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Comment Re:I'd love to trash Edge, but... (Score 1) 109

I found the setting for this: chrome://password-manager/settings has a "Use Windows Hello when filling passwords". It was off for me - I can only assume that is the default, as I have several Chrome profiles over several PCs and it's off in all of them.

Also noticed there's this:

Set up on-device encryption
For added safety, you can encrypt passwords on your device before they're saved to your Google Account

which, if I click on, takes me to a page that just says "On-device encryption canâ(TM)t be used for this account. Sign in to another Google Account and try again."

Comment Re:Lack of accountability (Score 2, Insightful) 132

The teachers--at least, the competent ones--are often the only ones who care. But they're the least empowered of the parties involved.

They are paid a pittance by the district and treated like glorified babysitters by the parents. They have had their ability to enact discipline taken away; parents are unwilling to hear that their little angel could do anything wrong or that they themselves are responsible for a home environment that doesn't foster learning.

The administrators only want to line their own pockets. They keep increasing class sizes and cutting programs and services, while repeatedly falling for band-aid, quick fix "solutions" pushed by corporate educational snake oil salesmen.

Parents are overworked, underpaid, and can barely enforce discipline on their kids. They've abdicated their role as parents to social media algorithhms. In this regard, social media is a symptom of the problem, not the root cause. In other parts of the world where social media is as pervasive, why have we not seen a similar magnitude of decline in learning outcomes?

Meanwhile, corporations and politicians are behind much of these problems. It's a societal and cultural issue, in which those in power correctly believe that they don't need to cultivate future generations of intelligent citizens. They only need some of them--their own children and friends--to be well educated, while the rest of the working class only needs to be smart enough to do whatever menial tasks their corporate overlords enslave them to do.

Comment Re:I'd love to trash Edge, but... (Score 2) 109

Chrome does require authentication for every password retrieval. It uses Windows Hello as well so in theory you don't even have a password to intercept since something like facial recognition authentication via a FIDO2 handshake is what ultimately allows Chrome to fill a single password on a single site.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 'auth' here, but on my PCs (Windows 10):

It does require auth for passkeys, I think every time, but not for regular saved passwords in the browser. I have Windows Hello set up for a couple passkeys and I have to auth via Hello when I use them.

But I have regular saved passwords for almost every other website I use routinely and am not prompted to auth via Hello for that. My understanding is that for these, the auth/unlock is done once at user login and then the session has access to the unencrypted passwords.

(I posted elsewhere in this thread about Chrome using DPAPI as of 2024 - this was news to me so it's possible I'm just way out of date).

Comment Re:I'd love to trash Edge, but... (Score 2) 109

Been trying to figure out how Chrome does this because my recollection was that Chrome had the exact same problem - I remember making a similar point to you in forum threads a couple years back with people complaining about it then.

It looks like in 2024, Chrome added support for something called the Data Protection API (DPAPI), which provides some mitigation against arbitrary memory reads:

App-Bound Encryption relies on a privileged service to verify the identity of the requesting application. During encryption, the App-Bound Encryption service encodes the app's identity into the encrypted data, and then verifies this is valid when decryption is attempted. If another app on the system tries to decrypt the same data, it will fail.

Because the App-Bound service is running with system privileges, attackers need to do more than just coax a user into running a malicious app. Now, the malware has to gain system privileges, or inject code into Chrome, something that legitimate software shouldn't be doing. This makes their actions more suspicious to antivirus software â" and more likely to be detected

It's not clear from my quick read if this defends against this class of "attack" in all cases but it reads like it might provide at least some protection?

If that is the case, it of course raises the question why Microsoft - who created DPAPI in the first place - wouldn't use that same service in the same way. (i.e. maybe it just sucks and they know it's a waste of time :)

Comment Re:Speaking of Amazon and books... (Score 0) 57

The reason I pulled away from Amazon is because I'm not going to sit around pissing myself about the rich while funding their wealth at the same time. Too bad too many assholes don't feel the same about the situation. I still like physical books, for the most part, so now I buy used from Half Priced Books who has a local storefront.

Comment Re:The purpose of art (Score 3, Interesting) 90

It makes more sense as a dialogue if we think of it not so much as a one-to-one conversation, but more like an ongoing, global discourse. After all, movies are not made in a vacuum, and they are--generally speaking--not made for a single specific individual to watch. The artist is informed and shaped by their experiences.

I frame it this way because I want to move away from the "maker"/"viewer" framework--this dichotomy of the creator of an experience versus those who experience the creation. There is a kind of feedback at play that is intrinsic to the ability to create art and to enjoy it. We even see this in cinema--the works of actors (which roles they choose, how they play those roles) are invariably influenced by the culture and sentiments that surround them.

In a strict sense, you are right--it's not as if the artist is directly engaging in a back-and-forth literal conversation. But I think that a more encompassing point of view is useful for contextualizing why generative AI being propped up as "art" is so offensive to some. It doesn't feel "real" to us, and it isn't because the tool is "artificial"--we have computer animated films, for instance. It's because it feels disengaged from that feeling of human connection.

Comment The purpose of art (Score 5, Insightful) 90

is not, as many would have you believe, to be found solely in its consumption or appreciation.

Art is a dialogue. It is a conversation between humans--those who feel joy and pain, sorrow and hope; and it is the embodiment of creative expression in which the artist, for all their imperfections and struggle, brings into being something that marks existence--as if to say, "I was once here, in this space that you now observe."

And that is not necessarily pretentiousness or egocentrism. Art is born from a desire to connect with others, across space and time.

The intrinsic problem of "generative AI" as it is presently utilized as a vehicle of artistic expression is that, overwhelmingly, it fails to create a true dialogue, in much the same way that using a chatbot amounts to speaking with nobody but yourself. There may be a director and other humans who are prompting the AI and exerting control over the output, but the lack of human actors and cinematographers means that the result can only ever be a simulation of art, not art itself. It is not until we can create artificial consciousness--machines that experience human emotions and concept of self--that we can ever say that their status can transcend that of mere tools and their product might become art. To be clear, I am not suggesting we should attempt to do so. But what we have today is very, very far away from this.

Maybe a simulation is enough for most people, who think of popular media as nothing more than transitory stories to consume, discard, and forget. That the audience may not have the capacity to respect art as a process, by failing to distinguish what it is and is not, does not invalidate the artist, no more than someone who doesn't understand mathematics or computer programming can decide that it is not worth learning or doing.

The reason why there is a lot of pushback against AI has to do with the preposterous notion that it can (and therefore, should) serve as a substitute for human creativity. Of all of the things that such sophisticated computational models could be used for, the last thing that I would want it to do for me is my thinking and feeling. We should be using technology to make our lives easier and give us more freedom to express ourselves creatively, not less. People who are using it to simulate art have entirely missed the point of why we make art in the first place. Creative expression is not a chore like washing my dishes and scrubbing my toilet bowl. Yes, making art is sometimes painful and difficult and challenging. But that struggle is not something to be eliminated. It is meant to be overcome.

AI apologists--at least, nearly all of those I have met--are, in my view, nearly entirely lacking in understanding of what makes living worthwhile; and those who do understand are intentionally and cynically promoting AI because they stand to gain financially from this position.

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