffles about them anyway. An inability to understand the Turing test and the difference between logic that's similar, if far more complicated and with far more data, to that of an autocomplete text entry system in a phone, and consciousness, was not on my radar.

Are the people rooting for the murderous theocrats in this room right now? Or do you need to see a psychiatrist about your inability to distinguish between criticism of one set of murderous shitbags, and support for the people they're murdering? Were the girls at that school murderous theocrats? Just curious.

Yes, the "Damned city folk don't understand" people come out whenever dial-up is mentioned, but here's the problem: DIAL UP IS FUCKING USELESS IN 2026.

Do you SERIOUSLY think you can browse the net at 56kbps? Google's home page currently weighs in at nearly 300Kb. Do you remember what it was to download 300k back in 1995? And Google's home page is one of the few on the net right now that's trying to be "lightweight". How big do you think Amazon's home page is right now?

What websites are still useful in 2026 that can be downloaded using a 56kbps modem?

I just use regular autocomplete to get my winning lottery numbers. I am now a multi millionaire!

I get the impression most people here didn't spot the joke in the reply.

(The clue is in him hyping both AI and chiropractory, both mostly phony fields, for those missing it)

Completely impractical in 99% of cases. Manufacturers rarely sell directly to the public, and when they do, they usually do it in the form of an "Amazon store" or eBay equivalent.

I don't disagree at all. It's the #1 reason I decided not to recommend Rust to people... yet. Once they have a core library that supports critical features like encryption, or else has an alternative to crates.io that is curated and people take responsibility for, I'll change my mind.

It's ironic. I'd rather do stuff in PHP. Yes, an awfully large amount of stuff is via composer, but PHP, for the most part, doesn't require you actually use composer stuff, it has most of the core stuff built in. And I hate PHP, and everyone knows why, which makes me wonder why, in 2026, we're still fucking around trying to avoid PHP from equating "" to "0".

Anyway, if I were creating a new language, that'd be the first thing I discourage. Hell, I'd go out of my way to break it if a third party created an uncurated repo that everyone started to use.

The Middle Road: "I'm not an extremist, I think Trump Musk AOC and Sanders are extremists, I am a proud centrist who isn't extreme at all"

Also The Middle Road: "Isn't it a shame we're not all murdering each other."

OK, true, there are some jobs available where it isn't a practical requirement. But unfortunately pretty much any job that involves any of the languages covered by the above list generally ends up with the programmer having to use those tools.

(FWIW I resisted as much as I could at my last job, but we still had to use composer to build a plugin because updates to the plugin had stopped being available by more normal routes, and we had too much already dependent upon it. So now, because of a completely unnecessary rug pull, we had to use composer, which we sandboxed. In our case we could justify sandboxing the composer part because the software we wrote had to be PCI compliant, but... I am VERY unhappy with this particular trend in computing. People act as if the entire history of the Internet wasn't security problem after security problem, and the people who OUGHT to know best how to avoid security problems are quite intentionally creating new paths to ensure even they can be exploited.)

No, right now it's literally impossible to be a professional in the industry right now and not use something like NPM, Composer, or whatever. Most of us don't have any choice. And likewise, if someone finds an exploit in a common web browser and you don't know this, how the fuck are you supposed to mitigate from it?